McCain and the Decline of the Republican Party

McCain spends his time at the rallies lately bashing Obama's tax cuts, carefully choosing to quote 'Joe the Plumber' when calling it 'socialism'. At the same time he proposes a 30% tax cut for corporations - from 35% to 25%. On the campaign trail, he tries to separate himself from GW Bush saying he wants to take America in a new direction, but doesn't say what that direction is. It's simply rhetoric, with nothing to back it up.

The reality is that his own plan for the economy is basically the same as the disaster that GW Bush has had for the last 8 years. Remove regulation and provide huge tax breaks for the large corporations and the generosity will 'trickle down' to the rest of us who work for a paycheck. The problem with that approach is that it assumes corporations are socially benevolent organizations. In practice, the last 8 years especially have shown that the CEOs, executives and shareholders will line their pockets with profits while continuing to cut operating expenses by shipping jobs overseas. He wants to do the same thing to health care, but we have already seen that absent regulation, health care corporations will deny services, and insurance companies will deny claims.

In the past, McCain came out against the Bush tax cuts, calling them 'irresponsible' while the country was at war. Now he wants to cut taxes on corporations even more, while continuing to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan with a cost of over $10 BILLION a MONTH. Who is going to pay for this tax cut? All the rest of us. What has ruined our economy? People cannot continue to 'spend' money they don't have to support an economy while it is being sucked dry by military spending. The credit has been used up, the well is dry. We need to stop spending that money overseas on bullets, and instead spend it here at home on our veterans and on our infrastructure and in ways that produce positive economic results at home.

Obama's tax plan isn't 'socialism'. Taxes - all taxes- are always about 'redistributing the wealth' in one form or another. Our country has come to expect certain services from our government. To suggest that the lower and middle class have been paying too much of the cost, and that the wealthy can afford to pay a little more is what I call 'fairness', not 'socialist'.

The ideals of the Reagan era Republican Party are gone. They have been replaced with greed, power brokering, nation building, corruption and the worst kind of whisper campaigns that use fear mongering, racial prejudice and McCarthyism. Code words like 'terrorist', 'muslim', 'arab' and 'associates with' have no business in a political campaign. It's disgusting, narrow minded and reminds me of the tactics that GW Bush, Carl Rove, and Dick Cheney used to invoke the eras of McCarthy and Wallace in whipping up sentiment to support their hidden agenda of war with Iraq while suppressing their detractors.

This is a dangerous ploy that has to stop. It will divide our country and set us back 50 years. We must not allow candidates to use these tactics and simply deny the obvious truth. They must be held accountable for stoking the embers of extremism in this country. We can stop it with our voices in the press, and we MUST stop it with our votes at the polls.