A Wide Brush

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You would think that President Obama giving the first Oval Office address of his presidency would be the rhetorical highlight of the week.  However, Republican tone-deafness on the oil spill and BP’s responsibility to pay for cleanup efforts and the loss of business and habitat for Gulf Coast residents has been, in a word, alarming.  Although Joe Barton’s “shakedown” comment and apology to BP was the apex of Republican missteps, similar sentiments were expressed by several conservative figureheads including Dick Armey, Michelle Bachman, Newt Gingrich, and the House Republican Study Committee, which includes over a hundred Republicans in Congress.  This kind of thinking goes beyond galling into insulting.

Having said that, I think it’s important to remember that the idea that taxpayers should pay when a company does something wrong is not a fundamental tenet of American conservatism or the Republican party.  Although both believe that corporations should be relatively free of government regulation and allowed to do what they believe is best for their own interests, the idea that the general public should be held accountable when corporations do something harmful is not part of their philosophies.  In that respect, I think it’s unfair to claim that Republicans and/or conservatives as a whole think regular Americans should be expected to pick up the tab when something like the Gulf Coast oil spill happens.

You don’t exactly see Republicans rushing to point out the differences between Democrats and between liberals, though, do you?  Since long before I was born, lumping everyone to the left of X point in with socialists, communists, and terrorists has been on the first page of the Republican playbook.  One need only look back exactly eight years ago, as we were heading into the 2002 midterm elections, for a shining example of how Republicans painted all Democrats with the same wide brush, scaring the American public into thinking that more terrorist attacks would happen if “soft” Democrats were in power.

For too long Democrats have tried to play nice with Republicans, and the end result of that has been that Democrats and Americans as a whole have suffered.  Look at any major policy debate of the Obama administration, particularly health care, and you will find Democrats soliciting Republican ideas, adding them to bills no matter how bad they were, only to have the Republicans vote en masse against the bill.  We liberals aren’t happy because it’s proving Obama’s “change” mantra was empty rhetoric, Americans aren’t happy because bills are getting watered down and taking too long to pass, and in the end conservatives are still out there claiming Obama, and by the wide brush’s extension all Democrats, are in the same league with Hugo Chavez.

Assuming there isn’t a groundswell of support for the Green Party this year (which, as much as I hate to say it, is probably a safe assumption), if the Democrats want to turn this coming midterm election around, it’s high time for them to give the Republican Party a taste of its own medicine.  Every imbecilic comment a Republican or conservative figurehead has made to suggest that we Americans, instead of BP, should pay the costs of the oil spill, should be on a never-ending loop on television this October leading up to the elections, both in national ad buys and for local candidates.  As much blame as Democrats deserve for moving too slowly on the oil spill — among other things — they need to get out there and remind people that all these messes of the past five years, starting with the breach of the Louisiana levees during Hurricane Katrina, extending through the near-collapse of our national economy, and all the way through to the oil spill, is a direct result of conservative/Republican “the only good regulation is no regulation” ideology, and electing more Republicans into office will only guarantee more disasters of that scope in the future.

Regardless of who winds up paying the bill to clean up the Gulf Coast and the people whose livelihoods and habitats depend on it, one thing I think we can all agree on is that even if everyone gets reimbursed for the damages they’ve suffered, we all would have been better off if the spill had never happened in the first place.  I can’t say that I put too much trust in Democrats to put in place the regulations and safeguards needed to ameliorate the risk of something like the oil spill ever happening again, but I trust them a whole lot more than I trust the Republicans.

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