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Rubber & Glue
By Nancy Greggs
It’s official. The new GOP Talking Points have been announced, and are already making the rounds with the usual lock-step precision we’ve all come to know and love.
As inevitable as death and taxes, we can always count on you guys to come up with some gooduns – like fighting ‘em over there, or adapting to win. But the current crop of mindless media messages are so pathetically disappointing, you can’t help hearing that half-hearted rim-shot every time someone sheepishly trots one out for public consumption.
Using the phrase surrender in connection with the Democrats’ plans for a scheduled withdrawal from Iraq – now that’s a truly unfortunate choice of words. You see, these days when an American hears the word surrender, they can’t help thinking about how your party surrendered your oversight role when this president declared himself above the law. They make that instant connection between Republican majority and the surrender of traditional rights and freedoms. They can’t avoid remembering how quickly you surrendered to tax-cuts for the wealthy, along with the sanctioning of secret prisons, the acceptance of torture, the surrender of moral values that once defined our democracy.
Talking Point No. 2: Retreat – again, bad move. How many times did you people retreat from the battles you should have waged on behalf of your constituents? When faced with supporting policies that bit the middle-class in the derriere, like enriching Big Oil and Big Pharma to the detriment of the working stiff, we all know how quickly you scurried off, like so many cockroaches, into the political shadows. The voters can’t help but recall how you retreated, time and again, into silent submission as their hard-earned tax dollars were literally shoveled into the accounts of war-profiteers via no-bid contracts. They can’t dimiss the connection between the growing deficit and that much-touted GOP fiscal responsibility – just another Republican ideal surrendered in the name of political expediency.
But it’s Talking Point No. 3 – albeit a spontaneous and perhaps inadvertent one – that is tantamount to Republicans hammering the last nail in your own coffin with the reckless abandon your party is quickly becoming known for: “I can’t remember.”
Just put a GOPer’s hand on a Bible, have him swear an oath to tell the truth, and their memories are immediately wiped as clean as a well-shaken etch-a-sketch.
I’d think the last thing you guys would want to remind the citizenry of is the faulty memory of your typical Republican. Condi didn’t remember being warned about an increased volume in terrorist chatter before 9-11. Bush didn’t remember having said that Saddam Hussein was behind those attacks, any more than he remembered the victims of Katrina once the photo-op was over, or the fact that he once swore to get Bin Laden, dead or alive.
And now we have Gonzales, who didn’t remember his involvement in the attorney firings until documents were released that proved him a liar – ahem, I mean, forgetful – along with all of those other administration flunkies who are apparently so incapable of remembering anything, it’s a miracle they can find their way to their respective offices on a regular basis.
Surrender, retreat, forgetfulness – when you are reduced to using the very words that typify your own party’s increasingly unspinnable behavior, it’s more than obvious that the game is over.
You have surrendered whatever moral standing you ever pretended to have, you have retreated from your obligations to your country, and “I don’t remember” won’t get you off the hook for either.
But that’s okay, feel free to try and wipe the past from your addled little minds. The American people will be more than happy to remind you in 2008 – an election you might want to start forgetting about right now.
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