I could spend the next hour fixing this blog so it is more reader friendly, but I have confidence in you. I think you can get the message if I do nothing more to it. The link is to a Frank Rich NYT column in today’s paper. The black print below is all quoted from Rich. The red print is from me. Don’t miss the opportunity to click the link and read the whole article.

The public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal. [I would laugh here and say, ALL AMERICANS have ancestors saved . . . ]

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15rich.html

Unfortunately the question is for whom the bell tolls. (Remember the answer? It tolls for us.) We sit just like the Jews in the ghettos during the holocaust. We hear of others losing their jobs. Millions out of work in China, 25 % unemployment in Detroit, but we remain delusional, looking around our own neighborhood saying things aren’t that bad here. The Jews heard the rumors of horrible things that had happened, some survivors even returned to the ghettos and walked the streets telling of mass murder. No one believed them. As this economy spirals downward, banking continuing to fail, housing continuing to foreclose, we are dancing around the edge of the back hole pointing to others disappearing into it’s depths and saying, “that is not me.” Even when 175 Fayette county teachers face dismissal before next year and all teachers face a 5% cut in salary, even with fire stations being closed in Atlanta, firefighters laid off, we still don’t believe that the Gestapo will come for us. The GOP is dancing on TV saying ridiculous things about the New Deal not working (this is historical revisionism plain and simple), insert links and reveling in their ZERO votes for economic stimulus. Do nothing and the freemarket fairy will save us, they say. Cut taxes for the rich.

While I heard repeatedly that the public had turned against the stimulus package, apparently only the Rasmussen poll showed that. In all the other polls, stimulus support was in the majority and Obama support is in the high 60s and low 70s. Amazing.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.
Judgment day is coming in about 20 months when we get to go back to the polls and remove more of the GOP. Do your little dance, you obstructionist little GOP so and sos!

The country wants health care reform. The country wants changes in the tax codes. The country wants restrictions on Wall Street greed. The country wants banks responsive to people. You want to help the country. Put a moratorium on foreclosure for the next year. Without foreclosures flooding the market, the market clears up and rebounds. Spirits lift.