Read it and weep

I can’t read the Lansing State Journal anymore.

Yesterday’s “Talk About It” section – which features responses from a panel of average Joes and Jills to a question posed by the paper – asked the following question: “Do the current swings in the stock market make you uneasy?” One panel member responded, “What makes me uneasy is the same thing that is making investors uneasy, President Barack Obama’s policies.” He went on to criticize Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke, and government taxation, regulation and inflation.

Further up on the same page, 9A, the Journal featured an op-ed authored by Bobby Schostak, chair of the Michigan Republican Party, claiming that Obama and the Democrats are endangering the future and the GOP’s conservative fiscal policies are the right change.

What’s conservative about spending over a trillion dollars on two unnecessary, unjustifiable, endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? What’s conservative about taking our country’s economy to the brink of a manufactured disaster, the absolute edge, in a political fight over raising the debt ceiling, which was raised five times during Dubya’s administration? What’s conservative about awarding billions in tax cuts to the richest two percent of Americans, those who need it the least, and fomenting class warfare? What’s conservative about protecting tax loopholes for Big Oil even as it announces record profits? What’s conservative about inheriting a budget surplus from Democrat Bill Clinton and turning it into a massive deficit in eight years?

This “Republicans are our only hope to rein in the tax-and-spend liberals” claptrap infuriates me for two reasons: 1) it’s just not true, and 2) lots of people are naïve enough to believe it.

I regularly – some say excessively – criticize Barack Obama, and one of my recent blog posts explained why I no longer consider myself a Democrat. I’m no knee-jerk liberal. But this mischaracterization of the two parties, this bending of reality, this suppression of fact and advancement of lies and distracting and diverting and misstating is a disservice to all of us. It threatens our future because it mucks up the electoral machinery and ensures that ignorance will remain the primary characteristic of many voters. It helps the defenders of the status quo and people who don’t have our country’s best interests at heart to retain their ability to rule the roost.

Not all Democrats are “tax-and-spend liberals.”

Not all Republicans are fiscal conservatives.

There are distinct, major differences between today’s Democrats and today’s Republicans.

Taxation, regulation and government are not always bad.

And not all investors despise Barack Obama. Some despise Republicans and some despise all politicians.

There are times when I don’t lament the fact that newspapers like the Lansing State Journal – which a former colleague used to call the “Lansing State Urinal” – are going the way of the stagecoach and rotary telephone. This is one of those times.