April 21, 2024 - Republicans and a Recommended Book

 

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The Truth About Republicans

For many years, the Republican Party was the party of respectability. It stood for what most Americans saw as traditional values.  It was graced by the memory of Abraham Lincoln, probably our greatest president.  It favored healthy small town and rural values, and avoided being associated with urban problems, which even immigrants who initially settled in cities tried to escape.  It championed individual accomplishment and tried to discourage foreign influences as well as foreign involvements. Any hints of radicalism were left to the Democrats.  When crooked politicians turned up, they were not found in the Grand Old Party. That was the stuff of Democrats, rumored to be in cahoots with organized crime.  Choosing to be a Republican was the safe, honorable, and respectable way of being an American!

Republican women were sometimes known as ‘cloth coat Republicans’ because they preferred a durable, stylish, cloth coat rather than furs, and that symbolized to many the party’s ties to the common working person.  I recall, when growing up, that my father, a unionized salesman, selected the New York Herald Tribune as his Sunday newspaper of choice. I doubt that he agreed with its editorial page but that was the respectable thing to do in those days. He liked being seen as the reader of the Trib. (During the week, he stuck with the Newark Evening News, another conservative paper.)

But here’s the big news!  It is no longer respectable to be a Republican. It has become the party of permanent opposition.  Even worse, it treats those on the other side of the aisle not as opponents but as enemies.  Its strategies are based on lying and cheating. 

• It opposes a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion.  
• Its members oppose immigration policies that brought their own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents here.  
• It opposes government support of health care for all Americans and even minimal retirement benefits. 
• It readily accepts those who are against efforts to achieve racial equality and regulations to protect the environment.  
• It favors reduced taxation of the wealthy and businesses believing in the fairy tale that their wealth will ‘trickle down’ to those their businesses and investments employ. 
• It thinks isolationism is a valid defensive strategy 
• It says ‘no’ to regulating the proliferation of weapons among civilians. 
• It claims a close relationship to the Bible and wraps itself in the American flag, when in reality, its actions daily deny what the the Bible and the flag represent. 

But even then, it manages to maintain a patina of respectability.  Really though, that is just an illusion.  Some Americans, because of greed, selfishness, and possibly even fear of their innate prejudices being exposed, despise a democracy chosen by all the people, and most importantly, one that works to serve the interests of all of the people.  They ignore the equality of all men promised in the Declaration of Independence. These people have found a home in the Republican Party and have taken it over.  They are today’s Republican Party. 

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?  At first tolerated because they produced votes, the bait that attracts all politicians, some unruly and dissatisfied Americans turned to the Grand Old Party and soon they became crucial to its electing its candidates to any office whatsoever and had no scruples about lying to accomplish that.  Without them, Republicans found they could not win elections.  

Violence is not excluded from their tactics. Think of the rioters at the Miami Board of Elections in 2000, trying to stop the count of Florida’s vote there in the election that took the Supreme Court to put George W. Bush into the White House.  Think of the rioters who stormed the Capitol in January of 2021 to stop the electoral vote count. Think of the demonstrators in Charlottesville a few years ago screaming antisemitic slogans whom then-president Trump included among the ‘good people on both sides.’ Think of those feared by the witnesses, jurors, and Court officials in the current litigation concerning the defeated former president, defenders of whom are not beyond stooping to violence.  These are today’s Republicans!  Watch them gloat and threaten nightly on Fox News!  

They are not just blowing hot air. The stage for their acceptance of violence was set late in the last century with the rejection of government authority by the armed Branch Davidians in Waco who died fighting the enforcement of Federal laws, inspiring the terrorists who later blew up the Federal Building In Oklahoma City with great loss of life, and even some of the subsequent shootings at schools and entertainment venues. It was reinforced by the gross misinterpretation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court in D.C. vs Heller in 2008 allowing the proliferation of weapons in this country, bringing about thousands of deaths in this country over the years since then.  The pro-gun opinion of Justice Scalia (another flawed Republican idol) in that case will be remembered along with the Dred Scott pro-slavery decision in 1858 as one of the depths of American history.

These ruthless people have gotten control of local governments, school boards and many State legislatures and their influence has crept into the Federal government as well. 

You can find it, tragically, among some in law enforcement and in the military who confuse patriotism with Republican opposition to those they personally see as political enemies.  Some were even among those arrested for their participation in the January 6 rioting! 

They even elected a lying and cheating snake oil salesman to the presidency in 2016, who supposedly unknowingly, has been used by the nation’s enemies to further their causes.  Russian propaganda is voiced on the floor of Congress by those who couldn’t locate Russia on a map. The forty-fifth president still does not, along with many of his supporters, accept the fact that he was defeated in  2020! These are the people who pass as Republicans today. 

Republicans no longer condemn the world’s despots and dictators but seek to emulate their efficiency.  With the three politically motivated Justices that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell shoehorned into the Supreme Court during Trump’s presidency, Republicans try to twist our laws and legislative bodies to serve their purposes, many of which seem aimed at weakening our Federal government’s role in best serving the people, replacing it with easily manipulated State laws.

It does not matter that some Republicans are not as bad as others, because when push comes to shove, most hold their noses, and nonetheless, stick with their corrupted party.  While those Republicans who choose not to run for re-election, retiring from corrupted Republican politics, are to be commended, their replacements usually come from the ranks of the very extremists whose presence brought about their retirement.

 ‘Respectable’ Republicans like New York’s Jacob Javits or Nelson Rockefeller of the last century no longer exist.  At the G.O.P.’s 1964 Convention, Rockefeller was humbled by the supporters of right winger Barry Goldwater, where physical violence almost erupted.  Goldwater preached the backward looking, ‘off the wall,’ conservatism of author William Buckley (who was the ghost writer for Goldwater’s book, ‘The Conscience of a Conservative’).   Really, very few Republicans today have what is considered a ‘conscience.’  Or a heart for that matter. That year, 1964, marked what really was the death of respectability for the Republicans, despite traces of sanity sometimes being detected occasionally, such as when the Republican-controlled House depends on Democratic votes to act on crucial legislation, or in the personages of those like the presently ostracized Liz Chaney.   

That is why Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and even the naïve Ronald Reagan, who didn’t know what he was buying into when he accepted the support of these vile interlopers into the G.O.P., would roll over in their graves if they knew that Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed to be Republicans.  It is very simple, folks …

 

Do Gaetz and Greene Call fhe shots for the GOP?

To be a Republican today is a disgrace.  

JL                                        

 

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A Book to Read

Portions of my piece about the Supreme Court in the previous posting of Jackspotpourri were inspired by scholar Louis Menand’s review in the April 15 issue of the New Yorker magazine of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, ‘Reading the Constitution: Why I chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism.’ The book, Menand points out, ‘is accessible, rather repetitive, and neither theoretical nor technical … and addressed to non-lawyers.’  I’ve added it to my reading list.

JL                                        

 

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri

Strange “Hits’!  The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore has suddenly ceased. In their place, however, there have appeared large numbers of ‘hits’ on each posting in the hundreds, and as was the case with those from Singapore, but this time from Hong Kong!  I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them.  

Email Alerts:  If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do.  And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com. 

Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.

If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them. 

There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!   Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible.  If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you.  Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog. 

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter.  This is an election year.  Spread the word.

JL

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