Last Call

Fresh off his mind-shattering stupidity where he believes government jobs are in fact a sort of mass delusion and the people who earn money at them are in fact getting weird scraps of colored paper, RNC chair Mike Steele doubles down on his cluelessness on This Week with Snuffy.

However, newly-elected Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele believes that government-funded jobs don't count as real employment because "a job is something that a business owner creates."

"What this administration is talking about is 'making work.' ... It's not a job," Steele explained during a Sunday appearance on ABC's This Week. "It ends at a certain point. ... These road projects that we're talking about have an endpoint. ... There's no guarantee that there's going to be more work when you're done that job."

ABC host George Stephanopoulos objected, "We've seen millions and millions of jobs going away in the private sector, just in the last year."

"They come back though," Steele insisted. "That's the point. They've gone away before and they've come back. And the point is, the small business owners take the risks. They're the ones that are out there in the morning putting the second mortgage on the house ... so that they can employ your kids."

Describing the present once-in-a-generation economic crisis as merely "the downside" of a recent period of economic expansion, Steele told Stephanopoulos that all we really need is "tax credits and relief for small-business owners, incentives for people to get back into the credit markets, to deal with the mark-to-market rules that have stymied the banks and deal with the housing crisis."

This guy is the presumptive leader of the party (although the real leaders are El Rushbo, Malkinvania, and the rest of the Wingnut blowhards) and he's embarassingly stupid.

No Mike, the jobs you're talking about "coming back" aren't coming back. They're good middle class jobs being replaced by minimum wage fast-food and service jobs. Most of them are retail positions...and retail has been gutted by this recession. These jobs are going overseas and they're not coming back at all.

But government jobs don't count to Republicans. Government workers are mostly unionized, meaning they are a clear and present danger to Republicans who want us all to be "right-to-work" McDrones, able to be fired at a moment's notice with no benefits or recompense. The idea of collective bargaining, tenure, or a fair wage is poison to the Republican efforts to strip the people of all they have to enrich those at the top of the mountain.

These private sector jobs aren't coming back. They're already minimum wage poverty jobs that trap millions of Americans in a cycle of suffering. With those jobs vanishing at the rate of tens of thousands per day, what pray tell will replace them? Unless the government steps in, they will be replaced by nothing.

But that's what the GOP wants: millions of angry unemployed Americans who the GOP can stir up into a lynch mob to demand more of the same self-inflicted wounds that America has brought upon itself during the Bush years. They want a failed, crumbling economy. They want an angry, misinformed populace. They want a compliant, subservient media.

It makes it so much easier to finish what the neo-cons started under Bush.