Was it when Nixon sent the National Guard to Kent State which resulted in that horrific massacre of anti-war protesters? Maybe for some it was Nixon and Watergate? Well, I get it. It would be fairly understandable to believe those were just aberrations.
But why wasn’t it enough to come to that understanding when Reagan decided to launch his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi the city where some of the most brutal civil rights killings took place, but not to memorialize the dead and and send a warning to the future, but to embrace concepts like “reverse racism,” which was clearly a dog whistle to the “I will tell you who the REAL racists are”?
OK, maybe coincidence? What about his nomination of a deeply racist man in Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship? Or the nomination of an equally racist man in Judge Bork to the Supreme Court who also called the Ninth amendment to the constitution an “irrelevant inkblot.”
No?
What about Reagan’s press secretary cracking jokes about gay men dying of AIDS during an official White House press conference?
What about Reagan’s cynical invention of the racist “welfare queen” stereotype of poor black women?
What about what remains one of the most hateful political conventions in history in the 1992 Republican Convention?
No? Just a few bad apples?
What about Bob Dole’s return of donations to the Log Cabin Republicans as to avoid offending his right wing base because he did not want to be seen as affiliating himself with LGBT who agreed with the Republican Party’s platform on all but one measure?
What about the subliminal confession of an absence of compassion for the suffering of others among the Republican faithful when George W Bush felt a need to coin the term “compassionate conservatism.”
No? What about when the Republican majority on Supreme Court decided to take the unprecedented step of reviewing state election law to shutdown attempts to have a proper recount in Florida?
No? Not then either?
What about when the Bush administration fabricated an excuse to go into a preemptive war in Iraq? What about Colin Powell’s fake vial of anthrax at the UN? What about Condi Rice’s mushroom cloud scare tactics to grow support for that illegal war? And it was an illegal war.
What about Abu Ghraib? Guantanamo? Water boarding? “Enhanced interrogation? No?
What about the cult of personality surrounding Sarah Palin who ran a smear campaign against Obama so awful that her own running mate had to refute her claims?
What about the threat of martial law in the USA if Congress did not give $800 billion to the big banks?
What about lies about “death panels?” What about “do not ask what good you could do?”
What about tea party activists waving guns at protests outside of events featuring Obama?
When did you figure it out? Was it when Republicans booed Rick Perry from uttering that very politically incorrect term “compassion” at a Republican debate? Did you figure it out then? Did you figure it out when mass shooting after mass shooting Republicans refused to act to protect the citizenry for the sake of the gun industry that lined their pockets?
What about the enthusiasm for Trump’s overt racism, xenophobia, islamaphobia?
If you just figured out the Republican Party is deep into an abyss of darkness, lies, mendacity, racism, and bigotry when they got to ripping babies from their mother’s arms, and refusing to give those children back to the mothers after immigration proceedings were over, you figured it out too late.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Spammers, stay out. Only political and video game discussion here.