Getting the August Bile Out of The System

August seems to be the cursed month for President Obama. The Gallup poll records the highest gap for Republicans--10--in their history tracking elections. (The highest for Democrats was 32% around the time of Watergate.) But it should be noted that a Gallup poll in August 2008 had McCain at 54 to Obama's 44%. It was one of the only that showed McCain ever ahead. The University of Buffalo predicts the Republicans will take the House and Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball also has the Republicans taking the House with a team more far right than New Gingrich's in 1994. Larry Sabato writes that there is even a chance that Republicans will take the Senate. Nate the Great Silver is being coy about his House numbers. He believes the Gallup poll is an outlier but that the Democrats' fortunes have sunk in the last month. Most agree with my prediction that Republicans will sweep state houses in the Midwest.

Larry Sabato predicts we are in for two years of nothing getting done in Washington. Given the severity of the problems facing the country, this is a disaster in the making. Even more so because Republicans are now signing on to Ryan's "Blueprint for the Future", which will raise taxes significantly on the lower and middle classes and cut dramatically taxes on the wealthiest and corporations. It will also cut social security benefits and severely restrict Medicare, which now serves 50 million Americans. Objective analysts of the plan say it will further increase the national debt.

Candidates like Sharron Angle should be reason enough for Democrats to get out to vote. The Christian Reconstructionist backed by Karl Rove's American Crossroads came out yesterday against public education. She already has come out against social security, unemployment insurance, the Department of Education and the EPA. Of course, she is for repealing Obamacare. The Alaskan teabagger Miller has already questioned the constitutionality of social security and Medicare. (This issue was decided by courts years ago. But with the Roberts Court, who knows?)

The Majority of Republicans believe Barack Obama wants to institute Sharia Law in the United States and that he sides with Islamic fundamentalism. Last summer he wanted to install death panels to pull the plug on grandma. As a result I back both. Pulling the plug on grandma would save health costs and reduce our national debt and Sharia Law would eliminate the interest payments on my considerable credit card debt. So, my wife would have to wear a headscarf.

Tonight President Obama speaks to the nation for an allotted ten minutes graciously allowed him by the national networks to announce the official end of the combat in Iraq. Republicans already beat him to the punch in speeches today that praised President George W. Bush and claimed that he was responsible for the conditions that allowed us to leave. The Republicans went on to berate the President on Israel, fighting terrorism and the Afghanistan War. Which we all know they would be better at since we saw the excellent foreign policy of the previous eight years.

Only Sunday, President Obama spoke to the residents of New Orleans on the fifth anniversary of Katrina. Besides the Administration's commitments to the Gulf region on the BP oil spill, people neglect to mention its bolstering efforts at reconstruction after the Katrina disaster. Through the stimulus package and other programs, the single-spaced list of programs just aimed at Katrina-related reconstruction runs two full pages. But local polls in Louisiana give credit to Bobby Jindal and not Barack Obama.

This phenomenon is frustrating to read and hear about. Jonathan Alter in an article "The Illustrated Man" documents the on-going smearing of the President and his apparent inability to escape the targeting by Fox News and the Right, despite a lengthy and impressive list of achievements that have affected every American.

Former Clinton adviser and toe-sucker Dick Morris promises when the Republicans take power they will successfully close down government. He promises his Fox audience this time he will support it and it will work. Democrats are now scrambling around to figure out how the Administration can play small ball if Republicans come back into power. Some believe that the lunacy of the right will be on display with House investigations into Acorn, the New Black Panther Party and the TARP ballouts, even though that was Bush's program. This , they're convinced, will create a reaction from the American people that will propel the Democrats back in 2012. Remember those were prosperous times and America was not at war. The mood of the country may not be with the Democrats on this. Fox News had not even been invented yet and internet blogging was in its infancy. Already we see other news agencies like CNN and even MSNBC cowed by the Right, chasing conservative audiences.

