I grew up in a leftist family -- my father a solid supporter of the
IWW -- the people he admired for having fought and died, putting it all on the line, in order to get rights for American workers, and a supporter of the
Abraham Lincoln Battalion during the
Spanish Civil War and of the surviving veterans of that fight after the war, calling themselves, only THEN, the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade, for the same reason, that they fought and died to oust
Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a man who -- like
Ferdinand Marcos of the Phillipines, had claimed to be a courageous military hero until people with a different opinion about the conduct of the country won power, at which point both of them -- rather than accept the possibility that a different point of view might be valid, and that the will of the people might be something to respect, became vicious, murdering sonsofbitches.
(It was many years before I realized that "Franco-the-murdering-bastard-who-bombed-his-own-people" wasn't his actual name.)So with Republicans -- my view having long been that Democrats were people who believed the economy would be in good shape if the people were able to survive and flourish contrasted against Republicans who believed that the people would be in good shape if the economy was allowed to flourish unencumbered.
I didn't agree with them, but I had to grant them respect, even grudging, for their honesty (and the possibility that their point of view might be valid, might work).
Or I believed that until the post-Nixon years when they ran the sincere patriots out of the party and became what they seem to be now -- lying cheating thieving walking talking bags of shit spouting bizarrely perverted religious fanaticism as justification for every crime, every ethical monstrosity, every murder.
They lie about anything they don't like, making up incredible crap like "the Democratic Health Care Bill is designed to allow those evil Democrats to force granny to take her own life." They send out thugs (just like they did in the 30's when the Wobblies struck to create unions) to harass and harm anyone who thinks differently than they do, i.e., the Brooks Brothers Riots of the year 2000 sending out Republican staffers to stop the legal process of recount by rioting and threatening the people who were following the law.
Or these days -- sending out rabidly angry people to shout down anyone who actually wants to discuss the pros and cons of Health Care Reform. Thugs. Goons.
This from the party that has so long harangued the rest of us about Law & Order and only stopped ranting hypocritically about Family Values when it turned out that so many of their self-righteous assholes were getting after it in sex with women other than their wives. (And men, despite what their anti-gay hypocritical crap would suggest, men they meet in bathrooms and suck off through glory holes. All that venomous anti-gay hate-rant coming out of their mouths when the fact was it was something quite different going INTO their mouths. Their only allowable intimacy and honesty being with anonymous penises they'll never seer again.)
There are people I know who have been actual Republicans for a long time -- friends -- some of whom (I haven't discussed this with all of them) are ashamed to call themselves Republicans, and while they won't call themselves Democrats, considering that to be -- not without justification -- a jump from the frying pan into the garbage, they have re-registered as Independents (or Decline to State -- depending on in which state they are decline)
Screaming about how Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor is too empathetic, thereby will be biased and make decisions based on emotion rather than law -- not mentioning that the Reagan Administration Houseboy, Clarence Thomas, said the same thing, and he didn't even have a backup position of actually KNOWING the law, that Justice Alito said the same thing, all of which made it obvious that what they were saying was that a woman and a Latina could not conceivably make "good" decisions (i.e., the kind of decisions their white boys -- and the wannabe white boy -- made looking from THEIR perspective.)
Add to that their racially-based attacks on the President, and it's pretty obvious that the Klan still survives, only these days, having thrown out all the rational moderate people, it calls itself the Republican party.
I don't even want to get into their Mommy-hatred here, the slavering attacks directed against Nancy Pelosi, Sonya Sotomayor, et al. Leave that for another rant.
And when I say post-Nixon, it's the same players -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush (
pere et fils), Eliot Abrams, Ollie North, time after time, same names, same games. Only NOW those inmates have taken over the asylum, not only chasing out the staff, but even other inmates, ones who may be more rational, the ones who threw their hands up in defeat when they realized you just can't talk sense with these rabid assholes.
So it comes down to this -- these people who are calling themselves Republicans would rather than the entire country sink into economic ruin and be violently and repeatedly attacked, have Americans suffer loss of all they hold dear rather than to allow good things to happen if it's from plans set forth by Democrats, let everyone sink into despair and death rather then allow the Democrats to dig America out of the hole they put us in -- intentionally -- with their plunder and theft (the old
Grover Norquist formula of "Spend it all on insane crap so as to honestly tell those "liberals" "Sorry -- there's no money left for YOUR social welfare programs." First tested by Ronnie Reagan whp pissed away the wealth of the nation on Star Wars Anti-Missile Defense -- a bizarre fantasy more suitable to a 9-year-old boy than a 70_ senile president.)
They would rather see many thousands of Americans die from lack of health care than give up the bribes they receive under the euphemism of "Campaign contributions." (Or the promise of future highly paid employment by those companies.)
Either way, to me, that's murder for hire.
The 21st century Republicans --a band of thugs with no honor, no scruples, no ethics, and nothing that even approximates love of country or that word they throw around so much, even though they obviously don't understand what it means -- patriotism.
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Interestingly -- since I posted the above this morning, the AFL-CIO has stepped up and will be sending their own people around to deal with the RepubliKlan goon squads being dispatched to stop the political process... the AFL-CIO which had to learn how to handle thugs in order to come into actual existence... an aside, 2-time medal of Honor recipient Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC founded the Veterans of Foreign Wars to represent the interests of soldiers, rather than -- as he put it -- being nothing more than a goon squad of strikebreakers for big business. General Butler was also first asked to ride down on the Bonus Army camped out in Washington D.C. veterans of WWI asking for the $360 they'd been promised. He refused, at which time Dugout Doug MacArthur volunteered to disperse the Army vets, killing a few in the process. This was, of course, YEARS, before his flight from the Phillipines ("I shall return ... once it's safe.") won him the title of "Dugout Doug."
