Over the past ten years, the Republicans have lurched then jerked sharply ever more to the right, as if there were an unannounced competition that only they knew about----as to who could be more cruel. Deny health care? Bravo! Make it impossible to get birth control, then make abortion just about unobtainable, then cut funding for day care, for welfare, for food subsidies for the poor, for housing....what else can they cut?
And now they're going after the unions. The unions, the Repubs say, hurt jobs. Really? You know what really hurts jobs? When you give corporations ungodly amounts of power and obscene amounts of money, and tell them for years that it's their right, by God, to pay workers pennies and squeeze every last one of those pennies right back out of them if you can, in the form of the fees, penalties, one-time-only charges, overdrafts, ATM fees, and all the little charges that corporations use to rob people of more and more money. We're being fee'd to death by people who are so obscenely wealthy already that if there's no possible way they could spend all the money they have in their lifetimes. And if they did spend that money----in the US, that is, instead of on high-end luxury goods that are imported or support a tiny number of specialists----it would be the first worthwhile thing most of them have ever done. So let's look at Republican America, shall we?
In Citizens United v. Federal Electric Commission a conservative bloc on the Supreme Court destroyed generations of case law and declared that, basically, rich corporations could donate as much money to politicians as they wanted to. This spelled the death knell for the working man and woman in this country, unless we keep fighting back, and keep fighting back till we win back every seat in Congress next year.
With that court decision, billionaires dumped bales of cash on their Republican faithful, and mysteriously, the Repubs who ran on "Jobs, jobs' jobs", worked instead to redefine rape----it's only rape if you were forced, you lying hussy----and to deny rape victims, alone of all other crime victims, unable to call themselves 'victim'---pre-conviction. And with a dismal conviction rate for rape, very few women would get that meagre justice. In other words, you lying hussy. The belief that women lie about rape is at the bottom of this kind of hateful denial of rape victims' pain, because for Republicans, sex is bad, and if she doesn't have bruises and broken bones, she must have liked it, that hussy. The only kind of sex Republicans like is the kind they have with: women they aren't married to, sex in Minneapolis airport mens' room stalls, and sex that involves sums of money being exchanged. Republican hostility to rape victims----if you were eighteen and the victim of incest, tough shit for you!----ought to serve as a warning, because rape serves as a microcosm of how people actually view women, deep down inside, and Republicans view women as sluts who need to be punished for having sex.
The effect of the extreme Religious Right on the Repubs cannot be over-estimated. Repubs do the same venal crap over and over again, then ask forgiveness from their fundie master of choice, and the slate is wiped clean----without some important elements----namely penitence, atonement, and change. Thus is it that we wind up with a lizard like Gingrich, who's cheated on each wife with her successor and whose excuses for his infidelity are a confusing mishmash of 'Patriotism gave me a hardon so I cheated on my wife" and "I'm old now, so it probably won't happen again" which leave out the utter hypocrisy of attempting to impeach Bill Clinton for the sin of being a Democrat who could and still does run circles around any Republican, intelligence wise.
Republicans also believe that if God loves you, he makes you rich, so if you're poor, you obviously had it coming. Seeing as how most of these Repubs inherited their wealth, it's hard to quantify this degree of hypocrisy. Also, seeing as how the Repubs create situations which place horrible burdens on people and then force them into even worse situations, after which Republicans wave their finger and them and say, "You're a bad person." The classic example is the three-step campaign against womens' rights.
One: abstinence only promotes a bigoted view of womens' sexuality and promotes outright lies about sex and birth control----much the way the anti-choice movement does, too, with their constant refrain of "Abortion causes cancer!" A common ploy in abstinence only classes is to ask kids if they'd chew on a wad of gum that their friend had been chewing. Then they tell the kids that that's what it's like having sex with 'someone' who's had sex before. With every sexual relationship, goes the text, the partner's intimacy goes down because she's giving away a part of herself with every partner. (While they make the usual faint noises about boys, it's clear that girls are the ones who have limited value to begin with.) Birth control doesn't work, condoms always break, birth control causes cancer.....all that and more. Congratulations, kids, it's time for the real world!
Then the Repubs go after Planned Parenthood with even more incredible lies. John Kyl: "Ninety percent of what they do is abortion." Backpedal, days later: "That wasn't intended to be a factual statement." Who cares if women don't get screened for cancer, various diseases, get shots----and men too? If you lived a virtuous (and non-sexual life, unlike Republicans) you wouldn't have to worry about any of that.
And, then, of course, there's the war on choice, which never gets referred to as the terrorism it is. Let's face it, if Cheryl Sullenger were brown-skinned, named Fatima Mohamed or Jamila bin Laden, her ass would be in jail the minute Scott Roeder showed up repeatedly at Dr. Tiller's clinic a full month before he killed him.
