"I love mankind...it's people I can't stand!!"
- Charles Schultz.
We have seen what rank-and-file Republicans CLAIM their party represents, and we see what the party leadership ACTUALLY represents:
The claim: Fiscal responsibility
The reality: debts and deficits skyrocket under Republican administrations thanks to kickbacks to corporate donors, tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to social services, and massive handouts to cops and the military.
The verdict: the Republican claim to stand for 'fiscal responsibility' is a lie.
The claim: lower taxes, because taxes are 'bad'.
The reality: we all pay more so that the rich can hoard more gold. Taxes are routed into accounts the Right plunder brazenly while necessary functions of government and society suffer huge cuts to pay for it all. This causes people to feel that taxes arent useful and are inherently 'bad', despite how much of what makes America work would be - and IS - powerless thanks to GOP policies that make sure those taxes benefit no one so much as themselves. Thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for the ignorant to grab hold of.
The verdict: the Republican claim to stand for 'lower taxes' is TECHNICALLY true...the only people who benefit, though, are those who least need to.
The claim: 'religious freedom'
The reality: only for Christians. The right KIND of Christians. All other voices are mocked, ridiculed, demonized, distorted, misquoted, and dehumanized. The Jesus of white, American evangelicals has very little, if anything, to do with the actual guy in their holy book, but calling that out gets you accused of being 'anti-Christian'. Being non-Christian makes you, basically, a 'devil worshipper'. Demanding that America be the secular haven it was designed to be is 'anti-American'. Expecting churches who cross the line between church and state to face repurcussions is 'persecution'. 'God hates fags' is fine, but 'God loves my gay son' is 'blasphemy'. 'God loves black people, too' is 'racism'.
The verdict: the Republican claim of support for 'religious freedom' is a blatant lie based on gaslighting anyone asking for religion to stay out of politics.
The claim: 'free speech'
The reality: the only speech they seem to care about protecting is white supremacist rhetoric, bald-faced lies being sold as 'alternate facts', and the poor, oppressed voices of those neglected, abused, powerless straight, white, wealthy, Christian men. If any other voice asks to be heard, its 'activism', or 'un-American', or 'pandering', or 'playing the race/gender/sexuality card', or 'just a former bartender who doesnt know anything'. Contradict a Republican's nonsense with actual facts, and their propaganda arm will RIP you to shreds. Even though you have the truth on your side.
The verdict: the Republican party claim to support free speech is a lie.
The claim: fair elections, constitutional inerrancy, and 'patriotism'.
The reality: we have all seen how much the Republican party values fair elections in how they fight for the disenfranchised, demand that every vote be counted, and scrutinize against the plague of voter fraud sweeping Amer...oh? Wait...what's that? THEY are the ones disenfranchising whole swaths of people for having the wrong skin color, zip code, or party affiliation...? THEY are the ones trying to stop vote counts - unless those vote counts are going their way - and interfering at every possible turn with this election? THEY are the ones who have been the source of the only recorded instance of ACTUAL voter fraud this year...? Huh...
Also, for Constitutional originalists, they fail to look at literally any other documents from the writers that help explain and contextualize the Constitution. They pretend Jefferson didnt recommend reviewing and revising it every few decades as society advances and culture changes. They pretend that the Founders were Christians the way THEY understand that word, not within the context of the culture of the time. They love the first part of the second amendment but ignore or try to weaken to impotency the second part, because that part interferes with payoffs from the gun lobby.
And patriotism? Only inasmuch as 'ignorant jingoistic excess' is 'patriotism'. They wave their flags and act like idiot cowboys about to molest their gun collection, but...they are ignorant as hell about what America is supposed to be, or how it is supposed to work for all of us. They have sold the lie that patriotism means never questioning your government (unless a black guy or a woman is in charge). And thecrank-and-file gobble it up and cry out for more confirmation bias...
The Verdict: oh, big ol' lie.
The claim: 'We arent a party of bigots!'
