Hypocrisy means “feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not.”
That’s Republican Representative Paul Ryan in a nutshell.
He says he’s now concerned about income inequality, blaming President Obama’s economic policies for making the gap between the rich and the poor worse.
For any Republican, especially Rep. Ryan, to express concern about economic disparity is like the fox being concerned about the safety of the hens in the hen house.
What we need in this country is for economic justice to become a national priority, but the Republican Party will never lead us there. The reason is simple. Its view of the American economy is that government should leave the marketplace alone and things will always be good, and when they are not, given enough time the marketplace’s natural forces will eventually make things better.
The fact is, history has proven that this view just doesn’t work as Republicans claim, which is why without exception Republican economic policies benefit no one but the rich.
So, when President Obama faced the 2009 economic meltdown the Republicans said, “Do Nothing. No stimulus. No GM bailout. No intrusion into Wall Street practices. Keep increases in unemployment benefits to a minimum. Cut social programs. Let the market correct itself.”
That would have proven to be a disaster similar to Herbert Hoover’s inability to deal with the Great Depression had the President listened to them.
But these facts raise an interesting sidebar question. How do Republicans sell these failed economic policies to ordinary Americans?
I believe the answer is by focusing on something else, and that something else are hot button social issues.
Using Christian Republicans effectively as its mouth piece, the Republican Party has won social conservatives to its side by convincing them that abortion and gay marriage and the like are more important than economic justice.
One of the good ole’ boys I mentioned last week I grew up with brought up abortion in one of his responses to my support for President Obama’s economic policies. It had nothing to do with what we were talking about, but it was his “go to” argument because abortion was more important to him than the economy, and, by implication, abortion was somehow Obama’s fault.
That is how the Republican Party has been able to pull the economic rug out from under ordinary Americans without them getting upset. Push the social issues button and nothing else matters.
They’ve been doing this since the days of Ronald Reagan – stir up the passions of ordinary Americans against such things as abortion, gay marriage, “illegals” coming into the country and those who have been here all their lives, the “war on Christmas,” and any other threat to our “Judeo-Christian heritage” they can trump up, all the while rewarding the rich at their expense.
So for Ryan and other Republicans to blame the income gap between the rich and the poor on Obama’s policies fits the definition of hypocrisy perfectly.
Just as appalling, though, are Christian Republicans who preach that it is more important to make sure a poor woman cannot have an abortion than to have food to give her children before they go to school, more important for a gay man not to have the right to marry his partner than to find a job that pays a livable wage, and on and on.
But I will give the Republican Party one thing. They have an amazing ability to use hypocrisy to blur people’s moral vision.
