COMMENTARY

For those of you who are Tea Party devotees and others who think “Government,” with a capital “G” and with no face on it, is always bad—read no further. 

As a writer for The LA Progressive wrote last week, any politician who is against government is like an actor who is against entertainment.

The GOP has sold Americans a bill of goods, not a Bill of Rights.  The Republicans have sold voters on the trite message “Government is the problem, not the solution.”  Well, that makes for a great sound bite, and it even has won a lot of votes for Republicans. 

However, sound bites do not solve problems.  And boy, does the U. S. have problems to solve. 

I have lost all patience with those who lump all politicians and all elected political leaders into one basket with no differentiation among those who work long and hard to carry out the will of the people who elected them, and those slackers, who are merely place holders at the table, or who are totally beholden to the money PACs and other donors, who keep them in office.

I have been a minority of one many times in the halls of the NC General Assembly, as the causes I have espoused and lobbied for were not the “sexiest” or best polling issues of the last two decades. 

They just happened to be issues lacking much support, and I am a die-hard champion of the underdog.  I also support crucial health and social services issues, and those issues are just not popular with most legislators in Raleigh, N. C.,  or in Washington, D. C.

So, while I seldom do this on Examiner.com, I am offering up an opinion:  The Republicans who rightly dealt the Democrats a “shellacking,” as President Barack Obama called it, last week at the polls will either lead the U. S. House of Representatives and compromise to pass laws in the U. S. Senate, or they will get their own spanking at the polls in two years.

It is easy to be a Party that is the party of “no,” as the GOP has been for two years, especially in light of the tough economic times that Obama and his Democrats in Congress inherited from former President George Bush and his cohorts. 

Do you recall who was in office when TARP was passed in 2008?  Well, President Obama was still a U. S. Senator from Illinois at the time.  And why was TARP needed, anyway?

Because, when the GOP had control of all three parts of “Government” (The Congress, The Presidency, and the Supreme Court) in Washington, D. C., they took the opportunity to completely gut financial regulations that had previously protected consumers. 

President Bush had from 2001 to 2007 to “fix” government, and what did Bush and the GOP leaders leave in their tracks?                                                                                                                                                                                                             Nothing but devastation everywhere:  two wildly expensive wars and a mounting deficit, even though Bush inherited a surplus after President Bill Clinton’s two terms.  A backlog of unconfirmed judiciary appointments, as the GOP applied their own political “litmus tests” to all those nominated to federal judgeships.

And, how about the lack of oversight by federal agencies from EPA to the FDA that resulted in damages from the Gulf oil spill to persons injured or dying from drugs that should have never made it to market?

Now on top of the GOP leadership who want only to obstruct the Democrats' proposals, not to put anything as a viable althernative on the table, we have the tea party.  Not exactly a party, but as Hodding Carter III put it in a speech at NC State University today, they can be even more of a problem in real policy creation.

Carter, a Democrat and Professor of Public Policy at UNC-CH, pointed out that while there are still true conservatives like David Brooks of the New York Times and George Will of the Washington Post, he sees the tea party as "reactionaries" and not true conservatives.  "They just want to destroy what exists." Carter said of the tea party leaders and its newly elected officials.

Carter said to a group of senior citizens in the Encore Program at NCSU, "I am not a fan of rage substituting for policy and thought."  He also said that he sees parallels between the economic and political instability of the United States in this decade and "what swept Europe in the 1920s." 

Carter cautioned that unless conomic opportunity and educational opportunity are kept alive in the US, as they were in the post-World War II years and prior to the past 30 years, the country " will not be invulnerable to a move to the left or the right of socialism or fascism."

Good luck, GOP.  You are going to need it.

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