The reality: The Republican party is at the heart of every attempt, successful or not, to deny or strip minorities of their rights as citizens (and where that doesnt apply, they work to strip them of their basic human rights), they are behind the lies and misinformation that keeps the populace poorly informed about abortion, sexuality, race relations, drug and violence issues. They fight to prevent any attempt to educate our children about the REAL history of the US and its human right violations because... they think it makes us look bad. Never mind how denying factual, verified history makes us look. They have fought, do fight, and will continue to fight to deny the basic humanity of sexual minorities, standing arm in arm with religious zealots who want us dead and then saying we are anti-Christian when we object. They stand alongside police who murder sleeping women and unarmed fathers. They cheer on the murderers of children and people exercising their free speech right. They demonize the victims of their violent bigotry, and blame everyone else for the situation THEIR members caused, all while denying they have any role in the constant stochastic terrorism the right engages in brazenly across all of their media. They stand behind white men who feel angsty about having to finally share all that they've plundered. With the people they plundered from...
The verdict: any Republican claim to support equality is a lie, unless they are SPECIFICALLY and ONLY speaking about making sure white men have their voices heard.
The GOP has CLAIMED to stand for many things. But its actions show that all of their claims are just a smokescreen intended to confuse the ignorant and easily distracted into voting for them. And it conveniently affords those in power with a variety of scapegoats to misdirect their voters into hating, (various GOP scapegoats include: women, 'coloreds', 'queers', 'Jews', 'Muslims', 'Indians', 'Mexicans', 'socialists', game designers, musicians, actors, teachers, historians, scientists, fact checkers, reporters...) when the rank-and-file start catching on that the 'liberals' aren't the only ones getting screwed by the GOP reps they voted for.
The GOP leadership have shown us, by their actions, what kind of people they are. And by looking the other way, by pretending they don't support the worst of the party - while funding it, defending it, and continuing to support it (despite all the tangible, real harm to America, its citizens, and our standing in the rest of the world it has done/is doing/will continue to do) - the rank-and-file reveal themselves to be just as bad. You COULD earn some respectability by stepping away from them and removing yourself from their crooked orbits. But you stay with them - willingly associating yourself with them and getting their filth all over you in the process. You vote for them - and thus, support all of their corrupt power grabs and slimy politicians. You donate to them - and thus fund the causes they represent and champion. You defend them - thus reharming those who have been most harmed by the GOP and its policies.
You claim that the statement "Democrats don’t lie, cheat, steal, disenfranchise voters, flirt with fascism or openly condone racism and xenophobia to a monumental degree like Republicans" can't possibly be believed, but then...what else CAN we believe about the GOP, when this is all they show us? They can SAY they represent unity and America and puppies and kittens and kumbaya and Jesus, but we have eyes. We SEE what they ACTUALLY stand for. And we can't help but continue to question where you (and the other supposedly 'good' Republicans who want us to think that they aren't all corrupt and tainted with Trumpism) stand, since even though you SAY you arent like them...you still support and defend them. You still lie for them, gaslight for them, obfuscate for them. You derail every discussion of GOP excess and corruption that anyone raises with a thousand little questions that avoid the actual subject matter and focus on the minutae of semantics. When you arent condescending or outright dismissing us. Which just shows how little respect you have for us.
There are two old sayings that apply here:
'If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with their fleas.'
- and -
"By their fruits shall ye know them'...
Last edited by zinderel; 11-22-2020 at 02:37 AM.
I see someone still believes 'both parties are just as bad'.
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Black on black crime is a deflection, you don't see white people worried about white on white crime. Also notice how different the white media treat the opioid crisis.
As for defund the police, it means realocating funds to underfunded social programs which police isn't trained to deal with anyway. Also Retraining don't do shit. Half the stuff the police do is already technically illegal lol.
On this date in 2014, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled of Mark Souder, who was a big proponent of abstinence-only sex education, who just so happened to have been caught sleeping with the wife of a Republican County Commissioner. The same wife who he once went on a local Indiana talk show to promote... you guessed it, abstinence. Further adding to his hypocrisy is the fact that he was in office long enough to have voted for the impeachment of Bill Clinton for... lying about being unfaithful to his spouse. Souder's hypocrisy goes even deeper, when you also include the fact that he filed legal challenges to stop same sex marriages from taking place in Washington, D.C. to "protect the sanctity of marriage" when he wasn't even protecting the sanctity of his own. The fact that Souder was also a big ally of Rick Santorum, with both claiming they were victims of discrimination for believing in intelligent design and creationism while denying the science of evolution.
