The Evil Republican Party!
The morass of deceit and cheating emanating from the GOP has become ever more shameless, but it’s been building for a LONG time.
Ah, so it is revealed… (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/22/arizona-election-fraud-claims-mark-brnovich) that the Arizona attorney general, a Republican, knew full well claims within his state that the 2020 election was stolen were total baloney. As in all of the other states where this demonic dragon of a conservative hypothesis took wings, there was not the slightest shred of evidence. The Arizona attorney general initially confirmed that Trump had lost the state, but then considered his own Republican political future, which almost certainly would be abruptly ended if he refused entirely to get onboard ‘The Steal” hell-bus. So he, the leading election official in the state, hid information that thoroughly discredited the steal claim, and, instead, launched an official “INVESTIGATION” of the one, large liberal county, fanning the flames of the conspiracy! That “investigation” continued through the 2022 election, with the attorney general still not alerting the voting public that No, Democrats did not steal Trump’s chances in Arizona. Earlier this year, a new attorney general came in, a Democrat, who shut down the “investigation” (which had found, in two years — you guessed it — nothing!), and became privy to the manner in which her predecessor, the Republican, had ignored his staff’s findings and recommendations in order to be on the “right” side of Trump’s lies. Even now, knowing better, the guy is still propping up the lie… as he runs for the United States Senate. Good old Mark Brnovich! Republican Mark Brnovich! Meet an authentic American villain. What this guy is up to is no less than E-V-I-L!
How do we know this about Brnovich? Because of information gleaned from a lawsuit. You may recall that Fox News and conservative media in general took glee in propagating one of the supporting lies of the Big Lie, that Dominion Voting Systems’ voting machines were rigged in favor of Joe Biden. Fox News knew full well these claims had no basis in reality. ALL of their primetime hosts scoffed at the notion, then went on air and told their audience the precise opposite. Now Dominion is seeking over a billion dollars for damages to its reputation, and in the discovery process all kinds of Republican turds of deceit have come floating out of the erstwhile camouflaged sewer. So it’s not just small-fry orc Mark Brnovich who took a swan dive into the black pool of pretense. Just about every Republican is lying their ass off.
News Flash! The Republican Party is rotten to the core!
OK> Yeah, this headline is actually from 1872 (when the Republicans pretty much gave up on being liberals, and became the Party of Big Business… only later becoming the Party of Big Business AND Crazy Conservatives), but could be applied every year since then, with very short lapses in rottenness during the rules of Theodore Roosevelt and Ike Eisenhower. But here we are again. And arguably things have only gotten worse.
Things were already veering in the wrong direction in 1968 when Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon held secret meetings with the North Vietnamese, encouraging them to NOT sign any peace treaty with the U.S. Democrats… they would get a much better deal if they held out until HE was president. He lied! He would prolong the Vietnam War. Then, of course, we know how Watergate worked out after he, cruising to re-election in 1972, thought it was a good idea to hire some thugs to break into the Democratic Party headquarters.
In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan borrowed from that very same script, secretly telling the Iranian government NOT to free the American hostages until after his election… implying maybe there would be some perks down the line for the Ayatollah if the Iranians complied. They did… holding the hostages for weeks longer… and sure enough, now as president, Ronnie Raygun figured one nifty way to SECRETELY fund his SECRET WAR in Central America would be to SECRETLY sell weapons to our friends the Iranians. Oh, and another fun way to funnel untraceable funds to Nicaragua would be to SECRETLY SELL DRUGS! Yes, as they are wont to do, these facts eventually came to light. Ah, the 80s… fun times.
But not nearly as fun as the 2000s when Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush’s brother and father and Supreme Court judges nominated by that father stopped an election re-count and essentially appointed to the presidency the drug-and-booze-addled dolt who had gone AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard without a smidgeon of recrimination. Immediately upon election, “W” splurged the last known National Surplus on tax cuts for the rich (of course), then was asleep at the wheel whacking weeds at his “ranch,” ignoring his own National Security Advisor screaming warnings that Al Qaeda was going to attack when…. Al Qaeda attacked. What a boon that turned out to be for the NeoCons, Bushboy and Darth Cheney included, as they had long lusted for the Iraqi oilfields and now were presented with just the confusing pretext about which to lie to the American people so as to gin up angst and fear over Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction,” which were, they knew, as real as rainbow-striped unicorns. Two of the longest wars in American history ensued, with one of the worst economic crises in our history thrown in for good measure. Bushboy’s legacy was so slimy he slinked out of town and hasn’t been seen since.
Barack Hussein Obama, a Democrat, and also the first “black” man (though he is actually as much white as he is black), was elected president, and many thoughtful, caring and quasi-moral (i.e. “Woke”) Americans thought perhaps this was a sign that America had learned some lessons from the Republican debacles (did we mention the Great Depression as well? No? Consider it mentioned), and progress might resume.
