Newt has tried to appear to take a principled stand in the war on Romney and today's Republicans don't seem to want to join him there, which just shows what a throwback Newt is and what co-dependents Republicans have become in their job-servitude.
Republicans are in thrall to the concept of The Job as much as Germany was to The Worker in the 1920s. Sarah Palin's remarks asking for full disclosure of job creation data and of Mitt's tax returns strike me as pure posturing and ass-covering in the face of Mitt's impending coronation. What was it, five colleges she attended to get a four year degree?
While Newt's gotten older the Republican Party has continued to move so far away from its old moral positions that it now considers Newt to be talking the values of the enemy. Rush Limbaugh is a case in point, who constantly derides Newt for using the language of the left, when Rush can't make up his mind from day to day whether the bank bailouts were necessary, superfluous or deceitful. A convert like Augustine of Hippo couldn't possibly have something important to contribute, could he?
The truth is Romney's capitalism is parasitic, not entrepreneurial, because it incessantly demands gains in productivity which go to the owners and investors at the expense of the workers. Please. Save. My. Crummy. Job.
No one aged 50 or more who has lost a position on a mere technicality after twenty or more years of service, and they are legion, is sympathetic to this argument. What work at year 5, 10, 14 or 18 was superior to the work at year 20, but for the fact that salary and benefits at that point represented a juicy cost savings going directly to the almighty bottom line? The young who lose their jobs are too inexperienced and too frequently abused to know any other reality than job-hopping in the world created by the corporate raider. Such lives do not produce traditional, stable families, nor committed, law-abiding communities and reliable tax bases. The business left is now in full-throated holler for simplifying taxes, removing tax deductions, and, the real point, a more mobile worker, one who doesn't own a house and who can be moved here and there at will without having to sell first.
Pat Buchanan, who twenty years ago this month made life very difficult for one President George Herbert Walker Bush in the New Hampshire primary, had a change of heart about what was really happening to American workers as he made the rounds during the campaign. It made him realize that something had begun to change in the relationship between worker and employer which went to the heart of patriotism. Today we see the full expression of businesses' loyalty, and it's not to justice, only to the letter of the law, skilfully crafted by its bought and paid for politician.
If only we had Republican candidates today who could effectively tap this well of misery in order to alleviate it instead of merely to get elected. Democrats are better at this, which is why their future looks bright, and ours looks dim.
