What If The Republican Party Was Always Hot Garbage?

[Nevilledog]

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Stephen Robinson
@SER1897
How the worm has turned and devoured the very people who used voters' ignorance and fear as bait to win elections.

What If The Republican Party Was Always Hot Garbage?
Trump didn’t ‘hijack’ anything. He claimed his inheritance.
wonkette.com
8:38 AM · Aug 1, 2021

https://www.wonkette.com/what-if-the-republican-party-was-always-hot-garbage

Last week, Lauren Boebert, an actual member of Congress, called for the expulsion of Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger because they put the bipartisan in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's January 6 commission. She declared, "They are a cancer to our party and to our caucus, and they must be expelled from our conference."

Our party, our conference, she says. Boebert has stunk up the House for just half a year but she's claiming proprietary interest in the GOP. Kinzinger has served in the House since 2010 (an important date we'll return to in a moment), and Cheney's father is Dick Cheney, the former two-term Republican vice president over George W. Bush and one-time GOP House whip.

How the worm has turned and devoured the very people who used voters' ignorance and fear as bait to win elections. Kinzinger claimed recently, after the latest sedition caucus stunt, that "clown politicians" had hijacked his beloved party. But the circus has been in town for a while, long before former Alaska Governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin endorsed Kinzinger during the 2010 Tea Party takeover. Palin's lies at the time about “death panels" were just as repugnant as Greene and Boebert's anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Kinzinger defeated Democratic incumbent Debbie Halvorson 58 to 42 percent. It was one of the most decisive butt thumpings in the GOP midterm rout, especially considering that Halvorson won her seat two years earlier by a 24-point margin. Kinzinger might lament "outrage politics" now but it's what brought him to the dance.

*snip*

[Thomas Hurt]

1. yep, we have been headed down this path since Reagan.

[Chainfire]

13. I think that you timing is spot on.

Ronald Raygun taught the Republicans that you can break from reality with impunity. That if you act crazy enough, and heartless enough, long enough, it will become the new normal. Since Reagan, all Republicans have been trying to out-Reagan Reagan. Trump and DeSantis is how far we have come, but they may not be the limit of how far we are going.

The problem is now days, a Republican has to appear to be batshit crazy to appeal to enough voters to put him or her into office. The fate of the nation may well lie in the 30% of Americans who buy into the Republican system of governing with the fervor of a religious zealot. Nations have been brought to their knees by lesser numbers. We are not so "special" as to be immune.

Todays politics are a warning, it is up to us to heed it or keep our heads in the sand.

[ampm]

21. It's all showing up now

Yep, I grew up in Regonomic and it was brutal in Cal. But it the word IF that brother me, it happened.

[aocommunalpunch]

2. Then we don't need a strong Republican party.

We need to defeat them. They either are or are not "friends/colleagues across the aisle".

[dalton99a]

3. Before the MAGA scam, there was the Contract With America scam

[hedda_foil]

14. And in between was the Tea Party scam.

[dalton99a]

18. +1. Which gave fertile soil for Trump's birtherism

[lastlib]

4. "The Republican Party Was Always Hot Garbage."

There--fixed it for ya.

[Hortensis]

5. These people are always among us in every nation, whether running cold or hot.

Hopefully after this more people will understand that some people actually crave leaders who promise to smash their nation into fearful compliance.

[dchill]

6. The correct answer is "Duh!"

[rickyhall]

7. When were they not?

[WarGamer]

8. People make the mistake of assuming...

Trump is the leader of some movement. They think he's some Hitlerian "leader"...

When in reality, he's just the latest Spokesman for the movement that is decades old. Timothy McVeigh was "Trumpian" before Trump rec'd a single vote. Goldwater sounded like Trump decades earlier and Trump and early Reagan were pretty similar.

The movement is truly Conservative using the definition that they want things to stay the same as they were in the past. No progress, less equality...

And this movement won't stop with Trump exiting politics, either.

If the GOP found and got behind a candidate with a triple digit IQ, charisma and Trumpian policies they could win 30 States.

