The problem with Republicans …

(As promised, equal time.)

Rush Limbaugh once said most Americans naturally identify with Democrats. Republicans only get elected when Democrats screw up so bad the voting public wants to punish them. Once things get back to normal the public feels comfortable enough to vote Democrats back in.

I don’t always agree with Rush, but on this I think he’s on to something. 

Democrats have done a better job of positioning from a marketing standpoint. They are the “fun” party; the anything-goes party where you can do pretty much whatever you want as long as you don’t physically harm someone else – and no one ever judges you. It’s like having perpetually indulgent grandparents who always have a gift for you and never tell you “no.”

What’s not to like?  Sure, there’s a lot of weird stuff Democrats are up to but as long as it doesn’t affect you personally, who cares?  Plus, they always have a gift for you.

Compared to the Democrats, Republicans are pinch-faced party poopers. Republicans are the neighbors who call the cops on you for making too much noise and having too much fun. 

Well, of course Republicans aren’t all like that. 

But enough of them are to make those descriptions stick. And we can thank the far right wing of the Republican Party for that.

While the Democrats have managed to keep their far-left loons under relative control and still supporting the Party, Republicans seem unable to rein in their crazies.  Now part of that is because the media likes to focus on the far-right nut jobs disproportionally but it’s also because Republican Party mavens are afraid to confront the far right and the evangelical blocs. 

Consequently, Democrats stand for good times; Republicans stand for intolerant redneck Bible thumpers. Sorry, but that’s what the Republicans have devolved to as a political party.   

Democrats don’t claim to be for anything or anyone but the working class. The average Joe and Jane. The mental image is of a hard-working, lower or middle-class family, a couple of kids, in a decent neighborhood where everybody barbeques. The reality of who the Democrats represent is quite different, yet that’s the image they successfully deploy.    

The Republicans claim to be for the working class and small businesses. However, the mental image they convey is as shills for the ultra-religious, ultraconservative, creationist / anti-science fundamentalists who believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, that women should be subservient to men, and that homosexuality is an abomination to God punishable by an eternity in Hell.   

Who would you rather hang out with?  It’s a wonder Democrats don’t win every single election.

That’s not an accurate representation of Republicans, any more than it is of Democrats. But perception equals reality.

Every time the Republicans’ far-right crazies get on their soapbox, it leaves a mark.

All it takes is some Republican male running for office to say rape rarely leads to pregnancy because it’s not God’s will.  Or, some Republican getting a bunch of other Republicans to support legislation to address a “threat” that isn’t one – such as defining gender based on anatomy at birth, or marriage as only being between a man and a woman. It always seems to be Republicans pushing for laws enabling businesses to discriminate based on the owners’ religious beliefs, or allowing elected public officials to refuse to do their jobs for personal religious reasons.   

The Republican Party’s far right and religious right never know when to simply STFU. 

And Republican Party leaders aren’t willing to kick the party’s looney tunes to the curb.  Or put a leash on them. There are a lot of far-left nutcases in the Democrat Party for sure but Democrats at least have the common sense to realize you can’t let the loons be the public face of the party.

Worse, when some ill-informed Republican struts his or her far-right or religious-right creds – and basic ignorance of science, or even the Constitution – far too many other Republicans defend whatever nutso thing they said.

When elected Kentucky official Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because of her personal religious beliefs – even though the law said she had to – a number of “leading” Republicans leapt to her defense.  Why?  

She was wrong.  She violated her oath of office. There’s really no other possible interpretation of the circumstances. But the champions of the religious and social far right – like Huckabee and that pandering horse’s ass Ted Cruz – tried to make this Bible-thumping bigot into some kind of hero for religious liberty. Exactly whose religious liberty? 

There’s an Uncle Remus and the Tar Baby sense about Republicans as well.  They can’t resist getting sucked into the traps set by the Democrats. Then they flail about making themselves so wedded to a losing issue they look even more ridiculous.  And there’s no way out.

