Where's Les McCann When We Need Him?

Whenever I hear a Republican speak these days I have a serious Les McCann moment.

You know the one that McCann, along with Eddie Harris, gave the world at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

"I love the lie and lie the love/A-hangin' on, with push and shove/Possession is the motivation that is hangin' up/The God-damn nation looks like we always end up in a rut (everybody now!)/Tryin' to make it real -- compared to what." 

Since Jan. 20, 2009, Republicans have repeatedly shown that they are a callous and irksome lot that loves the lie. Don't simply take my word. Look at the GOP's six-year policy of obstructionism that was hatched as Barack Obama was being sworn in as the nation's 44th president.

For years Republicans lied about the President's economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, saying each would destroy the economy. Now that we have seen more than 50 months of steady job growth -- 3.1 million jobs in 2014 alone -- since 2011, a drop in the unemployment rate to below 6 percent, records set on the stock market, soaring profits by the nation's major corporations, and GPD growth we haven't had since before 2008, Republicans seek to take the credit, saying it was the anticipation of a Republican takeover of Congress this year that pushed the economy forward. Of course, they still lie about the Affordable Care Act and their so-called replacement plan, which seeks to gut the ACA and would leave millions of Americans without health insurance -- again.

But if those six years of Republican "no's" and obstructionism in Congress are not enough then look at the actions of the Republican party since it expanded its majority in the House of Representatives and took control of the Senate after the 2014 midterm elections. One can also look at the actions of Republican governors and state legislatures around the country. Whether it is the doubling down of broken fiscal and tax policies in Kansas, Wisconsin, or Louisiana, the ridiculous comments of state legislators on what constitutes rape, or efforts to further destroy unions, the evidence is there.

Let's look at Congress first. After six years of making Congress as dysfunctional as possible and lowering its favorability rating to single-digits at various times by shutting down the government, playing brinksmanship with the debt ceiling, and blocking all meaningful legislation, the first bills the newly empowered Republican majorities voted in the House and Senate do nothing to break the logjam of do-nothingness in Congress or help the American people who continue to face economic hardship six years after the economy collapsed.

Instead, they have voted to put the Federal Government on the hook again for reckless banking practices that the Dodd-Frank financial regulations sought to curb; have voted to repeal or alter the Affordable Care Act for the 56th time; pushed through a law that would thwart Obama's actions to block the unnecessary Keystone XL pipeline project; have voted that future analysis of tax bills should use a questionable formula that would make all tax cuts seem good; and have added a poison pill to the Department of Homeland Security funding bill in an effort to block the President's executive order granting a reprieve to immigrants whose parents brought them into the country illegally as children.

Oh yeah, we also have a Republican U.S. Senator who says restaurants should be able to "opt-out" of the requirement that employees must wash their hands after using the restrooms, and several so-called Republican doctors who equivocate on the importance of vaccinations to stem preventable diseases that have the potential to kill.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

We also have several Republican governors doubling down on failed tax and fiscal policies that have stymied economic growth in their states and have blown large holes in their budgets. With the 2016 presidential election season already in progress, Republicans have said that the next president should be a governor, someone with executive experience.

Yet, a look at those Republican governors gives us Bobby Jindal whose home state is facing a $1.6 billion budget hole this year and in the foreseeable years because of tax cuts, budget gimmicks, one-shots, and a drop in oil prices; Scott Walker whose home state faces so large a budget gap that he plans to cut about $300 million from the state's vaunted public college system; Rick Scott who faces multiple claims of ethics violations, the most recent for allegedly firing the top state law-enforcement official investigating the governor for wrongdoing; Chris Christie -- a bellicose, bullying, buffoon -- who has more scandals and junkets from businessmen than any other governor should ever have and still be walking free; and Jeb Bush who we now know was a hashish smoking alleged bully who wants other people's kids incarcerated for something that he did and seemed to enjoy as a teenager.  

To add further insult, Republican-led state legislatures are filled with "whacko birds" that have no idea of what constitutes rape. According to one Republican state legislator, while rape of a woman is ugly, it becomes less ugly if the woman gets pregnant. Then there is the Republican legislator who wonders why it is considered rape to have sex with an unconscious woman.

And we can't forget the religious right, which is trying to change state laws to make discrimination legal as long as one can cite religious belief. Yes, Les McCann was right.

"Church on Sunday, sleep and nod/Tryin to duck the wrath of God/Preachers fillin' us with fright/They all tryin' to teach us what they think is right/They really have to be some kind of nut (I can't use it!)/Tryin to make it real -- compared to what."
 

