The destruction of our country

Krugman is right. By a thousand cuts and now by the chopping off of the head, the Republican fanatics are determined to destroy our country. As more a member of their party than of the Democrats, Obama is aiding and abetting them. On every issue he has caved in, giving them what they were asking for--and more.  Was he part of the plot to pull America down, right from the beginning of his election?  Were all his promises (now lying buried in the political mud) just lies to get our votes?  It is looking more and more that he was always in league with the conservatives.  Either that, or he has been personally threatened, reminded of what happened to the Kennedys when they opted to stand alone against the real rulers of this country and world.  He may have been naive enough to really believe the President has power (just as we who voted for him were fooled). If so, he was reeducated very quickly after taking office. The President only has (apparent) power when he is the tool of the right wing, like Duhmbya Bush who was the puppet of the ultra conservatives.  We are all paying the price for the ascendancy of the right wing crazies to a place of political power.  The founding fathers are spinning in their graves.  And, as a country, we will soon be spinning in ours.

The Cult That Is Destroying America

By Paul Krugman

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.

And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.

It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.