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Without any facts to sustain his position, during his first radio commentaries of 2012, Rush Limbaugh continued his series of racial assaults on President Obama.  During the week of January 9, 2012, Limbaugh claimed that the Obama family think they are “owed” a lavish lifestyle “because of what’s been done” to them and their “ancestors,” that President Obama’s “plan” is “payback” against the “white Europeans” who “illegitimately founded” the United States, and Limbaugh claimed that President Obama believes the United States was “immoral in its founding” in part due to slavery.  Naturally, Limbaugh ended his 2011 show with the following racially tinged comment:

From the Rush Limbaugh Show, December 9, 2011

LIMBAUGH: “Snerdley, what do you think the odds are that Obama got confused Hanukkah and Kwanzaa?  When was Kwanzaa invented? No, ’66.  I looked it up.  Kwanzaa was invented 1966. Close enough. It was invented by a guy named Ron Karenga. Yeah. Yeah. His name was Ron Karenga but he had an alias, Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga.  So he was a doctor. And he invented Kwanzaa, which is a seven-day feast, runs December 26 to January 1. In 1966 he branded it a black alternative to Christmas. The idea was to celebrate the end of what Ron Karenga considered the Christmas season exploitation of African Americans. Now, what was that? What was the Christmas season exploitation of African Americans? Was it all the black Santa Clauses that were out there in the department stores? What was it then? What was the exploitation of African Americans at Christmastime? According to the official Kwanzaa website, as opposed to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site, the celebration was designed to foster conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the — anyway it also has a candelabra. It was seven days, seven candles instead of eight for Hanukkah, and you light ’em all at once. So Obama had a menorah there and he lit ’em all. I’m sure he thought it was Kwanzaa while talking about loyalty to Israel.”

From the Rush Limbaugh Show, January 9, 2012

LIMBAUGH: “Now, I believe that in addition to whatever drives Obama and his party ideologically, also near the top of the list is the pursuit of money without having to work for it. Being able to pass it out to their friends and set their friends up to be wealthy for the rest of their lives. I think there’s all kinds of that going on, too. And I think if you look at the way the Obamas live, with Michelle and her separate vacations and not being concerned about how much it costs to take separate airplanes — there’s no question in my mind that they view this as — whatever else they view it as, as an opportunity to live high on the hog without having it cost them a dime. And they justify it by thinking, “Well, we deserve this, or we’re owed this because of what’s been done to us and our ancestors all these” — who knows? I think that’s — I think that’s part of it.

From the Rush Limbaugh Show, January 11, 2012

LIMBAUGH:  “Obama has a plan. Obama’s plan is based on his inherent belief that this country was immorally and illegitimately founded by a very small minority of white Europeans who screwed everybody else since the founding to get all the money and all the goodies, and it’s about time that the scales were made even. And that’s what’s going on here. And that’s why the president is lawless, and that’s why there is no prosecution of the Black Panthers for voter intimidation, because it’s not possible for a minority to intimidate the white majority. It’s not possible. It’s always been the other way around. This is just payback. This is “how does it feel” time. That’s how he seems himself, pure and simple. He doesn’t see himself as a capitalist reformer saving a stupid automobile company. He sees this is his opportunity to take it away from the people who founded it and give it to the people he thinks have a moral right to it because somehow they have been taken advantage of, used, exploited, paid unfairly, what have you. Yeah, it’s socialist. “

From the Rush Limbaugh Show, January 12, 2012

LIMBAUGH: “I think Obama — and Giuliani’s right: [Obama’s] an Alinskyite. He has been taught, he’s been raised, educated, whatever. He’s got a deep resentment for this country. You know me. I have told you. I’m willfully naïve, I guess. I can’t get my arms around the fact that there are people born in this country who hate it. I know they do, they can explain to me the differences in ideology and so forth, I just — I’m never going to intellectually or emotionally understand it, even though I can explain it, it still makes no sense to me. Yet I know those people exist and I know that they are the people that taught Obama. They are among those who educated him, both in his family and at the institutions of higher learning and academe that he attended. I know that he thinks this is an unjust country that it was immoral in its founding for reasons including but greater than slavery. He thinks it was economically unjust and immoral. He thinks a bunch of rich white guys — this one percent versus 99 percent stuff, that’s how he thinks the country was founded and that the one percent has maintained themselves in total control of all the wealth since the days of the founding and that they take purposeful steps to keep everybody out of that club. He believes it. He thinks the only remedy for it is to take everything the one percent has and give it away to everybody else. Now the ulterior motives to that are entrenching his own power. I don’t think there’s benevolence in this. I don’t think Obama runs around every day feeling genuinely sorry for the 99 percent. I don’t think he’s motivated by altruism. I think he’s motivated by anger. He’s got a chip on his shoulder, a number of them.”

Although protected by the First Amendment, it continues to astonish me why Limbaugh is still on the air after spewing years of racially provoked commentary based on stuff he just makes up.  If a minority American engaged in such despicable behavior, I believe that some in the white community would “pull out all of the stops” to get that person taken off the air.  I fully expect Limbaugh to provide more race-baiting rhetoric against President Obama during 2012, but that’s just my take.

