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Rachel Maddow poignantly addresses who exactly the people are who Republicans insist on firing, on laying off, on eliminating sources of steady work, on denying employment, income, and therefore health care and education opportunities. Those people for whom many on the right show such obvious disdain are public sector workers who have (or had) jobs as real as any private sector workers have (or had).

Yet the GOP has reveled in slashing “government workers” as if they are something less than, as if their jobs aren’t really jobs at all, as if there is something inherently inferior about what they do to get by.

And by get by I mean feel secure, and by feel secure I mean also offer the rest of us a degree of security by way of the services they provide to this country.

But busting unions and privatizing America is the goal of those on the right. Their priority? Profits over people. Power. Livelihoods and economic “certainty” be damned. Oh, and of course, denying President Obama any victories ever at the risk of assuring him a legacy of *gasp!* success (too late).

An appreciation by Rachel Maddow:

“We have never cut government jobs when we were trying to save the economy. Until this time.”

“Good luck, officer, see you around!”

“We lionize and celebrate the people who teach us our multiplication tables and fix our streets and keep us safe at night and rescue us from fires. We lionize and celebrate them justly as we should, and then in record numbers, we can them, [!] hurting them and hurting us as a country. Not every public sector worker’s gonna win the Medal of Valor like those eighteen heroes did at the White House today.

“But there is reason to appreciate them, both in the heroic individual specific, and in the aggregate, for what they do for us every day.“