U.S. faces existential crisis now!

New York Times Editorial, September 13, 2011
On Sept. 8, Mr. Obama proposed a $447 billion job-creation initiative, and on Monday, he proposed a sensible package of tax increases to pay for it — saying, in essence, that a sane fiscal policy requires more careful government spending now and eventually higher taxes.

Congressional Republicans initially offered a cautious reaction to the jobs bill. But once Mr. Obama talked about taxes, they lost all restraint. For all the caterwauling from Republicans about the budget deficit, the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, said paying for the plan would amount to a tax on “job creators.” The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said the tax proposals were dead on arrival — his reaction to anything Mr. Obama has proposed since Inauguration Day.
Now it is up to Mr. Obama to sell the public on his approach, something the White House has not done well. It will be a test of whether Mr. Obama will aggressively take on his opposition as the 2012 elections approach.
And then just this morning, we learn the New York congressional seat vacated by Anthony Weiner (D) was won by a former cable executive for the Republicans after he successfully channelled public anger against President Obama.
"Dead On Arrival" is the mushroom under which the republicans are hiding, in the hope that the New York example will be repeated across the country in the presidential election of 2012.
Unfortunately, DOA is the moniker that should be used to describe the Republican party representatives in Congress who have made government virtually cease to function. DOA removes the obligation to think through all proposals and recommend approaches in the country's best interests. DOA also removes republican candidates from answering questions, legitimate questions from the media as to their detailed policy approaches to what is now agreed to be the worse economic crisis since the 1929 Depression.
Harry Truman made famous the phrase, "do-nothing-Congress" when he was met by obstinate opposition to his proposals to get the economy moving back in 1949. The current Congress is not only a do-nothing congress, it is a congress determined to assure that President Obama is a one-term president.
And the country is locked, for the next fourteen months, in the jaws of this rich-baited, affluency-addicted, cash-dependent political dinosaur, the Republican party now having been taken over by the Tea Party.
Rendering the government "existentially challenged" is not an exaggeration because that is the real goal of these anarchists. For the most part they would like to see a return to the days of the wild west when the anarchists ruled by the power of their guns, where government, if it existed at all, was an annoying pimple on the buttocks of the territory, where the safety and security, and the schooling and the health care of the people came from the "back kitchen" with recipes and simple addition and subtraction were taught at the end of the old man's belt that hung, for effect, in public view of all the kids. There was no television and no knowledge or consciousness of the world beyond the range of hills that formed the boundary of both physical vision and intellectual capacity. There was no research university with scientists learning about how we are suffocating our planet; there was no 'third world' starving and dying to disease, poverty, terrorist and a different kind of lawlessness. There was only the simplest and most basic of facilities like water from the bucket that was carried to the well, or the stream, a hole in the house out back for a washroom, a stove in the middle of the kitchen to gather around for warmth and a few chickens and the occasional cow for meat and the few vegetables that each family could grow for their own table. There was a God "up there" and a Devil "down there" and a few aphorisms to please the former and avoid the latter. And these people believe that a return to these conditions: physical, mental, legal and certainly governmental are in the best interests of all Americans.
And having reduced themselves and their country to a one-dimensional cardboard stereotype, they are proceeding to act out the hollow lines of the script whenever they open their mouths. No matter the question, or the issue or the nuance of the questioner, the responses are the same.
the most elementary television sit-com has more nuance than a Tea Partier's answer to a question, any question. It is as if the proponents of this reductionism have elevated their form of vacuuity to a religion, with its own 'gospel' and its own pulpit, the political bully pulpit. And they proceed in their tyrannical and obsessive addiction to the pursuit of their own personal power, while they take the country, and the millions of unemployed, hungry and disaffected Americans down the drain of uselessness.
Talk about an existential crisis, for countries like Israel, in the face of the Arab uprisings. There is an existential crisis facing the United States below the 49th parallel. And it's face is the face of the Republicans who are committed to gaining power while their countrymen and women starve, become ill and even die, except for those win the big earnings and the big houses and the big cars and the big vacation homes....for it is those people who will perpetuate this crisis by funding the very voices who will make it happen in Washington.