Once again I’m trying to wrap my mind around an irony of sorts.

The irony is much larger than my feeble leftist mind.

Now the New Conservative Neanderthal Party (NCNP) is the compassionate party, the one to look out for the interests of middle America. Gosh, that’s what Gov. Mitch Daniels said last week in the Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union address. Gosh, golly, the NCNP is just chomping at the bit to unleash America’s potential and reclaim the world.

Gosh, golly.

Irony, irony, irony.

Everybody is in a tizzy to dent the deficit and cut spending without raising any revenue while we’re doing it. At the same time, I’m watching the stock market get back up near record levels, which must indicate that money is flowing somewhere, the oil companies recorded record profits during the Great Recession, Fortune 500 companies also profited well without hiring, the top two percent of income earners—you know, the millionaires and billionaires—increased their wealth, at times exponentially, and Americans of all stripes doled out hundreds of billions in leisure time gambling revenue to try to win their fortune.

We close schools and can’t fix roads because public money has grown scant, but we can dig in the pocket to buy a Powerball ticket so we can be rich just like the robber barons. 

Does any of that seem ironic to you? 

In the meantime, public sector workers and unions are being vilified by the rest of the commoners, serfs, and sharecroppers who’ve whimpered away their workplace rights over the years, while the free marketeers and the New Conservative Neanderthal Party (NCNP) continues to fool the populace with hollow rhetoric that somehow glosses over the fact that our nation has fallen into this hole through the greed and a false patriotism of the very free market proponents that are operating the dials and levers behind the big curtain in the shining city on the hill called Oz.

I heard one fellow on the radio recently, a Wisconsin farmer, say that unions are a thing of the past, that it was about time “those people” learn to live like everybody else. It struck me that a farmer, of all people, would begrudge another worker for having union rights, and that overall the profession has shifted politically to the right since the days when the government milk and crop subsidies came into being and the takeover of the food industry by multinational conglomerates pretty much meant the end of true family farms.    

I’m stupefied when the followers of the New Conservative Neanderthal Party and their billionaire-supported grassroots followers in the Fee Party claim to be spiritual in a Christian way as services to the poorest of Americans are cut, health care funding is cut, early childhood educational monies are cut, and protections to rich through tax cuts are spared.

If Jesus showed up, they’d call him a socialist and tell him to get a haircut.

I tell you, those pesky Saul Alinsky types and those communists, socialists, labor unions and other progressive organizations sure have a way of scaring the uninformed electorate into thinking that they actually had anything to do with the pickle this nation is in. And there was that word “patriot” again, rolling off the tongues of the NCNP candidates, sneaking its way into the rhetoric of the wayward right. I just don’t know of so many people who can be snake-oiled so easily.

I call it the Ozzie and Harriet mentality, that whitewashing of reality. The New Conservative Neanderthal Party-Fee Party sleight of hand philosophy. Like I’ve said before, these folks would acknowledge the dedication and hard work of old soldiers like Eisenhower and Dirksen, but then kick them out of the club for being too compassionate, too liberal.   

Labor unions did not create the fiscal mess that nearly every state is staring at. Government policies did not cause the collapse of financial markets. While regular Americans daily gamble away their money in the hope of hitting the jackpot, Wall Street and Corporate America have for decades gambled away the workforce and the nation’s economy in search of profits that have no nationality.

Democracy in our workplace and across our landscape is fading fast.

The economocracy, on the other hand, is the blind monarchy we all seem willing to bow before.