OpEds: Difference in Republicans & Dems

MIKE INGLES

In a perfect world, I would be considered a liberal-Republican. This is not a perfect world.

I believe that most issues, other than defense of our country, discrimination, poverty and interstate commerce could be handled at the local and/or state level. But it won’t happen. It won’t happen because I am too lazy to care what happens at the local landfill or what happens at school board meeting or who gets turned away from a local hospital or who gets jail time and why.

You see, the world is too complex for me. And the differences apparent in living in San Jose or Columbus or Milwaukee are so insignificant that it is much easier to let all these bothersome issues be decided in congress by national politicians and not have me be annoyed as to whether or not schools will have to close because of low national tests scores or if tipping fees at the city dump are going to be raised because of the new EPA regulations. There is no local anymore.

So in my opinion, it is impossible to be a Republican in modern-day America. In reality, all of us are Democrats because we are so interrelated and dependent on one another that it is impossible to govern 315 million people on a local basis. We’re national baby!

Here’s a perfect illustration: In my city we have about 40,000 illegal immigrants. Down deep inside, most of us would like to load up 8,000 Greyhound busses and send them back to Tijuana. We can’t. Even if we used the entire city budget and rounded up all the illegals and shipped them off—those busboy jobs and laundry jobs and roofing jobs would be calling out to the illegals who live in San Jose or Milwaukee and bingo-bango-bong—we’d have 40,000 different illegals living in our barrios. Besides, who’d takeover all those taco-wagons that I rely on?

So, if you are a Republican, drive your Edsel to the nearest DNC office and lay prostrate. Under Obamacare, you can have your prostate checked while you are there. However, you will have to go to the back of the line before you can become relevant or receive any benefits. And, you must furnish your own rubber glove.

There is only one real political party in America—and it is divided into two broad groups: The Have’s and The Havnots. Neither party can deliver us back to the days of yore, back to the days of Adams and a weak central government. If you’re tired of big-government, sorry, get used to it. Oh, I know there are all these debates going on about cutting the size of the federal government. But it will never happen. It will never happen because politicians have a vested interest in watching government grow. Take away the security blanket of Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and Welfare and Obamacare and food stamps—and we will have anarchy. Cut those benefits and you piss-off 98% of the voters. The easiest group to attack, of course, are the very least of us; the single mothers, the homeless the mentally ill who mostly rely on food-stamps. They don’t vote. So, you might think that *food-stamps would be under attack—nope, the poor have a strong ally in Big Agriculture so even the poor are safe from Draconian cuts.

Wealthy folks had figured out all this interrelated stuff long ago. They don’t much care if the politician they’re backing has a D or a R beside their name, they only care to make sure that the Capital Gains Taxes are not screwed with and that they can still write-off that business expense for the trip to Tijuana and can still swipe hookers through on their American Express card.

Pass the taco sauce.

*Foodstamps should become a new noun this year and I will not have to hyphenate it any longer. There is little point in wasting a noun as a modifier when one comprehensive noun will do quite nicely, thank you. Besides, foodstamps have been around for a generation now and they’re not going anywhere. In fact, we should shorten it to Fstamp and take away any ambiguities with postal-stamps, which, should remain hyphenated because soon they will go the way of the Edsel.

Mike Ingles is a connoisseur of fine-Mexican cuisine in Columbus, Ohio and prefers the spicy sauce.