The neo-Neanderthals

It was very enlightening of you to ask us, your readers, for comments on some articles. But when I tried to comment, I was directed to an enrollment form for Facebook. While I am aware of the popularity of the "social networking" website among teen-age children that like to gossip and bare all, I am an adult who values his privacy, and to paraphrase Groucho Marx I do not wish to join any "social" website that will have me as a member. I also do not think that this is the right portal for comments on important issues, such as the Republican assault on public education and it providers.

So, allow me, please, to express in writing my opinion on Republicans and education.

When the neo-Neanderthal Republicans started to take over their party in the nineteen-eighties, Russell Baker defined their aims as "comfort the comfortable, and afflict the afflicted." Their first step in the process was to reduce, drastically, the tax brackets for the very, very rich -- the "comfortable" -- and then declare that we can not afford to provide needed services like education and health care, for the "afflicted", because the flow of much of the tax money to the treasury was reduced to a trickle as a result of tax breaks for the very affluent.

Now, with a lingering recession and severe unemployment further reducing tax revenues, the Republicans continue to falsely cry poverty, while at the same time further reducing taxes for the multimillionaires. They must be made aware that the way out of the financial crisis, that they created, is not to break government workers and educational unions but to reinstate the taxes of the five percent of the richest Americans to the pre-Reagan levels.

It is not surprising that the primary target of the of the neo-Neanderthals and the know-nothings is education. The Republican strategists know that the majority of the better educated electorate, usually vote Democratic. So in order to retain their hold on the southern Republican enclave, it is in their best interest to inflict severe damages to the public education system.

When Henry Louis Mencken observed that "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" he could not foresee that, some seventy years later, the amalgam of Republicans/Tea Baggers would adopt his words as their electioneering strategy.

The Voodoo President February 6th of next year will be the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan, so President Obama appointed a committee to prepare an official commemoration. Why? Granted that the list of his accomplishments is unique and different from that of his predecessors in office, but does it really need a commemoration? Ronald Reagan did reverse the laws of gravity with his supply-side economics theory, better known as "Reaganomics" (which his soon to be Vice President called "Voodoo economics") by promising that the wealth generated by his tax cuts for the rich will trickle down. It did not, it gushed up making the rich richer and the poor poorer. When Reaganomics took effect in the summer of 1981 they brought upon us the worst recession since the great depression of 1929. During the Reagan administration the number of people below the poverty level increased every year and the trade deficit quadrupled. Another accomplishment of the Reagan administration was the tripling of the national debt as a result of the tax cuts. We actually borrowed money to give tax cuts to the rich. Ronald Reagan legalized and institutionalized selfishness and disregard for the welfare of others, by transforming the party of Abraham Lincoln into the American branch of Margaret Thatcher's heartless conservatism with its enmity for labor unions and the underclass. In October of 1981 Reagan's administration proposed new regulations, announced by the Agriculture Department, for school lunch programs that would have classified catsup as a vegetable. Ronald Reagan started the elimination of the safety net for the most needy in this country; he preached that "government is the problem, not the solution" and then he, and the Republican Presidents that followed him, did their best (or rather, their worst) to cripple the government and curtail its services. Like previous Presidents, Reagan lied to us. He declared that he would not negotiate with terrorists, but he did. He denied exchanging arms for hostages, but he did. He violated the laws that Congress passed by financing and arming the contras in Nicaragua. When the truth came out he accepted responsibility. Reagan did manage to bring two super powers -- the United States and the USSR -- to the brink of bankruptcy by spending on comic book versions of "star wars" and increased missile production and deployment. And lets not forget that Ronald W. Reagan begat George W. Bush. He was not Bush's biological father, but the dogmatic one, and George W.'s presidency was not the presidency of Bush the second, but of the second Reagan. Ogden Nash wrote a whimsical ditty about an inscription on a tombstone: Here lies my wife Here let her lie, Now she is at rest And so am I. President Barak Obama, when it comes to Ronald Reagan, please let him, and us be at rest.