Coked Up Winged Monkeys Fly In From The Right

 Rarely did the film version of The Wizard of Oz reach the level of real darkness. But when those bellboy-suited winged monkeys were unleashed by the Wicked Witch of the West, there was an undeniable creep factor. In L. Frank Baum's novel, the Winged Monkeys were incredibly destructive - shredding the Scarecrow and using his innards as bedding, dropping the Tinman into a craggy ravine, degrading and enslaving the Cowardly Lion as a dray animal. And let's not forget the kidnapping of Toto, too.

Enter the Republicans, authors of the 1 trillion dollars-worth of wars in southwest Asia and a $1.5 trillion tax cut for the super rich, with their critiques of stimulus spending. A sort of political version of winged monkeys themselves, the arch-conservatives, as we already know, have no regard for any of the following:

Science
Economic justice
History
Plain old facts
Civil rights beyond the 2nd Amendment
Normal politicial dialogue

The right-winged monkeys are led by the once quasi-honorable John McCain, embittered and mortified by his presidential election loss, as they seize upon a few sometimes bizarre-seeming awards under the huge stimulus plan. (McCain is ably assisted in his mindless lashing out by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.)

As one would expect, they are off base about almost every single project they buffoonishly criticize. The truth, indeed, is always the first casualty.

Let's start with an unhappy accident - no pun intended. BP America was awarded a $308 million grant for a clean energy project in California. That was before the ghastly Gulf disaster. But, the project has attracted 7x the amount in private investment that the goverment is investing and will directly create at least 1,600 jobs.

A pause here to note that the numbers bandied about when discussing employment impact almost exclusively discuss the direct creation of jobs, never minding the fact that there is a multiplier effect because materials, shipping, provisioning the workforce, taxes paid and consumer dollars spent spin off even more jobs.

Forward to the "exotic ants" study to be conducted by the California Academy of Sciences in the Indian Ocean. Of course, like a bunch of high school boys, the right wing thinks this is a waste of money. (Hey Charlie... how about them exotic ants, heh, heh? ) It appears that exotic insect species, because of brisk global trade and transportation, pose a particularly dangerous threat to agriculture. Studying the insects in their native habitat is crucial to understanding how they breed, behave, etc. California is the largest agricultural state in the Union.

There is also Fort Jefferson (1846) in the Dry Tortugas 70 miles west of the southernmost Florida Keys that has been deteriorating through lack of funding for the last 35 years. It is known as the Gibraltar of the Caribbean. The fort is the main tourism attraction on the little island that lives exclusively by tourist dollars and is served by a modern ferry that employs dozens of people. It is also one of the most magnificent pieces of military architecture in the country. Is their argument that we should just let this piece of history and prime tourist destination crumble into dust?

Then there is a $762,000 grant to design a computer program that can monitor and subsequently recreate on screen (and eventually on line) the movements of a particular choreography. Students and faculty will design and build the entire system from scratch. On the surface it sounds like an arts program - dreaded amongst the anti-cultural right wing - but in reality it is a computer project that will have applications far beyond dance - such as orthopedics, sports medicine and performance, gerontology and human-centric design of products. This is exactly the kind of basic research and application an intelligent government should be funding.

In Glassboro, New Jersey, $1.2 million will go for the restoration of a wooden train station that dates from the 1860s and operation of a museum within. The station will also make for a stop on a planned light rail system that would connect Delaware Valley towns with Camden and Philadelphia. Currently the only way to navigate to those places is by car. Moreover, the Delaware Valley is reliant on tourism to keep its economy humming. Glassboro - once the East Coast's center of glass-making, as one could have guessed - is in the process of an enormous rehabilitation of its downtown area focused on Rowan University's various constituencies. Finally, Glassboro was the site of President Johnson's historic meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in 1967 - a key moment in Cold War detente, and was also the site of an American President's first address to a high school graduating class (by Ronald Reagan, 1986). What's history got to do with anything?

Know Nothing ignorance, the cynicism of the defeated, the lack of alternatives all further taint the right wing radicals. Make no mistake: they despise the America that most of us love and they want to turn it into a second-rate nation. They are destructive - the Winged Monkeys of a very dark movie.
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Why Am I Reading The National Review?

Like the Hatfields and McCoys, it's best to look out across the holler and see what the other side is up to occasionally. I can report two things.

