Dear Republicans, You Deserve This

Dear Republicans,

You remember how this started, right? You got in bed with the 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore' Tea Party. You saw the Harvard Law Review Editor who just happened to be black and you lost your minds. You called him a Socialist. You said he never read the Constitution. You said he was a Muslim as if that were some slight when Muslims have fought and died for this country right beside citizens of every other religion. It was never enough. You never seemed to run out of the venom you spewed.

You played to the fears of white, male America. "He's coming for your guns!" How many did the Great Gun Grabber actually get? You stared at twenty children slaughtered in Sandy Hook and turned up your palms and said, "This isn't the time to talk about gun control."

You listened and half-believed the conspiracy theorists who talked about the great conspiracy of Sandy Hook and too many of you accused the parents of being actors. The best of you, who used to care about your country first and your party second, kept silent and eventually began to participate in the madness.

You sold your souls because you saw after Romney lost that you weren't going to be sitting your man in the White House anytime soon. Reince Priebus presented his autopsy of that election. To even be competitive, you have to carry 40% of the Latino vote and 45% of the women's vote. Let's not even consider the black vote which Romney lost by more than 90 points! Romney only got 27% of the Latino vote.

Did you learn from it?

You certainly swelled your ranks with a fresh infusion of "populist" infantry who had the audacity to say Obama was going to invade Texas in Operation Jade Helm. You said that he was born in Kenya and a secret agent of the Muslim Brotherhood. You were more angry at Hillary than at the murderers at Benghazi. You stood there, silent and complicit as every maniac with a mouthpiece or radio show lied and incited their listeners to hatred and worse.  When your cries of wolf fell on deaf ears, you turned up the volume.

The night Obama won, the establishment met in secret and promised to do everything to make him a one term president even if it meant hurting the country. That's what your partisanship wrought and what did you achieve? You wasted millions in taxpayer money to flog the Benghazi horse and you voted to repeal Obamacare sixty times. While you strained to do anything to make the President look bad, you shut down the government and cost the economy $24 billion. While you played brinksmanship with the full faith and credit of our government, what you really achieved was to convince the vast majority of Americans that you are incapable of governing.

This time you went to the natural end of your rope and jumped the shark with Trump costing you stalwart republicans like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol and any steward of the Nation's security. You nominated a man for his success in business even as many of his businesses were going bankrupt and are under investigation for fraud. You apparently learned not a thing from the political train wreck that was George W. Bush.

But this time is different and you know it now. There is no hiding the fact that white supremacists and the full complement of other racists and xenophobes have embraced your nominee publicly and loudly.  The last Univision poll Jorge Ramos reported had Trump with an 83% disapproval rating among Latino voters. The party that claims to be the defender of "family values" sent dreamers back across the border or deported their parents  so they have to visit them across a fence. Not only have you proven that you care nothing for their lives but your nominee intends to deport eleven million of them .

You've turned your back on the very heart of America by refusing immigrants citizenship because you know who your constituency is afraid of and what gets them to the polls in droves. You've refused to accept the economic reality that your supply-side economic dogma has failed everywhere it has ever been tried and it has wrecked economies in almost every red state to the point that we have a negative population growth because millennials are so saddled with debt that they can't afford children.

What you've shown is that there is no amount of money you will not spend to go to war but there is no service or entitlement you will not cut for the people who fight those wars. Our veterans can't even get routine healthcare because of your opposition to VA funding. You sold everyone on the premise that the free market and private business would run everything more efficiently than the government.  Yet recently the Justice Department announced that it will no longer renew contracts with the private prison industry after they proved over and again that they had no interest in reforming the abuse of the people they incarcerated and that the civil penalties you imposed were weak and ineffective.
You loved the free market so much that you put in a rider in Medicare Part D that forbids our government to negotiate prices for any drugs. The result for that unbridled "free market" efficiency is  $800 bags of saline solution! We pay four times more for healthcare than other industrialized countries and we get worse results. Where is all this free market efficiency you keep talking about? Medicare runs perfectly well and it's run by the government that you hate.

Then there's the post office that you have done everything imaginable to break. You set a precedent never seen anywhere in the world by sneaking in a rider that requires it to fund its health care costs 75 years in advance! You only wanted that so you could say that the post office which normally runs a profit is in the red.

Lies have a cumulative effect and now you're going to pay the price.

There are so many lies that you've told that you can't even spot the truth anymore. You've fought to destroy the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act in the vain hope of crippling the regulations that protect the people. You send buffoons to the Senate who toss snowballs in the Senate chamber as proof that climate change is a hoax while ignoring the fact that this past July was the hottest month ever since records began to be kept. Meteorologists are now saying the deluge of rain in Louisiana is a 1000 year flood that's done more damage than Katrina. What's your answer to these very obvious and troubling facts? You nominate the father of birtherism to say that climate change is a lie.
Fortunately for humanity, the millennials are now the largest voting block in American history and they aren't stupid enough to fall for your lies. They've had a sample of them and they know what it means when Republicans refuse to help ease the costs of student loans. They know what it means to be debt slaves because that's the American dream you've left for them and it makes them sick. They see you voting to repeal the ACA 60 times while they struggle to find housing.

That's what your intransigence and recalcitrance has bought them. They're not happy about it either. You're going to lose the presidency and the senate. You succeeded in gerrymandering the house so much that you might just keep it for a few more years but you are about as popular as Nickelback right now. That you won't get that allusion is demonstrative of how divorced you are from the youth you've fettered to protect your own bank accounts.

The conservative site RedState.com is desperately trying to put their finger in the dike.

But the current polling is so bad, as Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton, that the toss-up states don't even matter anymore. Excluding the toss-up states, RCP has Clinton up 272-174, which means Trump could run the table of NV, AZ, IA, MO, OH, GA, NC, FL and he still loses 272-266.

I grew up in a city that was a Republican stronghold back in the '80's, in the midst of a love affair with the trickle-down economics of Ronald Reagan, and I attended many gatherings in which your representatives at the time said all the things in private that you still don't have the courage to say out loud.

In a long article, "A Tale of Two Conventions," in the August 8th issue of The New Yorker, Jill Lepore–no supporter of your candidate–had the courage to say out loud that as the progressive movement began its gradual slide to the right as far back as the 1940's,

"a big problem with postwar liberalism was liberals' failure to really listen to the continuing populist criticism of the idea of progress" (Christopher Lasch. The True and Only Heaven).

In short, we have blinded ourselves to the flood waters of destruction rolling in from Tea Party Republicanism because our naive belief that all is well and our refusal to look reality in the eye have kept us too long trapped by our own dangerous idealism.

We might be less guilty than you, but we are not innocent.

In the eighteenth century, philosopher Edmund Burke famously said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Toward the end of her article, Lepore offers this startling bit of history:

"In 1992, the year Bill Clinton was elected, a letter to the editor appeared in a small newspaper in upstate New York. 'The American Dream of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries,' the letter writer argued. 'What is it going to take to open up the eyes of our elected officials? America is in serious decline.' It was written by a young Timothy McVeigh."

Dear Republicans, good men and women are finally fed up.  Watch your backs.  You deserve what's coming.

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