Monday, June 22, 2009

Hooray for American Support of Democracy



Republicans in Congress are getting more and more irksome, tiresome, and downright repugnant.

They condemn Obama for not taking a stronger stand against the Iranian regime. We have always stood for democracy, they say. You mean like in Iran when Republican President Eisenhower approved the engineering of the overthrow in 1953 of Mohammed Mossaddeq, the democratically elected leader of Iran who had nationalized the oil companies. We restored the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlev, who allowed the British and American oil companies to get their lips back on the nipples of the pipelines so oil wealth could flow Westward? In passing we might observe that Democrat Harry Truman had refused to approve the coup. By the way, the Shah was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, whose current Supreme Leader is shooting protesters in Tehran. Hooray for the American support of democracy in 1953.

Then there were those decades when American policy toward Latin America was designed to suit the interests of the United Fruit Company without regard to whether the favored regimes were democracies or not.

Wasn't that all in the past? Not quite considering that we have been in bed with Saudi Arabia for a long time. They don't have democracy, but they have lots of oil.

Republicans constantly raise the specter of government bureaucrats making decisions about health care for citizens. Apparently, they prefer bureaucrats in big corporations to make those decisions, corporations motivated by increasing profits by limiting medical care to subscribers. There is no sustainable system that will allow any and every form of medical care to everybody.

Is there any good reason why Republicans should exist at all?

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