Some city in North Carolina passes an ordinance that all public restrooms need to be gender neutral. It’s a silly ordinance that’s wildly impractical. But leave it to Republicans to escalate this into a scenario where young girls would be forced to shower with adult men, and young boys with pedophiles – at least according to Huckabee and Cruz.

Democrats had a field day with that. They used that as evidence that Republicans hated the transgendered, the new politically favored victims du jour (less than one-tenth of one percent of the population), which in turn meant Republicans hated the entire LGBTQ community.

And that’s exactly how it looked.      

Holy Mother of God.  When will Republicans learn to stop rising to the bait?

Here’s the really, really weird part about Republicans:  Just about every single Republican I know personally – and I know a lot of them – is appalled by the current Republican Party, especially the far right and religious right factions holding it hostage. 

Yet they are equally appalled at the Republican Party establishment, which seems more and more like Democrat-lite. Republicans have had control of both houses of Congress for a long time and have done absolutely nothing except spend as wildly as the Democrats they criticize. Government continues to grow. More regulations are passed every day.  The debt keeps increasing.  Republicans seem impotent to stop the madness. 

Republicans have no solutions for anything. If the Democrats are the party of bad ideas, then the Republicans are the party of no ideas. 

In essence, my Republican friends increasingly find themselves voting against Democrats rather than for Republicans.  Republicans don’t seem to offer anything different or new except that they aren’t as bad as the Democrats. 

Based on their performance over the past few years, the jury’s still out on that.     

Now they have Trump, who beat the Republican Establishment while also beating the far-right and religious-right candidates, to win the nomination of the party. 

He's the wake-up call to the Republican Party. I wonder if they'll listen. 

The problem with Democrats …

(Don’t worry … there will be a follow up posting about the Republicans, too.)

It’s been said that if you’re not a liberal when you’re young you don’t have a heart.  But if you’re not a conservative when you’re older you don’t have a brain.

The Democrat Party has never grown up.  Democrats live in a never-never land of make believe still populated by Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and other wish-granting mythologies. They shut their ears to anything they don’t want to hear. They throw tantrums when they don’t get their way. They repeat the same lies over and over again as if repetition makes something true. They make up stuff when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

You can’t reason with them, any more than you can with a 4-year-old. 

When you try to pin them down on anything they’ve said or done, they defiantly try to avoid responsibility. They refuse to accept there’s a right or wrong – the only thing that matters is whether you get caught; even then you might have an out on a technicality.

I think that’s what annoys me most about Democrats.

Even when they are caught red-handed they try to find a loophole to exploit. They are big on “intention” as the only measure of guilt. If you can’t prove they “intended” to do something wrong, they expect to get off scot-free.  And proving “intention” is always subject to interpretation.

Ted Kennedy didn’t “intend” for Mary Jo Kopechne to die when he drunkenly drove off the bridge and abandoned her to drown. Elizabeth Warren didn’t “intend” for her claim of Native American lineage to have any impact on her ability to get a job in academia. Obama didn’t “intend” to bow to the Saudi king, or for the $400-million payment for the release of the Iranian hostages to be considered ransom, in violation of long-standing U.S. policy.  Hillary didn’t “intend” to lie to the parents of the Benghazi victims, or to allow classified State Department documents on her unsecured private e-mail server to be vulnerable to hackers.      

That’s the moral gray area in which Democrats thrive.   

Their other way to avoid responsibility is to claim that whatever they’ve done is not all that different from what others have done. So if others got away with it, they should as well.

That’s why you have Hillary now saying that other Secretaries of State used private e-mail. Except, of course, none of them maintained a private e-mail server, nor deleted all their e-mails when asked to turn them over to the State Department. But isn’t it sort of the same?   

It’s childish.  As I said, it’s like trying to reason with a 4-year old.

The truly sad part is that Democrats have managed to convince a large number of Americans that they have their best interests at heart. In reality they don’t; the only thing that matters to them is getting their way regardless of the consequences. 

They’ll do anything to get their way. They’ll lie. They’ll cheat. They’ll even try to rewrite history to provide justification for their actions. Essentially, they are morally and ethically bankrupt; the perfect personification of the United States of Me, and Me the People.

