A Radical Party Based On Cruelty And Lies – Another Rant
When Paul Ryan realized his boyhood dream, a dream that has consumed him since he was sitting around a keg in college, to dismantle Medicaid, needlessly kill thousands every year, force thousands of others into bankruptcy, deny needed healthcare to millions of Americans, and give a massive tax break to the 400 families he really represents, he held another keg party in the Capitol with his Republican partners in crime. Then they all went to “celebrate” with their putative leader, an admitted sexual predator and tax evader who possibly colluded with foreign adversary to become President of the United States.
And how did these Republicans defend what they had done? They did what they have done for the last 30 years. They lied. Kevin McCarthy says “No one on Medicaid is going to have it taken away”. Steve Scalise assures that everyone who has a pre-existing condition and is currently insured will not lose their insurance and reiterates “Everyone”. Another GOP member claimed that 24 million will not lose their insurance but instead choose not to get it, saying, “the CBO said that 24 million people might choose not to stay insured because the mandate is being lifted”. Tom Price said today that the $880 billion in Medicaid cuts will “absolutely not” mean that people will lose Medicaid but, in fact, the bill ensured they will “be cared for in a better way”. And Raul Labrador denied that the bill would end up killing people, saying, “That line is so indefensible. Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.”
The Republican party started going really off the rails under Reagan. His huge initial lie was that tax cuts would pay for themselves. Republicans still point to that time as proof that they do when, in fact, the cuts blew a massive hole in the deficit and forced that last great reform of the tax code, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, in order to restore much of the lost revenue. He followed that whopper up in the Iran-Contra scandal with “we did not, repeat, did not, trade weapons or anything else for hostages. Nor will we.” We were and we did. But beneath those lies there was the increasing demonization of those who least able to protect and fend for themselves. There were the lies about the “welfare queens’ and the plight of the poor was because “government is the problem”.
Newt Gingrich took up Reagan’s mantle in the 1990s, and amped it up into the hyper-partisan attack mode and thirst for power that the GOP has been on ever since. One of his opening bombs was to accuse Democrats of being communists and saying, “When in doubt, Democrats lie”. He forced two government shutdowns. And he knew how to use the media. In Newt’s world, “The number one fact about the news media is they love fights…When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.” So fights he gave them, not only with Democrats but even with fellow Republicans, once calling Bob Dole “a tax collector for the welfare state.” Of course, the fact that Gingrich was personally a moral and ethical mess who used his office as Speaker for personal enrichment and illegal partisan activity did nothing to diminish his popularity with the newly powerful “Christian” conservatives. And the same cruel GOP attitude toward the poor was evident back then but best reflected in his 2011 comment, “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’, unless it’s illegal”.
Newt was followed by George W. Bush who was installed by a partisan Supreme Court decision that even its members knew was so bad that they never wanted it used as precedent after the Republican party decided to attack democracy itself and organized a riot in Florida in order to stop the votes from being counted. Bush, of course, lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the Mideast and people are still dying today because of that decision. He could cut taxes and wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but still felt comfortable enough to cut veteran’s benefits, attack reproductive rights, claim evolution was just a theory, begin the all-out assault on voting rights, and drive millions into poverty. And never forget Katrina.
Meanwhile, the Republican attacks on our democracy continued. Tom Delay was busy illegally gerrymandering the country to make sure the GOP stayed in power and John Roberts and the Supreme Court were doing their part to help by gutting the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Republicans in Congress did their part to obstruct anything and everything that Obama and Democrats tried to get done. And the lies continued. Climate change is a hoax. 47% of the people are freeloaders. Voting fraud is rampant. Tax hikes will cause a recession. The stimulus will cause interest rates to go through the roof. Obamacare has increased the number of uninsured. And all their lies reverberate through the right wing echo chamber of Fox, Limbaugh, and Drudge without any refutation.
And all this led the Republican party to Donald Trump, a congenital liar who blames immigrants and foreigners for everything wrong in the world. A thrice married sexual predator with six bankruptcies who accuses Obama of being a Kenyan and possibly colludes with the Russians to get elected was the culmination of what Republicans have been doing for the last thirty years. The media likes to say that Trump is a different kind of Republican because he bucked the traditional GOP orthodoxy on trade. The reality is that Trump is apotheosis of the thirty years of Republican lies and willful ignorance.
And the party’s first successful significant legislative act when they finally have control of the White House and Congress is to pass one of the cruelest pieces of legislation in American history. And they lie about it and they celebrate. And people who call themselves “Christians” will still vote for them. And their voters will still probably believe their lies.
To repeat Thomas Mann and Norm Orenstein from their 2012 book, “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” It’s only gotten worse in the last five years.
Masha Gessen, in writing about the rules for dealing with autocracy, stresses about the need not to normalize the behavior of the autocrat. But we have allowed the extremism of the Republican party to become normalized over the last few decades. Their excesses and outrages are simply accepted as something Republicans do. I don’t have the answer about how to change that other than to relentlessly resist and build a movement to vote them out of power until they become de-radicalized, if ever.
Significantly, the media has played an important part in the normalization process. This is Chris Cillizza’s comment after, as I say, Republicans in the House passed one of the cruelest pieces of legislation in American history. “When House Republicans secured their 216th ‘yes’ on the American Health Care Act Thursday, Democrats immediately began taunting their across-the-aisle rivals. ‘Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye,’ Democrats sang at Republicans. A few Democrats even waved goodbye. The implication was obvious: Democrats believed many Republicans had just cost themselves their political careers by voting for an overhaul of Obamacare. And the DC political class wonders why people hate them. I understand that Democrats not only didn’t like the way this bill was passed — without any estimates on what it might cost or how many people might lose coverage as a result — but also believed the policies contained in it would leave the country and its people considerably worse off. That is a worthy conversation to have. But, that’s not what Democrats were doing. Instead, they were jeering and mocking their colleagues.”
Of course, the “tradition” of the opposition party singing that song was started by Republicans when Democrats passed a tax hike in 1993, but Cillizza won’t mention that. And Cillizza was quite clear that a significant portion of the DC media class hates Democrats and that alone is far more important than anything Republicans might do, no matter how horrible. The thousands who will die, the millions who will lose coverage, they mean nothing compared to the fact that Democrats might have hurt Republican feelings with a simple chant. That chant is far more significant to Cillizza than the beer party and the premature celebration of GOP cruelty at the White House.
Until we change mainstream reporting like this, force the truth to be told, and win elections, it is hard to see the Republican party changing. After all, they get away with it. Donald Trump, as ignorant and horrible as he is, is just a reflection of the real problem, and that is the Republican party.Not only are Republicans Trump’s enablers, that fact that they could pass such horrific legislation such as the AHCA should make it clear as day that they are a dangerous, radical, and extreme party that must be fully repudiated.
Rant over.