The Insanity of America's Cuba Policy

Insanity, people say, is doing something the same way over and over, and expecting different results. That also has been the definition of United States policy toward Cuba, and those who have sought to maintain that misdirected policy.

For a little more than half a century America has waged an economic war against the island nation and its people in an effort to topple the Castro regime. It hasn't worked. Fidel Castro, who stepped down as President in 2008, outlasted 10 U.S. presidents before turning power over to his younger brother, Raul. Still, too many political hacks have wanted to stick with the same outdated and unproductive policies toward Cuba. They were unable or unwilling to recognize that something different was needed.

President Barack Obama finally made the correct decision for them: On Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2014, he announced the United States would seek to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. Under the agreement, the United States will open an embassy in Havana, and Obama will call for the lifting of the Cuban embargo. In addition, Cuba released Alan Gross, who had been imprisoned there for 5 years, and another man who had been imprisoned for nearly 20 years. The United States released three Cubans convicted of espionage. (Early reports of the agreement also suggested that Cuba would release more than 50 political prisoners.)

"We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries," Obama said. "These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked. It's time for a new approach."

Obama's noon announcement from the White House was met with the usual hand wringing, hyperbole, and kvetching.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida blasted Obama's actions as "another concession to tyranny," and vowed that he and other Republicans would do all in their power to thwart Obama's efforts, particularly any efforts to roll back the economic embargo.

"This whole new policy is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people. All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to stay in power," the Cuban-American senator said -- as if the Castro government was set to fall any minute now.

Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey was just as opposed. "Let's be clear," said Menendez, who is Cuban-American, "this was not a 'humanitarian' act by the Castro regime. It was a swap of convicted spies for an innocent American. President Obama's actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Castro government."

Republican presidential wannabe Jeb Bush said Obama was rewarding the Castro brothers' "heinous" behavior, a remarkable comment considering it was Jeb's brother who defiled America's reputation abroad through mendacity, torture, and an unjustified, decades-long war in Iraq.

Of course the irony and hypocrisy of the criticisms are lost on Republicans, many of whom have spent the last week or so defending the torture methods used during George W. Bush's administration. According to Republicans, Obama's overtures to Cuba are misguided because the Castro brothers preside over a corrupt and totalitarian government that does not respect democratic principles.

That should sound very familiar to the party that added a possible bailout of the nation's six largest banks in a must pass budget bill; shut down the federal government to get its way; oversaw a sweeping expansion of government spying on its own citizens; passed laws that made it harder for people to vote; seeks to deny women control over their own bodies; pushes a conservative Christian theocracy in a nation founded on the principles of the separation of church and state; is shamelessly in the pockets of corporate America, particularly the Koch brothers; seeks to deny health care to poor Americans; and justifies police killings of unarmed black men by saying its black people's fault police are killing them. 

Nonetheless, many Cuban-Americans in Union City, N.J., and Miami showed muted enthusiasm. While many of the older generation lamented that nothing will change for Cubans until the Castro brothers were gone, many in the younger generation were delighted that the United States and their homeland would move toward normalization.

As they should be.

The issues that have kept this country from correcting a five-decade old wrong are dying with many of those who fled Cuba after Fidel's fighters moved from the mountains into the Presidential Palace.

Surveys by Gallup since 1999 show a shift in how Americans view Cuba, with a majority -- ranging from 55 percent to 71 percent at any given time -- favoring normalizing diplomatic relations. Among Cuban-Americans, support for normalization ran as high as 79 percent in Florida and 73 percent nationwide. A similar poll by Florida International University found that 68 percent of Cuban Americans favor normalized diplomatic relations, while 69 percent want travel restrictions relaxed, and 52 percent want the embargo lifted, according to an article published on The Atlantic's web site.  In addition, the old Cold War complaint that Cuba is a communist country no longer carries the same weight considering U.S. relations with Russia, China, and Vietnam.

That so many Americans would want an end to an economic war on a country whose most serious crime appears to have been an association with this country's worst Cold War enemy has not moved Republicans.

"I would argue that, instead of lifting the embargo, we should consider strengthening it," Jeb Bush said in a speech earlier this month. According to The Miami Herald, "the crowd of donors, the backbone of Cuba's exiled elite, applauded loudly."

But not loud enough to drown out the calls for America to end one of its longest and possibly most unjust wars in history. 

When the "Big Tent" Collapses

One has to wonder what is happening to the Republican Party and its members. Is the party’s establishment having a Grinch moment, finally coming to its senses on a myriad of issues, growing a heart where one did not seem to exist before? Or is it having a Scarecrow moment, finally realizing that having a brain is about whether one actually uses it? What about its members? Are they having the opposite experience, rejecting both the Grinch and the Scarecrow?

