28 Primaries Later

GOP zombie hordes feast on tax cuts and war.

by David Faris

If ever a political party richly deserved an ass-kicking in a presidential election, it would be the Republicans this year. The GOP is so completely out of touch with reality that the party seems on the verge of nominating an empty corporate suit in the middle of an economic crisis, a 71-year-old man who thinks we should be in Iraq for 100 years or a smiling millenarian who believes the Constitution needs to be brought in line with the Bible.

Mitt "Mittens" Romney is a former corporate downsizer — think "the Bobs" in Office Space — and an epic stiff who, while posing recently with a group of African-Americans, quipped, "Who let the dogs out?" Romney certainly believes in letting the dogs out in the form of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on any human being — including American citizens — who Emperor Mittens believes might be a terrorist. Romney's plan for the faltering economy is — yes, you guessed it — more tax cuts. Tax cuts for the wealthy are like brains for the Republican zombie; they keep chomping away even though it never satisfies them. Bush's tax cuts for the rich did little for the economy other than continue to widen the equality gap in America, which is getting bigger than the talent gap between Eli Manning and Tom Brady.

Sen. John McCain is one of those public figures, like Joe Lieberman, who is admired more by people in the other party than his own. For some inexplicable reason, there seem to be a number of otherwise sane progressives who would consider voting for him.

It's true that McCain is a high-profile iconoclast on a few issues of Republican orthodoxy, like immigration and campaign finance reform, but for the most part, he is a boilerplate anti-choice conservative who has said he wants to make the Bush tax giveaways to the rich permanent. He'll put more fundamentalists on the Supreme Court and has promised to increase the size of the U.S. military and throw away billions more on missile defense.

Asked about the war in Iraq at the Florida debate, McCain said without hesitation, "It was a good idea." He has openly said that we might be in Iraq for a century, and his Iran policy can be summed up by his charming rendition of "Bomb, Bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" a few months ago. In short, he is an unabashed cheerleader of American militarism who will do nothing to halt this country's slide into imperialism.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is notable as the only Republican in the field who seems to care about the plight of poor Americans. But his plan for a national sales tax to replace the IRS and the progressive income tax would cripple the very people his plan falsely alleges to help. Perhaps the uninsured, underemployed American poor can suck down some fried squirrel for sustenance, as he bragged on television about doing during his college days?

Huckabee also shocked observers with his interpretation of constitutional law. As he told Faux News, "And that's what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view." Huck also thinks that evolution is just a theory.

So the Republican vision of the future basically comes down to this: a massive American underclass whose grandchildren's grandchildren, hailing from the abortion-free coastal cities of Las Vegas and Pittsburgh, will be chomping on buttered rodents at a checkpoint somewhere in Anbar province or Tehran, waterboarding teenagers as part of the endless War on Terror and praying for another reduction in the corporate income tax for their oligarchic overlords.

David Faris is at it again.