The Ordinary Citizen's Rebuttal to the Bloviating of Republicans About the State of the Union Address.
Dear Republicans, Teabaggers and Conservatives:
Kudos for selecting Marco Rubio to respond to the President's remarks. In doing so, you have relegated him to Bobby "I've reached the peak of my political career" Jindal status. It's all down hill from here, Marco. I expected a more accomplished liar to deliver that particular work of fiction, and to answer the obvious question, yes, everyone knows that when a person lies, they tend to suffer from dry mouth and yes, it was the "gulp heard 'round the world." I hear that Poland Springs has already approached Rubio to be the spokesperson for their new "It helps ya lie better" ad campaign.
Points off however, for selecting Rand Paul to present the bat-crap-crazy rebuttal to the mainstream-crazy rebuttal. Your choice of Paul was unimaginative. We've known for quite some time that Rand hails from Crazy Town. Steve "because pedophile is the new patriot" Stockman or Ted "how much can I embarrass myself today" Cruz would have been far more inspired choices.
That being said, let's get down to the speech and the future of this country. You disagreed with everything that the President said. No surprise there, really. If President Obama advocated breathing oxygen, you all would call him a Communist and say you had the right to breathe whatever you liked...FREEDOM!! So, no...we're not really surprised to know that you have every intention to stay the course on your party above country agenda. To expect (or even hope for) better would be to give you far too much credit. So let me just tell you this; we're watching you, and we're a lot smarter than you think we are.
A lot of us remember living through eight years of Reaganomics and we know from experience that your trickle-down philosophy doesn't work for the majority of Americans. Trickle down means we're being pissed on by you and your corporate overlords. We know that you don't represent us. You represent the people who paid a lot of money to put you in office. Even your base is waking up to that fact and it's going to cost you dearly in the mid-term elections in 2014. You're in trouble and you know it and you're starting to cannibalize yourselves. We liberals are popping corn and getting ready to enjoy the show. It's been a long time coming and we're going to savor every minute of it.
We noticed last night as we watched the President, that Johnny two-shot, sitting behind the leader of the free world with a full bar set up in front of him, didn't applaud much. Especially when the President called for simple votes on policy to move the country forward. No, old bar-back Boehner doesn't like to bring things to the floor for a vote, because he can't keep his own caucus in line. Therefore, to advance any type of legislation, he has to count on a Democratic majority, which makes him look like a weak and impotent leader--which is precisely what he is. We already know it, so there's no point in trying to hide it, Johnny. The jig's been up for a while.
We couldn't help but notice that the one thing that Rubio and teabag Paul could agree on was that if any American wasn't a successful small business owner, than it was our own damn fault. You want us to believe that success is just waiting for us and if we're struggling, then it's because we don't want success badly enough or we aren't willing to work hard enough to achieve it. There's a word for that philosophy: BULLSHIT. There's just no polite PC way to say it. It's sheer unadulterated bullshit.
In today's economy, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even how many hours a day a person works--the deck is stacked against us. Many of us have full time jobs. We work overtime when it's available to us (which it usually is not); we work our fingers to the bone and it still isn't enough to achieve the elusive success that you dangle in front of our faces like forbidden fruit. You see, while executive pay has sky rocketed in the past 25 years, wages for the men and women who actually do the work haven't budged a dime. More often than not, corporations don't even offer full time positions any more. And don't go blaming Obamacare for it because that little scam has been practiced long before anyone ever dreamed of Obamacare, much less signed it into law. Every company offers benefits to their full time employees, so hiring two people part time instead of one full timer who is eligible for benefits has been the status quo forever. I'm not just talking about healthcare benefits, here. I'm talking about things like 401k plans, and paid sick days and paid vacation time too. Companies have to offer such things to attract workers, and most are hired part time with the promise of going full time. It's a promise that goes unfulfilled for many, many years--if ever.
If we're lucky enough to get a full time position and an offer of health insurance, the employee contribution is so expensive that we're working for less than minimum wage when you subtract the premiums. The biggest raise a person can get is usually around a quarter to fifty-cents an hour. It's usually attached to a performance review that's done once a year. Employers are quite adept at finding some reason to gripe about a worker's performance and rarely does a worker achieve the maximum fifty-cent an hour increase. The boss happily smiles and tells that worker the same line of bullshit that you are telling us; work harder. It's a lie we don't believe anymore.
Like you, we also worry about the world we're leaving to our kids and grand-kids, but do you know what keeps us up at night? It's not the budget deficit. We worry about the condition of the country that we're leaving behind. We're handing our kids a nation with crumbling roads and bridges. We're handing them a power grid that is woefully inadequate. We're handing them schools that are antiquated with roofs that are caving in and walls that are falling. We're leaving behind water and sewer systems that are a century old. Instead of worrying about minor problems like the deficit, why don't you spend some time worrying about real problems for a change?
While we're on the subject of imaginary problems, here's another one: The entitlement crisis. That sweet little turn of phrase is compliments of my very own Congressman, Tom Reed. We don't have an entitlement crisis, or problem or whatever cataclysmic adjective you want to use to describe Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and SNAP. SS and Medicare are not entitlements. We pay for them all of our lives, with every pay check. You know who doesn't pay for them? Rich people. They only pay FICA on the first $110,000 of their income, while we middle class and working poor people pay on every damned dime. You say that SS needs fixing? That's pretty simple. Exempt the first $25,000 of income and deduct FICA on the rest--no cap. Problem solved. The same goes for Medicare; exempt the first $25,000 of income, pay medicare tax on the rest--no cap. Problem solved again. Why not? Congressman Rubio said that you're not protecting your rich contributors, right? As far as medicaid and SNAP are concerned, they protect the poorest people in our country; babies and children and old people. You're the party of family values and Jesus, aren't you? Jesus was a big fan of protecting kids and old people, so protecting those programs is what he would do. So should you. Otherwise, you're just hypocrites.
I think the President saved the best for last in his speech. It must have been pretty hard for you to ignore the thunderous applause and shouts of affirmation in support of common sense gun restrictions. We, the people are not playing games. We want universal background checks for firearms purchases, we want to ban high capacity ammunition magazines and clips. We're no longer accepting your "slippery slope" nonsense and the same old rhetoric that unless we can find a perfect solution we should do nothing at all. That's just not acceptable any more. We don't care how much money Wayne Lapierre and his NRA cronies contribute to your campaign funds. The NRA lost all credibility when they made Ted "Pedophile" Nugent a board member.
So, there you have it, Republicans. We re-elected President Obama for four more years. We like his ideas. We are taking a more active roll in our government. It's our country and we're taking it back. We're going to push hard for a Constitutional amendment to obliterate Citizens United. You're going to have to answer to your constituents from now on. We hired you and we'll fire you. From now on, you work for us.
