Our elected are supposed to be public servants – not bullies, not grandstanding stars, not scoundrels.
But that’s just the way the Tea Party faction in Congress has been behaving for the past three years. I’m sick and tired of hearing how the government shutdown and the threatened rejection of the debt limit was caused by the president and the Democrats. That’s like saying if everybody’s guilty, nobody’s guilty. The recent inexcusable crisis was caused by the vast majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, whipped by the Tea Party upstarts, all of it orchestrated by a self-serving egotist and presidential hopeful by the name of Sen. Ted Cruz.
Some say the president and the Democrats wouldn’t compromise. While it’s true the president, thankfully, stuck to his guns, refusing to cave into the Tea Party extortionist scheme, he did, in fact, meet many times with Republicans, and every time they balked. First, the Tea Party insisted on defunding ObamaCare, even though they knew that was a no-go, no matter how much they whined, wheedled and plotted. Then, they proposed incremental changes to ObamaCare, hoping to whittle away at its foundation like famished termites. When that appeared to be a no-go, they proposed budget cuts and all manner of manipulations to frustrate Congress and the president.
The Tea Party’s ultimately self-defeating tactics were obvious from the beginning when Ted “Fake Filibuster” Cruz talked nonsense for 21 straight hours to make a name for himself in the spotlight, like a copycat of movie star Jimmy Stewart in the famous filibuster scene in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
The Tea Party and some of their Republican minions were completely reckless, not caring one whit for the sufferings their shutdown caused. Indeed, some of them, like our “very own” Rep. Michele Bachmann gleefully gloated about how the shutdown had made Republicans “so happy.” We should demand a recall election to get rid of her.
It was nauseating to see these Tea Party types, after they’d caused the shutdown, scurrying around at the World War II Veterans Monument expressing phony outrage about how the president caused the memorial’s closure. One congressional creep even berated a woman park-department employee at the monument, telling her she should be ashamed of herself, as if SHE had anything to do with the shutdown. And there was Bachmann, of course, for yet another photo op, hugging and kissing veterans.
Later, Cruz and other Tea Party rabble-rousers gathered near the White House. One protest sign depicted Obama as a kind of mentally retarded monkey. Another riff-raff hooligan held up a confederate flag by the White House gates. For three years, Tea Party rallies far and wide have attracted riff-raff elements displaying ignorant, blatantly racist behavior – as ugly as a lynch mob. What drives these people is a blind, irrational, rabid hatred of President Obama. They are fueled by lunatic lies about him, lies they either invent or parrot after hearing them on right-wing hate radio shows. What’s worse, the Tea Party never berates these crude ralliers; Tea Party leaders not only tolerate them but slyly encourage them through the use of dog-whistle code words.
It’s a disgusting irony the Tea Partiers and intimidated Republicans, who pretend to care so much about wasteful spending, caused this nation to lose at least $24 billion in the shutdown, according to Standard and Poor’s, a respected, nonpartisan financial research company. Because of their implied threat on the debt limit, they also sent jitters of uncertainty through companies and financial markets worldwide. These jokers claim ObamaCare will ruin the economy when they themselves came close to tanking the economy big-time in one fell swoop. And what if these reckless wreckers cause another shutdown come January?
I get very upset when I hear people say, “That blankety-blank Congress. They’re all crooks. All useless.”
That is simply not true. There are many hard-working, good public servants in Congress on both sides of the aisle.
There is hope that reasonable, decent Republicans will stand up to these extortionists and tell them just where to go. The Tea Party has hijacked the Republican Party, and it’s the party’s fault because it has courted these obstructionist rebels for too long. If good Republicans want to win in presidential elections, they better start soundly rejecting the Tea Party, which has become a millstone around Republicans’ necks.
