Recently I have been asked why I seem so hard on the current Republican party’s lack of political participation. I am a child of the sixties, just as the Democratic party forfeited the south as a loyal base, gained a conscience, and pushed hard for civil and voting rights. The late Roger Ailes—former head of Fox News and a friend and ally of Richard Nixon, committed to himself and the GOP that the party would never again abandon a Republican president without a public relations defense against real and perceived corruption and scandal. Ailes shaped Fox’s then-fledgling News division in his own image by 2001, with Bill Clinton providing the perfect catalyst. That shaping has led to a party with little regard for honesty, fairness, or truth.
Sure some might say that’s just politics…
For the both sides, do it [folks]; go to the Republican National Committees website and look for their party platform; you will find a set of generic principles but no policies. Nothing exemplifies their lack of morality better than their embrace of racists, insurrectionists, the evisceration of voting rights, women’s rights, and most recently, defending guns to the literal deaths of children. Their platform in 2016 became a literal endorsement of whatever Trump said and a chicken in every pot. Sure I have beef(s) with the Democratic party, the intransigent infighting and inconsistencies of the party drive me crazy, but those are political, not moral evils. The Republican party is failing the country morally, and even worst, they seem not to care.
The blind defense of guns and how the Constitution has been turned on most of us like a weapon is maddening. The often-quoted second amendment never said every citizen has the right to carry any gun of their choosing. Neither did Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who loaded the chambers of gun lovers in the Heller decision. Justice Scalia’s decision, which is recited like gospel by the right-wing, never states the limitations of his ruling, “like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited” and that it is “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,”wrote Scalia.
It is not news that the dispute between Justices Stevens a Scalia centered around the wording and meaning of a “well-regulated militia.” What is not in conflict is that the low lives who shot grandmothers, children, and party-goers over the last few weeks are not a militia. Bubba and Skeeter throwing back beers at the local bar are not a militia, and neither is Pookie and Man-Man at a local “jawn” in Philadelphia. The only hunting an AR-15-style rifle is good for is hunting people, and unfortunately, it has proven to be very efficient. Two pressing issues will decide the prospect of America. Number one is the saving of the democracy, which Republicans have chosen to treat as a hindrance to their quest for power; Secondly, damn the future—our children.
Six dollars for a gallon of gas or four bucks a gallon of milk can be fixed, but with a Republican party willing to take the country down—imagining replacement, survival is fleeting.
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