Two Parties, but Only One if You Have a Mind and a Conscience
As Election Day grows ever closer, I hear rumblings that there are a few folks out there who are discontented and leaning towards “the other guys.” Well, let’s just recall who the other guys are and what they are about. It’s not as though we were picking between two equally sane and well-intentioned parties.
Here are a few pieces from this very blog from the last few years that illustrate the distance the GOP has put between itself and simple human decency.
- They have given themselves over to the lunatic, often-racist Tea Party,
- opposed in the most hyperbolic terms the inviting of more Americans under the umbrella of health care coverage,
- filibustered the Unemployment Insurance that keeps families above water (just to pick one of their many targets),
- refused to face the menace of climate change and stood squarely in the way of any and all attempts to do something about it,
- kept their feet firmly on the economic brakes (with the “sequester” and other economic growth-impeding measures), costing jobs and hurting Americans in perhaps-irrecoverable ways.
And that’s just what’s on this page…
Would I appreciate it if the two parties were competing and arguing honestly about ways to improve the lives of regular Americans? Absolutely! But that’s not the world we’re living in.
EJ Dionne on the Character of Today’s Republican Party
I’m catching up on EJ Dionne’s recent columns – a task that’s always worth whatever time it takes. If you’ve ever read any of his books or heard him on the radio or seen him on TV, you know how level-headed…
Health Insurance for Millions Threatened; Republicans Celebrate
Thanks to Paul Waldman for this: Health Insurance for Millions Threatened; Republicans Celebrate If they’re wondering why Americans think their party is cruel and unfeeling, well here you go. And will the news media tell these people’s stories? When news…
Fewer Americans Lack Health Insurance, Thanks to Obamacare
One of Obamacare’s main goals was to reduce the number of Americans without health insurance. Proof continues to accumulate that it’s succeeding in that. I’m seeing the above graph everywhere lately; this copy comes from Professor Krugman, who also takes pleasure…
Obama EPA Releases New Climate Rules
Of course Republicans are attacking the new climate rules. This GOP believes that if Obama says it, they are obliged to be against it. Remember, these are the same people who have spent the last 5 years insisting that health care…
ObamaCare Leaves Millions Uninsured – Conservatives Pretend to Care
…from Brian Beutler’s latest post, “The Right’s New Scam: Feigning Anger on Behalf of People They Encouraged to Skip Obamacare“: In a more sane country, everyone would be pulling in the same direction, so that the end of open-enrollment didn’t…
GOP’s Health Care Opposition Costs Real Lives
Here’s a story from last week in Florida about the real cost – in lives – of the GOP’s insane opposition to Americans’ obtaining health care. Some five million Americans – almost one million in Florida alone – who would…
More GOP Blackmail to Try To Prevent Americans from Getting Health Care
Sahil Kapur reports at TPM today: GOP’s New Plan: Pay Cuts For Doctors If Obamacare Isn’t Chopped House Republicans have a bold new strategy to attack Obamacare, which involves huge pay cuts for physicians unless Democrats agree to delay the…
Affordable Care Act Gives Workers Freedom; Republicans Enraged
Paul Waldman captures it succinctly: “Some Americans will leave the labor force when they can do so and still have health insurance. And it’s a good thing.” Look, the Republicans hate Obamacare. I get that. I don’t understand how you…
Why I Am Not a Republican, Part 326 (Arkansas Medicaid Expansion – Not)
Yet another story illustrating the depravity of today’s Republican Party. They so hate Obama and so hate the notion of doing anything to help low-income Americans that they’ve refused to expand Medicare in several states where they have control. They’ve…
Unemployment Insurance: GOP Filibusters the Unemployed
Well, the question never even made it to the House. It appears to have died in the Senate at the hands of the obstructionist GOP. Illinois Senator Mark Kirk went along with his GOP colleagues earlier this week in filibustering…
More Sequester Damage: America’s Scientific Preeminence Threatened
More evidence today from Jonathan Cohn on the damage being done by the GOP’s reckless use of the sequester to address the deficit (mostly a non-problem, which by the way is shrinking rapidly, though they won’t admit it). Cohn cites…
Obamacare Subsidies Mean Big Savings for Americans
As we approach the next rollout milestone for Obamacare this fall, the GOP is becoming more and more desperate to undermine it. You must be getting tired of reading stories about their Chicken-Little-ing over every small hiccup and their cynical efforts to…
Monstrous GOP, Part the 3,216th
I continue to be at a loss as to how any decent person, with even the slightest bit of concern for his or her fellow human beings, can choose to align with today’s GOP. Just in the last few months…
And there are many more illustrations of the depravity of the GOP as a party. I’ve documented a few but there are so very many other ways in which the GOP has demonstrated its fundamental unfitness to be in charge.
Why would a decent person choose to align with and support this malice?