In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted profiles of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who in our first profile, we discussed his three terms as Texas Attorney General where he worked with Gov. Rick Perry, serving as one of the front line soldiers in the sorts of Fundamentalist conservative culture wars the state of Texas has fought against equality, and frankly, facts over the past decade and a half, including filing 27 separate lawsuits against the federal government in the first five years of the Obama presidency alone, once joking that his daily routine is "I go into the office in the morning. I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.” The great majority of those legal challenges were obviously doomed to fail upon review by judges at some level, but that didn't stop Abbott from filing them anyway to prolong a constitutional battle at of partisan spite at a cost of millions of dollars to Texas taxpayers. No ridiculous legal statute passed in Texas is beneath him, including his obsessive quest to make sure that dildos cannot be sold in the Lone Star State, but fighting tooth and nail to make sure that firearms can be purchased without a background check. In 2007, The Washington Post reported Attorney General Abbott declined to pursue charges against employees of a Texas youth prison who were sexually abusing underage inmates after a Texas ranger had sent e-mails to him with evidence and asking him to put a stop to the abuses for TWO YEARS. Greg Abbott is a man who violated the tenets of our very democracy to suit partisan ends by gerrymandering in his own state, and then sued when the Department of Justice tried blocking the racist policy by arguing it wasn’t racist, by pointing out it was just wholly partisan based on party affiliation, writing, ”DOJ’s accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats.” Prior to the 2012 elections, Abbott threatened to arrest poll watchers from Europe, who were monitoring the ethics of American elections, and claiming there were “closely affiliated with ACORN” which was amazing because ACORN ceased to exist three years prior to the election. In 2016, he sued the federal government (and lost) because he didn’t want Texas to resettle any refugees fleeing Syria, and threatened to sue any Christian organizations that would, y’know, follow the Bible and take in refugees like it preaches.
Greg Abbott is also an opponent of all kinds of immigration, be it legal or otherwise, fights back against equal pay for women, is a gay conversion therapy supporter, and a climate change denier who is beyond “hands off” with giants of industry, arguing that the government should not regulate chemical giants and that if citizens wanted to be aware of what chemical agents were being used by them, they should just “drive around and ask”, and the companies would simply acquiesce. Gov. Abbott is hyper-partisan enough that he has been quoted saying that “Democrats are a more dangerous threat than North Korea” and has thanked supporters for referring to his opponent in the 2014 elections, Wendy Davis, as “Retard Barbie”.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Greg Abbott being a paranoid lunatic, though, was over the summer of 2014, when several radical conspiracy theorists, the kind who are avid fans of Alex Jones and InfoWars, were frothing at the mouth in fear of routine military exercises known as Jade Helm 15 that they, as kooks are wont to do, imagined to be a government invasion coming to take their guns away, ship them off to work as slave labor in WalMarts (as if WalMart needed any help with that) and impose Sharia Law upon the imprisoned populace. Abbott actually sent the Texas State Guard to “monitor” the activities of the joint exercise between the Green Berets and Navy Seals, our own armed forces, just in case they really were going to swoop in when no one was looking and conquer poor Texas (which is still already a part of our country). Unbelievably, Gov. Abbott decided to waste taxpayer money to keep a watchful eye on American troops to make sure they didn’t come for us all in the night, rather than just dismiss an insane conspiracy theory, that he seemingly also fell for (or exploited). Fast forward a few weeks, though, and after Texas had a series of storms that left the state flooded, Greg Abbott’s mistrust of the federal government was gone when he started asking for relief aid funding to be sent to his state. Because apparently, he also has the memory of a goldfish.
