The GOP’s Impending Great Betrayal

Don’t expect much from the thin new GOP majority in the U.S. House—at least anything that will materially turn the ship of state from its headlong dash toward fiscal disaster. That because on the big issues that really count, the beltway lifers who dominate the GOP’s senior ranks and committee/subcommittee chairmanships are on the wrong side!

That starts with the Warfare State and its symbiosis with the Welfare State, intermediated by the log-rolling politicians of the bipartisan duopoly. The fact is, all of Washington’s abominable spending, borrowing and money-printing flows from that deadly coalition of convenience.

But today’s GOP is not about to sever this convenient nexus, and pivot in favor of nonintervention abroad and drastic curtailment of the Washington spending machine at home. This means, in turn, that the vastly bloated $850 billion defense budget, and the neocon foreign policy of global intervention and Forever Wars which it funds, will not likely shed a single dime of its current budgetary obesity.

That’s because the GOP national security leaders are raving neocon interventionists. The worst of these is Rep. Michael McCaul, who has now become chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Like the overwhelming share of the GOP rank and file on the Potomac, he’s never seen a US foreign intervention that he couldn’t embrace lock, stock and barrel.

Thus, he (and they) cheered on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the interventions in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and assorted others; and now is especially whooping it up for proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and hot war with China, if Washington is given half the excuse.

Indeed, McCaul is such an incorrigible interventionist that he see’s fit to prance around the Imperial City as co-chair of the “Congressional Caucus on Sudan and South Sudan”!

You can’t make this up. Both of these notional nations are among the “sh*thole” countries of the world that the Donald once fulminated about. Racked by civil war, poverty, famine, disease and ethnic strife, these two ostensible nations (divided in 2011) have GDPs of $34 billion and $1 billion, respectively, which together amount to the equivalent of 11 hours worth of US economic output.

South Sudan itself has a population of 10 million, with 6 million considered to be victims of famine by the UN, and a per capita income of $100.

And, no, we did not forget any zeros!

Its national income is just $100 per miserable soul in what has become truly one of the hell holes of the planet.