Why the GOP acts as it does

I saw an article in Vanity Fair Magazine titled: Met Gala 2023 Red Carpet: See All the Fashion, Outfits & Looks.

In looking at the photos, I suddenly understood something about the Republican Party.

I saw all those vacuous people,

dressed in outrageous costumes,

each trying to out-shock

out-shameless,

out-deprave the others,

I, at last, realized what you already may realize.

The GOP has become a fashion show

for empty-headed

vicious,

gun-toting.

bigoted haters.

You may remember when the GOP was the staid, common-sense party,

the calm, sober, solemn, religious party.

It was the party of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford.

No flashy, wild ideas there.

It was the party of kind, friendly, “everyman” Ronald Reagan.

It was the party of the Bushes.

That party had ideas:

Fiscal responsibility.

Business growth.

Military strength.

Above all, honesty.

It was the party of honesty (despite a few peccadillos here and there).

These people had honor.

Their lies were in the “normal” politician’s range.

They would be embarrassed by the public’s discovering their lies.

They were family men who didn’t cheat or at least hid their cheating.

Their voters would have rejected a man known to be a cheater.

The men were realists, so far as any politicians are realists.

They were patriots.

The believed in democracy.

They despised authoritarianism and the Hitlers, Stalins, Maos, and Mussolinis of the world.

Some were in the military.

They were intelligent men.

They attended church.

They surrounded themselves with intelligent people.

Similarly, their voters tended to be the more educated,

more intelligent,

more honorble people,

of the sort, who would not easily be conned by a carnival barker

or by a hate monger,

or by a superficial psychopath.

Each man was different.

Each had his faults.

But all followed the  overall straightlaced tendency of the Republican Party.

That was what Republican voters wanted.

Then came Donald Trump,

and everything changed for the GOP.

He lacked intelligence.

He lacked ideas.

He lacked a philosophy.

He lacked morals.

At one time he was a Democrat.

Then he was a Republican.

He lied incessantly.

Thousands upon thousands of lies.

He lied about his grades in school.

He lied about his “heel  spurs”

so he could avoid military service.

He lied about his business plans.

He lied in business.

He cheated his employees out of their wages.

He cheated his lenders.

He cheated his financial backers.

He criticized soldiers who gave their lives in battle as suckers.

He was not embarrassed by disclosure of his lies.

He had three wives,

and cheated on all three

and boasted about it.

He won not by expressing reasonable theories

but rather by extremism.

He won because he was outrageous.

He taught Republicans that to gain attention you have to be ridiculous to the extreme.

Being unintelligent

and amoral,

and incompetent,

he surrounded himself with,

or befriended

way to many unintelligent,

and/or amoral,

often criminal,

mostly incompetent people,

who had no plan for the betterment of America,

but only for personal power.

Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Tom Price, Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, Wilbur Ross. Steven Mnuchin

Scott Pruitt. Michael Cohen, Chris Collins, Tom Barrack, Dinesh D’Souza,

Michael Flynn, Igor Fruman, Michael Cohen,

Rick Gates, Duncan Hunter, Corey Lewandowski,

Paul Manafort, George Nader, Peter Navaro,

George Papadapoulos, Lev Parnas,

Brad Parscale, Roger Stone, Allen Weiselberg,

Lewis Libby, and dozens upon dozens of others.

Thus today, we have the GOP,

a party willing to forgive and and to cover up an attempted overthrow of the democratically elected government of the United States,

the single most traitorous act in America’s history.

We have the GOP, that features such lying incompetents,

who would have been ostracized from previous Republican organizations,

as Marjorie  Taylor Greene, George Santos, Kari Lake,

Madison Cawthorn, Herschel Walker, Rick Scott, Mike Lee

Ron Johnson, Ron DeSantis, Mitch McConnell, ,

Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan,

Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Paul Gosar,

Louis Gohmert, Andrew Clyde, Gregg Abbott,

Kristi Noem, Tom Cotton,

Marco Rubio, Tucker Carlson, Mike Pompeo,

the entire Fox “News” group,

Breitbart,

Kanye West,

QAnon,

OANN,

white supremacists, nazis, fascists.

All of this has become the new normal for the GOP.

Rather than despising despots, Trump and his GOP admire them

and hope to be them.

Trump’s admiration for Putin is legendary.

His affection for Kim is written in love letters.

His similarity to Hitler is stunning.

IN SUMMARY

The GOP has descended into performance art,

similar to Hollywood,

and fashion

where the most outrageous performer gets all the attention

and voices of reason are ignored.

Part of this is due to the Internet,

where people get their news in tiny bites

because there are so many sources of news

it’s difficult for anyone to focus on just a few.

To break through the avalanche of information, misinformation, and disinformation,

and to penetrate the public’s consciousness

the public has been conditioned to ignore the

safe, sane, and truthful

in favor of the outrageous,

“did she really say that”

lie.

And because the GOP has no real plans,

and primarily devotes itself to throwing stones

at any Democrats’ plans,

along with trying to reduce benefits for

the poor and middle-classes, while increasing benefits for the rich,

it devotes itself to the powerful emotions,

outrage, hatred, and envy.

Thus, you have Donald Trump convincing his MAGA base

that Mexican immigrants are rapists and drug dealers,

and blacks are criminals and animals,

and Muslims are terrorists,

and the poor are lazy takers,

and gays are “groomers,”

but nazis, white supremacists, and traitors attacking Congress are “good people.”

And his base, the MAGAs, being less educated and

possibly less intelligent than the median American

is more naive about conspiracy theories.

and believing of such conspiracy theorists as Alex Jones.

