Why the thousands of little affiliations and bloggers and .org can not seem, finally, to get organize, not around a 'personality', but around the need to react to those dangerous forces at work right now within the inflammatory Republican pundits machine advocating violence, 'revolution', excessive demagoguery and right down sedition, is beyond me.
But it is also the most tender Achille's heel of the Left and leaves it vulnerable to the most poisonous impact of the hate speech of the right snake oil vendors. We are the new Silent Majority. And we can't seem to find representatives that know what to do with us since we're not the big corporate donors that they seek.
All of this could even spell, democratically, the undoing of a country who once knew how to do the right thing instead of just the Right's hysterical new memo point of the day.
A Voice Of Reason
By BOB HERBERT
The Republican Party is not simply the “just-say-no” party. It’s also a shameless advocate of the free lunch. Ronald Reagan famously told us he could jack up defense spending, cut taxes and balance the federal budget all at the same time.
Readers' Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
The Great Recession and the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been savage enough to reintroduce the G.O.P. to reality.
One of the reasons so many conservative Republican absurdities became actual U.S. policy was the intellectual veneer slapped upon them by right-wing think tanks and commentators. The grossest nonsense was made to seem plausible to a lot of people — people who wanted to believe in a free lunch. When Mr. Reagan told the country that “government is the problem,” the intellectual handmaidens of the corporate and financial elite were right there to explain in exhaustive detail why that was so.
The result, in addition to the terrible consequences of Iraq and Afghanistan and the damage to America’s standing in the world, was the tremendous (and tremendously debilitating) transfer of wealth from working people in the U.S. to the folks already in the upper echelons of wealth and income. The elite made out like bandits — often literally.
