SURE, I'M A REPUBLICAN--A PROGRESSIVE REPUBLICAN LIKE LINCOLN, TEDDY ROOSEVELT AND EISENHOWER...
I used to be a Republican. I'm now an independent, voting (lately) more often Democratic. The Republican party has changed. The progressive Republican party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower is, alas, long gone. It has only gotten worse, though, lately--it has now become the party of populism, ignorance, fascism, bigotry, with both Ayn Rand style atheism and religious extremism, and pandering to powerful lobbying interests such as the gun lobby, wall street, the super-rich, and the military industrial lobby, which Eisenhower himself warned us about.
1. I'm financially conservative. In contrast, the Republican party no longer cares about deficits, and has a record of doing the opposite of what they say. It supports subsidies to rich "welfare queens", i.e., weapons exporters, corporate farmers, ethanol, oil companies. It supports continued tax cuts without spending cuts. It pretends that tax increases are "evil". It's a good thing Republicans don't try to operate a bank or credit card company.
2. The U.S. has historically record low tax rates on the super rich, even discounting the ultra-low capital gains taxes. Income inequality is the greatest among industrialized nations, comparable to France prior to the French revolution. The Republican "solution" is to further reduce taxes on the rich, scale back environmental/pollution controls, and further subsidize the oil industry--as if more pollution equates to more economic opportunity. I do not agree with this stance.
3. I believe that waterboarding is torture. The Khmer Rouge and the Spanish inquisitors would agree with me. So, apparently, did the U.S.--in 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. George Washington prohibited torture during the revolutionary war. The advantage of waterboarding over other forms of torture is that is only leaves psychological scars--no burn marks or severed body parts that would serve as damning evidence. We might wink at this but other countries take it seriously. If we were a small, powerless country, we would be ostracized by the community of western civilized nations. Even Josephus spoke at length about Herod the Great's use of torture and its ineffective and disastrous results. History has repeated itself. The United States is now an official member of torture-practicing nations. We share this distinction with such kindred spirits as North Korea, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Burma. The Republican administration supported waterboarding, calling it "enhanced interrogation". I do not agree with this.
4. I do not support the NRA in their efforts to legitimize any and all sorts of firearms, including full-automatic weapons, lubricant-coated rounds that can penetrate Kevlar (The "cop-killer" bullets), and more. The Republican party apparently does. The gun lobby has come to expect the Republican party to toe their line.
5. I'm a Christian conscientious objector who does not believe in killing people as part of a "nation-building initiative", or for wars whose justification is based on false pretenses--especially wars in which the rest of the world had not been threatened. History tells us the middle east is the "graveyard of empires," and Afghanistan is no exception. Republicans refuse to acknowledge their role in two disastrous and futile proxy wars in which 150,000 innocent civilians were killed and nearly $4 trillion was wasted.
6. I no longer support capital punishment, after our own previous (Republican) governor put a stop to it upon finding that DNA evidence exonerated several people on death row in IL. I believe the U.S. should join virtually all the other civilized countries in the world who have already banned capital punishment.
7. I do not like abortion, but I do not think "anti-abortion" is the defining issue of today, as some Republicans do. I believe it is a cynical, hypocritical sideshow to paper over a predilection for starting foreign wars costing many innocent lives and terrible bodily and emotional harm, for torture, for export of deadly weapons for profit, and for indifference to massive starvation and genocide in other countries that "coincidentally" do not have petroleum resources. Not to mention indifference to physical and psychological abuse of unwanted children who often suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, drug related abnormalities, and aids infection.
8. I believe very strongly in separation of Church and state, as did our founding fathers--which our previous Republican president did not believe in, unfortunately. As government starts giving government money to the Presbyterian, Lutheran and Catholic charities, it will also be obligated to give money to Muslim charities. Government has no business funding religious organizations, nor should they inject religion into the war effort by employing "Christian" propaganda to encourage killing.
9. I believe our healthcare system is in deep trouble. We spend twice as much on healthcare as other developed countries and end up with inferior health care and worse health statistics. Instead of working in a bi-partisan partnership with the democrats, the Republicans have united in an effort to gut any meaningful parts of "Obamacare", ensuring its failure. Their political strategy is to label it socialized medicine and therefore part of a communist conspiracy, as if all the other developed countries in the world apparently have "communist" health care. I do not agree with this destructive, irresponsible and cynical behavior on the part of the Republicans. I am also concerned by their acceptance of outsized campaign contributions from drug companies, hospitals and health insurance companies. Worst of all, the Republicans have absolutely no plan of their own, other than cutting Medicare, which they now say is off the table. (Incidentally, guess which party created Medicare?)
10. I believe the climate is changing, as do 97% of climatologists. The other 3% get on TV and mock the 97%, basking in the media attention. Some have correctly pointed out that global average temperatures have been rising rapidly for the last 30 years, but have since leveled out a bit. However, the last 11 years are still the hottest on record. Even if climate change has nothing to do with global warming, our profligate use of natural resources is hideous compared to other nations, and it also has had a huge effect on pollution of our planet. And even if we care for none of those things, we SHOULD care that we are bankrupting our nation by buying oil "on credit." The Republican party opposes alternative energy, opposes a gas tax hike, and consistently opposes fuel efficiency regulations. Meanwhile, our transportation infrastructure is crumbling because we don't have the money to maintain it. I do not believe this is responsible behavior from a political party.
IN CONCLUSION: When the stock market was about to tank, euphoria was at its highest, and people predicted DOW 40,000. Politics is similar in that way--Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were shocked and surprised (despite the "obvious" historical hindsight that we now have) when the French revolution started--they were insulated from reality. They thought France was doing fine, except for poor people who were "lazy", and they even thought they could afford to help bankroll the American revolution--talk about naive and ironic (but fortunate for us)! There are a lot of people insulated from reality today. They do not believe America's moral standing among the rest of the world is important. They believe they are safe from social turmoil, and do not notice disturbing trends happening right in front of their noses. They've learned no historical lessons from the crusades. They are shallow thinkers who listen to populists as they pander to our paranoia, greed, selfishness and self-delusion with paid-for politics. They are suckers for the oldest trick in the political playbook--create an enemy to distract us from the real issues whenever their political support starts to get shaky.
The Democratic party seems to have taken up the mantle of reform while the Republican party seems out of ideas and is content to be reactive and cling to the status quo. The Grand old Party isn't so grand anymore.
--Anonymous
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