Their traditional supporters are also wholly self-serving. 

Our national motto – for now – may be “in God We Trust,” but the Democrat motto is more aptly described as “What’s In It For Me?” That’s why the Democrats have the unwavering support of the teachers unions, public service employee unions, labor unions in general, Wall Street, and of course class and race warriors. Democrats are the party of big business as well. 

Democrats don’t do anything in the public interest – be that making our military stronger, protecting us from terrorists, providing a business environment that creates more private sector jobs, improving education outcomes, reducing crime, cutting the size of government, or reducing government spending and the national debt – if that conflicts with in any way with their base. 

How Democrats keep winning elections – especially in our decaying urban centers – continues to baffle me.  I can’t think of a single major city with good public schools.  Or one that’s been regularly creating good private sector jobs. Or one that families with children want to move to. 

However, I can name any number of major cities with skyrocketing murder rates, historic high black unemployment rates, massive poverty and dependency on social welfare payments, widespread government corruption, and other objective measures of failure. They are all run by Democrats, and have been for decades. 

Plus, their residents reliably vote for Democrats in every national, state and local election.    

The real question is why? 

One possible answer is that Democrats like things the way they are – no rules, no legal penalties or social stigma for bad behavior, plus more and more free stuff. The poor are made comfortably poor with little or no pressure – or financial incentive, to be honest – to work their way out of poverty when all their basic needs are already being met.  Why bother? 

For white middle- and upper-class Democrats, there’s no need to actually get their hands dirty helping others – government does it all with programs paid for with their tax dollars. Sweet.

So better-off Democrats can live comfortably in their suburbs or their downtown luxury high-rise pied-a-terre and still feel good about helping the underprivileged without having any real contact with them. They don’t have to go into their neighborhoods, send their kids to school with them, find jobs for them, or even associate with them in any way. They’ve outsourced everything – including their white-privilege guilt – to the government.

That’s why so many of the really rich are Democrats; they’d much rather pay someone else – in this case the government – to manage the poor so the underprivileged don’t show up on their doorstep. 

The ultimate problem with Democrats is that despite all their conniving and planning to maintain control by any means just about everything they do in terms of government policy and programs is short term. They don’t even attempt to address underlying problems; everything is a quick fix for the issue du jour – not a long-term solution.

Financial crisis?  Bail out banks and speculators.  Economic contraction? Increase the number of people on food stamps. Soaring national debt?  Raise the debt ceiling.  The growth of ISIS?  Use drones to kill the leaders. Mass murders by Islamic terrorists in San Bernardino? Push gun control legislation. Growing illegal immigration? Limit border enforcement and stop counting.     

Short term solutions and quick fixes are no way to run a country as large and complex as ours. The constant lies, deceit and reliance on specious “technicalities” from the Democrats continue to erode what little faith most Americans have in public officials.

Then again, that’s what Democrats seem to want – no accountability for anything. 

Next, the problem with Republicans …  

Calling a spade a spade …

I bet that made you uncomfortable. Admit it.

This is what political correctness has done to us. 

It’s a harmless phrase about calling something exactly what it is.  But since it includes the word “spade” someone might interpret that word as a racist epithet.  

I’ve had Maine Coon cats as pets. “Coon” makes us all wince, too. So does “Negro,” even though that’s the Spanish word for black, and is an accepted anthropological term. 

For years the jingle for the Flintstones’ cartoon series ended with “We’ll have a gay old time!” I’m sure years from now that will be deemed unacceptable. Someone will find a hidden meaning.   

We live in a time when silly old series like Dukes of Hazzard are no longer shown simply because the car had a Confederate flag on the roof and was called the General Lee.  Huckleberry Finn, Dr. Doolittle, and Little House on the Prairie are being pulled from library shelves along with other classics either for being racist or culturally insensitive.

Where does it end?    

People actually search for sexist and racist innuendos in the strangest places – like the ice cubes in a liquor ad, the bubbles in a cold beer, and even Disney cartoons.  TV ads are scrutinized to ensure no one could possibly be offended.

