Congressional and Senate Republicans (and some gubernatorial Republicans) are practicing political opportunism at a very inconvenient time.
Currently, the Republican strategy to win back America is to hold up conformations (openly and anonymously), happily accept stimulus money for their districts—although they are explicitly against the stimulus (or deciding not to accept federal money), take the position that bipartisanship means to implement their agenda (but at the same time blame President Obama for the bipartisian divide), and to breed the gotcha culture in order to assert and regain importance—because it’s the only way they can.
Congressional and Senate Republicans have contributed no new ideas that remedy some of our greatest problems: (1) securing adequate energy for the future, (2) balancing diverse competing interests, (3) fixing the financial debacle, (4) solving environmental degradation amongst a culture of unsustainable consumption, and (5) implementing a foreign policy that doesn’t cultivate negative attitudes towards the United States. From New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman:
Meanwhile, the Republican Party behaves as if it would rather see the country fail than Barack Obama succeed. Rush Limbaugh, the de facto G.O.P. boss, said so explicitly, prompting John McCain to declare about President Obama to Politico: “I don’t want him to fail in his mission of restoring our economy.” The G.O.P. is actually debating whether it wants our president to fail. Rather than help the president make the hard calls, the G.O.P. has opted for cat calls. It would be as if on the morning after 9/11, Democrats said they wanted no part of any war against Al Qaeda — “George Bush, you’re on your own.”
As for President Obama, I like his coolness under fire, yet sometimes it feels as if he is deliberately keeping his distance from the banking crisis, while pressing ahead on other popular initiatives. I understand that he doesn’t want his presidency to be held hostage to the ups and downs of bank stocks, but a hostage he is. We all are.
On the Net:
- Bypassing [Republican] Haley Barbour, Mississippi House votes to accept all recovery package funds
- Approval Ratings on the Rise for Congressional Democrats
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