Black "Welfare Queens" and the Racially Inferior - NYT Bob Herbert

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Subject: Black "Welfare Queens" and the Racially Inferior - NYT Bob
Herbert

Date: Oct 11, 2008 4:29 AM

(GOP, LMAO)
http://www.actionlyme.org
============================================

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/opinion/11herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

The New York Times
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October 11, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Mask Slips
By BOB HERBERT

The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the
crackup of the
financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are
real-world consequences
when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have
over for
dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at
how well your
401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this
month, or whether
the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as
robust as you’d
like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly
complete control
of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil,
top government
and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are
dusting off treatises
that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But
he seemed
like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a
useless and
irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the
terrorists who struck
us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin
Laden is
still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.

Voting has consequences.

I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of
egregious
problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P.,
and especially
its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.

The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many
profoundly
important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has
nevertheless
been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its
wrongheaded, favor-the-rich,
country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans,
but was the
patriotic way to go.

Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush
used for
Ronald Reagan’s fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense
spending,
cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with
Mr. Bush as
his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.

In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of
Economic
Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the
deficit: the
president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest
on the expanding
national debt.

These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving
so profligately.
The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but
soon the
“fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t
matter,”
said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was
on.

Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms,
were repeatedly
told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down
to them. Someday.

Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican
politicians
and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one
important national
issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it
from the start
and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald
Reagan saw
it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy
and global
warming.

When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of
the link between
chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who
would go on
to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the
award as the
“Nobel Appeasement Prize.”

Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans,
opposed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to
the historic
Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F.
Buckley, the
ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that
whites, being superior,
were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.

“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time
being, it
is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but
only after
it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.

The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of
much that it
has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey
the wreckage
of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with
the financial
crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons
of history
and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they
may cast in
the future.

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