Those are some of the questions that hover over the GOP national convention in Tampa, Fla., this week. While the party of Lincoln appears united in its desire to defeat President Barack Obama, it seems more divided than it has been in some time, with various factions trying to out conservative the others, instigating a battle over such hot button social issues as abortion, making xenophobia part of the party identity, and articulating a disdain for government that has made the GOP far too extreme for most Americans.

Even Republicans – from Dan Quayle to George Pataki to Chuck Hagel to David A. Stockman to Jeb Bush to Mike Lofgren – have articulated the problems stemming from the party’s hard-right turn.

“The Republican Party needs to re-establish its philosophy of the big tent with principles,” former Vice President Dan Quayle told The New York Times recently. “The philosophy you hear from time to time, which is unfortunate, is one of exclusion rather than inclusion. You have to be expanding the base, expanding the party, because, compared to the Democratic Party, the Republican Party is a minority party.”

Former New York Gov. George E. Pataki said: “What I fear is that that very positive desire to limit the power and the role of the federal government could turn into a philosophy that is antigovernment. Sometimes, those who I fear have that antigovernment view, as opposed to the limited-government view, rise to the center of the nominating process. I think that is not a good thing for the Republican Party.”

Indeed, the GOP has moved so far to the right that Ronald Reagan, the man neo-conservatives praise repeatedly as their beacon, would not want to be part of it, according to Chuck Hagel, a former U.S. Senator from Nebraska who now teaches at Georgetown University.

“Reagan would be stunned by the party today,” Hagel told Josh Rogin for a story posted in The Cable on Foreign Policy’s Web site in May. “Reagan wouldn’t identify with this party. There’s a streak of intolerance in the Republican Party today that scares people. Intolerance is a very dangerous thing in a society because it always leads to a tragic ending....

“Ronald Reagan was never driven by ideology. He was a conservative but he was a practical conservative. He wanted limited government but he used government and he used it many times. And he would work with the other party,” Hagel said.

Hagel compared the battle over the soul of the current Republican Party to a similar battle in the 1950s, when such moderates as Dwight D. Eisenhower fought such conservatives as Joseph McCarthy. The moderates won that battle. Their heirs are losing this one.

“Now the Republican Party is in the hands of the right, I would say the extreme right, more than ever before,” Hagel said. “You’ve got a Republican Party that is having difficulty facing up to the fact that if you look at what happened during the first eight years of the century, it was under Republican direction.”

Hagel decried the current Republican Party as schizophrenic and intolerant of dissent. He cited the resignation of Republican senator Lamar Alexander from a leadership post last year as a clear indication of how the party has changed. “There has been a litmus test, purity factor that has been applied over the years. I saw it in the Senate myself,” said Hagel, who was in the Senate from 1997 to 2009.

Hagel is not alone in his assessment.

In an Aug. 13 op-ed piece in The New York Times, David A. Stockman, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, described Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan as “the same empty conservative sermon.” Stockman should know since he was the person that oversaw Reagan’s budget office.

“Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to ‘job creators’ (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse,” Stockman wrote. “Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neocon conservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion ‘defense’ budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.”

Stockman went on to say that Ryan folded “like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout.” (Ryan the shrink-the-government radical also sought federal dollars to save a GM plant in his hometown, the same one he has repeatedly accused President Obama of failing to protect. GM announced in June 2008 that it was closing the plant, which happened in December 2008.)

“But the greater hypocrisy is his phony ‘plan’ to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade,” Stockman said. “A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing.”

The criticisms of the GOP by its old guard go further than just the budget lies being told by Romney and Ryan, and the abandonment of what were once Republican principles. Jeb Bush assailed the party for its harsh anti-immigration stance, saying in essence that the GOP is becoming the party of angry white people. Bush urged his colleagues to recognize that the shifting national demographics mean that the party must soften its rhetoric if it wants to lead.

Possibly more revealing was the warnings presented by Lofgren, who spent nearly 30 years as a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill. In a September 2011 article for Truth-Out.org, Lofgren lambasted both the Democrat and Republican parties for their ties to corporate America. He also described each as being rotten, but he was especially harsh on his fellow Republicans.

“Both parties are not rotten in quite the same way,” Lofgren said. “The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP. To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics.”

The “crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center” of the GOP today, Lofgren said. “Steve King, Michele Bachman, Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy,” he said.

“It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” Lofgren wrote nearly a year ago. “This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.”

He is right.