No such luck. Still clinging to that Civil War era attitude that NO DEMOCRAT IS LEGITIMATE, Republicans badgered and bothered Obama through his eight years (that’s right — Hussein the Black was elected TWICE by the American people), then, when the time was right, the conservatives brought forth their thundering, shuddering, plundering push-back and escalation to the grotesque miscarriage of the previous two elections: a serial-lying, Gatling-gun insulting, foul-mouthed braggart with orange hair and skin to match, coifed and made-up like a bad actor, torching the rest of his party’s would-be nominees rousing millions of “loyal” Republicans to shaft their previous beaus and snuggle up to this famous shyster. To complete the absurdity, this champion of the victimized “real Americans,” largely poor and middle class conformists from across the ruralties of America, was a fake billionaire (but real Reality TV star) hailing from that bastion of Christian conservatism: New York City!
Something like Donald Trump was the inevitable end-result of the essential fact of conservative selfishness. It only seems as if the Republican Party has been remade in his image: Not really. He shouldn’t be given too much credit for, at last, ripping the lids off all shamelessness. The way was paved by many before him: Joseph McCarthy, Robert Welch, Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Fox News, whomever came up with QAnon, and many others. Is there no scumbag conservatives won’t fall in love with so long as he/she whisper sweet nothings in their ears? Apparently not. Each of these entities was enriched with every lie, telling the gullibles and selfish-squad, the racist and sexist, the homophobes and xenophobes, the anti-Semites and anti-Science dimwits, the rednecks and the fundamentally religious just what they wanted to hear. Indeed the lies began flying so fast and furious even Welch — Mr. John Birch Society — would have blanched at many of them. It became a perfect storm of dishonesty. To succeed — heck, to be heard — in the conservative ecosphere, you had to become more and more extreme. Know-nothing that he is, Trump could at least read these rather apparent tea leaves. There was no lie, no brag, no insult, no betrayal off limits for him. “Only I can save you! The Great and Powerful TRUMP!” he bellowed. They swooned, forgetting these words were lifted from the Wizard of Oz.
Pretty much everyone in the party has taken note at how profitable lying can be. Now the Republican Party is riddled with liars and con-artists, some of them “intellectual elites” — like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott and Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Josh Hawley and such, deftly pushing the buttons of a riled-up base, others are bona fide idiots with an agenda of sheer mayhem — hello there Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, et al. Even as a tiny veneer of the establishment (including a clique of the big money donors) has shied away from this unsustainable thrust, the bulk of the party has come together over the Big Lie — that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump — and the Big Lie’s spawn: that ALL elections are being rigged against the Republicans. Which, of course, means that anything goes in order to restore “sanctity” to the elections. That most certainly includes ever more lying, and actually stealing elections, that high crime that has so incensed Republicans, that Democrats have not actually done. It also, obviously, includes attacks on the U.S. Capitol. What’s next? Anything and everything conservatives feel they need to do to conserve what they conserve: their own advantage, privilege, power and ownership of society.
For many conservatives, it long ago became a “Cultural War,” in which they must kill or die. Metaphorically speaking, of course, for most of them (for some? Bring on Civil War III). Conservatives have ever been at war with true American values, especially that “equality” nonsense. That fight goes back to before America was America. But nowadays they sense they have been pushed into a corner. They still have the guns, but they are losing the numbers. They are keenly aware America is getting browner, and they have lost seven of the last eight presidential popular votes. They are being tortured and maimed — their culture and heritage obliterated — by “socialists” allowing Blacks to push back against police brutality and transkids to use their restrooms. The do have it so bad in this modern world. In such wars, hot or cold, imagined, metaphorical or all too real, it is necessary to convince yourself that the enemy is evil. This process has long been practiced by Republicans against Democrats. Back in the 1860s, they actually had something of a point. Such warranted suspicions prevailed into the 20th Century while white conservatives in the South, and sometimes elsewhere, occasionally partook of their inbred taste for “strange fruit” and otherwise were puffily proud of their irascible racism.
Republicans were once the most LIBERAL party not just at the time but in American history, with the sole objective of abolishing slavery! That moral focus is moldering with Abe. By the end of the 1970s, the Republican Party had done a 180, calling over those loathsome Democrats of the South the party was formed to conquer. Irate that their traditional party was dallying with that foundational value, equality, that had for so long been considered antithetical to their “way of life,” the Dixiecrats — and many of a similar ilk — without so much as a look back flooded into the folds of the very party that had destroyed Old Dixie, bringing their backwardness, arrogance, hubris, ignorance, bigotry, violence and Confederate flags along with them. Lincoln has been writhing in his grave all these decades as the Republican Party became the enemy, and then dug deeper toward hell.
The “Grand Old Party” is now a Grand Old Abomination, not just the comfy political home of racists, sexists, anti-Semites, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, creationists, theocrats and other religious wackos, even neoNazis, and still the preferred political safe-house of petty snake-oil sellers, greedy profiteers and the dirtiest industrialists. It is now, firmly, the party of deceit, cheating, trickery, tomfoolery and sedition. It has become a party that is willing to destroy truth as willingly as it has stabbed nature in the back. It has set its teeth to destroy American democracy once and for all. And it will take down the planet to do so.
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No Hate.
No Violence.
All Life is Sacred.
The Universe is Magnificent & Beautiful.
Love is the Way.
Copyright 2023, Rusty Reid
