Disloyal Opposition: Rick Perry, Mitch McConnell and the GOP

It is true that people often accuse others of what they are most guilty of themselves. So, when Rick Perry accuses Ben Bernanke of "Treason" he knows of what he speaks. He has suggested, more than once, he would like Texas to secede from the union if the federal government does not change its tax policy.

Perry is not an anomaly in the Republican party on this line--Mitch McConnell announced, forthrightly his top priority in the just finished Congressional session was to ensure the defeat of Barack Obama. Eric Cantor and John Boehner chimed in.

The remarkable thing is nobody in the press or even in the Democratic Party batted an eye, or expressed any outrage that the Republican leader of the Senate would say that his main purpose, his main job was preventing President Obama's re election. Nobody said, "Wait a minute, is that why the voters of Kentucky sent you to the Senate? Did they not want you to create jobs, improve the national economy, improve the security of the nation, prevent terrorist attacks, make the country stronger, the people healthier and create opportunities for the nation to flourish?"

The whole concept of a loyal opposition is what makes a government of a democracy work: You can disagree with the approach of the majority party, but you put the nation first, and you work to make things better for the four years between elections, not work to make things worse so you can blame the ruling party for the mess you helped create.

Of course, the Republicans have a problem in that their tax code has resulted in the staggering statistics which keep coming out about wealth distribution in America: The top 1 percent of the population now receive 1/4 of all income every year; that top 1 percent controls 40% of all the wealth--an even greater percentage than the income they control. This is the result of GOP tax policy, pure and simple. They whine about "Death taxes" but that is only because they are bought and paid for by people with estates.

Of course, you can't blame the Republicans for trying. If they can sell this notion that you are poor now but there's pie in the sky--one day you'll be rich and then you'll be happy we have made things so good for you, well, then more power to them. If the American public is so tied to that delusion, well they get what they deserve.

And the deficit, which the GOP wails and gnashes teeth over--it's just the hammer of our national undoing, until you start talking about reducing that deficit with taxes on millionaires, then you hear the worse thing you can do would be to alienate the "job creators," who have held on to their huge profits and not hired any body much.

These are the real traitors. They are loyal to only their class--the country, that is the other 99% or the other 80%, however you want to slice it, well, they are not really deserving. The nation ought to belong to those who own it. That's the capitalist way.

And if our fellow Americans are stupid enough to vote for Kelly Ayotte and Guinta and Rick Perry and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and yes, even Scott Brown and Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, for any Republican, then they have embraced the Cyborgs and all those who care more for the riches of the few than for their country or their countrymen.

And in a democracy, or actually in a plutocracy, a nation governed by the privilege few, well all's fair.