Back in August of 2008, an obscure right winger named Marie Jon wrote a hilariously off-the-mark and anti-prescient article entitled, "Americans will reject the fifth column Democrats, and Obama" (A bigger man will not bring up the fact that then-Senator Obama got elected by nearly 70,000,000 of his fellow Americans and the Democrats significantly widened their lead in both chambers of Congress. Fortunately, I'm not that big of a man.).
This wasn't the first time the President was risibly attacked for being a fifth columnist. On June 8th, 2009, another obscure right winger, this time Kevin Hassett, accused Obama of the same thing in the pages of Bloomberg. Reagan administration flak and hack Mark Levin also appended this ludicrous term to Obama.
OK, as soon as you're done laughing over these knuckle-draggers calling our President a Communist and 5th columnist, I'll continue.
Now, what we're seeing is the exact opposite. We're seeing all these Tea Bagging psychopaths like Rand Paul, Allen West and Dan Webster actively pursuing with hammers and tongs (as opposed to the hammers and sickles with which President Obama had run) to become part of a government they plainly despise. Remembering very well what Reagan had famously said about the US government not being the solution to our problems but government being the problem (especially if you lived in Grenada or El Salvador), they have joined a government with the intention of subverting it.
They have joined a government they plainly loath and seem to mistrust with the openly avowed intention of atrophying its size, scope and influence from within. How does that not fit the definition of a 5th column, people?
I know, I know, they can't be a 5th column. The Grand Old Party is over 150 years old, it's half of our two-party system of government and a huge part of the mainstream. I know why this hasn't occurred to most of you. It's a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees, Steinbeck's dog Charlie's inability to see the towering California redwood trees for what they were and to properly piss on them.
But Obama didn't run on a mantra of government being evil, of government being the problem but that government is the solution to our problems (if you need another second or two for a second laughing fit, I'll wait.).
The Republican Party has, is and always will. They run for public office and enjoy all the perks such as the $174,000 salary, junkets, free health care, franking privileges, a fat pension while decrying government lavishing money on public servants (provided they're union workers making a quarter of what they make). They join a government and by doing so do not shrink the size of government but maintain a status quo at least in the legislative branch and, using populist rhetoric that still hypnotizes a disturbingly large segment of the population, shits on their constituents and claiming it's manna from heaven.
This is a 5th column, people. The Tea Party is not a 5th column because they are not the ones in power but elect into power those who at least feign sympathy with their concerns. If they could actually read, the Tea Baggers no doubt would think of themselves as Heinlein's 6th columnists such as the hidden guerilla fighters taking on Asian occupiers.
Until now, 5th columns have historically suffered a dismal track record after the Spanish Civil War of 1936. But now, with the rise of the post-Reagan Republican Party, one needing a boost after the dismal 2006 and 2008 elections and the Tea Party that was largely inflated by the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey's FreedomWerx giving them that boost of political nitrous oxide, we're seeing a decidedly nastier version of the GOP, a virulent mutation of the kind of conservative that Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon had once represented.
Subversive, treasonous 5th columnists? How can that be? They're the Republican Party, JP, they're the establishment fercrissakes!
Well, let's think about it: Just five years ago when George W. Bush pushed like a one nut on Viagra during a foursome with the Pointer Sisters to privatize Social Security, even rank and file Republicans got the dry heaves and put the skids to that. Social Security just five years ago was considered inviolable, a sacred cow, as it ought to be.
Now, Social Security, followed by Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, etc. is following each other into that slaughterhouse known as the Free Market. Now, nothing is sacred, not even child labor laws. Michele Bachmann, a leading Republican presidential contender, recently said that under slavery blacks had it better then than they do under Obama.
The most accurate and damning appraisal of the latter day Republican Party is, "They will spend the rest of the 21st century undoing the 20th."
That sounds like a 5th column to me.
They've already deprived us of the right to sue corporations even when they kill our own. They've deprived us of the right to file for bankruptcy when the unregulated health care racket ruins our credit ratings. They've made it all but impossible to challenge banks when they steal our homes or resort to sleazy means to obtain them. They've denied Medicare the right to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma yet have blocked cheaper (and probably safer) Canadian pharmaceuticals after using scare tactics about how they will kill you. They all but put the kibosh on any meaningful health care reform, including a public option. They want to repeal or retroactively abort the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and even the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
And these corporate-serving fucksticks and blowup dolls are not done, yet. Now, they're trying to take away your Social Security even though it cannot be blamed for one penny of the national debt or deficit. They are trying to finish what Reagan only started and to smash every union in sight. Their fear-mongering, anti-Islamism and rank incompetence has resulted in the public TSA molestations that they're even now decrying as an impingement of our privacy and civil liberties. They've outsourced tens of millions of our jobs then call us hobos when we get on unemployment.
And now, the cocksuckers are after our kids. They want to dumb them down by firing teachers and increasing class sizes and to weaken child labor laws. They will spend the 21st century undoing the 20th century until we're back in the 19th century. Soon, we will see signs above the front entrances of what workplaces we'll be lucky enough to have, reading, Work Will Set You Free.
All because we didn't recognize the 5th Column of the Republican Party. All because we didn't hound these assholes with pitchforks, torches and ropes and to demand of them in courts of law and Congressional hearings, "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Tea Party Caucus?" And only then will America finally begin progressing for the first time in decades, after the last Republican and Tea Bagger is strangled with Milton Freidman's rotten guts.
