This may come as a great shock to many of my readers, fans, and followers, but I want the Republican Party to return to respectability. I want the GOP to return to the Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower days. On election day, I want to choose between the better of two respectables, not the better of two evils.
The biggest reason why I spend so much time satirizing the modern-day Republican Party is because I want its members to finally realize how the GOP has been hijacked by racists, sexists, homophobes, oligarchs, narcissists, conspiracy theorists, and phony Christians, and to take it back. Unfortunately, that has yet to occur, but I still remain cautiously optimistic it will at some point.
Segueing from that, a number of self-described Republicans are, to this day, still naively stuck on the party's name, claiming it represents today what it represented 150 years ago. I'm sorry, but the party names mean relatively little. If a KKK member was a registered Democrat in 1950 and a registered Republican in 1970, one thing's for certain - the guy is a racist. The fact of the matter is the Republican Party used to be more progressive than the Democratic Party in many ways, and at that point in time, chances are I would have been a registered Republican. But that all changed with the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. The two parties began to gradually swap identities to what they are today. Yes, many 2017 Democrats would have been Republicans pre-1964 and many Republicans would have been Democrats. In other words, it's completely nonsensical for a Republican Congressperson to say in 2017, "We're the party of Lincoln!" Technically, yes, but ideologically, no, and the latter trumps the former in terms of importance to a party's identity.
In saying that, I sincerely hope the few sane, moderate Republicans left in the party find a way to take it back and, in essence, save it. Over the past two to three decades, the party has been taken over by talk radio, cable news, conspiracy-oriented websites, phony pastors, oligarchs, lobbyists, and special interest groups. As sad as it is for me to say this, a majority of the party believes science is bunk, debunked conspiracy theories are accurate, fact-checkers are fake news, and opinions and facts are interchangeable. The Democratic Party is far from perfect, but at least, for the most part, it's reasonably sane. It tends to embrace science, equality, education, and progression. I only hope the Republican Party of the future is similar in those respects, for it's almost unconscionable at times, on election day, to think to myself, "Okay, so I have to choose between a candidate who lives in the real world and accepts it and another who has no concept of reality. Okay, this is a tough call..." For as staunch of a liberal as I am, it's never a good thing to have just one sane party from which to choose, and I'll continue to poke fun of the modern-day GOP until they finally wake up, look in the mirror, realize who they've become, and do something about it.
The biggest reason why I spend so much time satirizing the modern-day Republican Party is because I want its members to finally realize how the GOP has been hijacked by racists, sexists, homophobes, oligarchs, narcissists, conspiracy theorists, and phony Christians, and to take it back. Unfortunately, that has yet to occur, but I still remain cautiously optimistic it will at some point.
Segueing from that, a number of self-described Republicans are, to this day, still naively stuck on the party's name, claiming it represents today what it represented 150 years ago. I'm sorry, but the party names mean relatively little. If a KKK member was a registered Democrat in 1950 and a registered Republican in 1970, one thing's for certain - the guy is a racist. The fact of the matter is the Republican Party used to be more progressive than the Democratic Party in many ways, and at that point in time, chances are I would have been a registered Republican. But that all changed with the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. The two parties began to gradually swap identities to what they are today. Yes, many 2017 Democrats would have been Republicans pre-1964 and many Republicans would have been Democrats. In other words, it's completely nonsensical for a Republican Congressperson to say in 2017, "We're the party of Lincoln!" Technically, yes, but ideologically, no, and the latter trumps the former in terms of importance to a party's identity.
In saying that, I sincerely hope the few sane, moderate Republicans left in the party find a way to take it back and, in essence, save it. Over the past two to three decades, the party has been taken over by talk radio, cable news, conspiracy-oriented websites, phony pastors, oligarchs, lobbyists, and special interest groups. As sad as it is for me to say this, a majority of the party believes science is bunk, debunked conspiracy theories are accurate, fact-checkers are fake news, and opinions and facts are interchangeable. The Democratic Party is far from perfect, but at least, for the most part, it's reasonably sane. It tends to embrace science, equality, education, and progression. I only hope the Republican Party of the future is similar in those respects, for it's almost unconscionable at times, on election day, to think to myself, "Okay, so I have to choose between a candidate who lives in the real world and accepts it and another who has no concept of reality. Okay, this is a tough call..." For as staunch of a liberal as I am, it's never a good thing to have just one sane party from which to choose, and I'll continue to poke fun of the modern-day GOP until they finally wake up, look in the mirror, realize who they've become, and do something about it.
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