I’d be marching in the streets against McCarthy, and never in a million years would vote for her. Unless Hitler himself was her opponent. And probably not even then. I’d be campaigning hard for third parties.
We’ve had plenty of crazies on the left. They usually get so little support from the Democratic party that they form parties for themselves, let’s call them… The Green Party. I mean I am mostly being serious here. We also had a weirdo alt-left that came in with part of the Bernie group. That group managed to be both racist and sexist, but you know what neither Hillary or Bernie did, play solely to that element to squeeze out more votes. I’m not saying that all of the Bernie Bros were sexist and racists, nor were all the anti-Hillary individuals in the party sexist. Both Bernie and Hillary tackled education, healthcare, and a dozen other concerns people had from those groups, but no one ran around to pat them on the back and assure them they would take care of their bogeyman fears like GOP candidate and party did.
Yeah, I think this was a big part of it. There were just a lot of people who were swing votes who were never going to vote for her because they didn’t like her.
Yeah, Slainte, I feel kinda like you’re asking me to imagine a world wherein Democrats are capable of stomaching the hateful, ignorant rhetoric that the Right has been gobbling up since… Wallace? I mean, it’s an interesting theoretical, sure, but we’re living in a world where only one party is the go to camp for the KKK, Neo Nazis, and all the rest of the charming milieu. If we reached a point where the moral scum of the earth found some subset of Democratic ideals appealing, I guess my answer is the same as Craig’s, but I think I’ve got about as little risk of that as Ted Cruz has of being warmly and genuinely loved.
You guys are missing the point. It’s not about how likely or unlikely it is for the Democratic party to be corrupted by racists or whatever, it’s about how the Republican party actually WAS and how millions of otherwise perfectly average and normal people fooled themselves into thinking: “Trump isn’t my first pick, and these new people in the party sure are disgusting, but once we win the rest of the Republicans in Washington will keep Trump in line and the rest of the country will make sure we don’t become some kind of crazy fascist state, because that’s how the checks and balances are supposed to work. In the meantime, I get my conservative SCOTUS, Obamacare gets replaced, and that awful Hillary bitch doesn’t become President. What’s the worst that could happen?”
In other words, the 2016 election wasn’t about America giving racism a big thumbs up, it was about average (non-racist) people convincing themselves that things were not nearly as messed up as other people were saying because the need to be part of a winning team and/or get the win on that single issue that is important to you has overridden any sense of civic responsibility in this country.
Does that absolve Republicans who voted Trump from responsibility? Fuck no. But it isn’t fair to simply label them as outright racists or even tacit supporters of racism simply because they voted with their party in 2016. Maybe if Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush had all run on platforms of undisguised authoritarianism with racist undertones we could argue that anyone left in the party by now was racist by association, by that’s not fair to say given only the 2016 election to go on.
And with that I’ll conclude my devil’s advocate defense of the average urban/suburban educated Republican voter. My sincere hope is that Trump and Company are so awful that these people recognize the error of their ways and either vote third-party in 2020 or just stay home.
Ah, but a core component of my rage stems from the fact that Republicans haven’t only just recently magically and accidentally become the party of Fuck Over All Poors, Nonwhites, and Women. This has been their clear and obvious legislative modus operandi for decades. Trump shaded in some bonus authoritarianism, to be sure, but to be clear, I view Steve King, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan as being on exactly the same moral level as the great orange buffoon. A couple of them are just a little better at diplomatically stating that they’d like poor people to die to give tax cuts to the Waltons, please.
And how many of these fine upstanding citizens of the GOP gambled with the future of their neighbors and fellow citzens because in their mind, the worst that could happen would happen to someone else because, you know, they’re not brown. And it absolutely was. At how many Trump rallies did we see non-white individuals physically handled followed by some half-ass story about how really nice that guy is for reals, but he just got caught up in the moment? No, no that guy stopped being nice long before they started assaulting any black person around, including members of their party just because they were black.
The GOP doesn’t just get to take responsibility for Trump. For years these were the same people who claimed, literally claimed, that Obama was the reason racism existed, that he divided the country because racism was dead, then they bathed in it, in racism, to get votes trying to claim it’s not because they’re racist. They emboldened or let these people feel embolden because in the end, they just wanted to win an election. Well, no, no… you’re right. It’s a lot more complicated than that.
