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We can't have both
Author: Raine    Date: 04/05/2021 13:09:26

There are some that say the demise of this Republican party began with Newt in the 90s. Some say Reagan's administration was where it all fell apart. It's almost immaterial now. This political party has become a party with no political policy. You'll recall last year, they didn't write a platform; instead, they just reused the 2020 platform.

I can't help but think about John Boehner's book excerpt released last week. Say what you will about his politics (and we have over the years), he's got a talent for weaving a story.

Retaking control of the House of Representatives put me in line to be the next Speaker of the House over the largest freshman Republican class in history: 87 newly elected members of the GOP. Since I was presiding over a large group of people who’d never sat in Congress, I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way. Incrementalism? Compromise? That wasn’t their thing. A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. That’s why they thought they were elected.

Some of them, well, you could tell they weren’t paying attention because they were just thinking of how to fundraise off of outrage or how they could get on Hannity that night. Ronald Reagan used to say something to the effect that if I get 80 or 90 percent of what I want, that’s a win. These guys wanted 100 percent every time. In fact, I don’t think that would satisfy them, because they didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.

To them, my talk of trying to get anything done made me a sellout, a dupe of the Democrats, and a traitor. Some of them had me in their sights from day one. They saw me as much of an “enemy” as the guy in the White House. Me, a guy who had come to the top of the leadership by exposing corruption and pushing conservative ideas. Now I was a “liberal collaborator.” So that took some getting used to. What I also had not anticipated was the extent to which this new crowd hated—and I mean hated—Barack Obama.

By 2011, the right-wing propaganda nuts had managed to turn Obama into a toxic brand for conservatives. When I was first elected to Congress, we didn’t have any propaganda organization for conservatives, except maybe a magazine or two like National Review. The only people who used the internet were some geeks in Palo Alto. There was no Drudge Report. No Breitbart. No kooks on YouTube spreading dangerous nonsense like they did every day about Obama.
There is no more Republican party - they are extremists, and stand for nothing more than 'owning the Libs'. They are a party that represents White Supremacy.

Gone (probably forever) are the days of so-called fiscal conservancy and family values. Gone is the aspirational idea of Morning In America. Trickle down economics is unrecognizable.

Members of this party exist for TV hits. Its existence is one of power and greed at any and all costs. Power - and its desire for it - feed the greed and vice versa. It's the party that's increasingly becoming authoritarian and that is the danger to the cloth of our country: the idea of Democracy.

One cannot have a democracy and authoritarianism coexist. One will eventually be destroyed.

&
Raine
 
 

5 comments (Latest Comment: 04/05/2021 14:52:03 by Raine)
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