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Racism during the 2012 presidential election will be an issue because there is a group of racially-motivated white people who voted against Obama because he is Black and who opposes his presidency solely because he is Black.  That racism nucleus of mad white Americans has never supported racial equality.  In fact, their political representatives voted against both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.  The loudest voices of right-wing talk radio and cable television such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Fox News commentators, appeal directly to that core with racially tinted messages as the right-wing of the Republican Party continues to do.  You may recall that there were blatant signs of racism at the most heated town hall meetings during the summers of 2008 and 2009 including many Tea Party signs that carried overtly racial messages.

In addition, the radical “voter suppression laws” enacted by Republican Governors in Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, North Carolina, New Jersey, Maine, Minnesota and Missouri is yet another example of overt racism because it primarily affects African Americans, young voters, working poor, elderly and the disabled.  The Republican Party knows that this segment of the American people helped to elect President Obama and other Democrats in 2008, and the Party is working very hard to stop them from voting in 2012.  Before this year, most states allowed voters to use all kinds of identification, even utility bills, to get a ballot.  Not anymore.  Now a non-expired, state-issued photo ID is necessary.

Many African-Americans believe that President Barack Obama is being disrespected by a racist White America.  The continued involvement of the “birther” movement that raises doubts about Obama’s citizenship, the uproar over President Obama speaking to the nation’s school children about studying and working hard and, of course, the disrespect shown toward the President by a white Congressman from the South, Joe Miller, who yelled “you lie” during the President’s State of the Union address in September 2009 and whose pathetic apology catapulted him in becoming a fund-raising icon.  Recent examples of overt racism include Newt Gingrich’s frequent attacks on President Obama as a “food stamp president” and his claim that African Americans are content to collect welfare benefits rather than pursue employment.  Campaigning in Iowa, Rick Santorum’s statement, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” is yet another example of a remark characterized by blatant racism by another Republican presidential candidate.  These comments were so “over the top” that it prompted 45 Catholic leaders to issue a letter this past Friday to Gingrich and Santorum, themselves Catholics, urging them “to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail.”

John Gehring, the Catholic outreach coordinator at Faith in Public Life, highlights the idea of “intrinsic evil,” adding that “a lot of people look at Catholic teaching and think about abortion as being a preeminent political issue, and that is true, but the bishops are also very clear that racism and torture — where Santorum is very bad on, Santorum has been an apologist for enhanced interrogation — are an intrinsic evil.”  Gehring also stated that Gingrich and Santorum’s “rhetoric around class and racial issues is in many ways out of line with Catholic social teaching.” “That is something Catholic voters will be concerned about,” Gehring says, “particularly given that both Santorum and Gingrich have not been shy about talking about the importance of their faith from a personal perspective and also how it shapes their political views as well.”

Color Lines, which reports on racial justice issues, reported this past Thursday that, “Gingrich argues that the reason so many people are on food stamps is not that the economy has thrown millions into poverty, but rather that lazy black families are getting on the dole and don’t want to work.”  Earlier this month, Gingrich told an audience in New Hampshire, “If the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.’”  Color Lines added, “Gingrich’s attack on the food stamp program is not surprising; it’s the kind of politics that he’s been helping to perfect for over 30 years.”

Although much progress has been made in attempting to eliminate racism, many believe that there was a significant set-back when President Obama was inaugurated as the first African American President.  Twenty-first century racism at its finest has emerged.  The rage during the campaign and over the past 3-1/2 years have been unprecedented especially when you hear emotionally charged members of the white community say that they want to “take their country back” as though it has disappeared because there is an African American President in the White House.  Many of us know that there are racist white Americans who will never accept a black or brown brother or sister in the White House and although we cannot call every disagreement an issue of racism, there is no question that racism still exists.

As we continue to embrace the 2012 Presidential election, there is no doubt in my mind that both subtle and obvious racism behavior will be displayed.  President Obama will not play the race card and his only expectation is to be judged as a president and not as an “African-American president.  However, Republican right-wing white voters have so much hatred for President Obama that they are more interested in trying to remove him from office rather than be concerned about the radical policies that will definitely be implemented under a Republican administration, but that’s just my take.

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Republican presidential candidates and other right-wing pundits, continue to use the Reagan presidency as the conservative model for fiscal discipline; however, according to his legacy, Reagan served as a poor example for future Republican presidential hopefuls.  We all know that Reagan’s massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised during his campaign, but record-setting debt.

Forced to raise taxes eleven times to avert financial disaster, Reagan, affectionately referred to as “the Gipper,” nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It’s no wonder his former Budget Director, David Stockman, lamented: “[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.” It is clear why the Gipper cited the skyrocketing deficits he bequeathed to America as his greatest regret.

