Neanderthal Two-Step

That was Bob Herbert’s very apt description of Republican behavior in his Op-Ed Column, as they tried their best to derail the economic stimulus package working its difficult way through Congress. And making sure no one would mistake him for a “class act”, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina ranted and raved about how “This bill is stinking up the place.” That should do it, Lindsey, puts you right up there with the eloquent Bushie!

Obama has gone out of his way to get Republicans to make a genuine effort towards cleaning up the miserable mess that resulted from the long, dark night of GOP control in Washington, but he was rebuffed, and in some cases contemptuously.

Thursday night he struck back, attacking Republican intransigence and its failed policies of the past and then, of course, everyone started complaining that he wasn’t being the nice guy anymore!! Well, whatever, the bill did get passed, although by a very slim margin and a small number of Republicans did finally come aboard.

It’s been clear for years that the GOP is a party without a heart. But, according to Herbert, its pointless obstructionism, its overall lack of any serious response to what is a clear national economic emergency, seems to indicate it’s also a party without a brain. Oh, I’m so glad someone besides me has said that! Someone with a lot more credentials than I have.

Republicans in Washington have behaved like a milling crowd standing in the way of firefighters trying to respond to a devastating blaze. The best that can be said for the party is that a few senators seem to have been able to part the crowd enough to let the rescuers begin to inch forward.

On the front page of The Times on Friday was an article that said the number of women on the nation’s payrolls is poised to pass that of men for the first time in American history. This isn’t necessarily because women have been doing so well, but because men have been doing so poorly Yeah, those guys who used to lap up Rush Limbaugh’s slimy crap while driving to or from work are now having to tune in from their living rooms because the benefits of the GOP’s right-wing, tax-cutting ideology never trickled down to them and they are now jobless. The price of stupidity!

They just don’t get it. Most act as if they don’t understand that in this radical economic downturn the demand for goods and services has fallen off a cliff and that government spending is needed, and needed quickly to replace a large portion of the lost demand. If you haven’t read my post “A Different Take on Recession”, you might take a look and you can see why this actually applies to all of us.

The goal is twofold: to alleviate some of the enormous suffering (something that is easily understood if you have a heart), and to revive the battered economy (equally easy to understand by anyone with a brain – a functioning brain, that is).

John McCain indignantly sputtered that “This is not a stimulus bill; it is a spending bill.”

It was an objection that had been addressed by an incredulous President Obama on Thursday night. “What do you think a stimulus is?” he asked. “Spending is the whole point.”

Wake up guys!