Joan of Orc

About the only thing we haven't heard from the right wing during the nuclear arms nonproliferation talks in Eastern Europe is that President Barack Obama secretly met with Iraqi intelligence officials while he was in Prague yesterday.

Hardly a mention has been made of the hypocrisy and convenient amnesia of the right wing in berating the President while he's overseas for seeking a strategic reduction in nuclear weapons. Because this is precisely what Republican President Richard M. Nixon did in the early 70's with the first SALT Treaty. And this is something Republican President Ronald Reagan did between 1984 and 1985 when he negotiated the SALT II treaty with Gorbachev. And this is alarmingly similar to what Republican President George H. W. Bush did in 1991 when he also negotiated START with Gorbachev, a move that was hailed as the death blow to the Cold War. And who was criticizing Republican President Gerald Ford when he reached a breakthrough in Vladivostok during the negotiations with Leonid Brezhnev in 1974?

In fact, the first President Bush's agreement with the Soviet Union was for our two countries to reduce nuclear arms by 35% over seven years, leaving enough so that we could still assure eachother's mutual destruction.

President Obama's deal is hardly any more revolutionary. His deal with Russian President Medvedev is that our two countries reduce nuclear arms by 30% over the next seven years while still leaving more than enough so that we could still assure eachother's mutual destruction. And no mention was made of the suitcase bombs that terrorists are still feared to be trying to acquire. The treaty does little to make either country safer from a nuclear attack and it was designed primarily as a way of avoiding charges of hypocrisy from other nations with nuclear ambitions such as Iran and North Korea.

Yet, suddenly, when a black Democratic President wants to do it, it's a bad thing. According to Sarah "I Can See Russia From my House" Palin, Obama is like a kid on a playground inviting bullies to hit him and promising to never hit back.

If one ever said such a thing after the NPT triumphs of Bush I, Nixon and especially a conservative icon like Reagan, they would've been tarred and feathered in the town square and labeled seditionists and traitors.

So how come the GOP has to depend upon a foreign policy anti savant like Sarah Palin to do their talking for them on this matter and how come her immature and completely ignorant schoolyard analogy is being given serious house room to the point where George Stepha... Stefa... you know who I'm talking about felt the need to waste the Commander in Chief's time to ask him for his response to Palin's comments?

The President, to his credit, came close to bursting out laughing at the very mention of Palin's name.

But this hypocrisy and naysaying every time time the President turns around has got to end. When Mr. Obama advances a Democratic agenda, he's lambasted by the right wing. When he adopts Republican ideas, the GOP abandons them and lambastes him for using them. When he simply tells kids to stay in school and do their homework, he gets lambasted by the right wing and mouth-breathing Republican voters hold up signs saying, "Stay Away From Our Kids" as if he was a Catholic priest straight from the Vatican.

Never mind that, once again, President George H. W. Bush delivered a similar speech to American students encouraging them to essentially do the same thing as advised by President Obama (except, when Bush did it, it was purely for political advantage the year before an election year, reducing the students to mere props).

About the only thing on which the GOP is nominally placated is Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan, a country in which war contractors are about to receive a second windfall even larger than the last in Iraq, a country in which we're murdering civilians by the dozens, covering up the crimes and lying about the circumstances, digging the evidence out of the bodies of dead, pregnant women. Even Hamid Karzai's brazen corruption and recent hostility to his puppet masters has gotten little more than a cluck of the tongue from this President.

The orcs in the Republican Party are quite happy to let Sarah Palin and her flying monkeys in the Tea Party do their talking for them because they know they have no ideas and no words other than "hell" and "No!" They know they need a Hail Mary, a miracle, a Maid of Orleans and Sarah Palin promises to fill that role. Let's call her Joan of Orc.

But Republicans are going to need more than just obstructionist tactics, "Hell NO!", "You lie!" and plain, sociopathic and immature contrariness to have even a ghost of a chance of picking up any significant number of seats in the House and Senate this November. The Democrats can sleepwalk their way to a third consecutive Congress as the majority Party.

Unfortunately, it looks as if they're quite happy to do just that with theirs and the President's tepid reforms and treaties.