One the Republicans are through subjugating women----and they apparently believe the task is almost done----the general public is going to get the same form of screwing, as anti-union measures that are being attempted in seventeen states indicate. Is this being covered on your local news? No, funny about that, isn't it? Close on their heels---but far less remarked upon----are the attempts at making voting very very difficult for anybody who's poor and Democrat (and might have a rather high melanin count.) If you can't vote, you have no voice and you don't effectively exist. This suits Republicans just fine. Unions form the main base for Democratic power and funding, so if the unions go, not only do workers see their rights and pay plummet, they'll probably have so little energy from working five jobs that they won't have the ability to agitate for change.
Being poor is expensive. If you live from paycheck to paycheck, you can't get ahead, by saving money for a better life. You can't afford a checking account, so you have to pay check cashing fees. You can't afford a car, so you have to take the bus, and if you have to pay bills, you do so in cash, which means taking time off from work. You can't afford to buy food in bulk, much less afford the utensils necessary to cook food in large amounts to freeze and take for lunches, etc., etc., Because such a life results in bad credit----one illness is all it takes----the places that you have to live in cost more---and often require application fees just for attempting to rent the place----and thus bite more out of the paycheck. Being poor is expensive, but behind all those fees are big businesses, raking in every cent and trying to get away with more. Instead of the company store of years ago, it's many many companies, and what's left is practically nothing. When people ask why Planned Parenthood is so necessary, along with health care, show them the lives of America's poor, who see their paycheck eaten up by fees because for today's Republican-inspired corporations, it's not possible to be rich enough. If there's an untouched penny out there in someone's pocket, it's practically theft not to have to fork it over in some kind of fee.
In Republican America, corporations strip the land of trees, minerals, greenery, and people in their unceasing search for more wealth, and dump caustic chemicals into the water, the air, and the earth, while they live in gated communities where even the servants are imported from other countries. While whole tracts of homes are empty and rotting due to foreclosure, corporations make more money off the foreclosures than on selling the home in the first place, and so far they haven't seen punishment for nearly bringing the US and world economies to their knees.
In Republican America, abortion is illegal and birth control not available, with all the Planned Parenthoods defunded. Hospitals are forced to re-open the sepsis wards, where women die from self-induced abortions, their living children left motherless. With health care out of reach for everybody but the rich, the emergency rooms are swamped, yet can do little. Diseases common to Third World countries flourish. With taxes eliminated for everybody but the rich, services such a police, fire, and water, are overtaxed if available at all. What jobs there are pay a pittance, and there's more applicants than there are jobs. Crimes flourishes, as the hungry and the poor seek for any way to survive.
In Republican world, train tracks are rusty and traversed only by cargo trains, because even though people don't have money to buy cars, the Republicans are still so venal that they don't want those socialist high speed rail trains to carry people around cheaply and easily. What if they get to a gated community and rob their house? (And I've actually heard people saying this.)
Many of these poor people once voted for Republicans, because they bought into the Ponzi scheme that Repubs offered the poor. They would one be one of the oligarchs, they were told. In The Handmaid's Tale Serena Joy thought she'd be one of the honorary guys after all the work she did, telling other women to shut up, sit down, and praise Jesus.
Republican world has an end point, where there is no more money to steal, no more people to abuse, no more people to attack, to deny, to lie about, and that's when revolution start. Yet the Republicans think that they can ruin the environment, impoverish whole classes of the population, and yet escape the effects of their own policies. Their children will bear the brunt of a polluted world, not just the children of Dems; their children will inherit polluted water tables ruined by fracking, oil-befouled waters, all the wild life killed. The Republicans pursue these policies in part because they don't believe in science----or they're in incredible denial.
Despite running on "jobs, jobs, jobs", they have not created a single job, and proven themselves to be strikingly amoral and compassionless. If they win any more seats next year, they will certainly put in place many of the very things I have pointed out here.
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Look at how the Republicans have acted for the past ten years---and longer.
The Dems have an opportunity to take off the gloves and shout them down like the hatemongers and sadists that they are.
How do you do that?
Every news station that treats Andrew Breitbart like a reputable source, call or write till they know they're losing viewers and revenue. Write their sponsors. Start boycotts. ANd keep writing. Gather signatures. We did it to Glenn Beck, we can do it again, In every state where the Right has tried to bust the unions, the unions--and the people, some of them former Repubs----are fighting back---and winning. Now is the time to fight and fight back with no concern for the buddy buddy relationship one might have with Repubs in Washington. What relationship? The Repubs want everything, they give nothing, and that's not any kind of relationship that I'd want to be in. What about you?
I can't write any more right now. I have to go call MSNBC for touting Breitbart as if he were a journalist, and I have to make sure there's examples on hand of his scheming, shamelessly untruthful history.
What are you going to do?