Republicans Criticizing Obama Have Chutzpah

I started to write this over a month ago, but I observed something rather remarkable-foreboding. The Republicans-conservatives were rather blase in completely dismissing the eight-year record of doubling the $5 trillion national debt, while blasting President Obama and the Democrats on the nearly $800 billion stimulus bill. In addition they ignored the nearly $3 trillion bailout of the banks and Wall Street with hardly a whimper between September '08 and January, '09.

Talk about chutzpah, hubris. Their latest take on this nation's current economic crisis now supersedes the old classic example: The boy who pleads for mercy when the jury convicts him of the murder of his parents, by claiming he is an orphan. How dare they criticize President Obama when they left him this humongous catastrophe! Net even a month in office.

Even after the doubling of the national debt, Treasury Secretary Paulson handed the bankers, Wall Street and the mortgage industry nearly $3 trillion to save them, while leaving home owners, working people and small businesses in the lurch. (By the way, just what is a small business? Here in Florida the Legislature wants to cap "small businesses" at $50 million. One senator thinks that is too much; she wants to cap it at $25 million.)

Question: How many small businesses make $25 million a year? I was not a businessman, but I worry about the thousands of small businesses that have closed in the past year, not even coming close to $1 million in earnings. One conclusion: Those legislators need to focus on the real world.

We are talking about $8 trillion deficit when President Obama took office on Jan. 20 and they nick-pick his stimulus bill. They claim they didn't get to read the bill. Please explain how they were able to reduce it by $30 billion if they didn't read it. They are masters at passing legislation without the other party reading it. Remember the Patriot and Home Security bills written by Sen. Joe Leiberman and rewritten behind closed doors? The Democrats literally did not read those bills, but voted for them without question because of 9-11. they supported the president, who lied to them about Iraq.

That first $700 billion bailout was actually $850 billion; the Republican Senate held out for $150 billion for AIG and several other elite corporations. Yet, they quibble about a mere $17 billion for General Motors and Chrysler with exacting conditions. We still do not know where those billions of dollars went, except for bonuses and golden parachutes that rewarded outrageous corporate failure.

Now the media are assigning the blame on working people-citizens for re-electing public officials to office. Have they not noticed a change in the national government? As noted previously, working people have been trying to survive these economic times. They did not cause this disaster; in fact, many were deliberately steered into fraudulent sub-prime mortgages by corrupt bankers and mortgagers.

In addition, those "Conservatives" sneer at President Obama for selecting people who did not pay a few thousand in taxes, but overlook corporations that sent tens of billions offshore to avoid paying any taxes, billions in profits from outsourcing millions of jobs for cheap labor and they want to blame people working for minimum wage with no benefits for not being informed? What chutzpah!