The GOP: Run By Deep-Cover Democratic Operatives Since 2009
If I were prone to conspiracy theories, I'd swear the Republican Party has been taken over by secret-agent Democrats whose mission is to ensure Obama's re-election no matter how lousy a president Obama actually is.
After Obama's inauguration, many people who voted for him, like me, were soon dismayed to learn that Candidate Obama outright lied when he promised to (for example) order the Department of Justice to lay off prosecuting medical marijuana patients, close the unconstitutional monstrosity that is our prison camp in Gitmo, and other things. I voted Obama in 2008 because I felt it very important to repudiate the previous eight years of Bush/Cheney chicanery, and was flabbergasted to discover that on pretty much every constitutional/civil liberty issue -- government transparency, punishing whistleblowers, ignoring the fourth amendment on mass transit -- Obama was actually worse than George W. Bush. Obama makes me nostalgic for the carefree freedom of the Bush/Cheney years -- and pre-2009, I never believed anything short of powerful hallucinogens could make me do that.
"Well," I thought sometime around 2009, "if the Republicans nominate a nice, sane, centrist moderate -- maybe Huntsman, or Gary Johnson -- they have a pretty good chance of overcoming Obama's incumbent's advantage and taking back the White House in 2012." But what did the GOP do instead? Look at a president whose own base was fed up with his anti-civil-liberties stance, and offered us a choice of Newt Gingrich the megalomaniac, Rick Santorum the Catholic Taliban, or Mitt Romney, who changes his principles almost as frequently as I change my socks.
The GOPers below the presidential level are even worse. Missouri Congressman and senatorial candidate Todd Akin collected unwanted headlines this weekend when he insisted that victims of "legitimate rape," as he put it, could not be impregnated by their rapists. Bad enough a few months ago, when Santorum said that rape victims impregnated by their attackers should consider their rape-babies "gifts from God" -- but at least Santorum's comment tacitly admitted that the pregnant woman in question had actually been raped. I doubt I would've believed anybody then, who told me "You think Santorum's view of preggo rape victims is bad? Give the Republicans a few extra months, and they'll top it."
If all you knew about modern America came from today's GOP, you'd swear the majority of Americans think gay marriage is the greatest threat to the republic since Nazism, and science is an atheist plot and the single most evil thing in the earth's 6,000-year history. Oh, and "fiscal responsibility" means "We can afford a military almost as expensive as every other military on earth combined, and we can afford to run a worldwide chain of secret CIA torture prisons, but giving some poor family 200 bucks a month in food stamps will bankrupt us." And women's fallopian tubes contain special anti-sperm firedoors that slam shut whenever she's raped.
I miss the days when the GOP was the party of small government and personal and fiscal responsibility, rather than the party of unvarnished theocrats, scientific denial and utter incoherent rage at the thought of consenting adults engaging in non-procreative sexual activities. But I suppose this was inevitable, once the GOP started sucking up to Moral Majority/Christian Coalition types a generation ago.
Paul Ryan, Romney's vice-presidential pick, once sponsored a bill that would allow states to ban abortion in all circumstances -- including cases of rape, incest, and even when necessary to save the mother's life. (Which, by the way, is another reason I wish anti-abortion people would quit calling themselves "pro-life" in favor of the more accurate "pro-forced gestation." There's nothing remotely pro-"life" about telling a pregnant woman "Better you should die in childbirth than live childfree.")
Mind you, I have no inherent philosophical objection to the death penalty; I agree with the idea "Certain actions are so heinous, the individual who commits them deserves to die." I just don't think being a woman with an ectopic pregnancy is one of those death-worthy actions. But Paul Ryan does, and Mitt Romney finds the idea palatable enough to make its adherent his veep, one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
I'll be voting for Gary Johnson this November, but I can no longer criticize those who'll vote for Obama again, not with the GOP going out of its way to make Obama the lesser of two evils.
After Obama's inauguration, many people who voted for him, like me, were soon dismayed to learn that Candidate Obama outright lied when he promised to (for example) order the Department of Justice to lay off prosecuting medical marijuana patients, close the unconstitutional monstrosity that is our prison camp in Gitmo, and other things. I voted Obama in 2008 because I felt it very important to repudiate the previous eight years of Bush/Cheney chicanery, and was flabbergasted to discover that on pretty much every constitutional/civil liberty issue -- government transparency, punishing whistleblowers, ignoring the fourth amendment on mass transit -- Obama was actually worse than George W. Bush. Obama makes me nostalgic for the carefree freedom of the Bush/Cheney years -- and pre-2009, I never believed anything short of powerful hallucinogens could make me do that.