Fortunately time is not their friend. Progress is happening.

[meadowlander]

27. Grover Norquist has been saying for decades that their strategy is to elect

someone whose only qualification is that they can hold a pen.

The real power players in the GOP realised this with Reagan when they saw he could still function enough through Alzheimers to bring in the votes without inconveniencing them with principled policy views. They experimented with GWB and then they hit the jackpot with Trump.

The only problem with Trump was his ego and that he was too stupid to avoid alienating swing voters. They thought they had rigged the system enough that the second part wouldn't matter and they were almost right.

When they come again in 2024 it with be with more rigging and either a completely senile Trump or a slightly more politically savvy version of him.

[WarGamer]

28. +1000

[The Unmitigated Gall]

9. Nixon sabotaged LBJ's Vietnam peace talks

And ushered in the modern era’s “win at all costs” ethic.

[empedocles]

12. treason no less

[The Magistrate]

10. '64 And Goldwater Called The Turn, Ma'am

Nixon's ;Southern Strategy' sealed it tight.

Before then, there were genuine moderate, even liberal Republicans, though there was always an old guard of shell-backs formed in hate and opposition to President Roosevelt and the New Deal.

[TheFarseer]

11. Lincoln did some good things

And TR. So for the last 110 years, they have been hard at work screwing working people and the poor. What’s worse is TR was out of step with his party so it’s probably worse than 110 years.

[moondust]

15. Atwater Legacy

Seems the GQP succumbed to racism after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Atwater started injecting the steroids in the 70s.

[maxsolomon]

16. A succinct reminder. Or primer for the

"Bill Clinton took the GOP's best ideas and left them with Phyllis Schlafly."

MAGA is the Delta variant of Movement Conservatism. John Birch, Get Us Out of the UN, Nativist, Racist, Kneejerk Social Revanchism.

Sorkin's fictions are always comforting in that the characters are overly articulate. Never could handle the West Wing as a result.

[Under The Radar]

17. Why can't we have Aaron Sorkin in charge of Democratic messaging?

…or perhaps make him chief of staff or deputy chief of staff, or at the least let him write all of the speeches for democtoc leadership.
Heck I would vote for Jeb Bartlett over Joe Biden right now if given the chance.

[andym]

19. Nixon turned the GOP toward the dark side

His men have led them to the sewer: Roger Ailes (Fox News) and Roger Stone among others.
Btw, many African American leaders and voters were Republicans before the modern civil rights era/legislation.

[Yoyoyo77]

24. Don't forget Pat Buchanan. He had a lot to do with the GOP's radicalism.

[andym]

26. Yes. Forgot to mention Pat Buchanan. He was one of the worst of them

and was a "special consultant" to Nixon.

[Baked Potato]

20. Then there's the evil hot garbage. Common nowadays. Nt

[Bucky]

22. Trying to imagine Ike's Military Industrial Complex speech as a fundraiser

...which Eisenhower immediately turns into a personal slush fund, which he hands over to his idiot daughter and idiot sons to manage...

Teddy Roosevelt creating the National Park System... and then selling it off to Carnegie & the Rockefellers for strip mining....

US Grants reconstruction policy is.... (wait for it... wait for it...) a continuation of Andrew Johnson's

Yeah, no

[dalton99a]

25. +1. And Nixon had the decency to propose a universal healthcare plan

The current crop of Republicans is utter criminal trash

[Silent3]

23. If you go back as far as Lincoln it wasn't

But it's a shame you have to go back that far.

Pre-1960s, given that the biggest stronghold of racists was southern Democrats, I'm sure there are times I could have felt better voting for a Republican than a particular Democrat.

But the Republican party definitely started taking a big nose dive with Goldwater and Nixon, and worse, Reagan.

And yet I was still surprised (although perhaps I shouldn't have been) that Trump didn't shatter and split the Republican party. As low as my opinion already was of Republicans pre-Trump, I never realized so many were so capable of abandoning all principles, pride, decency, and sense, simply to cling to power.