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.