I wonder if the “Duke” (John Wayne) was alive today, whether he would still be a Republican. Maybe you don’t know what “Toadie” is so I will tell you up front. It is a “Suck Up”. That’s what this post is all about.
Read moreTag: GOP
Favorites Sunday – About The Pope
This “Looking Back” post is about Pope Francis and how American Catholics saw him, but maybe more importantly how they might differ from the MAGA/Evangelicals who have moved to the extreme right in American culture.
Here are the words from the post five years ago with my highlights that I will talk about here:
When I wrote these words, Pope Francis had been pope for less than two years and was just getting his footing in the papacy. Five years later, it seems obvious that at least some US Catholics see him an un-Pope in the same way as I see the #CO3 (Current Oval Office Occupant) as the un-president.
Pope Francis has certainly shaken up the Catholic Church in many ways. To my mind he has bravely attempted to take it into the 21st century. Others see him as destroying the traditions of the church, and to them, traditions are probably more important than even the wordsf of Jesus. I just wonder how many of the conservative American Catholics side with him or the GOP?
To try to discover where US Catholics stand in the current US political field I found a rather enlightening article. Click here to see that source. According to the header at the top of this post it is split where about 40% will vote for him and 50% will not. (The grey bars are Catholics while the red bars are all voters including Evangelicals.) That is significantly better than the 85% of Evangelicals who totally align with his radical right stands. Since the majority of world Catholics are people of color, I wonder how the US split is among white Catholics and Catholics of color?
Personally, as an ex-Catholic (but maybe now I am really an in-my -heart Catholic) I see Pope Francis as fighting to take the church back to its roots in the words of Jesus. After having experienced the Protestant version of religion and their radical right political swing, if I do ever return to religion it will likely be the Roman Catholic version. At least Pope Francis’s version of it.
If They Were Smart…
It looks like the impeachment hearing are headed toward an end before Christmas. But, as usual I have a contrarian attitude toward that schedule. That is what this post is all about.
Read moreTo Spite Your Face…To Spite Your Principles
The Shift From Country To Party
Up until the last decade or so, if you asked someone which came first country or party, they would almost always say country. The utterly sad reality is that is no longer the case. Far too many of us now say their party affiliation is much more important, in fact they believe that those in the other party or the enemy! How did we get to this condition? That is the topic of this post.
Of course one of the prime causes is the current Oval Office occupant. He has only two things in mind. One is to do whatever Fox News tells him to do. The other is to do nothing that doesn’t glean support from his base. The other 70% of the country be damned, they simply are not part of his compassion if he even has any compassion. To a sane person, this modus operandi is insanity for he knows as a public servant his fate lies with the whole electorate. But I would be the last person to call the Oval Office occupant sane.
Here we are in a temporary stay of the longest shutdown in history and I’m willing to bet that after the stinging comments from Fox News we will have another shutdown in mid-February. Millions are affected by this idiocy. The constitution provides for a way to get around an incompetent Oval Office occupant, it is called a veto. The trouble is that the person who controls the Senate is hellbent on the party-over-country mantra. Nothing can be accomplished while he is still in that position of power. The GOP has the immediate ability to fix both of those problems but they presently are just too cowardly to make that happen. Why don’t they see that they are doing more harm to their party by refusing to use the veto override than linking their future on someone (or maybe two someones) who almost guarantee them to go down in flames in the next election?
Yeah, I continue to be an optimist and foresee the day in the coming years where serious changes will happen to bring us back to some decent level of sanity once again. Just don’t make me tell you which of the many possible scenarios that will cause it.
Vote Independent … But Maybe Not This Time
I am very serious about trying to wrestle control of our political processes from the two dominant parties. I am convinced that they are just too entwined in battling each other to be focusing on what is good for those who they represent. Adding another political party is critical to changing things. BUT, maybe not this time around.
There is one thing that should drive everything else in the political sphere in the coming election and that is to prevent #CO3 from doing any more damage to the democracies of the world. To do that Congress must be delivered to a party opposed to his madness. I would love to think that there are enough independents running for office to do that but I am for this election very skeptical of that possibility.
So, for the coming elections, I will be voting Democratic. There just seems to be no one in the Republican party who has the courage to stand up to the executive branch. They all are deathly afraid that the fringe who put the extreme narcissist in office might turn against them out if they voice a contrary opinion to #CO3. The only Republicans who are brave enough are the ones that are not running for re-election or are dying.
So, I will be taking off my third party hat temporarily to effect immediate change in the direction our country is headed. Maybe it is too little too late but I have to try.
Cutting Taxes Is The Easy Part…
As the new header says the GOP just loves to cut taxes but that is the easy part. They just don’t seem to be up to the more difficult part of cutting spending, or at least cutting it where a majority in Congress will agree. They most often propose to cut entitlements as they call them. Those are things that help the average citizen along in life. Things like Social Security, food for the poor, healthcare for those who can’t afford it are near the top of the chopping block list for them.
They don’t seem to realize that we are a nation that cares for the welfare of our citizens. We, as our constitution says, promote the general welfare of our citizens. We care for each other. The ironic part of the enigma related to this is that most of the GOP claim that the US is a Christian nation. Jesus, who is the foundation of Christianity, said the two most important things in life are to love God and to love each other. It’s hard to make anyone believe we love them while at the same time stripping a safety net out from under them.
I saw something the other day that shows that for the last forty years or so the Democrats have been more fiscally responsible than the GOP. One of the biggest flaws of the GOP is that they can’t stop throwing money at our war machine, even when they don’t need it.
