To spite the face

Well, my friends, looks like the Republicans are pullin’ out all the stops now. They are going full regress, layin’ it out there for everyone to see — especially their hateful, spiteful, frightened base.

Oh yeah, I’m tellin’ ya, the four remaining candidates are spewing such bile that it’s a wonder they can even speak after letting that kind of poison in their throats.

Here’s the Republican platform — although I can guarantee that most of this won’t make it on the “official” platform at the convention. Doesn’t have to. Whoever is the nominee will have already either directly or indirectly backed each one of these hideous “policies.”

• Radically alter Medicare, Medicaid so that it doesn’t cost the government a dime. If it costs the people who need it, too damn bad.
• Eliminate Social Security.
• Eliminate child lunches.
• Eliminate food stamps.
• Eliminate child labor laws.
• Drug test welfare recipients, provided there’s any welfare left to receive.
• Eliminate environmental regulations.
• Eliminate all unions.
• Eliminate labor regulations.
• Make abortion illegal.
• Make birth control illegal.
• Make extra-marital sex illegal.
• Make homosexuality illegal.
• Remove judges whose rulings are seen as “liberal.”
• Double down on the military.
• Attack Iran and anyone else they don’t like. Ignore atrocities committed by leaders they do like. Use nuclear weapons.
• Repeal the Affordable Health Care Act.
• Repeal the Voting Rights Act.
• Enact a national voter ID law.
• Cut corporate taxes.
• Eliminate campaign funding regulations.
• Enact a “fair” tax that benefits the highest income earners.
• Enact stiffer anti-terrorism laws.
• Drill the Arctic and anywhere else.
• Eliminate the endangered species list.
• Open up all public lands to mineral, gas and oil exploration.
• Eliminate public education.
• Eliminate public assistance for higher education.
• Ban Sharia law while enacting “Christian” law.

Maybe you can think of a few more. I’m sure I can, but it’s making me sick.

I’m bringing all this up to you because I’ve run upon the last straw, the straw that broke the camels back, which, ironically, is an old Arabic story, and we can be sure that Arabs, and more specifically, Muslims, will be in for a world of trouble should one of these Republican clowns become president — particularly should the Senate fall into Republican hands at the same time.

The last straw, in this case, was one Foster Friess, an extremist Christian — a very rich extremist Christian who backs Rick Santorum, who, in the absence of Michele Bachmann, holds the most extreme Christian views of the bunch — if you consider that Mitt Romney is not a Christian and Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich are just playing to get the religious vote.

The Washington Post later said he was “joking,” but I don’t think Andrea Mitchell took it that way. And what kind of joke is that? Something along the lines of Ron Paul’s “real rape”? Jeez, Santorum himself has said that birth control is “harmful to women.”

And on the very same day, Rep. Darrell Issa held a House hearing on birth control (what is this, 1970?) at which only men testified. That, all by itself, should tell you everything you need to know.

Goes right back to the source of the whole controversy — the president’s intention that all employers offer insurance to cover birth control to their employees. This, of course, upset the religious, particularly the Catholics, who openly oppose birth control. And the evangelicals jumped in too, to back up their new friends the Catholics, who, any other time, they consider a fake religion allied with Satan. Kinda like how the Jews are their friends because they’re in the Holy Land, which is very important to their fantasies about Armageddon.

The president didn’t do that, though. He relented. He decided that employers as Catholic charities and hospitals and such wouldn’t have to provide insurance for birth control. Instead, the insurance companies would reach out to women employees and offer them birth control free of charge. The insurance companies are good with that because birth control is a helluva lot cheaper than abortion or childbirth. But the bishops still oppose it, in the same way that they still oppose the Affordable Care Act even though it does not fund abortion, which was the reason they gave for opposing it to begin with.

Here’s the bottom line, people: I know some of you out there are not happy with Barack Obama, and hey, I understand that. But I gotta tell you something. You’re being unrealistic. If you want a truly progressive agenda enacted, you need to put a progressive majority in the House, a two-thirds progressive majority in the Senate and keep a Democrat in the Oval Office.

See, these idiots haven’t taken the close votes in recent years to mean they must be more reasonable. They’ve taken them to mean just the opposite, that they must tack even further to the right, even further off the chart of sanity.  And they’re doing that because they know there are many, many fearful people (hell, they’ve been fostering that for decades) who will follow them blindly into making the United States one of the most backward nations, socially, on the planet.I’m serious. This isn’t 2000, when your foolish following of Ralph Nader got us George W. Bush. Twice. This is far, far worse.

So go ahead, withhold your vote or cast it for some third or fourth or fifth tier candidate as a “protest” vote. But if you do, and the Republican nominee wins, you will have earned my undying scorn for your shortsightedness. I’m sure that won’t bother you.

But it might bother you if we move one step closer to an American fascist theocracy, because this election isn’t about a health care law that doesn’t go far enough, or warrantless or wiretapping, or same sex marriage, or any number of other pissant little items that don’t matter all that much in the long run because they can be easily changed in the future. This election is about the direction this country will go for the foreseeable future. A Republican administration will make it next to impossible to turn it around again — because that’s what they intend to do.

It’s our choice. We can get out and vote for the chance to really become what we say we are, or we can leave it to the fearful religious nuts and their regressive, backwards ideas.

I know what I’m choosing.