Social Security is Dead

Jump, Mr. President? How high?

For weeks, we've been hearing about how the public isn't on board with Dubya's plan to scrap Social Security. The polls have actually been moving against him on the issue, the more he talks about it.

But public opinion doesn't matter. Public opinion can be molded by savvy propagandists, as those in the White House are.

What matters are votes in the House and Senate, and while those have seemed scarce so far, I believe they are on the way.

First, you had Alan Greenspan, fuckhead partisan hack that he is, telling these gullible lawmakers that private accounts were a good idea.

Of course, as Dean Baker points out, when Greenspan said the Social Security system wasn't working, he was basically criticizing his own handiwork, since he worked up the Social Security "fix" in 1983.

But since when has logic ever stopped Alan Greenspan? This is the same seedy Randian crackpot who just a few years ago said that we needed to slash taxes in order to get rid of a budget surplus.

Let me repeat that: he said we needed to slash taxes in order to get rid of a budget surplus. Can you believe he wasn't laughed out of the country?

But he wasn't laughed out of the country, even though he should have been fired and then tested for Alzheimer's. Instead, gullible lawmakers swallowed his bullshit hook, line, and sinker, enacted big tax cuts, and the rest is history. Now we're talking very seriously about how many programs we need to cut in order to get rid of the budget deficit, with little discussion of reversing the recent tax cuts that caused it.

Our nation is batshit insane, our lawmakers are batshit insane, and when Greenspan tells them private accounts are a good idea, they will listen.

And now Josh Marshall has seen signs that Lieberman has vibrated back into the Fainthearted Faction. I tell you, this fibrillating vagina is like a lot of the other lawmakers on Capitol Hill who have made noises about protecting Social Security: they're all hedging their bets, with one finger in the air, waiting to see which way the political wind blows. If they can get away with ravaging Social Security, our retirement security, in order to give Bush another rim job, you better believe they will. They can't wait to do it.

And when they do, the Democratic Party will be dead. And I, for one, won't miss it. What a bunch of jackasses. It's time for a new party, a truly progressive party. It may take years in the wilderness, years of Bushian facism, before the tide is ready to turn again, but turn it will. The economic inequity we are creating is sowing the seeds of future change. It won't be pretty, and we could have avoided it, but we chose not to, and we'll suffer the consequences.