His base is the perfect audience for the outrageous lies thrown at them

And the GOP knows it.

So they give the people what they want: Lies, bigotry, hatred, fear, and conspiracies.

No, the government is not planting microchips in your body via vaccination,

and no, Hillary Clinton is not holding children in the basement of a pizza parlor.

An irreligious man, who cheats on his wives and consorts with hookers,

has the backing of conservative evangelical Christians (!)

and the Church of Jesus Christ Later Day Saints (Mormons) (!)

And somehow these religious people are able to justify their hatred of immigrants

and people of color, and gay people, and deny America’s history of bigotry,

and rationalize their blind support for a man so antithetical to everything their God has preached

because they are enthralled with his embrace of hell.

He has planted fear in their minds, and then presented himself as their savior.

and amazingly, they believe him,

so powerful is their hatred.

The more religious they are, the more they believe. Their piety has primed them to believe the impossible.

They confuse the man’s psychopathy with strength, though in truth, he is weak, morally, psychologically, and physically.

If the GOP was a TV show, one would conclude they have jumped the shark.

Through Donald Trump the GOP has sold its soul to the devil, and we all know how that story ends.

 

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

……………………………………………………………………..

The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

12 thoughts on “Why the GOP acts as it does

  1. Quite honestly, Rodger, I have followed you for years, but this time you outdid yourself with a straight, hard-hitting summary of where our politics stand. Until these events unrolled I would have never dreamed there was such a contingency of people in this country who could devolve into such a shameful culture and cult.

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  2. Greg Abbott demonized the victims of the Texas shooting. It says a lot about why the GOP loves guns
    Opinion by Amanda Marcotte

    The details of the mass shooting near Houston, Texas on Friday are harrowing.

    The suspect entered the home with an AR-15, allegedly intoxicated, intent on gunning down an entire family in revenge for them asking him to be quieter late at night.

    Two of the five dead were women who were found laying on top of living children, having died to shield them from harm.

    One of the dead was a child. The natural, human response is abject horror and sympathy for these innocent victims, who were just trying to live their lives and raise their children in peace.

    Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, however, has erased his own humanity in his ongoing bid to be a prominent leader in MAGA America.

    So he responded to the shooting by demonizing the victims, calling them “illegal immigrants” in his tweet about the crime.

    Abbott’s ugly words are being contrasted in the press with the reaction of San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers, who choked up as he told reporters, “My heart is with this 8-year-old little boy. I don’t care if he was here legally. I don’t care if he was here illegally. He was in my county. Five people died in my county, and that is where my heart is—in my county, protecting my people to the best of our ability.”

    An activist shared the permanent residence card of one of the victims, proving that “illegal immigrant” is just a racial slur that has no relationship to the actual immigration status of people who get tagged with it.

    The people were here legally.

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  3. Trump recently said his 47,000 “Series 2” NFTs sold out at $99 each in just under five hours. He had released his first batch of cards: a collection of 45,000 limited-edition NFTs at $99 each, which sold out in a day for a total of $4.4 million.

    What did the MAGAs get for their total of $8+ million?

    Nothing. Really, absolutely nothing.

    Like all of Trump’s failed projects, the investors were screwed. NFTs are smoke and mirrors, multiplied by 10 (Owners don’t even get to see the smoke or use the mirrors.)

    The ownership of an NFT has no inherent legal meaning. An NFT does not restrict the sharing or copying of its associated digital file and does not prevent the creation of NFTs that reference identical files.

    In short, each of you MAGAs, who paid $99 dollars to “own” the codes to pictures of Trump looking pompous, could have had (still can have) the codes free.

    But that is MAGA brains at work. Perhaps you MAGAs who paid good money for those codes, can find other MAGAs to buy from you.

    Hey, didn’t P.T. Barnum say, “There’s a MAGA born every minute”?

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  4. The GOP has more than “jumped the shark,” they have, unfortunately, deified the gun while managing to execute education. Common sense has been thrown out with the bathwater and replaced with diplomas for dumbness!
    (Have I jumped the shark yet?)

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  5. Very well said. I agree with every word … we no longer have two viable political parties, for one has been turned into a circus act, complete with numerous clowns.

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  6. Are they still paranoid about having a professional standing army while wrapping themselves in the flag? Someone once referred in a movie to ‘patriotism being the last refuge of a scoundrel’.

    Retired justice John Paul Stevens [1920-2019] in 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20180330024649/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens-repeal-second-amendment.html

    “Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”

    Standing Army: A professional permanent army composed of full-time career soldiers, and not disbanded during times of peace.

    Pretty sure the unregulated unorganized militia in abeyance has not been called out since the War of 1812 when it’s performance was quite pitiful: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3277

    https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246 – that is the extent of it’s regulation presently.

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  7. Does RMM have anything to say about the Senator Feinstein job abandonment fiasco? FBI, ATF, and all the other federal law enforcement officers have mandatory retirement last day of the month in which they turn 57; CIA they’re gone by the last day of the month in which they turn 65. Any sage thoughts about our congressional gerontocracy? When the dearly great leader Leonid Brezhnev keeled over in November 1982 the Kremlinologists all joked that the eightysomethings of the Poliburo and Central Committee were squabbling as to who among them would replace the dying seventysomethings of that creaking moribund system.

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    1. I’m 88, and I believe I could function far better than many of today’s Congresspeople. (Hello, MTG).

      I don’t think age alone is the issue. The ability to function is the issue, and I am not close enough to the Feinstein situation to make a recommendation.

      That said, there should be term limits on all elected officials and the Supreme Court, for exactly the same reason there is a term limit on the Presidency. With each year in office, the probability of incompetence and thievery increases.

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