How Can You Belong to This Party and Not Be Horribly Ashamed?
Seriously, how? I cannot understand anyone who is not.
The core of the Republican Party has become a group of children who just make up anything that they want and then angrily insist it’s true.
They have become a party of deluded conspiracy theorists. Whereas it was once a fringe thing to believe in stuff like Bush planned 9/11, where you would be lucky to find a fraction of a percent who believed such stuff, now sizable numbers of people in the Republican Party instantly believe every wild-eyed, fantastical accusation made by any right-wing pundit and politician, no matter how absurd or impossible.
All that is needed is for one pol or pundit to say something, like Joe Wilson shouting “You lie!” about Obama’s debunking of the illegal immigrant lie, and suddenly hordes of conservatives jump on board with him, echoing his words, making his erroneous and asinine outburst their new gospel. All Sarah Palin has to do is write about “Death Panels” on her Facebook page, and instantly millions of these birther-truther-tenther fanatics know it is god’s own truth.
60,000 to 70,000 of them show up for a march on Washington D.C., and suddenly it’s 2 million people and any other claim is a conspiracy to downplay their ability to mobilize the faithful.
Meet the new GOP: a party of six-year-olds, except without the social graces, mathematical abilities, or critical-thinking skills usually inherent in such a group.
Well either you’re insane — a Christianist, gun nut, goldbug, flat-taxer, etc — or still enjoying a whole host of tax cuts the Republicans got passed in 2001-2006.
When you don’t got the law, or facts, on your side, you’ve got to just bang the table.
This will escalate into another OKC no doubt; the lunacy runs deep and strong.
“All buy decisions come down to an emotion.”
Actually they are all 66 year olds.
An interesting thing happened on another web site talking about the “Old, White and Angry” crowd showing up at these rightwingnut events.
I pointed out how my father, 79, who was once a gentle, kind, considerate, circumspect man, that everyone loved and with great reasoning and creative skills, though politically conservative, modest in his bearing etc… is now, though functional but suffering from dementia, according to my mom is becoming a mean and angry old man. I figured out it’s because he listens to conservative talk radio or watches Fox News every chance he gets.
Everybody knows about con men and women who call old people and get them to buy the Brooklyn bridge over the phone. The fact is, when people age, one of the things to go are their critical reasoning skills. They become like children, who also are subject to cons at an early age (remember your parents telling you to stay away from strangers bearing candy). This is the reason why there are age restrictions put in place on a number of things.
Now, just figure Fox News and its confederates as a political version of the same old con thing.
What Fox & the like are peddling is the emotion of anger. It takes an emotion to hook people. Anger is easy enough.
Older people who have declining faculties, and younger people who haven’t developed them, are prey to the likes of these con men.
Once they have the emotion, they’ll go along with just about anything until reality confronts them really hard with really hard evidence.
By the way, the way, I meant to add two things.
My father is angry all the time, but because of his dimentia, he doesn’t even remember why he’s angry.
I posted comments like about, and quickly several other people said the same thing had happened to their parents.
Many of them had been liberal or life long Democrats.
I think there’s an interesting phenomena going on here. Especially if Fox and its confederates know what they are doing. It’s Sara Silverman’s “Great Shlep” in reverse, systematic, 24/7.
Interestingly, there are a lot of younger faces in those crowds, which is a bit worrying. I think they may be the Reagan “Me” generation, the forty-somethings who got theirs and now they are going radical not just because they follow anyone carrying the banner of Reagan, but also because they see any shift to the left as a threat to their current “I’ve got mine” status.
These are the middle-aged Christians who are going to the town halls and saying, literally, “Screw the 20% who don’t have insurance if there’s even an outside chance that it might affect my health care!”