The only thing to fear...

So, Republicans have decided they are once again the only "real" patriots and must have "tea parties" to protest the new adminsitration's spending to try to keep the country moving and growing, rather than stagnating and falling into depression.

I understand that "the party of 'no'" has NO positive ideas, but this is ridiculous.

If these patriots were concerned about too much government and out of control spending, then where were they when the problem was being created--so blatently during eight years of W and Cheney?

And why is rolling back Bush's cuts to the most wealthy, a hideous form of Socialism, when they were even higher under the Republican God Reagan. They don't seem to like real history, only history invented by Fox.

All this spending and bailout was OK when Bush did it--did it once again without restrictions or oversight. Now that Obama is doing it, it's Socialism. How exactly does that work in their brains?

I'll tell you what I try to remember now when talking to people with a limited world view like this-- REPUBLICANS ARE AFRAID.

(FDR: The only thing to fear is fear itself. That still applies.)

I don't know why they weren't afraid under Bush, which, if they weren't blinded by their limited world view they would have been, but they weren't.

Now that they don't feel like "they" are in power, they are afraid, that's the root of it all, the anger, the greed, it's all fear that they might not get their little slice of the pie because big government is going to take it away from them.

Never mind that Bush's big government was the most intrusive and that it really DID take it away from them in the form of out of control spending and deficit.

But now that the government actually NEEDS to spend money ON Americans (rather than on wars and a few corporations), these same people are crying "tea" and acting as it we should just stop. Suddenly they're born-against libertarians instead of war-crazed, money-is-no-object spend spend spend just as long as you don't tax (oh, nevermind the deficit, it's good when we do it) neo-cons.

We wouldn't want them to tax their brains by thinking about the consequences of this--by making them look around and see the stores shuttered all over, the people out of work and without health care, and at the confusing mobius strip that is our world economy and how it's all interrelated and that if you just let a lot of things fall apart we can be plunged into a deep and long depression the likes of which they can't even imagine with their fearful little brains.

But those of who we CAN see the world as it is, who see how it got here, know we can no longer afford to listen to those same voices that
got us into this mess.

My hope is that the fear and anger that's blinding them can be let down long enough for them to remember that if they are really patriots, then they need to get behind our president (as even liberals did after 9/11), and work together to help our nation rebuild.

Rebuilding takes planning and effort, sacrifice, and money.

Yet these part-time-patriots have gone for eight years without planning, effort or sacrifice, and only want to spend other people's money (in the case of a deficit, their own children's)

We cannot rebuild by doing nothing or waiting for someone else to do it.

It's too late for that.

Now we have to work together.

As the great patriot Benjamin Franklin said to Americans before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."