Jeff Byrne

    U.S. Republican presidential candidates are a confused bunch. They are a bit like a dog chasing a car. If the dog was to catch the car, it wouldn’t quite know what to do with it.

    Republican candidates are like the dog. If they were to capture the White House, they wouldn’t quite know what to do.

    The extreme Right of American politics has only one aim: to remove Barack Obama. Because he wants to do things that they disagree with. Things like making the United States a better place for ALL Americans, not just the top 10 percent.

    Republicans are not talking about the things that matter to most Americans. Abortion, contraception, gay marriage and attacking their opponents — not the Democrats, their Republican opponents.

    They are not talking about how to fix the economic disaster threat the United States is facing. Not a word. The silence is deafening. This is not about policy, it’s about ideology — and a failed ideology.

    Then there are the horrific massacres by those who can buy a firearm and then go out and kill people. Because they can, for whatever reason. But the main reason people buy firearms is fear. Fear of being shot.

    And what about the people who have lost their jobs and their houses? Federal Reserve figures show that 25 percent of people who have mortgages — that’s one in four — owe more than their houses are worth and mortgage lenders are minimizing their losses by foreclosing on their loans with 3 million homes being lost to delinquent mortgagees by the end of 2010 and a further 7 million homeowners at risk of foreclosure.

    Leading the race for Republicans, Mitt Romney said in October that foreclosures should be allowed to continue. He is reported as saying: “Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.”

    Where was he when the banks and Wall Street were bailed out by the people who are now being thrown on the heap of economic failure. The banks should have been allowed to fail. We might then have seen some sanity return to global economics.

    But Republicans don’t want to talk about things that matter, so they mumble on about things that don’t matter.

    It amazes me that the mainstream American press does not even bother to critically examine both sides of politics.

    So, what does that tell us? It tells me that apathy rules. If Americans ignore what is happening in U.S. politics, then the indoctrination of America is consummate.

    Former U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson once said to an aide: “If you can’t improve the silence son, keep your mouth shut.”

    Republicans need to improve the silence.

(The author is a former Shenzhen Daily senior copy editor and writer.)