Common Sense

President Barack Obama spoke to the good folks of Cannon Falls, Minnesota about the Republican opposition to raising taxes on billionaires, "Think about that. I mean, that's just not common sense."

Gee whiz, actually, it makes perfect sense.

As usual, President Obama did not name names, so the greedy and the guilty remain faceless, nameless abstractions. They are the guys at Wall Street firms and at banks who played with everyone's money but their own, took no personal risks but reaped huge personal benefits on security back mortgages and things called derivatives and on other financial arcanea and they walked off with millions in their bank accounts, while the rest of the country lost their homes, their jobs and their self respect. Obama said he did not want to go after these guys. He's just too polite to speak ill of anyone. He may be too polite to lead, for that matter.

The Republican party is bought and paid for by billionaires and millionaires and people who are deluded enough to think one day they may become billionaires and they do not want to pay taxes when that happens. These are the poor, deluded souls who in another age would have cried out lustily, "God save the King!" as if the welfare of the king had anything to do with their best interests.

As one great Republican President once said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time."

And the Republicans have taken that to heart.

So they create these phony Reischtag fires and they ride to power on them. You remember the Reischtag fire. Well, maybe not, but the Reischtag was the Capitol building of the German Parliament and the Nazis set it ablaze and blamed the Communists and Hitler, newly elected, used this attack on the parliament as an excuse to pass The Enabling Act which gave him a lock on power. The Nazis created a phony "emergency" to justify seizing power, to "save" the country.

Sound familiar?

And now, the Republicans (Mitch, John, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor and all those who sail with them) are, as they always do, singing a song in chorus and it goes like this:

Oh, we are the saviors of the Republic,
We are the ones on whom the nation's life does depend.
We will save the country from the Deficit and from Bankruptcy,
From those nasty Democrats who want only to tax and spend!

Millions are unemployed, uninsured, and at their wits' end,
But we will save the billionaires first,
By slipping the knife into Medicare, and making the Democrats bend
And cutting Social Security at the jugular
So we can finally put the New Deal to an end!

And our pitiful President goes to the heart land and says, "It's jut not common sense."
Golly gee, fellas, act nice.

It makes perfectly good sense, to cut taxes for the millionaires, if they are the people who put you in office. We have the best Congress money can buy.

As a great Democratic President once said, "A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk forward."

The same man observed, "Over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present and future wars."

And, if he were alive today, that President would observe that our deficit today was caused by Republicans who got us into Iraq and Afghanistan and by the tax breaks they gave their rich patrons.

And it was this same Democratic President (not President Obama) who said, "Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to the ability to pay. That is the only American principle."

So here's hoping our present day President will man up and give 'em hell, President Obama. It's only common sense.