Tag Archives: shift in GOP values

Da Snark Just Keeps On Coming

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, cartoons, Election 2022, Law and justice, Political commentary, religion, Social commentary

Of late, I’ve been trying … well, sort of … to be less snarky than usual, more serious minded if you will.  But, as the late Popeye the Sailor famously said, “I yam what I yam.”  And what I yam seems to be snarky today, so instead of fighting it, I will go with the flow.

Do as I say, not as I do?

The ‘Christian Nationalist’ movement seems to have gained momentum in recent years.  I mean absolutely no disrespect toward those Christians who believe as they do, yet do not attempt to impose their will on everyone else.  The ones I am calling out here are those diehard Christian evangelicals who believe that they and they alone know all the answers and would force their will on us through a series of laws and punishments.  They have had some success already in stripping women of their right to make their own decisions about their health, and now they are targeting others, such as the LGBTQ community and the very history of this nation.  But here’s what’s interesting …

In the past two days, I have seen at least three news stories about Christian pastors sexually abusing children.

  • Gregory Adams, an Alabama pastor, started abusing four young girls when they were around 12 years old. Adams told one of his victims if she didn’t have sex with him, God would strike her down with lightning.
  • Jonathan High, a church deacon in Florida, was recently convicted of using children to produce the “hundreds, if not thousands” of child pornography photos found on his phone.
  • Shane E. Richardson, a youth pastor in Pennsylvania, raped at least one child under the age of 16. A youth pastor!!!

So … a woman who has an abortion or even takes oral contraceptives is a criminal, but those self-righteous Christians who would condemn that woman, support religious ‘leaders’ who abuse children.  Methinks those judgmental Christian sects better be cleaning up their own houses before commenting on ours!

Deserting a sinking ship … but who can blame him?

The Republican Party, formerly known as the “Grand Old Party” (GOP), has recently acquired numerous conspiracy theorists, fools, people who are against democracy, and idiots who can’t even write their own names without help.  So, it is sad and maybe alarming to see the few who were actually intelligent, viable human beings within the party, making a hasty exit.  It also speaks volumes about the credibility of today’s Republican Party.

Over the past two years, we have seen several of the better, more conscionable Republicans jump or be pushed off of the sinking ship.  Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney put the welfare of the nation ahead of their own careers and will be leaving Congress next January.  Justin Amash left the Republican Party in 2019.  Others, mainly those who are not willing to lick the boots of the former guy, who see the decay within the party, are retiring at the end of their term … among these are Senator Rob Portman.

Even so, my jaw dropped yesterday when I read that Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska plans to resign from his seat in the U.S. Senate at the end of this year to accept a position as president of the University of Florida.  Sasse was, in my book, one of the better Republicans, one who had studied and understood the U.S. Constitution, one who still believed in the democratic foundations of this nation, and one who called out the former guy’s corruption, dishonesty and lack of knowledge, and in fact voted to convict him on the impeachment charges in 2021.

To be clear, I have disagreed with most of Sasse’s political positions such as women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, guns, healthcare, and more, however … he wasn’t a cheater.  He played by the rules and if he wasn’t in the majority in a vote, he accepted that and moved on.  THAT is what is lacking in today’s Republicans … they don’t even care about the illusion of playing by the rules … they seem to actually be proud of breaking the rules, of stripping We the People of our right to have a voice.  I understand why Sasse is leaving, and I wish him the best of luck at the University of Florida … and by my count there remain about 4 Republicans in Congress who still possess a conscience and believe that their Oath of Office actually means something.

A lunatic in human’s clothing

You’ve heard of a wolf in sheep’s clothing?  Well, this dude is a lunatic masquerading as a human.  His name is Larry Klayman and while he has crossed my radar a few times in the past, I always just chalked him up as another attention-seeking weirdo.  And he is just that, but he takes lunacy to the nth degree!  His latest is a scheme he has cooked up to convict President Biden of bribery (???) and says he will be asking the military to arrest the president!