Gov. Abbott won re-election in 2018, and he’s already hitting the fear-mongering hits by sending out fund-raising letters to drum up fears of an “immigration coup” and disingenuously warning about how gun control will just lead to Hitler, when people asked about maybe changing Texas gun laws after a lunatic murdered a couple dozen people in a Sutherland Springs church, which maybe shows you his priorities are a bit f***ed up. It was only after another mass shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, that Abbott finally started to make noise about doing something about mass shootings in his state, all that he really accomplished was postponing his campaign giving away a shotgun at a campaign rally. That brief flirtation with even moving in any way towards a stance of being a human being ended pretty quick, though, as Abbott shortly thereafter made news by trying to insert himself into a custody hearing about a transgender youth to grant custody to the father who wants to deny hormone blocking treatments and prevent his son from having a sex change. Classic Republican hypocrisy… they’re “smaller government” unless it involves someone’s genitals.
In 2020, the threat of Covid-19 saw the White House lead a disastrous response plan that led many governors around the country to take matters into their own hands. And while the governors in many blue states did all they could to take measures to attempt to set limits on public gatherings and close restaurants and bars to avoid the spread of the disease… Greg Abbott only wanted to close the abortion clinics, but keep everything else running. His irrational desire to reopen his state as early as April based on false statistics (lies) had the predictable result of Texas becoming one of the hottest hot-spots for coronavirus in the nation. Texas alone has one million positive cases. That’s not a typo. The state has 29 million people, and one million have already been infected in eight months.
Oh, and not for nothing, but Greg Abbott also made it clear what his feelings are about American democracy, as his October attempt at yanking all but one of the ballot collection sites per Texas county to make sure there would be no way Texas might turn blue reeked of desperation. There still are not term limits upon Texas governors… and we’re wondering if this hyper-conservative lunatic will run again when his current term is up in 2022. He might be happier if Democrats retake the White House in 2020 and he can resume just being a bitter obstructionist. He seems to thrive in that role.
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Exactly.
If your pitch will consistently be "Well, We're Not Completely Worthless..."?
You've got to quit pitching a fit when folks treat you like you are largely worthless.
Never mind if you are dragging you heels when it comes getting rid of people like the Emanuels or just staying mum when Congress has a hush money system for folks that have been sexually harassed.
The Green Party failed this test. The Libertarian party's ineptitude rivals Trump's, they had huge blowouts in their debates about being ok with the government issuing driver's licenses and one candidate went there naked. The Democrats have no competition to speak of.
The white media don't do that because they're not defined by that, this is a problem with racism in the country.Black on black crime is a deflection, you don't see white people worried about white on white crime. Also notice how different the white media treat the opioid crisis.
As for defund the police, it means realocating funds to underfunded social programs which police isn't trained to deal with anyway. Also Retraining don't do shit. Half the stuff the police do is already technically illegal lol.
Because the reforms haven't had the teeth, why? Because the police and their allies have the political strength to water things down and at worst, they do things like threaten politicians or riot to force the opposition into caving to their demands. The police unions, by themselves, are incredibility powerful and won't be dismantled easily. People have tried, it's not that those ideas don't have value it's that nobody has cracked getting them into law and the tools to make them work. More needs to be done, obviously and large scale changes wee never going to pass so they haven't.
Last edited by Steel Inquisitor; 11-22-2020 at 02:56 AM.
I don't disagree with parts of the post but i have a legit question about the bolded part (I'm not trying to be snarky). Did you grow up in the US?
Your comment sounds like someone outside the country that listens exclusively to right-wing media. I'm not a descendant of slaves but I don't need to be to understand what generational trauma is and its effect economically. Not to mention the effect of deliberate policies focused on one particular group of people and designed to impoverish and prevent any form of economic progress them. I mean, right now Trump and the GOP are trying to disenfranchise black people in several states.
Loeffler tested positive for Covid (but is Elon Musking the results now), and she very recently campaigned with Perdue, maskless, so he should quarantine, too.
Advantage Democrats in Georgia.
"How does the Green Goblin have anything to do with Herpes?" - The Dying Detective
Hillary was right!
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Avatar: Here's to the late, great Steve Dillon. Best. Punisher. Artist. EVER!