What's dangerous now is that there really is only one rational party in the United States. The Republicans have deliberately made the choice to be anti-rational because this is effective in creating historic amnesia. Their agenda has become so radical, the Left must blush. They are the first de-constructionists in our political system,re-writing all of American history from its origins to today to provide validation for their wholesale assault on our system. It is no mistake that the Republican reaction is to roll-up the advances made by the New Deal during the Great Depression and to thwart the implementation of the range of new reforms created by the Democrats. Their appeal must be emotional because their policy prescriptions as outlined recently by Tan Man Boehner and the Mitch McConnell will only make the social and economic situation worse by several factors.

There is a reason for this intensity on the part of the Republicans. Their Southern strategy is now being extended to the rest of the country. While Barack Obama was elected with the most popular votes in American history, they have taken every effort to de-legitimize him as President. They are defending what they perceive as aggrieved white people, who have lost their jobs and are protesting at the urgings of the corporations and billionaires the very social services government provides. If George W. Bush destroyed the American peoples' trust in government, this only validates that government can't do anything. Therefore, government must be destroyed. The Republicans know that they have alienated every single demographic group with the exception of white males in this country. This is their last chance to put a stake in the system before they look at a generation in the desert. The mid-terms are being waged as a cultural war with the religious Right acting as a vanguard for the Republicans, who have embraced anarchy as the Koch Brothers proudly proclaimed. Policy solutions are purely secondary to them at this point. Remember this is their last chance to vindicate their worldview.

Remember the Republicans have sought to make every major piece of reform attempted by President Obama his Waterloo. They have failed at every level. But they have succeeded by obstructionism to allow other elements that are needed for America's economic recovery. This obstructionism is blamed on Democrats and not Republicans as polls repeatedly point out. The Democrats' job is to reverse this trend as much as possible before the election.

President Obama will be spending labor day with the AFL-CIO, which has stepped up to the plate in an admirable fashion in recent months. He has to use this occasion to lay out some new economic strategies and to outline the stark choices in the days ahead. We are not talking about George W. Bush coming back but people who are the most rightwing in modern American history. And he should also give the progressives a gift--Elizabeth Warren as head of the Consumer Protection Agency. Even if she can't get confirmed, it's worth fighting for.

This week, President Obama will be the host of peace talks between Bibi Netanyahu and Abbas. Even though American and Israeli policy for the past 20 years supports the creation of a Palestinian state, American commentators such as George Will and others now argue against such an idea. While the initial face-to-face talks may not produce earthbreaking results, it's clear that some deals are on the table. Netanyahu actually has put together a serious negotiating team on several sensitive issues. If the talks are somewhat successful, we might be absent a President after January, while he spends his time globe-trotting either for peace agreements or to repair our shattered relations with the rest of the world. If you can't get anything done at home, go abroad.

When Congress comes back from vacation, the issue of the Bush tax cuts takes center stage. The Washington Post and CNN have written that Democrats do not have the 60 votes to kill the tax-cuts for the wealthy. Notice how soon we got conditioned to the idea of 60 votes being the threshold for anything to get done, even though all the bills being hung up would pass with overwhelming majorities--just not the sacred 60 number.

It's true the tax issue will have to be deftly played. The Republicans have already ginned up the argument that these will be Obama's tax hikes, even though they are set to expire anyway in 2011. The problem facing the Democrats is that they must fight for the middle-class tax cuts, make it overt and repeat it over and over that is what they are doing. But if the filibuster holds, they must argue that the tax cuts for the wealthy must be paid for. This is the real dilemma Democrats face. None of the tax cuts under Bush were paid for--that's why they have to be phased out according to law. The Republicans want the tax cuts for the wealthy but they must be paid for out of severe cuts from the discretionary or social spending in the budget. Which is just what the Republicans want. They want to use the tax cuts for the wealthy to reduce any support for the middle class in the America. It's pure robbery and the Democrats must call them on it and beat them up with a club with it. If the American people actually fall for the Republicans on this, may God have mercy on their souls because they will undermine their own welfare. Be assured neither party will cut anything from defense to pay for these tax cuts.

Thank God, August is over. But I don't think the fever has broken yet.