The net that shall enmesh them all
Edited, Written, and Published by Josh Nossiter
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
Not for the first time, the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression hasn't brought out the best in the Republican party. As Russell Baker points out in the latest New York Review of Books, after the stock market crash of '29 Herbert Hoover waited three years for the magic of the free market to fix everything. By the time Roosevelt took office, dire economic conditions had become a world-wide economic cataclysm. As we all know this helped set the stage for the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazis, WWII, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, etc. It's really quite surprising how much damage a single brain-dead political party can do.
Now they're at it again, only worse. In the face of another economic collapse of historical proportions, the GOP's response goes beyond the catatonic, eschewing the sitting on of hands to promote a strategy articulated by Rush Limbaugh and executed by his followers in the House: make Obama fail.
Of course the Obama stimulus plan is far from perfect, though its worst imperfections were added to woo GOP support. But rational citizens understand that in the face of a multi-trillion dollar economic melt-down, a stimulus program in the hundreds of billions is merely a down payment. Reasonable citizens recognize that when the ship springs a big leak you bail first and worry about technique later. But not the Republicans. Their idea is to make the leak worse. They don't grasp that if the ship goes down, they go with it.
Forget Sarah Palin; the true Republican standard bearer is the woman the entire party rallied behind. And no wonder. The GOP saw Terry Schiavo and found themselves looking in the mirror.
©Joshua C. Nossiter, 2009
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A NOTE TO READERS ***Update***
Another three week plus hiatus, from April 30th until May 23rd, again due to Yahoo Geocities dismal service.
There was nothing new at The Nossiter Net between March 3rd and April 26th, 2007, nearly eight weeks. The reason: tech sabotage. Yahoo Geocities, the host for this site, denied access for the entire period. At one point, they even managed to lose all the files. In many discussions with Yahoo staff, no clear explanation was forthcoming. No one seemed able to fix the problem. Ruling out the possibility of Dubbya’s revenge, I finally wrote to Mr. Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO of Yahoo! Inc and described the ordeal the page had undergone since the beginning of March. A week later, a helpful Yahooo engineer named Jason called. He had my letter before him. Though he couldn’t do the repairs on on the spot, he promised a fix by the next day. That was April 26th, nearly two months after shutting me down in the first place.
The Nossiter Net apologizes, which is more than I can say for Yahoo Geocities.