The GOP has been stirring the racist pot for decades, and they own that. It’s well beyond just Trump who is blatantly racist and sexist… Fox News also didn’t become racist and sexist over night… these so called real conservatives can’t hide behind Trump for everything. They went in with their eyes wide open. Time to own that.
Amen.
This is not a party of people who diddle themselves to the same Billy Buckley tracts that @Timex sleeps with under his pillow every night. This is not even the party of Reagan’s Shining City on the Hill (nevermind that said city wouldn’t have admitted the single black mother of five on food stamps living in inner city Chicago after her boyfriend was shot dead by racist cops, or the terrified 19 year old kid dying of “that gay disease” in a hospital where even the nurses were afraid to touch him, or the battered and bloody refugees fleeing from the dozen Middle Eastern or Central American countries we were turning into bloodbaths by funding petty dictators or violent terrorists to stymie the Russkies).
This is the party that has stood against every meaningful scrap of progress we’ve managed to eke out of this country for decades now. Voting rights for blacks? Workers rights for women? Marriage whites for gays? Psh, all of that must fall before the Almighty Dollar and the Slightly Less Almighty Cross. Programs to feed the sick and hungry? Too expensive! Teachers desperate for the tools to educate our children to compete in a world rapidly leaving America behind? Too needy! Common-sense gun control to help stem the tides of blood washing through our inner city streets? Too extreme! Affordable, local healthcare for poor women struggling to make it in the world? Too amoral!
Look, I get it, the Democrats aren’t moral paragons. Those spineless shits signed off on the Patriot Act just as fast as their Red-bearing colleagues. They signed off on the Forever War Against Terrorism and every drone-delivered payload that ever fell on a hospital or school because doing things the right way was way less satisfying than getting our vengeance.
But when I weigh the scales each November, piling the crimes and imperfections of each side against each other? Holy fucking shit, is it the easiest choice ever to make each time around.
That so many of my countrymen mislead themselves (hopefully) or gleefully throw themselves (likely) into making any other choice, putting the interests of a few thousands of America’s richest (and also, perhaps not coincidentally, shittiest) citizens above the desperate needs of millions each and every election is absolutely soul-crushing to me in a way I do not possess the words to describe. The callous disregard for so many lives and needs that goes into every single pull of the lever for a candidate with R beside their name is an overwhelming and harrowing indictment of the person so voting, and I have no idea how we can possibly salvage a country filled with so many of them.
Oh, and in my rush to get back to work on time, I did forget to mention that only one of our major parties would prefer to stick its head in the sand over climate change, so before anyone feels the need to trot out the strained bothsidist argument that somehow the sun-borne fever dreams of some unfortunately repeatedly enslaved Israeli tribesmen collected into an often-rewritten, always-misquoted Holy Book might somehow justify a right-swinging vote to preserve the unlives of a few million embryos, let’s try to remember that only one party wants to hand the keys to the planet over to a bunch of self-interested corporate polluters hellbent on maximizing profits before the sea levels rise and billions die.
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There is no adequate way I can endorse this post - but it articulates exactly how I’ve felt since a teenager. (In the 80’s.)
Thank you.
And now, Fox News reports on Jr’s emails:
Watch Tucker throw a hissy fit.
Russia’s primary interest is to disrupt and weaken the US, because that is Russia’s only path back to great power status. Putin craves great power status, a return to empire.
An autocratic, imperialist Russia can never be a natural ally for the US. This is what the alt-right and trumpists simply cannot grok.
Holy $#!t, you don’t see him get unhinged like that too often, lol.
“Russia is evil and Russia is our enemy.”
It’s not often you can watch two people vehemently disagree with one another and dislike both points of view just as much. I guess that’s Fox News!
My man! If this forum had likes, you’d be a +10 right now because I’d have registered 9 other accounts (via my Russian bot connections) just to like this post more.
Here we go. More of this needs to happen.
Yes, and given that premise I understand the logic. I think they see themselves as equivalent to antebellum abolitionists.