Republican pundits and spin-masters never cease to amaze me.

It wasn’t too far back when the GOP controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency. During that time, Republicans did not stop once to ask the Democrats for input. Shunning bipartisanship, Republican leaders in Congress shamelessly used every nasty trick in the book to eliminate Democrats from all positions of influence and rammed through redistricting policies at the state level, hoping to ensure that the Democratic Party never recovered the seat of power in the United States.

The mess America and the world find themselves in is the direct result of Republican policies, and it is now a fact that the Republican “Contract with America” has proven to be a catastrophic failure.

It is not a coincidence, and Americans must never forget that. GOP policies resulted in the Great Depression; Americans punished the party by denying it a majority in both chambers of Congress for many years. Time to do that again.

I understand what President Barack Obama is trying to do, but I don’t agree with him. The majority of Republicans in Congress are nasty fanatics whose view of the world is extremely narrow and dogmatic. Nothing Obama does will please them because they don’t like him or what he represents.

We didn’t hear them object much to their primary media voice Rush Limbaugh when he broadcast that he wants to see Obama fail. What is wrong with the GOP? It seems to me that attack dogs are rarely suited to be leaders. It was very surprising to see Republican congressmen groveling at their satrap’s feet boosting his ego and asking for his forgiveness.

Obama was elected to dismantle the humungous mess resulting from eight years of total Republican domination of government and he needs to respect the people who voted for him to do that. If he lets himself be consumed by Republican double talk, he will fail. America and the world can’t afford to have him fail.

World-renowned economists agree that contrary to the Republican agenda, Obama needs to inject funds into a fund-starved economy and provide people with an opportunity to regain control of their lives and futures. He is not responsible for the great deficits or the economic mess.

Where was the fiscal discipline that turned $600 million surplus into nearly a trillion dollar deficit or a $6 trillion national debt into a $10.5 trillion one. What do the Republicans have to show for it except war, misery, graft, national decline, and societal fragmentation?

The Republicans have Joe the Plumber, Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter to help them chart the future of the United States. Obama shouldn’t feel compelled to lower his standards to meet that level of incompetence. The selection of experts he has at his disposal will do just fine. And, politically he knows what he needs to do and he should do it.

What is evident in all this are the major shortcomings of the Republican Party as a party for the 21st century. It continues to be caught in an 18th century philosophical loop, quite oblivious to fundamental political and economic changes. Laissez-faire is over and that lesson should have been learned long before the Great Depression let alone the second depression of 2008.

Current events are demonstrating that government is a necessary ingredient that cannot be omitted from any policy recipe, and contrary to the words of former President Ronald Reagan, government is not the problem.

But as demonstrated by years of administrations, including the previous eight years, bad government is.