George W. Bush buried the myth of Republican fiscal discipline.  Inheriting a 236 Billion Dollar federal budget surplus and CBO forecast for a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years, this Republican President quickly set about dismantling the progress made under President Clinton.  Bush’s $1.4 trillion tax cut in 2001, followed by a $550 billion second round in 2003, accounted for the bulk of the deep budget deficits he produced. (It is more than a little ironic that Paul Ryan eleven years ago called the tax cuts “too small” because he believed the estimated surplus Bush eviscerated would be even larger.)

Like Reagan, Bush resorted to a rosy state of affairs to claim he would halve the budget deficit by 2009.  Before the financial system meltdown in 2008, Bush’s deficit had already reached $490 billion. (And even before the passage of the Wall Street bailout, Bush had presided over a $4 trillion increase in the national debt, a staggering 71% jump.) By January 2009, the mind-numbing deficit figure reached $1.2 trillion, forcing President Bush to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion.

As it turned out, Congressional Republican majorities voted to raise the U.S. debt ceiling seven times while George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office.  “Reagan,” Vice President Dick Cheney famously declared in 2002, “proved deficits don’t matter.” Unless, of course, there is a Democrat in the White House.

It is interesting to note that during the Bush presidency, the current Republican congressional leadership team voted 19 times to increase the debt limit.  Fueled by the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the Medicare prescription drug plan and the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US national debt doubled during the Bush presidency.  Mitch McConnell and John Boehner voted for all of it and the debt which ensued because, as Orrin Hatch later explained:  “It was standard practice not to pay for things.”  That Republican intransigence persists despite the complete debunking of two of their favorite myths.

The first tried and untrue Republican talking point is that “tax cuts pay for themselves.” Sadly, that right-wing myth-making is contradicted by the massive Bush deficits, half of which were the result of the Bush tax cuts.  As a percentage of the American economy, tax revenues peaked in 2000; before the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Despite President Bush’s bogus claim that, “you cut taxes and the tax revenues increase,” Uncle Sam’s cash flow from individual income taxes did not return to its pre-dot com bust level until 2006.

The second Republican fairy tale, as expressed by Republican House Speaker Boehner, is that, “The top one percent of wage earners in the United States…pay forty percent of the income taxes…The people he’s [President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy.” If true, the Republican’s so-called “Job Creators” failed to meet those expectations under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6% during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush, not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, “Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record.” (The Journal’s interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The dismal 3 million jobs created under President Bush didn’t merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton’s tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush’s job creation disaster the worst since Hoover:

As David Leonhardt of the New York Times aptly concluded:

 “Those tax cuts passed in 2001 amid big promises about what they would do for the economy. What followed? The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II. Amazingly, that statement is true even if you forget about the Great Recession and simply look at 2001-7.Ryan Budget Delivers Another Tax Cut Windfall for Wealthy Looking at that dismal performance, Leonhardt rightly asked, “Why should we believe that extending the Bush tax cuts will provide a big lift to growth?” At a time of record income inequality which saw the incomes of the richest 400 Americans taxpayers double even as their tax rates were halved, that’s a fair question to say the least.”

As Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman and Steve Benen among others noted, the House Republicans “Plan for America’s Job Creators” is simply a repackaging of years of previous proposals and GOP bromides. (As Klein pointed out, the 10 page document “looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.”) At the center of it is the same plan from the Ryan House passed budget to cut the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25%.  The price tag for the Republican proposal is a jaw- dropping $4.2 trillion.

Largely overlooked in the media coverage of the Republican debt ceiling hostage drama last summer is that the 235 House Republicans and 40 GOP Senators who supported Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget bill voted to add $6 trillion to the U.S. national debt over the next decade. As Speaker John Boehner acknowledged, Republicans now and in the future would have to increase the debt ceiling – repeatedly.

“President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt explained in 2009, adding, “The economic growth under George W. Bush did not generate nearly enough tax revenue to pay for his agenda, which included tax cuts, the Iraq war, and Medicare prescription drug coverage.” That fall, former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett offered just that kind of honesty to the born again deficit virgins of his Republican Party. Noting that the FY2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion was solely due to lower tax revenues and not increased spending, Bartlett concluded:

“I think there are grounds on which to criticize the Obama administration’s anti-recession actions. But spending too much is not one of them. Indeed, based on this analysis, it is pretty obvious that spending – real spending on things like public works – has been grossly inadequate.  The idea that Reagan-style tax cuts would have done anything is just nuts.”

Thanks to the steep recession, as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and others have documented time and again, the overall federal tax burden as a percentage of GDP is now down to levels not seen since Harry Truman was in the White House.  The two-year tax cut compromise didn’t help any, adding $400 billion to the current deficit. But it’s the Bush tax cuts themselves which Republicans want to make permanent and then (as the Ryan budget mandates) lower further, that will account for much of the revenue drain into the future.

We should be careful not to buy into the “distortions, myths and outright lies” spewed out of the mouth of Republican politicians especially those that are more interested in bringing down this President rather than doing their best for our country, but that’s just my take.

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