I was raised by republican parents and though they made some show of encouraging me to cultivate my own judgment, their belief that the only responsible party was the republican one was made quite clear to me. But you know, the older I got, the more I investigated the world and history for myself, the more I realized that such unflagging loyalty to the party was bordering on stupidity. The core beliefs they raised me with had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with what is today called the republican party. The more I looked at the cold hard facts, when I could find them, the more it seemed that their lifelong support of the party had been based on nothing but lies.
Most of my life I have thought both parties were more or less equally corrupt and that neither group was morally better than the other, but over the last six years, my opinion on that matter has changed.
During that time, I have watched the republican party stand by while their appointed leader lied to the American people. (And do not even try comparing an unprovoked war that has killed thousands to a blow job.) And they supported those lies, parroting them without thinking because that was the ‘party line’ and it seemed they deemed it more important to go along with their party than to question. They just ‘went along’ while their party, heck, their country, was disemboweled under the cover of ‘executive privilege’. Not until this year did I see more than a handful of them even begin to confront their incompetent leader and it wasn’t until this year that the lies that Bush told to trick us into war were beginning to be exposed in the media. And they still claim this is a ‘liberal media’?
The neo-con’s lies have been obvious from the beginning to anyone who looked at them with even a vaguely critical eye. Their arguments for war made no sense; they weren’t based in reality, they contradicted themselves and their pronouncements have been proven time and time again demonstratively wrong. And yet, republicans believed them, or at least voted as if they did, for six years! Even on fiscal policy, the issue republicans seem to think they have sole ownership of, they have spent money like it grows on trees. Do you remember that 7 short years ago, we had a surplus?!!! And now that they have finally had a chance to practice their Regan era economic system without the interference of a Democratic congress (like the one Regan had to deal with) we see the resulting income gap devouring the middle class. There’s ‘trickle down economics’ for you. Like Marxism, it might work in theory, but now we have proof it doesn’t work in practice. And in case someone reading this thinks they’re one of the few economic elites who are actually benefiting from this economy, I am sorry to break it to you, but unless you have millions stashed away, you just aren’t even close.
This is why I have no respect left for the republicans. This was their house to clean, their party to lead, and they let it be taken over by insane people who lied to them. They let people so corrupt and incompetent that they can’t even run a war against an 8th ranked military power speak for them and said nothing. From the beginning this administration has operated as if they thought their supporters so stupid and cowardly that they could lie, threaten, take away any right and invade any privacy they wanted without consequence. It wasn’t ‘strength’ they were displaying but contempt, and the amount of that they showed for even their own base was staggering. The republican party as my parents represented it to me would never have stood for this. In fact, if I hadn’t lived through the last 6 years and seen it happen, I would never have believed that they did.
I was raised by republicans, but, thanks to this administration and the way the majority of them have stayed in mindless lockstep with it, I don’t think I will ever be able to respect them again.
Swift move, guys.
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