Truth about where the GOP has come: a day of reckoning is upon them

Though perhaps too coarsely put, there is MUCH truth in the following article that states the political picture like it is, speaking plainly and accurately about the GOP and its presidential hopefuls.  Try as they might, the right wing can't any longer hold back true Christian principles that are being enacted by the Supreme Court for the people of our country.  Right wingers haven't noticed, because they live in an impenetrable bubble world of their own, that the majority of our country's people are not on their bandwagon of racism, hatred and ignorance.  Thankfully, the majority has open minds and hearts and can detect those negative qualities when they see them being championed and practiced by the right wing. 

Now, the next step for the majority is to be able to detect deceptive rhetoric spewed out by presidential candidates on BOTH sides of the political spectrum. We must, as a nation of voters, see through empty promises, immediately to be broken on attainment of the White House.  This discernment will lead us away from candidates like all the present GOP candidates and Hillary Clinton -- to truthful authentic candidates like Bernie Sanders, a real man of the people, dedicated to bringing back a better life for the middle class -- and calling out the wealthy elite corporatists who have usurped democracy and made our country into an oligarchy.  Capitalism has gone mad and off the charts in favoring the rich, under the rule of the GOP and the elite string-pullers who own the Congress, making them dance to the corporate tune. With even Pope Francis loudly siding with the common people, it's finally time to sweep the decks clean and throw the elitist assholes out!

As Bernie so sensibly says, "At a time when 99 percent of all new income is going to the top one percent, and when the top one-tenth of the one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, maybe it's time for a political shakeup in this country and to go beyond establishment politics.  Countries in Denmark and Norway and Sweden, they are very democratic countries. Their voter turnout is higher. Health care is the right of all people. College education and graduate school is free. In those countries, retirement benefits are stronger than in the United States of America.  What's wrong when you have more income equality and a stronger middle class, a higher minimum wage than we do and are stronger on the environment? We do a lot in our country which is good but we can learn from other countries. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any country on Earth at the same time as we're seeing a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires. I don't think that's what America is about." 

YAY, Bernie! A man of the people! He's got my vote!

THE GOP ISN'T IN TROUBLE BECAUSE OF THEIR RACIST BASE: THEY'RE IN TROUBLE BECAUSE THEY'RE ASSHOLES
By Trogg

Conservatives — whose week went bad when retailers stopped selling southern treason flags before turning unbearable when the Supreme Court re-shoved affordable health care down America's throat today  — are in a bit of a slump. After being smacked across the snout with a rolled-up copy of Modern Etiquette and told it was considered déclassé to wave a Confederate flag while killing black churchgoers, they are doing a little soul searching and discovering that their soul looks like a raisin that fell under the refrigerator over a year ago.

According to Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast, Republicans need to take a hard look at this whole dogwhistlin', red-meat tossin', hunkerin' down in the dust with southern yahoos and talking about them thar obstreperous and uppity colored folk.

The injection of Southerners into the Republican coalition—a coalition they ultimately came to dominate—couldn't help but change the image of the GOP. There were racial, cultural, political, and even religious implications. Republicans captured the South, yes, but the South also captured the GOP. There were no doubt many salutary benefits to this arrangement—most obviously, an electoral boon that lasted for decades. But it also guaranteed we would eventually see a day of reckoning.

Lewis then goes on to soft-peddle the "Southern Strategy," writing "Whether or not you accept that this was an intentional strategy…"

It almost as if he is blissfully unaware of the late campaign wizard Lee Atwater bluntly describing it no uncertain terms as the way to the promised land.  (Atwater died of brain cancer and on his deathbed repented for all the dirty tricks/lies he was responsible for in political fights.

Now the full interview, 42 minutes long, has been unearthed. Atwater's "n-gger, n-gger, n-gger" quote has emerged as a kind of Rosetta Stone for unlocking the political language the American right has been using for decades to siphon off white voters, especially in the South, from their formerly traditional home in the Democratic Party. Here is Atwater to explain it for the dim at heart:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "N*gger, n*gger, n*gger." By 1968 you can't say "n*gger"—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N*gger, n*gger."

I can see how someone might find that unclear when their thesis is dependent upon pretending it doesn't exist — but let's move on.

Lewis is concerned that, having allowed  their Confederate flag-waving crazy cousins into a Republican big tent that is whiter than a Wes Anderson movie, the Republicans can't get their message heard over all of the yee-hawing, drunken political fistfights, and guns a'shootin' into the air.

So here's what the GOP has to figure out: How do they continue to get the Bubba vote while shedding appeals to the cultural symbolism of the past? How do they sell their conservative ideas about free markets, strong national defense, and conservative family values to 21st-century Americans?

Here is the problem with that.

That is what Romney ran on in 2012 and the electorate was all, "Nah, we'll pass" and Romney at least had the virtue of seeming like a decent –albeit out of touch — guy with sincerely held beliefs that were equally out of touch with anyone not still living in the 50's.

This election go-around the party bus is top-heavy with smarmy assholes like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker, insincere assholes like Rand Paul and Jeb Bush, dumb assholes like Rick Perry, and executive assholes like Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina. To his credit, Marco Rubio to this point only seems like a sweaty overachiever, but the debates may push him into belching forth something equally assholish.

The problem for the GOP is both the medium and the message.  And even if they can somehow tamp down the party's inherent racism –which is a feature and not a bug — in an election that most likely won't feature a person of the dusky hue, they're still going to have to explain that giving more tax cuts to the rich, starting up a few new wars, stripping millions of people of healthcare benefits, while trashing women, minorities, seniors, the poor, unions, gays, and science is what America is yearning for.

Good luck with that, guys. See you on the other side.

In the meantime, they'll have to deal with the more virulent form of racism that under-girds the party and bubbled up to the surface like raw sewage from a broken pipe after Obama was elected, hoping to return to those halcyon days when the movement expressed their bigoty with more finesse and grace.

If not, well: you go to war with the racists you have, not the racists you wish you had.