Huh? Part Two

Let me lead off with my own criticism of the Obama stimulus package. No one should be surprised that the economy is still tanking. First, it is taking far too long for the 787 billion dollars of the Obama plan to enter the economy. By the most optimistic accounts, it will be well into 2011 before all the money has been injected into our sagging national economy. Secondly, it does not take a Nobel laureate to be able to figure out that an economy that has lost more than three trillion dollars in wealth, investments, and jobs, will not be resuscitated by a less than one trillion dollar stimulus. In order to make his plan bi-partisan, a stupid idea from the get go, Obama watered down his request and what he got was no where near enough to end this recession. Now, facing a much more timid Congress, the president is going to have to ask for a great deal more money, or run the risk of a decade long, Japanese style recession.

That said, one wonders why House and Senate Republicans are on the attack against the whole idea of a federal stimulus plan. First, it was their runaway love affair with a completely de-regulated national economy that got us into this mess in the first place. With a little help from Bill Clinton in 1995, these economic geniuses gutted all our banking regulation laws, enacted a shameful tax cut for the rich, cut the funding for the SEC, and took massive amounts of campaign funding from the likes of hedge fund managers, Wall Street investment bankers, and the mortgage securities industry. In other words, while worshiping at the altar of Alan Greenspan and Adam Smith, these stimulus nay-sayers gleefully rode our economy into the toilet.

And now what is their solution? Incredibly, it is more of the same that got us into this mess in the first place! Cut taxes, deregulate, and, I guess, to the poor, "let them eat cake." Sorry Marie, but I could not resist stealing your line. I guess these guys are really convinced that, like so many of their ardent supporters on the far right, none of the rest of us ever read American history. Just because they missed the lecture on the New Deal in History 101, it does not mean that the rest of us did. My God, even Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the born again right, admired FDR as a great president.

But that isn't the truly weird part. The real Twilight Zoney stuff being babbled into microphones these days is a Republican attempt to lay blame for the recession at the front door the Obama White House. Where were these guys when Dubya was celebrating the blessings of runaway capitalism. Did they miss the fact that their party took a two trillion dollar federal surplus in 2000 and magically turned it into a three trillion dollar federal deficit? Had they any of the decency they say us leftists are void of, rather than bemoaning the evils of federal spending, they would be supporting all attempts to repair the damage they have done.

Heck, even the Pope, not exactly known for his leftist thinking, issued an Encyclical entitled, Charity in Truth this last week in which he condemned western democracies for giving in to the powers of corporate greed. Benedict XVI then went on to admonish western political leaders to restructure their economies to create true welfare states where the poor and vulnerable would be cared for, while at the same time instituting new and stringent regulations on private capital.

Hey if the Vatican has finally figured this out, why can't all those members of the Flat Earth party in Congress? Or maybe they all missed that sermon last week at the Fox News Cathedral.