Chris Jepson: Republicans - 'All hat and no cattle'

I was having a humorous conversation last Saturday about what I’d like to do that day and spontaneously proclaimed, “I have an agenda but no plan.” And I thought — BINGO! — that sums-up the modern Republican Party.

There are times in my life when I lament that I won’t be alive to see how history judges us. Oh, sure, we can surmise that humans 100 years from today will resentfully wonder, “How damn dumb were they? They had the facts, but chose to ignore them.” To employ timeless platitudes, they (we) kicked the can down the road, buried our heads in the sand and mumbled much as did Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With The Wind,” "Fiddly, dee, I'll think about that tomorrow."

If we lived in the best of all possible worlds, all Americans would be self-reliant, independent and responsible. No Americans would be born into poverty because their grandparents and parents made wise personal choices. All Americans would be healthy and lucky. America would be insulated and immune from economic downturns, recessions and depressions. America’s corporations wouldn’t move American jobs overseas for tax benefits or employee cost savings. America, in the best of all possible worlds, wouldn’t have a violent racist history of exclusion, wouldn’t have waged senseless wars abroad bankrupting our national budget and our political leadership would be just, forward thinking and accountable.

But, alas, sigh, that is not America, is it? Suffice it to say, we can imagine a better tomorrow, one that addresses America’s challenges. But we don’t. Why is that?

This is my major complaint with the Republican Party. What specifically does it offer (policy wise) to address long-term systemic poverty in America? If Republicans do not like Obamacare, what are its solutions for covering all of America’s uninsured? Whatever the issues: gun violence, environmental desecration, banking and financial regulatory oversight, foreign military interventions, higher education access and affordability, employment opportunities, you name it, Republicans offer little but “tax cuts for the wealthy and eliminating regulatory oversight of the economy.”

No point in going over the areas of disagreement regarding the social issues of gay marriage, abortion and reproductive choice. The economic powers within the Republican establishment (Chamber/corporate wing) don’t give a whit, I believe, about such matters but quite clearly “manage” the social conservatives into voting Republican in order to achieve their primary economic agenda of lower taxes for the wealthy (themselves) as well as deregulating the economy so as to maximize profits.

If Republicans have “plans” for improving America, let’s see them. But if the “plan” is little more than lower taxes (for themselves) and fewer regulations (for their corporations), know that that is no plan at all.

Too many Republicans are not interested in governing. They are elected to govern but they are “all hat and no cattle; all hammer, no nail; all show, no go; all booster, no payload; all mouth and no trousers.”

Republicans have an agenda but no real plan for America. If the agenda is to clearly benefit the wealthy at the expense of the many, have the decency to clearly state that that is the case. Then again, perhaps, we as Americans are not comprehending (disbelief perhaps) that the Republican agenda of “lower taxes/fewer regulations” is so patently self-serving, that it is nothing more than the feathering of the nests of the already rich. But for the rest of us, a generous serving of some of that ol’ trickle-down flim-flammery. Some plan.