First, not much has changed regarding political philosophy. (The same tired critiques that hampered the left in the 30s, 50s, 60s and thence forward are still in NR's print and online versions.)

Second, the writing would have its well-spoken founder, William F. Buckley, not just turning over in his grave but doing an hysterical prairie chicken mating dance. (In fact I had a hard time following Kathryn Jean Lopez's thank you note to Senator Jim Bunning for truculently blocking relief for millions of unemployed workers. Click the link if you can bear it.)

The right doesn't yet get it when it comes to budget deficits in times of national need. Or they only define "need" as wartime spending. But, even as WWII was practically on our doorstep, the radical right wing fought FDR's deficit-financed expansion of military spending, lend lease to the Brits, aid to the Soviets, and ramping up defense production in 1940-41.

Somehow the radical right hews to the idea that not extending benefits affecting 7 million unemployed workers and their families - upwards of 20 million people all together - would force them to go get jobs instead of lolling about on the dole. Naturally, and cruelly, these jobs do not exist.

Bunning wanted to take the battle ax to the regular federal budget in order to pay for the extended benefits, hoping to find $15 billion in offsets that would force the new spending under the heroic category of PAYGO. (PAYGO [pay-as-you-go] is the practice of financing expenditures with funds that are currently available rather than borrowed.)

What Bunning and other knee-jerk conservatives cannot seem to grasp is that taking $15 billion from one section of the economy and putting it into another would have a net zero effect, practically speaking. Just at a time when we need as much stimulus as possible, he and his fellow mandarins would simply move one pile of cash to the spot where another pile once stood. Logic?

In Bunning's own words: “If we cannot pay for a bill that all 100 senators support, how can we tell the American people with a straight face that we will ever pay for anything? That is what senators say they want, and that is what the American people want.” In other words, we the people will want it whether we like it or not.

100 Senators? What Twilight Zone episode is Bunning living in? It's doubtful the Senate could vote 100 to 0 on a resolution agreeing that the sun rises in the east. 

What the American people want are jobs, economic certainty and a loosening of credit for at least big-ticket items such as home and car buying. Removing $15 billion in purchasing power would only slow the already clotted financial flow further. 

Time out to give Lopez's elegant writing a moment to grip us:

That’s what Bunning wanted Congress to be held accountable for. That’s what he wanted Congress to make actual cuts in other spending in order to fund. (Yes, that's an actual quotation.)

And, of course, what ideological right wing rant, regardless of the loftiness of the forum, would be complete without a cheap shot at a president who was elected in a landslide? 

The writing-challenged Lopez feels compelled to call the President "the condescender-in-chief." (Spoiler alert: Obama triumphed by almost 10 million in the popular vote and by 190 electoral votes.) Perhaps she should change that to "Uppity-Negro-in-Chief"? That's what her epithet tells us she's thinking, anyway.

Finally, Lopez drags in centerfold-in-chief Scott Brown to make a point that can't be made because his proposals are so disconnected from reality. "The new senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, has introduced legislation that would return upwards of $80 billion in unused stimulus funds to taxpayers over six months, in the form of a payroll-tax cut," Lopez says.

There are a couple of problems with this idea.

The first is that the stimulus money isn't exactly sitting around somewhere waiting to be ladled out down at the corner bank. It's purely conceptual money until it actually is spent.

The second is that a tax cut will most likely go to either paying down personal debt or will be used randomly to purchase goods as likely as not produced in foreign countries, creating plenty of stimulus in those places. Targeted stimulus money creates jobs here, putting people back to work immediately and not waiting for the trickle down effect a tax cut promises. (Keep in mind that minutes after Brown was sworn in that he said the stimulus "hasn't created one new job." Not one? For spending $550 billion in direct aid plus a $275 billion tax cut - golly, Senator Brown, you really don't want to reconsider that statement?)

Third, let's mull over Lopez's touting of Brown's "Republican" proposal to cut taxes. It's as unfunded as the entire stimulus program is. So, the defense of Bunning's sclerotic stance via Scott Brown's muddled thinking is what? Just an exercise in liberal bashing, or a heartfelt "core value" of the party of No? You can't have it both ways, Lopez. Either you're for unfunded spending and tax cuts, or you're against them.

The NR describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for Republican/conservative news, commentary, and opinion."

Let the prairie chicken dance begin.