The GOP's Sick, Misplaced Priorities

I continually find it ironic that the Republican Party has become a political arm of this country's Christian Taliban even as the policies the GOP pursues are the antithesis of what anyone respectful of Christ's true Gospel message ought to be seeking to further. Yes, ignorant, self-centered loons from the Tea Party hold some sway, but over all the Christianists and the professional Christian set are in lock step with the anti-Christian (in terms of following the Gospel message of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and assisting the poor) policies currently championed by the GOP. Hate, greed and demagoguery are the three pillars of today's GOP. Robert Scheer has a post on Huffington Post that reviews just how depraved the policies of the GOP have become under the toxic influence of the Christianists and the Tea Party crowd. It's worth repeating because it underscores the unbridled hypocrisy of the supposed "family values" party that claims to honor Christianity above all other religions. Here are some highlights:
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How deceptive for politicians to stress "entitlements" when they talk about gutting Social Security and Medicare, two programs long paid for by their beneficiaries. The Republicans make it sound as if they're doing us a favor, cutting government waste by seeking to strangle America's two most successful domestic programs. And now Barack Obama seems poised to join their camp in undermining the essential lifeline for most of the nation's seniors, many of whom lost their retirement savings in the banking meltdown.
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These threatened programs are not government handouts to a privileged class, like defense contractors and bailed-out bankers, who do feel eminently entitled to pig out at the federal trough. On the contrary, Social Security and Medicare have been funded by a regressive tax that falls disproportionately on working middle-class income earners, while caps in the system leave the wealthy -- most notably the hedge fund hustlers who helped cause today's economic crisis -- largely untaxed.
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These programs have nothing at all to do with a national debt that has spiraled out of control in the past four years as a result of untethered corporate greed. In that time the debt -- already inflamed by two wars fought on the credit card while President George W. Bush cut taxes for the wealthy -- rose a whopping 50 percent as a consequence of the deepest recession in 70 years, brought on by the banking collapse.
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Social Security is a particularly weird whipping boy for what ails us, since the program has been solvent since its inception and will be so for the next quarter of a century. . . . . Presidents both Republican and Democrat have routinely dipped into the Social Security trust fund to float the national debt, and yet critics from both parties have the effrontery now to treat as some sort of indulgence a program for which seniors, current and future, have paid. Seniors are as much "entitled" to the payback on their investment as the folks who buy Treasury notes, people who will be at the forefront of those protected by a rise in the debt ceiling.
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Yes, there are more pressing issues with Medicare. Those have to do with cost containment in the medical industry, a situation aggravated when the Republican Bush expanded prescription drug coverage. Unfortunately, health care cost containment was not a serious focus of Obama's health care reform, and without a national policy alternative it is difficult to contain the cost for seniors who are medically the most needy and therefore the most vulnerable.
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Even more troubling than potential Medicare cuts is the threat to Medicaid, a program that provides health care to 68 million needy children, disabled individuals, pregnant women and poor seniors. These people are "entitled" to such aid only as a matter of government-recognized decency that has historically been supported by both Republican and Democratic presidents. That Obama is now even considering reducing support for the most vulnerable in the current harsh economy has brought written opposition from two-thirds of Senate Democrats.
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It is absurd that Medicaid, along with Medicare and Social Security, is on the chopping block when there is no serious effort to find savings in a defense budget equal to that of the rest of the world's nations combined, and still at Cold War era levels despite the lack of a sophisticated military enemy. And that the GOP-led House has gotten a supposedly progressive president to consider doing serious damage to our most vulnerable population in order to placate Republicans determined to continue massive tax breaks for the wealthy is morally obscene.