Team of Buffoons (Baboons)

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent treatise “Team of Rivals” has become the du jour read these days given President Obama’s attempts at extending an olive branch to the Taliban, I mean, the depleted and exhausted GOP. He has tried very hard to invite them into the process to develop a stimulus strategy to help our ailing economy. He has extended invitations to some to become part of his cabinet. Frankly, it has been a losing proposition from the beginning. Good intentions and reading history books are not enough.

Senator Gregg’s recent do over is just another example.

I contend that the fundamental difference between the Democrats and the GOP in this country is not about spending. Both parties when given the opportunity will spend money like drunken sailors for their pet projects, slip in earmarks for their districts and try to find ways to help those who have donated to their campaigns. What do you expect? This is politics. It’s not pretty.

Isn’t it a tab bit disingenuous for the Republicans to cry crocodile tears about the size of the stimulus package? This is a party that ran up deficits for years, gave out tax breaks to their affluent friends, offered lucrative senior drug benefit programs to their benefactors in big pharma, wrote legislation to insulate credit card companies from damages they caused cardholders who were given more cards that they can fit into their wallets, and ultimately let Wall Street create investment products that were modeled on ponzi schemes dreamed up in Albania.

Now all of sudden they are heralding fiscal restraint and smaller government. How transparent and pathetic.

I believe the real difference between the GOP and the Democrats is a rather simple but a profound difference. The leaders of the Democratic Party actually believe that government should be about helping solve the nation’s problems. The Republicans recent track record speaks to a series of cynical attempts to pay back their financial benefactors, placate the religious right and win tactical victories with various constituencies in hopes that these efforts lead to electoral victories. Rove’s efforts to build a national Republican Party as the majority was grounded in this approach. Legislative initiatives, governmental appointments, energy policy and rallying country to fear terrorism were really a series of tactical steps to acquire voting blocks. And at the end of the day it failed miserably. Bush barely won in 2004 and lost the popular vote in 2000.

Now, most of the house seats held by Republicans are in districts so disproportionately older, white, religiously conservative, and rural, the McGuffey Reader, Nancy Drew Mysteries and Reader’s Digest are the most popular items in the local public libraries. To say they are from “safe seats” is an understatement.

The apparent leader of the new effort to combat federal spending and to return the GOP to its philosophical roots is Senator David Vitter from Louisiana. Remember Diaper Dave? He was the one who was caught in the DC Madam prostitute scandal. Apparently, he greeted hookers wearing adult diapers. His recent comments to a gathering of the Federalist Society in Washington, DC underscore the GOP new attack strategy.

The newly invigorated GOP as per Diaper Dave is once again railing against wasteful spending in the stimulus package, claims Obama wants to form a dictatorship, and hopes that the economy tanks so badly in the next few years they can win a few seats in the house and Senate.

Meantime. President Obama and his fellow Democrats are trying to use the levers of government to actually solve our nation’s problems. If both houses pass the stimulus package, this is an enormous victory for the American people. Again, it’s not pretty. But it is an honest and sincere attempt to use the power of government policy, programs and resources to help get us out of their very serious economic malaise.

President Obama will take on entitlements, health care; try to get us out of Iraq. And the Republicans? Well, let just say they are trying to find their voice. At a time they need to sing more in harmony. It sounds like the finger nails scratching a chalkboard.