Those Evil Republicans and Tea Party Types

The NYTs has an article, Looking for a Pool and Coming Up Dry as Cities Shave Budgets, bemoaning the fact that pools around the nation are closed due to budgetary issues. As usual the entertainment (and the horror) comes from reading the comments:

Said one person:

Why not keep the pools all closed? And the rec centers too! That way we can breed even more criminals and the Republicans can be happy keeping American prisons the busiest in the world.

Said another:

Capitalism has devolved into buying and selling companies (and often leaving them weak, like Mitt Romney did at Bain), rather than creation of real wealth and lasting enterprise. Rewarding the stripmining of our economy hardly constitutes rewarding effort, as libertarians would have use believe.

And yet another:

just another reason why republicans are like vacuum cleaners.

And yet another:

The wealthy often own ocean/lakefront property, just as they have their private swimming pools. Based on the Koch mentality, low- and middle-class people have no right to believe that they should have access to a luxury such as a public pool.

And yet another:

Well, closing pools because of insufficient public funds illustrates how the Tea Party (etc) approach to "starving the beast" (cutting taxes as a matter of course) is really about starving the middle class and the poor.

And yet another:

The credo of the Tea Party and Republicans: let's get rid of the common good.

And yet another:

But as long as Americans continue to elect people who advocate for anti-tax corporatists, things like shuttered pools will be the new normal.

Of course it never enters anyone's mind that perhaps you can have pools and beaches without lifeguards. Here's a suggestion - swim at your own risk. Just say no to the lawsuits and say yes to individual freedom and individual responsibility.

Don't blame taxpayers for wanting to curtail spending - blame our tort laws that require lifeguards.