The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Wrecking-Ball Right Reaches Robert Reich, Frank Schaeffer

Posted on | July 15, 2011 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Who is the audience for some of the vacuous noise one sees on the Puffington Host? Robert Reich whines almost cutely in The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right, but his title demands at least a rubber chicken to the head, if not something more violent.

Recently I debated a conservative Republican who insisted the best way to revive the American economy was to shrink the size of government. When I asked him to explain his logic he said, simply, “government is the source of all our problems.” When I noted government spending had brought the economy out of the previous eight economic downturns, including the Great Depression, he disagreed. “The Depression ended because of World War Two,” he pronounced, as if government had played no part in it.

A few days later I was confronted by another conservative Republican who blamed the nation’s high unemployment rate on the availability of unemployment benefits. “If you pay someone not to work, they won’t,” he said. When I pointed out unemployment benefits couldn’t possibly be the cause of joblessness because there are now about five job seekers for every job opening, he scoffed. “Government always makes things worse.”

Government-haters seem to be everywhere.

Dude, the cart ain’t the horse. The over-reaching federal cart can’t drag the economic horse anywhere. Benighted fools such as yourself that pretend otherwise and write this sort of dreck are part of the problem.

It’s no coincidence that the emergence of the tea party coincided with the Wall Street bailout.

Have I already noted that you’re a fool, Mr. Reich? The bailout was just another brick in the wall of economic doom built by you and your Progressive ilk, crushing liberty.

Add in the relentlessly snide government-hating and baiting of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and his imitators on rage radio; include more than thirty years of Ronald Reagan’s repeated refrain that government is the problem; pile on hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of oil tycoons Charles and David Koch intent on convincing the public that government is evil, and you have all the ingredients for the emergence of a wrecking-ball right that’s intent on destroying government as we know it.

See, Reich: Fox, Rush, Reagan, Koch, Stacy, the rest of the blogosphere and I are, to merge you and Buckley, standing athwart history swinging an internet-driven wrecking ball. We’re saying to you and the rest of the Ruling Class Overlords: get stuffed! Your sad little socialist pandering can maybe bring temporary respite to Americans. Back to the horse/cart metaphor, your liberty substitutes are useful so long as the cart has a little momentum in it. Let history demonstrat even a slight positive grade, and your ideas are toast.
We hate your ideas, and hope they fall off the planet, without dragging those who love liberty along for the ride.
Is that enough wrecking, Mr. Reich?
Meanwhile, Frank Schaeffer serves up enough Old Testament-grade drivel to qualify as one of those priests of Baal whom Elijah wrecked: “Debt Ceiling Chaos Is a Born-Again Religion Problem”. Really? Do you actually conflate faith and politics to that degree, Frank, or are you imitating a knob for effect?

To understand why an irrational self-defeating action like destroying the credit of the USA might seem like the right thing to do you have to understand two things: that the Republican Party is now the party of religious fanatics and that these fanatics — people like Michele Bachmann — don’t want to work within our system, they want to bring it down.

In the scorched-earth era of the “health care reform debates” of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren’t the evil government. The right even decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies — even for military operations (“contractors”), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

See, Frank, our government has become a pack of thieves. Are you, yourself among their number, or wearing blinders? Or do you tell yourself some rational lies to rationalize ‘quantitative easing’?

Even the word “infrastructure” lost its respectability when government had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges, and trains. In denial of the West’s civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, Evangelicals (and the rest of the Right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God’s creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals.

Schaeffer, you paint with a broad brush. I cheerfully vote for parks and other civic improvements, At The Local Level. Yet you seem to be the one setting government up as God with ‘government care of individuals’. Do we need to be frank about your idolatry problem, Frank, or is that cow sacred?
In conclusion:

Theology is — by nature — not about reason but about faith. If God’s will is to be served then so be it if America is plunged into chaos! This debt ceiling fiasco is just another chapter in the “culture” wars.

The extreme language of Evangelical/”pro-life” rebellion has now been repackaged in the debt ceiling showdown. It is the language of religion pitted against facts.

One can nearly agree with your foolishness, if government is become God, in violation of the Establishment Clause, and you are the “culture” warrior foisting a God, call It “Progress”, down the public throat.
How about we go for something rational, secular, and economic like spending less than our tax receipts? How about if We The Caesars don’t overdrive what We The People render?
I’m warming up, but I have to go see about a plane.

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Comments

15 Responses to “Wrecking-Ball Right Reaches Robert Reich, Frank Schaeffer”

  1. Finrod Felagund
    July 16th, 2011 @ 2:59 am

    When you believe crap like “government spending brought the economy out of the previous eight economic downturns”, the truth seems absurd.