"Well," I thought sometime around 2009, "if the Republicans nominate a nice, sane, centrist moderate -- maybe Huntsman, or Gary Johnson -- they have a pretty good chance of overcoming Obama's incumbent's advantage and taking back the White House in 2012." But what did the GOP do instead? Look at a president whose own base was fed up with his anti-civil-liberties stance, and offered us a choice of Newt Gingrich the megalomaniac, Rick Santorum the Catholic Taliban, or Mitt Romney, who changes his principles almost as frequently as I change my socks.
The GOPers below the presidential level are even worse. Missouri Congressman and senatorial candidate Todd Akin collected unwanted headlines this weekend when he insisted that victims of "legitimate rape," as he put it, could not be impregnated by their rapists. Bad enough a few months ago, when Santorum said that rape victims impregnated by their attackers should consider their rape-babies "gifts from God" -- but at least Santorum's comment tacitly admitted that the pregnant woman in question had actually been raped. I doubt I would've believed anybody then, who told me "You think Santorum's view of preggo rape victims is bad? Give the Republicans a few extra months, and they'll top it."
If all you knew about modern America came from today's GOP, you'd swear the majority of Americans think gay marriage is the greatest threat to the republic since Nazism, and science is an atheist plot and the single most evil thing in the earth's 6,000-year history. Oh, and "fiscal responsibility" means "We can afford a military almost as expensive as every other military on earth combined, and we can afford to run a worldwide chain of secret CIA torture prisons, but giving some poor family 200 bucks a month in food stamps will bankrupt us." And women's fallopian tubes contain special anti-sperm firedoors that slam shut whenever she's raped.
I miss the days when the GOP was the party of small government and personal and fiscal responsibility, rather than the party of unvarnished theocrats, scientific denial and utter incoherent rage at the thought of consenting adults engaging in non-procreative sexual activities. But I suppose this was inevitable, once the GOP started sucking up to Moral Majority/Christian Coalition types a generation ago.
Paul Ryan, Romney's vice-presidential pick, once sponsored a bill that would allow states to ban abortion in all circumstances -- including cases of rape, incest, and even when necessary to save the mother's life. (Which, by the way, is another reason I wish anti-abortion people would quit calling themselves "pro-life" in favor of the more accurate "pro-forced gestation." There's nothing remotely pro-"life" about telling a pregnant woman "Better you should die in childbirth than live childfree.")
Mind you, I have no inherent philosophical objection to the death penalty; I agree with the idea "Certain actions are so heinous, the individual who commits them deserves to die." I just don't think being a woman with an ectopic pregnancy is one of those death-worthy actions. But Paul Ryan does, and Mitt Romney finds the idea palatable enough to make its adherent his veep, one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
I'll be voting for Gary Johnson this November, but I can no longer criticize those who'll vote for Obama again, not with the GOP going out of its way to make Obama the lesser of two evils.
posted by Jennifer Abel at 12:22 PM
9 Comments:
Nice, that's great.
I actually think you aren't that far off the mark, but in an odd, unintended positive consequences type of way. Since Obama has been governing as a moderate Republican any GOP'er that wants to create a clear difference between himself and Obama has to just be crazy.
I was with you until your last sentence. That Obama doesn't rant like Republicans on a single issue hardly places his followers above criticism.
Anymore I've started to think the lefties are worse than the righties. At least the righties are consistently up front with their murder and mayhem agenda, though now that I think about it at least the lefties are fairly up front and consistent about wanting to control everybody all the time. Actually I guess they're all more or less equally swine like so never mind.
Nothing against the swine there.
I think I might actually need to be a robot to read that last character ....
Ted, it's all a matter of what values one considers most important. For women whose main concern is continued legal access to contraception and abortion (if necessary) -- i.e., women whose main concern is "Continued control over our sex lives and reproductive destinies" -- yeah, I can definitely understand why they figure another Obama term is better than four years of Romney/Ryan. Especially given how many supreme court justices are elderly enough to likely need replacement during the next four years.
