The Criminality of Teapot Republicans

Money buys power in these United States and power corrupts. Koch brothers petroleum money -- more money than god -- is behind the imbecilic behavior of the Republicans in Washington.  They can't help being imbeciles but having run for the House of Representatives, and somehow been elected by their comrades in ignorance, they need to be held accountable for their crimes.

For it is indeed criminal that they are refusing to perform what has always been a routine function -- approving the payment, and authorizing the borrowing required for the government to do so, of the costs of government programs they have already voted for.  It is criminal because, as a result of their actions:

-- The United States is powerless to join other countries in the desperate search for a Fukushima solution before the earth is rendered unfit for habitation.  Water contaminated by more than 7,000 times the maximum tolerable amount of radiation is flowing into the Pacific Ocean.  Flotsam from the tsunami that hit the Japanese nuclear plant has already washed up on the shores of other countries, including our own.  The killer wastewater is on its way and en route nobody can even guess the devastation it will wreak on marine life, let alone people on the coasts.

--No responsible government entity or individual is working on the biggest threat to mankind since Biblical times: climate change.  Most of the same morons who brought us the government shutdown deny that there is such a thing, or that humans caused it, or should attempt to stop it and save the human race.  Such insanity simply cannot be tolerated in a crisis of this magnitude -- yet it's happening.

--Our illegal wars continue around the globe, and our illegal military incursions into sovereign nations (Libya, Somalia) continue as well, and our Secretary of State proudly declares there will be more.  But the Veterans Administration doesn't have money even for burial costs of our slain military, can't pay benefits to our disabled veterans and the imbeciles in John Boehner's cuckoo's nest do not give a damn.

--Families living below the poverty line with children cannot get assistance to buy basic food. The infantile asses who shut down the government think their problem is lack of good old American ambition.

--Hard-working American citizens who are fortunate to have a bit of discretionary money to spend cannot use our national parks and monuments, our national museums and cultural institutions, our memorials to the dead of yesteryear's wars,  Yet the exploiters of public lands, the drillers and diggers in our natiional parks and monuments, the polluters of the waterways that run through them and the exploders of their mountain majesties -- these makers of billionaires like the Kochs, takers who pay no income tax -- are able to come and go on public lands willy-nilly to extract and transport their spoils.

--People with terminal diseases have been cut off from the experimental drug treatments that  are their last desperate hope.

--The Slimeballs who caused the government shutdown say they want to control the deficit -- which actully has been shrinking for months -- but their shutdown is costing us as least $300 million a day.



None of this needs to have happened.  Millions of Americans  are suffering and some -- too many -- will die because a relative handful of amoral fools, wrapped in the flag and shouting the praises of a vengeful Old Testament god, full of hatred for all the "others" in this world, clinging to the material wealth of their class and jealous of the aspirations of those others to live in health in decent houses with adequate food, spiteful and juvenile and resentful and angry all at once, these blind and bloated  ignoramuses just do not care. They have no sensitivity, no empathy, no compassion.

But we let them control our destiny.  And so we are criminal, as well.