by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Forgive me for the following rant, but someone has to express the righteous rage of an actual human being of common humanity at the current GOP horrorshow. Nobody in our media will do that for you. Molly Ivins is no longer with us. Don't expect a living political pundit to engage with our politicians on a basis of actual human feelings.
So here goes, my corrective to the usual political punditry.
Let me ask: is this what our politics has come to, when a once great party (Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower) fields a big bunch of presidential contenders — eleven! — who are all of them such truly stupid and horrible people, they're unworthy of being humans, let alone politicians?
First off, all of these candidates were hating on Planned Parenthood, a public-spirited organization that has been helping millions of women, especially poor women, since its founding by Margaret Sanger, one of the heroic women of the 20th century, who helped bring women the pill.
And there stood the only female candidate, Carly Fiorina, coming out with a bald-faced lie about a so-called Planned Parenthood video, which she says shows a fetus with its heart beating and its feet kicking, while a Planned Parenthood official talks about harvesting its brain.
Such a video does not exist, except in Carly's lying teeth.
Talk about a GOP war on women, when a GOP woman herself is leading the war on her own gender, and using a horrible lie to back up her hate.
So now the GOP stands for hating poor women. This is worse than their hatred of Mexicans. Or Muslims. Or black people. Poor women are the biggest demographic in the world. The GOP now hates most of humanity.
What a horrible bunch. A cancer in our body politic.
Moreover, Carly Fiorina, this poor-women-hating female of lying-through-her-ass horribleness, has no standing in the business world from whence she was vomited forth onto our TV screens. She was booted out as CEO by Hewlett-Packard for running it into the ground (its stock plummeted 52% under her leadership). As a failed CEO, she fired 30,000 employees while she, at the same time, tripled her own salary and bought herself a million-dollar yacht. No other company wanted to hire her after her failure; she spent a decade in the wilderness, before she decided to enter politics, another game she is going to lose, after already, in her first run, losing to Barbara Boxer, a woman whom Carly cattily derided as follows: “God, what is that hair? So yesterday!” (Now she is hailed for zinging Trump for his comments about her looks: what a hypocrite.)
This woman is a totally egregious spin-off from the greedy 1%, just like Romney, and she is now hailed as the winner of the debate. And second to Trump in the latest poll.
Holy cow. What has our nation come to?
The other candidates were a little better than her — they were just stupid, instead of being stupid liars — but not much.
Huckabee, hating on gays.
Walker, hating on labor unions.
Rubio, hating on climate change.
Dr. Ben Carson, hating on Obamacare, which he has likened to slavery (you'd think, being a brain surgeon, and a black man, he'd know better).
Ted Cruz, ever the raving lunatic, hating on everything that modern America stands for.
Rand Paul, Mister Flat Tax. Oy vey. A stupid idea invented by another Mr Stupid, Steve Forbes.
Chris Christie, whose own state, New Jersey, hates him.
Kasich, whom I don't remember for anything he said. Maybe he's sane, but I doubt it, because if he is, what is he doing in this crowd?
And Jeb Bush, who says his brother kept us safe. Sure, as safe as a frog in a jar with a scorpion. 9/11 happened on Jeb's stupid brother's watch because his stupid brother ignored constant warnings from the CIA that an attack was imminent. George W. Bush then went on to sacrifice 4,000 good American soldiers and half-a-million Iraqi civilians in a dumb war for oil, that ended up destabilizing the entire region and leaving us with the legacy of ISIS.
Those 4,000 soldiers don't feel very safe, Jeb. Neither do any of the many thousands who came back brain-damaged or missing a limb or two.
It says something about how talentless the GOP has become, when the guy they fielded as their presumptive nominee — before Trump came along to pee on his parade — is the brother of the worst president of modern times.
And all of these candidates, of course, saber-rattled like crazy (Fiorina again being the worst). All were real eager to use our military to threaten and thump everyone, a military that has proved unable to win any war, none of which they should have been fighting in the first place. But of course a Republican, George W. Bush, liked to start stupid and unwinnable wars.
These saber-rattling war-loving nutbag bullies made me think I was looking at a stage full of Dick Cheneys.
Yes, they were that horrible.
Meanwhile, what is Congress doing, controlled by the GOP because of gerrymandering? It now wants to defund Planned Parenthood, and is willing to shut down the government yet again to do this. It also wants to blow up Obama's Iran deal.
Our GOP Congress does not want to do anything for the American people. All these idiots want to do, is undermine the president. This Congress has spent the last five years doing that, and nothing else, to no avail. After all, Obama has a veto. So what they're doing is wasting everybody's time. If these silly GOP pols were solid rocks instead of people, they'd do better, because at least they would not be using up oxygen.
They are now the most unproductive Congressional House in history. Their only achievement has been to produce useless poop, like a factory farm of pigs.
Ironically, they happen to follow the most productive Congress, when Nancy Pelosi ran the House instead of the hapless Boehner, who can't control his own troops.
As P.J. O'Rourke, a Republican, wryly admitted: “Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.”
The overwhelming impression I got from the debate is that these folks live on another planet, completely out of touch with reality. They don't belong in America. They belong in some bizarre past, before Roe v Wade, before modernity happened, when women were supposed to be barefoot in the kitchen. They belong in the Middle Ages.
Nobody on that stage spoke about jobs, or wage stagnation, or our crumbing infrastructure, or anything your regular voter cares about.
Bernie Sanders comes up with more sensible policy suggestions in a single minute than it took the entire debate more than two hours to come up with absolutely nothing.
And of course, all of them were hating on Obama, who has more decency in his little finger than these horrible people put together have in their entire bodies from their hair down to their tippy toes.
Would you seriously allow any of them in your house?
The only sane statements came from Donald Trump, who said he's all for a progressive tax, because we've had it forever, and it works. He also said he would tax the hedge fund guys heavily. And that he was against the Iraq War.
When the only sane guy at the GOP debate is Donald Trump, you know what's happened to the GOP: they've gone completely bonkers out-to-lunch bizarro crazy nutsoid insane psycho stupid.
With this much craziness and stupidity, who knows how long the GOP will last? We know by now there will never again be a Republican president, because only stupid Republicans will be vying for that honor, and because it seems only stupid people become GOP politicians these days, and maybe because only stupid Americans vote for them.
If these candidates are representative of our country and our people, we are doomed to be forever horrible ourselves.
It's enough to make one lose faith in America.
But hey, let's look for a positive. Let's realize that these presidential candidates are there not because the people want them to be there. They are there because every one of them has a filthy rich guy or two behind him, trying to buy themselves a stupid president who'll blindly follow their orders (Trump being the only exception, since he himself is the rich guy standing behind himself).
All of these stupid crazies represent and speak for money and money alone: not for actual voters. The only thing that these GOP presidential candidates are any good at, or good for, is raising money.
Will Rogers was right: A fool and his money are soon elected.