Here Comes Newt

Or, where did the GOP go?


The future of the Republican Party is shaping up in the shadows of the calamitous MCain and Palin campaign. Even before barrack Obama has been inaugurated, the remaining forces in the GOP are vying for power and attempting to define direction. Unfortunately for us, and unfortunately for them, they’ve taken McCain’s defeat as not having been too much of a thing but too little.

Even as we speak, George Bush is crafting “a right of conscience rule” which would give anyone the right to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable. The Hippocratic Oath would become a wishy-washy, worthless expression whilst doctors and nurses refuse to care for patients based on their own beliefs. Pharmacists, caretakers and even janitors could object to working or participating in any way in anything they personally might find objectionable even if they do not understand the facts or are not in a position to grasp the full meaning of a particular issue.

Sarah Palin is shifting to the right with her ramped up rhetoric that panders to the right wing, religious nutcases but that was almost to be expected.

But now here comes Gingrich. Newt Gingrich, that purported icon of forward thinking politicians. Newt has aligned himself with a new movement called The National Committee for Faith and Family. You all know where this is going right?

Gingrich, who almost certainly will run for the Presidency in 2012, appears in a trailer for a so-called documentary in which he says:

"There is no attack on American culture more destructive and more historically dishonest than the relentless effort to drive God out of America's public square,"

Oh really?

One of the movements main characters is David Barton who in the nineties, when Gingrich was trying to bankrupt the government in order to cripple the Clinton Presidency – remember – GOP before God and country, was allied with Christian Identity, a white supremacist group.

As Michelle Goldberg notes in The New Republic, visitors to Gingrich’s website are asked to sign a petition maligning the fact that there are too few references to God in the Capitol’s visitor centre.

This is where the GOP is headed and that is probably good, because with any luck, it’ll dig its own grave there.

Who's Responsible For the Financial Crisis?

If you’re a right wing pundit, you’ll still be bleating that the market meltdown was the result of Wall Street pulling it’s money out of stocks in fear of an impending Obama Presidency.

Actually, what now surfaces as reported by Yahoo, is a GOP construction that is so stinky I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae allegedly paid DCI, a Republican Consulting firm more than $2 million in order to scuttle legislation that would have led to regulation of the mortgage markets and would, in retrospect, have prevented much of the housing and therefore, credit crisis.

Ironically, the bill that DCI was targeting was written by Chuck Hagel R-Nebraska. The Bill was preceded by a letter written by Chuck Hagel and 25 other senators; here is an excerpt:

"If effective regulatory reform legislation ... is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole,"

Talk about foresight. To be fair to the Republicans, when the bill was sent to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, all Republican members of the committee voted for it, whilst the Democrats opposed it. That was back in 2005 and that was when FM and FM started using DCI’s services to target Republicans to oppose such legislation.

DCI's chief executive by the way is Doug Goodyear. John McCain's campaign later hired him to manage the GOP convention in September.

Why this is funny is because one of the illogical lies that McCain has been spreading about Obama is that the latter had taken advice from the heads of FM & FM. What McCain fails to tell his supporters is that McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, or his lobbying firm has taken more than $2 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2000. In December, Freddie Mac contributed $250,000 to last month's GOP convention.

In the end, the efforts to kill the bill were successful as nine of the targeted Republicans opposed it. Again to be fair, had the Democratic Senators backed it unanimously, it would have passed.

The amazing upshot of all this is that Freddie Mac CEO Richard and Daniel Mudd, President and Chief Executive Officer of Fannie Mae Syron pocketed nearly $19.8 million and $12.21 million in compensation last year respectively, whilst people lost their homes because of the deregulated market.

These are the people who pulled this scheme out of their butts out of sheer greed. The result of their actions are tens of thousands of destitute families across America – the very ones that the GOP is terrified Obama might want to try to help should he become President.

Take Away Women's Right to Vote

No, of course I don’t think it’s a good idea but it gives you a good perspective of how desperate the GOP is. Floundering like a galleon holed by enemy canon, sails shredded by a hurricane of scandals involving anything from embezzlement, through sexual harassment of page boys to tapping feet and waving hands under toilet stall partitions whilst soliciting sex in public, rudder and keel destroyed by a reef of disasters such as Katrina and Iraq, the GOP is gaping wide eyed at a 2008 election that is bound to send most of them into reclusive depressions.

What to do, what to do? Well, our favourite GOP hack Ann Coulter has a solution as reported in today's Raw Story:

"If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine….. women are voting so stupidly, at least single women."

Ann, Ann, Ann…. I knew that somewhere under that horse’s head lurked a misogynistic male cross-dresser. Or is it that you actually are a woman but hate other women who are simply happy being women? Or what is it, pray tell us? Maybe it’s just that you cannot take the frustrations of what has already happened to the GOP in 2006 and what is going to happen to the GOP in 2008 and you’ve blown a fuse?

Repealing women’s right to vote as a solution? I don’t think so. But this is the latest evidence of the Grand Oil Party, chest out, head high, arms flailing and windmilling in panic in an attempt to drag this country back to the Middle Ages where it actually never was; ban abortions, instigate a ‘Christian-Only’ rule for politicians and teachers, insist on “One Nation Under God” in the Pledge of allegiance, denounce evolution in favor of creationism and take away that icon of equality from fully one half of the American people that so many women fought so hard for: their right to vote.