Your Sequester Day Repost of Vintage Stupid

Remember back in 2009 when then-Republican Party Chairman and mustachioed C-class heartthrob Michael "Hobson's Choice" Steele went on the teevee machine to patiently explain to America that the Official Position of the Party of Personal Responsibility was that Gummint Jobs aren't Real Jobs?

No?

I'll bet your Conservative friends and colleagues don't either.

But I sure do.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down – Part 2 of 2

On “This Week” George Stephanopoulos asks Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele about Dubya.

Shorter Michael Steele: Bush was awesome. His economic politics were fooking brill. He inherited a recession from the Evil Bill Clinton.

And then came the Stupid Of The Month.

Steele: Government doesn’t create jobs. Only the private sector creates jobs.

Stephanopoulos: What?

Steele: Government jobs don’t count as jobs,

Stephanopoulos: What…squared?

Steele: They don’t count as jobs, because they have an end point.

Stephanopoulos: So people who will rebuild our shitty schools don’t really count as people who have jobs?

Steele: No. Because those jobs will eventually end. They’re just make-work. And private sector jobs never, ever end.

Stephanopoulos: But…but…3.9 million people lost their jobs year? All of those “private sector jobs” ended.

Steele: Sure, but private sector jobs always come back, George. The Majyk Jobs Unicorn brings them.

Stephanopoulos: OMFG. You’re a complete douche, aren’t you?

Steele: I’m a Republican, George; we’re all douches.

Wow. So this is now the official policy of the Party of God.

That cops don’t have “jobs”.

Neither do teachers.

Or firemen. Or sewer workers. Road construction crews. Bridge builders. Snow plow drivers. Bus drivers. Train conductors. Coast guard.

The United States Army.

has no "jobs".

Neither does

the United States Navy

The Peace Corps?

Nuh-uh.

Neither does the Marine Corps.

No "jobs" for state-funded nursing care. Doctors. Foster care workers.

Consultants and contract employees working the private sector aren’t really really working at “jobs” either, since their contracts eventually end.

The lady who delivers your mail doesn’t have a “job”.

The lifeguard who saved your uncle from drowning at a public beach doesn’t have a “job”.

The public defender that got your kid a little justice doesn’t have a “job”.

The judge who put the drug dealer who was terrorizing your neighborhood away doesn’t have a “job”.

The auditor who makes hedge fund managers pay their fucking taxes doesn’t have a “job”.

The tech guy who makes sure the computer lab at your daughter’s school can take a beating and still run the next day doesn’t have a “job”.

The hematologist at the county blood bank doesn’t have a “job”.

The gearheads and welders who make sure the buses and garbage trucks run, rain or shine don’t have “jobs”.

The people doing the 2010 census don’t have “jobs”.

The job counselors and case managers at your local employment One Stop also don’t have jobs, even though they are the ones who are going to work like hell to help that laid-off lathe operator find another way to support his family now that the GM supplier he worked for for 22 years has closed its doors.

The air traffic controller who made sure your mom’s plane didn’t slam into a mountain doesn’t have a “job”.

Customs agent isn’t a real job.

Even though millions of these people may have worked honorably on a public payroll providing vital services for decades – may have put their kids through college, bought a house and retired on that salary – the Chair of the Republican National Committee does not consider what they do to be “real” jobs.

So my mother, who taught her whole life, never had a “real” job.

My dad, who was a principle, was also somehow actually unemployed.

All of the dams my grandpa built wasn’t real labor. And the defense plants he worked at didn’t really exist.

The truly dreadful thing about this is not merely that in Mikey Steele’s world, all of these jobs and thousands more are all just sorta welfarey make-work, but that I’m absolutely sure Mikey Steele believes every single word of the bilge he hawks up.

Because if you want to rise through the ranks of the GOP, you are required to believe this tripe.

It is doctrine. Dogma. The station of the Conservative Cross and the Passion of the Gipper all rolled into one, big, toxic, Randite fattie.

Smoke it – inhale good and deep – and you’re in the club; take a pass and out into the wilderness you are cast. And because lying, grasping, sellout hucksters like Steele most definitely want to be in the club, they enthusiastically spout this objectively ridiculous bibble, not because the jobs – and they are j-o-b-s – they are talking about are somehow trivial or unnecessary, but because they are middle class jobs.

Many of them are union, middle class jobs.

And if there is anything a Republican hates more than the middle class generally, it is unions specifically. They are all that stands between the GOP and the America of their dreams – a land where the entire government has finally been liquidated, every fucking job in the country (except CEOs and hedge fund managers) has been outsourced to Indonesian slave labor camps, media has been gutted and gelded of everything but ads and trivia, and a corporate feudal state rules unchallenged and unfettered forever and ever, amen.

Over in the Better Universe, Al Pacino takes time away from his busy schedule, borrows Stephanopoulos’ hair and explains to Mr. Steele exactly what not-crazy people think of his “Beat The Working Man Harder” school of economics.

(Not Work Safe)

Over here, most of the media continues to pretend that the GOP wasn’t just crushed and roundly repudiated in two consecutive elections and that their ideas are not the tragically failed ravings of a gang of bitter regime dead enders.

More tax cuts.

Less regulation.

Stall and delay until it all burns to the ground, then lie down and make Happy Reagan Jesus Angels in the ashes while singing martial hymns about how dirty hippies are to blame for it all.

Where oh where is a fucking Rapture when you need one?

...

Four years later, Modern Conservatism remains the rotgut that has gotten this country shitfaced, reckless, bellicose drunk and run it off a cliff.

And chugging it mixed with a bump of bi-partisan apple juice still won't make it any less fatal.