arewepayingattention:

The title of this post is a takeoff on a charge conservatives love to hurl at liberals, namely that they are genetically predisposed to “blame America first.”  Well, here’s the deal about the right-wing in America — when they don’t control all the levers of power, they want to see America fail before they want anything else.  “Fail America First.”

Rush Limbaugh announced even before Obama was inaugurated that he wanted the new president to fail.  Astonishing.  And from Day One, he and the Right-Wing Funding Machine and FOX News and Republicans in general have done nothing but obstruct Obama’s every attempt to lift the country out of the ditch conservative ideology had driven us into.  In Congress, Republicans played their minority status in our Founders’ checks and balances system to the hilt — thwarting everything Obama has tried to do… even opposing things (like Obamacare’s individual mandate) which they themselves proposed in the 1990s.

 During the Cold War, we had the concept of a “loyal opposition” in American politics.  No more.  The right wing is not loyal to America but only to their own quest for power… and to the right-wing corporate interests which fund them.   Armed with this corporate-funded “grassroots” fervor and unlimited corporate campaign contributions (thanks to their allies on the Supreme Court), Republican politicians would rather see the American economy tank and the American people suffer than compromise with Democrats on anything that might help the country.

It’s in the Republican DNA.  In the 1930s, the old Republican white guys shown above tried to make FDR fail by knocking down one New Deal initiative after another.  That Republican Supreme Court would rather have seen the Depression linger and deepen than see government economic intervention successfully ameliorate the crisis and the suffering. 

Fail America First.  It’s a conservative tradition.  It’s their ideological DNA.  What galls me is that somehow they get to be called “patriots” in the media and in our culture… while those who criticize their blind obstructionism are “unAmerican” … or even worse… “socialists.”

Astonishing.