What is their end game?
I asked this to myself as I read the news about the gun violence protection bills—all four of them—going down in flames on a predictable almost-party-line vote. The Republicans, those self-purported fighters against terror and those eeevil, eeevil Middle Easterners, wouldn’t even back one of the bills proposing the prevention of gun sales to people on the “No-Fly” terrorist watch lists.
So not only do (mostly) Republicans want to prevent any measure to protect Americans against needless gun violence codified into law, they also don’t seem to care if terrorists are the ones to be executing the gun violence. And these were the same Republicans who misused the names of all who died on 9/11 to promote their dirty war in Iraq.
And speaking of wars, I had to ponder...why is it that our country’s military spending not only dwarfs that of the rest of the world, but also dwarfs our own discretionary spending on education, science, food and agriculture, energy and the environment, veterans' benefits, and many other expenses? “Do Republicans value killing over preserving and embettering human life?” shouldn’t be a trite, rhetorical question, but there you go.
Then my mind wandered off to the Republican Congress’s persistent push to eviscerate, if not fully dismantle, the Affordable Care Act. Bring back pre-existing condition restrictions. Reduce Medicaid coverage. Kick 24 million Americans off the only safety net that comes between physical/emotional health and financial solvency vs. bankruptcy, destitution, and even death.
We know the Republicans have been fighting to overturn the ACA, even with its only modest improvements to our chaotic healthcare system. Why would they, the People Most Concerned with Protecting Human Life (as long as it’s a fetus), want to take away one of the only lifelines that many living, breathing Americans in our country have?
Why are they always cutting funding to education and personal embetterment? Why are the Republican-run House and Senate full of climate-change deniers who fight tooth and nail over provisions that would stem the almost-irreversible environmental catastrophes headed our way. And by “our,” I mean “the planet’s”. Why do Republicans continue to shred what little remains of our social safety nets when millions in our country are impoverished and starving?
Is it really all in the name of “personal responsibility” and “self-sufficiency”? Is it really due to the dread of the “nanny state,” or not wanting to punish the “job creators” for all of their hard work by taxing them more, or whatever talking points Frank Luntz pulls out of his ass and distributes to any and every Republican spokesperson who shows up in front of a mike?
Honestly, I’ve come to believe they don’t want us to live.
I am not an alarmist, and I’m not much into conspiracy theories. I’m not making these claims out of ungrounded hysteria—or at least I hope it doesn’t seem that way.
But their major party’s candidate has writ large—and in fact gloats upon—his followers’ hatred of immigrants, minorities, women, the poor, the “other” in naked, stark detail. It’s more than 50 years of post-Great Society hatred for the “riff-raff” brewing to a head and making itself visible after cloaking itself in the niceties and false concerns for limiting government spending and “reducing the size” of government until it drowns—and apparently drowns all of us in the ocean of their bathtub.
They’ve spent 50 years turning us against each other in some fashion or another, whether it’s white against black, men against women, middle-class against poor, straight versus gay, Christian versus...well, most any other religion. And for 50 years, many Americans have taken the bait, voting for a party that couldn’t give three shits about them because they believe the Republicans are the only ones protecting their tax pennies from the “takers,” protecting the “real” Americans from those a shade too dark or too liberal to qualify as such, protecting their freedom to carry machine guns so they can blow the brains out of said enemies should their paths cross.
As long as we fall into a certain demographic that isn’t their demographic (which means most of us), we are all the riff-raff. They would rather us kill than protect or heal one another. They’d rather us die of attrition, not being able to afford to eat nourishing food, drink clean water, or seek medical care when we need it.
They want control of the Supreme Court so they can solidify their favoritism of the rich, the powerful, the white, the (mostly) men for decades. So they can further eviscerate voting-rights laws so that fewer of us can have a say in what they do and how they do it. So they can make the government of, by, and for themselves rather than we the people.
What is their end game?
What is ours?