HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY, all you (us) 1.3 million Americans out of work and unable to get unemployment benefits because 41 U.S. Senators won’t let you!!
Have a great holiday! Should be plenty of leftover food to steal at the holiday parties of rich people – like those senators – all celebrating their independence, big houses and expensive foreign cars!
You see, the senators – 40 Republicans and one Democrat – want you to be independent for Independence Day! They want you to be independent of money. They want you to be independent of food. They want you to be independent of self-esteem and of the basic necessities of life!
As a matter of fact, they want you to just suck it.
Once again, just before laying Sen. Robert Byrd to rest, the mostly Republican minority in the Senate blocked an extension of unemployment benefits to 1.3 million of us. Oh, and by the way, most of those unemployment benefits ran out at the first of June and Republicans have been blocking them all month long. Others ran out Wednesday.
Seventeen of those 41 senators – 40 Republicans and one Democrat – come from states with double-digit unemployment! Way to stick up for your peeps! Or is stick up your peeps? Or hold them hostage?
Officially, 15 million Americans are out of work. Half of those have been out of work for 6 months or longer. So a Senate minority wants to celebrate the Fourth of July by giving millions of Americans a bottle rocket up the butt?
Oh sure, they tell you they keep trying to make you suffer more because it will make you stronger but mostly because, they say, they don’t want to add to the nation’s debt.
“The only reason the unemployment extension hasn’t passed is because Democrats simply refuse to pass a bill that doesn’t add to the debt,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, in some kind of weird Republican-only mind-twisting logic.
But they don’t really give a damn about the federal debt.
“Deficits don’t matter,” famously said former Vice-President Dick Cheney, as his administration took the nation from the budget surplus left by President Clinton to the largest deficit in history as we spent willy-nilly to wage two unnecessary wars.
Naw, these GOP dream-killers are only interested in making sure the economy falls back into the depths of recession we faced when George Bush left office. It’d be good for them because they don’t want President Obama to get any credit for getting the nation back on the road to recovery.
It’s better politics for them, they reason, if Americans are angry and bitter. Angry and bitter works better for GOP politics because, well, they don’t really have policies of their own to promote. They’re happier and more productive politically when verbally fire-bombing the body politic out here in the hinterlands and procedurally fire-bombing the process on Capitol Hill.
Is this a great country or what?
This is precise what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they signed the Declaration of Independence 234 years ago on Sunday, particularly when in their indictments of King George, they included:
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”
The Founding Fathers didn’t know at the time the new Senate of the United States they would envisioned would include 41 King Georges a couple of centuries down the road.
