Republicans Have Pillaged, Now Comes the Raping

We've seen, in the slow, uncoordinated and sometimes ineffectual response to Katrina, the results of the Republican pillaging of our federal government: tax cuts to the richest, huge and uncontrolled spending on the illegal Iraq war and nearly lethal cuts to social programs for the poorest among us. These have left the government nearly, but not quite small enough to "drown in a bathtub."

Now comes the final raping of America.

While Democrats and a few moderate Republicans try to figure out how to help those who've been devastated by Katrina and her aftermath, those furthest to the Right are using this catastrophe as an excuse to flay the last bit of flesh from the federal government so that it can finally be drowned.

If you think I'm kidding, here's what Republicans are saying in response to Hillary Clinton's musings on perhaps needing to raise some peoples' taxes to pay for all of this:

So how will Congress pay for the new spending needs due to Katrina? Part of Clinton’s answer was to raise taxes. “We should be prepared to ask for sacrifice particularly from the richest people in America,” she argued.

But DeLay rejected any such notion. “The worst thing we could do in response to a recovery like this is to attack the economy,” he told reporters. “The worst thing we could do… is a windfall profits tax on the oil corporations, so that they won’t have the money to reinvest in developing more oil and more gas. The worst thing we could do is to increase taxes on the economy, an economy that now has to be a major part of the recovery.”

Some congressional Republicans indicated the hurricane recovery may point to an “era of smaller government” — requiring a suspension of regulations that slow down re-building of highways and more urgently needed gasoline refineries.

Even in wake of this appalling natural disaster, this band of thugs - no better than the looters in the darkest hours of New Orleans' misery - they can only think of how to benefit themselves and their largest contributors. All at the expense of the poorest and most miserable of American citizens. Instead of a helping hand, Republicans - again - are telling all of us to bend over.

They disgust me.