"You Can't Govern if You Don't Believe in Government"

[kentuck]

A good read... Where did it all begin??
=====================================================
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0906-21.htm

<snip>
n a May 25, 2001 interview, Grover Norquist told National Public Radio's Mara Liasson, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Norquist got his wish. Democracy - and at least several thousand people, most of them Democrats, black, and poor - drowned last week in the basin of New Orleans. Our nation failed in its response, because for most of the past 25 years conservatives who don't believe in governance have run our government.

As incompetent as George W. Bush has been in his response to the disaster in New Orleans, he wasn't the one who began the process that inevitably led to that disaster spiraling out of control.

That would be Ronald Reagan.

It was Reagan who began the deliberate and intentional destruction of the United States of America when he famously cracked (and then incessantly repeated): "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

....more

[Cleita]

1. That's when the real masters got their first actor to pretend

to be a leader.

[Mythsaje]

2. That quote might well

have been prophetic.

[fob]

3. This is what I've been screaming at the tv/radio for the last week.

When people who HATE government are "running" the government you get a government that is HATED!

republicks think government IS the problem and they "run" it to make it so.

[dchill]

6. I'm with ya, fob.

My family keeps telling me that they can't hear me.

"I know that, I know that. It's so funny you think I didn't know that." - Martin Short as lawyer Nathan Thurm.

[Quixote1818]

4. Thats a great one liner! Dems should use that in debates and refer

to the Katrina/FEMA disaster.

[kentuck]

10. Because it is true...

It is the truth that makes it so powerful as a statement. Yes, Democrats should definitely use it. Make the Repubs deny it or admit it.

[Dr.Phool]

5. Career people at the EPA now call New Orleans

Lake George. And I've heard it called Grovers Bathtub.

[dchill]

7. Honest to God -

I can't choose!

[kentuck]

8. Another excerpt from the article...

<snip>
Reagan, like George W. Bush after him, failed to understand that when people come together into community, and then into nationhood, that they organize themselves to protect themselves from predators, both human and corporate, both domestic and foreign. This form of organization is called government.

But the Reagan/Bush ideologues don't "believe" in government, in anything other than a military and police capacity. Government should punish, they agree, but it should never nurture, protect, or defend individuals. Nurturing and protecting, they suggest, is the more appropriate role of religious institutions, private charities, families, and - perhaps most important - corporations.

Let the corporations handle your old-age pension. Let the corporations decide how much protection we and our environment need from their toxics. Let the corporations decide what we're paid. Let the corporations decide what doctor we can see, when, and for what purpose.

This is the exact opposite of the vision for which the Founders of this nation fought and died. When Thomas Jefferson changed John Locke's "Life, liberty, and private property" to "Live, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," it was the first time in the history of the world that a newly founded nation had written the word "happiness" into its founding document. The phrase "promote the general welfare" - another revolutionary concept - first appeared in the preamble to our Constitution in 1787.

...more

[bribri16]

9. They all believe in government. They just believe it shouldn't help

people. Government is there to help corporations, and to give tax breaks to the wealthy while ensuring that there is poor working class to support the first two.

[PsN2Wind]

11. Reagan also said

"Government is not the solution to the problem, government IS the problem". (my emphasis)

[Hidden Stillness]

12. Now at Last We Will Not Be Able to Escape What Republicans Have Done

If you think about it, the only activity that the modern Republican Party has geared itself to for the past 35 years or so, has been dismantling government and replacing it with corporate contracting. The main reason they have even gotten into politics all these years, is to kill it; going all the way back to Reagan appointing the completely hostile Clarence Thomas to head the Equal Employment Opprtunity Commission, just to kill it as an active department. Their only approach all these years is "making government smaller," cutting people off of Medicaid, welfare, food stamps, Section 8 housing, etc., with the intent of eventually killing all of those programs (remember the horrible Congressional hearings on Medicare during the early '80s I think, when the woman dying of cancer was wheeled in on her hospital bed--and was cut off after anyway; Republicans learned a lesson from that, and it wasn't kindness, it was not having public hearings).

All these actions, until now, were either in a still-protected area, where there were laws, regulations, etc., so that we were not getting the real effects yet, or the situation just hadn't come up yet. They are all coming up now. Even though the armed forces have been all-volunteer since Jimmy Carter, only now has there been any kind of a problem about too-few troops, because of this idiot's fantasy-world "adventures," combined now with real-world disaster. Tax cuts, staff cuts, budget cuts, departments cut back or combined with other departments--all these things, just to disable their ability to work effectively. It has been a generation at least, since Republicans have had any constructive interest in governing. Since they were turned over to corporations and neo-cons, the only approach they have had to government, is to kill or disable it. Now we are getting the true nightmare results of all this evil.