2010-06-03 17:45:06
By Hal Bidlack
It would be funny if it were not so darn sad: The Radical Republicans are insisting not that they have a plan to deal with real issues, but rather, that what everyone else sees as reality is, in fact, not actually happening. In the Radical Republican world, up is down, wrong is right, and lies are not lies if you say them loud and often enough.
The radicals that have seized control of the party of Lincoln, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan have steered a course so far to the right that they have left the actual world and have entered Crazytown, and they want you to come along for the ride. The party that was, in theory, the party of small government, and respect for the individual has become the party of “No” in so many ways: No to looking out for the regular guy, No to even a hint of bipartisanship in Washington, No to the will of the people on health care, on the real science of climate change, on real Wall Street reform, and on over 200 bills passed by the House that the Senate cannot even talk about.
But now the Radical Republicans, with a straight face, demand not only that they be allowed to forget the ruinous eight years of President George W. Bush, but now they demand that the American public adopt this convenient amnesia as well. They would have us forget that Bush took a budget surplus of $236.2 billion (Congressional Budget Office) and turned it into a trillion-dollar deficit just eight years later. They would have us forget that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that only the richest .03 percent of families actually pay the estate tax, and that they said it was OK for oil companies to not bother installing acoustic switches on deep-sea oil rigs.
Recently Coloradans have been treated to two different and remarkable demonstrations of Radical Republican Revisionist Rethinking (I call it the “pirate strategy” of “RRRR!”). You may have seen the television ads put out by the Republican Governors Association, desperately tossing buckets of mud at Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. The RGA prattles on about job loss, conveniently ignoring the recession ushered in by the failed politics and Wall Street buddies of Bush and eight years of Republican control of the government.
Revisionist history in Radical Republican ads is not surprising, but getting caught in an outright lie can raise a few eyebrows, eh? You may recall in the ad, the RGA tossed a bucket of mud at Mayor Hickenlooper over Frontier Airline’s decision to supposedly move 340 jobs out of state because of “Hickenlooper tax hikes.” Only problem? Not true, according to Frontier, which took the unusual step of actually issuing a press release to object to the RGA’s false statements.
The simple facts are that Hickenlooper is a superb example of the “can do” spirit. He started out as a geologist in the oil business, started very successful small businesses, gives generously of his time and money, and was re-elected with a staggering 87 percent of the vote.
A second remarkable example of the way Radical Republicans look at the world came from Colorado Springs Mayor Lionel Rivera. By all accounts, Rivera is a nice man, and after my 25 years of military service, I have great respect for folks like Rivera who have served in uniform. But his comments show how truly out of touch with regular folks the Radical Republicans are. Rivera recently said (after turning down $42.8 million in federal job money to help the unemployed find work) that the city didn’t want the money, and that, apparently losing your home and your dignity really is not a problem because, “Some people want a homeless life. Some people, they really do.” Wow.
And so here we are. The Radical Republicans are asking everyone to forget that they are at the lowest total tax rate since 1950 (USA Today) and that 99 percent of American families got tax cuts from President Barack Obama (Citizens for Tax Justice). They ask us to forget the cozy relationship that existed between Wall Street and Republicans. They ask us to forget that it was Bush that blew the budget out of the water. And they want you to think that Hickenlooper was the cause of job loss in Denver. As a small-business man, Hickenlooper created jobs, and during the recent financial crisis, he steered a course that kept Denver from feeling the worst of the effects of the Republican recession.
The RGA hopes that you are too worried about losing your job and your home to remember whose fault it was. But that tactic will fail. Coloradans are too smart for such blatantly false tactics, and they are too compassionate to accept Rivera’s world view. We choose to live our lives based on the real world, not the fantasy the Radical Republicans offer up. I guess we are lucky that the RGA wasn’t talking about the problem of hunger in America; they’d likely just say “let them eat cake.”