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Okay, Barack Obama has not exactly turned out to be Mount Rushmore material, but – Good God! – the petulant pettiness of right-wing Republican Congressional leaders has turned them into a national embarrassment.
America has big needs right now. But those needs are not even being addressed, because little whiney ideologues like Eric Cantor, the GOP’s majority leader, keep throwing hissy fits, demanding that they get their way, or there’ll be no way. Of course, their way – on everything from tax policy to Wall Street regulation – is always the corporate way. Their plutocratic theories were exactly what was tried throughout George W’s eight-year reign, and they failed spectacularly. Yet, Cantor & Crew are now pushing the same nonsense – the very policies that caused America’s economic crash, which continues to crush grassroots people. “But it’s ideologically correct,” cries Little Eric, “so we and the Koch brothers won’t stop screaming until you give us more of it.”
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They are so insanely obsessed with extremist anti-government dogma that they have even hitched their star to the reviled Lords of Wall Street – the only group in America with a lower public approval rating than that of Congress itself! Bankers are furious that Democrats created a new regulatory agency last year with real clout to protect consumers from the assorted rip offs and frauds that banks keep inventing. So, in a perverse political reflex, Republicans have rushed to protect Wall Street’s gougers from us gougees, locking arms (as well as their minds) in a ridiculous “Save-the-Poor-Bankers” stand. Stamping their tiny feet, they say they’ll block Obama’s nominee to head the agency until Democrats let them rewrite the law to make the agency toothless.
Great – a government of dogmatists, by temper tantrum, for corporate elites. How pathetic.
“Former Ohio Attorney General to Head New Consumer Agency,” The New York Times, July 18, 2011.