Teachers; The New Welfare Queens

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I’m always grateful for John Stewart who compiles these montages of overpaid angry white men gnashing their teeth on Fox News over the phony liberal outrage of the day scripted by Roger Ailes.   Although the poison spewing from Fox’s echo chamber of junkyard dogs is sometimes overwhelming, Stewart makes you laugh.  Otherwise you’d cry.

Unfortunately I remember Reagan’s election promise that he would take the handcuffs off the millionaires and put them on the welfare queens working for him.  Even though there was no evidence that millionaires were shackled or that welfare queens were running wild.  That did not stop the Reagan Democrats from swallowing the bait and blaming their lot on a mythical freeloader sponging off their tax dollars instead of the greedy millionaire who doesn’t pay taxes.  And as soon as Reagan got elected, guess who got the tax break and who got stiffed?

Since Ailes, Rove and Atwood et al came of age under Reagan, you can’t blame them for dusting off the playbook.  Class warfare works.  Not the reflexive defense of the mega rich that the Fox hirelings faithfully echo when they decry “class warfare”.  But the real class warfare that the Republican successfully wage to get Democrats to vote against their own interests. 

The genius of the minority party is that it consistently gets members of the majority party to defect to them by stirring up class resentments and inflaming hatred towards imaginary “others” who are usually poor and black or brown.

Last time they found “Joe the plumber” to campaign for them against a community organizers who was black and was trying to help the poor.  The next time they will pit worker against worker as the revenue collapse from the Wall Street crash shakes down into a financial crunch when the States hit the wall.

Already unemployed workers from the private sector are being encouraged to scapegoat “overcompensated” public employees.  A preview of the Republican 2012 strategy that was recently launched in Wisconsin, which thanks to the garrulous governor, we all learned about from his frank discussion with the prankster posing as David Koch.

So why not demonize those jet-setting teachers driving their used Volvo’s and strutting about in their designer outfits from “Ross Dress For Less?”  It is a win-win for the Republicans.  After all the teachers are into public education.  And we can’t have that. 

If we have an educated public, they will vote for the Democrats.  So just as we downsized airline pilots and turned them into aerial bus drivers, we’ll demote teachers to vocational guidance instructors for the service industries.   How do you spell “Supersize me?”