bobquasit | Askville: Gloating at Republicans?

A comment on a thread over on Askville about how to treat Republicans after the election, if Obama wins.

It would be hard not to rub their noses in it, I must admit.

I can't help but recall all the nasty comments that Republicans made in such abundence, both times when Bush got the Presidency, and all the names I've been called for the past several decades. They've called us communists, idiots, moral degenerates...if there's a name that they haven't happily flung at liberals and Democrats, it can only be because it hasn't been invented yet.

"Liberalism is a mental illness." I've seen that on more than one bumper sticker, and more times online than I can count.

And yet look at what their policies have done to us. Look at what they've done to the United States of America. Our military is at the breaking point. We attacked a nation that hadn't attacked us, in a naked war of aggression. The gap between the rich and poor is greater than in almost any other country in the world. We've become a nation that tortures. The ages-old right of habeas corpus has been abridged, as has our right to privacy. NSA agents record the calls our soldiers make to their families, and pass around recordings of their private phone sex calls for laughs. No one gets punished for this.

The federal deficit and national debt is the highest of any country EVER, throughout history. We owe so much to the Chinese that it's virtually impossible to imagine paying it off. Our veterans are coming home to the worst care in decades - and many of their families are on food stamps and welfare, because we don't pay them enough. The government goes to enormous lengths to deny them care for the injuries that they sustained carrying out the insanely dangerous and UNNECESSARY actions that our terminally greedy "leaders" have ordered - Halliburton makes billions (trillions?), while our soldiers get a pittance. New Orleans has been devastated, and will never again be what it was. We've lost the northern polar icecap, for god's sake! Our children and pets are being poisoned and endangered by toys made in China by slave-children.

We've taken teenagers and imprisoned them for years without charges or international monitoring. We're running secret "black ops" prison camps. Extraordinary rendition. The monitoring and recording of all internet traffic without a warrant. Millions more children and adults without health care. Our manufacturing industry collapsing. Massive outsourcing of American jobs.

The collapse of the stock market and the financial industry, because the foxes were put in charge of the henhouse and the holy cult of Republican "deregulation" has ruled since the 1980s (and how many MORE areas of our economy will collapse soon thanks to similar deregulation in other fields?). The trillion-dollar bailout to CEOs and crooked companies who took our taxpayer dollars and then used them for wild parties and golden parachutes. The gap between CEO incomes and those of average workers, which in the past ten years exploded upwards (http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots_20060621). Stagnant or declining incomes for everyone other than the top 5%, despite escalating productivity. The ever-shrinking number of companies that provide health care benefits. Unemployment spiraling upwards remorselessly. Record numbers of home foreclosures. Record numbers of bankruptcies, even though Congress stripped away many of the bankruptcy protections for the middle class (but they're still available to the rich - look at Donald Trump, for example).

We're heading inexorably towards second-world status, a world in which we'll simply have to hope that the new superpowers such as China and India will be kind to us.

It didn't have to be this way. These results weren't a surprise to anyone with half a brain. And yet those of us who pointed out that we were headed straight towards disaster in so many ways couldn't have been more despised, more spat on, by the Republican elite. They seized control of the government and ran the United States of America off a cliff...and now they are trying to scare everyone into letting them stay behind the wheel. They have the nerve to drag out tired old slogans from the 1950s, from the era of McCarthy, while deliberately ignoring the fact that "socialism" is a word that can mean almost anything, and that much of what made America great IS "socialism" in their eyes: the Social Security which means that our senior citizens no longer have to live on the edge of poverty. Medicare. Police departments. Fire departments. Public roads, schools, traffic lights, trash collection...the list goes on and on, but not ONE of them will ever respond to it.

I don't know. Are these people insane? Evil? Stupid? I really don't know. But there's something wrong with them, and I don't have it in me to pity them any more. They've caused too much damage to the country I love. So yes: I'm going to gloat. I'll help to try to save our country from the consequences of their madness in whatever way I can, but I'm damned if I'm not going to rub their noses in what they've done. It's the least they deserve.

And who knows? Maybe...maybe some of them will finally wake up and see what the policies they supported have inflicted on the United States of America. Maybe they'll finally open their eyes. We can always hope.