Now, I could write an entire series of posts about the lunacy of this ‘man’ dating all the way back to the Clinton administration, but frankly he isn’t worth my time or yours.  Suffice it to say that I seriously believe he has something wrong inside his brain and to date, nobody has figured out how to stop him from his frivolous and ridiculous lawsuits.  The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as “pathologically litigious.”

Klayman has lost far more cases than he won, has been sanctioned and disciplined by the courts more than a few times, and last year had his license to practice law revoked for a period of 18 months, but still he persists in claiming he is going to have Biden arrested.  Good grief … his parents must have had some really strange DNA!!!

And to finish with a bit of humour … just a couple of ‘toons!

The Anti-Democracy Movement Run Amok

Posted on by under Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, History, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary, voting rights

As I lay in bed at 5:30 this morning seeking that elusive thing called sleep, I received an email with Robert Reich’s latest newsletter.  Despite my better judgment, I started reading the piece and there went any hope for sleep.  Peter Thiel’s name has crossed my radar before … he is a billionaire with a net worth of about $4.7 billion who has bankrolled some pretty nasty political candidates, most notably the former guy.  I didn’t know a lot about him, though, and Mr. Reich took care of filling in some gaps … some rather disturbing ones.  Please take a minute to read his piece, for it is well worth your time — just don’t read it at bedtime.

What you need to know about the anti-democracy movement

Who’s funding it, why it’s inspired by Viktor Orban, and what it aims to achieve

Robert Reich

May 19, 2022

Decades ago, America’s wealthy backed a Republican establishment that believed in fiscal conservatism, anti-communism, and constitutional democracy. But today’s billionaire class is pushing a radically anti-democratic agenda for America — backing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, calling for restrictions on voting, and even questioning the value of democracy.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier who is among those leading the charge, writes “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Thiel is using his fortune to squelch democracy. He donated $15 million to the successful Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of J.D. Vance, who alleges that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” And Thiel has donated at least $10 million to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.

The former generation of wealthy conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater, who wanted to conserve American institutions. Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything — at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote. As Thiel wrote:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

Rubbish. If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are drowning democracy in giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates who repeat Trump’s big lie.

Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s rich ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced. When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.

It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.

If freedom is not compatible with democracy, what is it compatible with?  

On Tuesday night, Doug Mastriano, a January 6 insurrectionist and Trump-backed Big Lie conspiracy theorist, won the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania (the fourth largest state in the country, and the biggest state that flipped from 2016 to 2020). Mastriano was directly involved in a scheme to overturn the 2020 election by sending an “alternate” slate of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College — despite the fact that Trump lost Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes. If Mastriano wins in November, he will appoint Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, who will oversee the 2024 election results in one of the most important battleground states in the country.

Meanwhile, the major annual event of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — the premier convening organization of the American political right — starts today in Budapest. That’s no accident. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party have become a prominent source of inspiration for America’s anti-democracy movement. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, describes Orban’s agenda as that of a “Trump before Trump.”

Orban has used his opposition to immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and religions other than Christianity as cover for his move toward autocracy — rigging Hungary’s election laws so his party stays in power, capturing independent agencies, controlling the judiciary, and muzzling the press. He remains on such good terms with Vladimir Putin that he’s refused to agree to Europe’s proposed embargo of Russian oil.

Tucker Carlson — Fox News’s progenitor of white replacement theory — will be speaking at CPAC and broadcasting his show from Budapest. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows will also be speaking (although he refuses to speak to the House committee investigating the January 6 assault on American democracy).

If America and the world should have learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that began growing like a cancer in the 1920s, it’s that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power — which in turn lead to strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.

Peter Thiel may define freedom as the capacity to amass extraordinary wealth without paying taxes on it, but most of us define it as living under the rule of law with rights against arbitrary authority and a voice in what’s decided.

If we want to guard what’s left of our freedom, we’ll need to meet today’s anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government both from authoritarian strongmen like Trump and his wannabes, and from big money like Peter Thiel’s.