At the top of my list of values is not blowing people to pieces for no really good reason or torturing them or just generally treating the law like a disposable diaper. I can understand self interest, I even have some of it, but it seems a little self absorbed to so aggressively value ones uterus above the arms and legs and heads of others. Besides which the chances of the republicans killing the abortion goose are nil, though now that I type that out I realize I'm presuming to bound their pathological idiocy. But anyway, the "my uterus right or wrong" argument has always seemed to me a bit absurd coming from people who don't particularly respect my unquestioned right to much of anything. Just saying.
That robot weeder is like some sort of psych test. Maybe I need a new monitor.
But, Ted -- where "not blowing innocents to bits" is concerned, there is absolutely no difference between Romney and Obama. So I can understand the attitude "Given how there's nothing I can do to stop innocent foreigners from being drone-bombed to death, I can at least preserve some of my currently endangered rights."
And dismissing such concern as simply "my uterus right or wrong" is, frankly, insulting. The GOP put a plank in its platform that would outlaw abortion in all circumstances, even to save the life of the mother. I don't want innocent people blown to bits -- and I don't want innocent pregnant women to die, either.
And if Romney/Ryan get into office, there's a good chance the right to abortion or even contraception WILL be repealed -- not by the president himself, but by the supreme court justices he appoints.
And, yeah, that stupid robot sign-up thing sucks, but the last time I tried disabling it, I got something like two dozen spam comments in no time flat. Even WITH the robosigning thing, I get one or two spam comments a day. I didn't used to require any sort of sign-in at all, until I got slammed by an avalanche of spam. As in, I"d make a blog post at night, go to bed, wake up the next morning and find over a dozen spam comments on the new thread. It was fucking INSANE.
Even on this thread -- the very first comment, which I deleted as soon as I saw it, was from a spammer who asked something like "Is there any chance you will vote for Gary Johnson?" followed by a link to a website selling sex toys.
I see your point that there's a certain logic to weighting the coin in favor of the bloodsoaked sociopath who isn't going to limit reproductive choices, but going with Johnson gets you the whole cow. Only you don't actually get the milk. Something like that.
I think it's unlikely that abortion will ever be denied to any woman, particularly if she has enough money to cross a state line, and unlikelier still that contraception will be outlawed, though I'd be the first to admit the times are challenging even my cynicism. Still, when politicians say they're going to do something I think it's generally safe to rule it out.
I've had my own difficulties with spambots, I think of it as preliminary skirmishing in the coming machine war. But I wouldn't be so sure the Johnson link was spam. He is after all the Libertarian candidate.
gynvent15? let's see ....
guess not. chthel21? feeling good about this one.
The Johnson link was definitely spam; first off, there's no need to ask if I might, maybe, be voting for Johnson in a blog post where I outright said I would; and second, there was no need for the link to the sex-toy website.
I think it's unlikely that abortion will ever be denied to any woman,
There's a lot of stone-cold facts now that I would've considered highly unlike only eleven years ago. "You're telling me I won't be allowed to ride mass transit without being molested by government agents first? You must be high, dude. You're saying the president will have the power to arrest and even execute American citizens without a trial, solely on his say-so? Talk about paranoia. You think the CIA's going to operate a worldwide chain of torture prisons? Chill the hell OUT, will you? You think strip-searches will be made legal for anybody arrested for even the most minor of infractions? Okay, I'm not even going to talk to your paranoid self anymore."
Yet all of these things now are so utterly true, the government isn't even trying to deny it.
I suspect my government file says I'm even more paranoid than you, but outlawing abortion ... actually, the crazier it sounds the more likely it seems. But all it would do is create a burgeoning black market for RU486, which come to think of it would just be that much more impetus for police powers, and besides which it's not like idiocy or even plain impossibility has ever been a bar to government pursuit.
I can't decide if it's a golden age for paranoid conspiracy theorists or the end of the genre. It seems like we're rapidly running out of eventualities to darkly speculate about.
speaking of speculation, that's about all I've got on this password ... ontreny34?
lucky guess.
oh geez now i can't leave my comment about guessing the password ...
19Guegoval?
Post a Comment
<< Home