Meanwhile, it’s perfectly okay to broadcast shows on basic cable during prime time – when kids are watching – that offer up murder, promiscuity, and gratuitous violence. These are sandwiched between commercials for products to treat erectile dysfunction, yeast infections, and herpes outbreaks.  Switch over to premium cable and the kids will miss the awkward-to-explain commercials but will be exposed to far more graphic treatments of sex, physical abuse, drug use and more, along with language that would make a sailor blush. 

Don’t get me wrong – I am no puritan; far from it. But I’m an adult. 

How do you explain erectile dysfunction to a 10 year old? Why should you have to? Why is it politically incorrect to allow children to read stories written more than 100 years ago simply because the words used then have now been deemed “harmful” to others?      

To me, it’s far easier to explain “nigger” Jim – one of the most important characters from Huck Finn, or Injun Joe from Tom Sawyer, in a historical context than it is to explain a man’s inability to maintain an erection, or what “if you have an erection that lasts more than four hours” means.

And that is my fundamental problem with political correctness. It’s solely in the eye of the beholder.  The rules constantly change, depending on the whims of a few.

If you read Huck Finn again today you’d probably flinch the first time you encountered the word “nigger” on a page. But then you’d realize the context was more important than the language used – a runaway child who partners with a runaway slave to escape a physically abusive drunken father. In many ways Huck and Jim are in equal straits. Jim and Huck are both treated like property – Jim by his owner, Widow Douglas; Huck by his alcoholic father, Pap. 

It’s a great story, written in the vernacular of a different time. Millions of kids read it without lasting psychological harm. If anything it probably made them more sympathetic to the plight of black slaves and the discrimination blacks faced. 

And it’s just a story, after all.   

What’s next? The Wizard of Oz was rereleased as The Wiz with a black cast. The latest incarnation of Annie features a black Annie.  The Honeymooners movie – a rip from the Jackie Gleason classic TV show – recast Ralph Kramden with Cedric The Entertainer. 

Why? 

I wonder what the reaction would be if someone re-released Porgy and Bess with an all-white cast? Or the classic Cabin in the Sky?  Should we ban Cinderella because it’s sexist?  What about Snow White – she can only be awakened by the kiss from the male prince?               

We’re all so sensitive now. We’re so afraid using a taboo word or phrase.

Except, apparently, Donald Trump. 

I think part of the appeal of Trump is a reaction to overbearing political correctness.  He has no filters and a lot of people find that refreshing.  So when he talks about radical Islamic terrorists or illegal immigrants it’s perfectly clear what he is saying – there’s no weasel wording about “radicalized jihadists” or “undocumented workers.”

In a speech the other night he addressed African Americans directly – something the Republican Establishment should have done for years but hasn’t. He pointed out the very obvious: African Americans have been voting for decades in virtual lockstep for Democrats, and what has it gotten them?  The inner cities run by Democrats are only getting worse.  Black unemployment remains stubbornly high. School choice – which would offer an avenue out of failing schools for black youth – is consistently blocked by Democrats and their allies in the teachers unions.    

Decades of support for Democrats – and even the election of a black President – have done nothing to help blacks. Trump put it succinctly – Democrats don’t really care about blacks; only their votes. He asked, what have Obama and Democrats like Hillary really done for black Americans, except to take their votes for granted?    

Trump added that if black Americans want real change they shouldn’t keep voting for the same people who’ve done nothing for them for years. 

That’s politically incorrect on so many levels – including criticizing our first black President for doing essentially nothing for the black community – but true. 

He also took on political correctness about Islam and respect for “multiculturalism” when he said:

“Anyone who believes Sharia law supplants American law will not be given an immigrant visa. If you want to join our society, then you must embrace our society, our values and our tolerant way of life. Those who believe in oppressing women, gays, Hispanics, African-Americans and people of different faiths are not welcome to join our country.”

Now, a lot of things Trump gets wrong.  He’s loose with facts, and he has a bad tendency to overreact to any criticism with low blows. 

But one thing is absolutely certain: he doesn’t give a damn about political correctness.  I have to admit I like that about him.  

In an era when safe spaces and microaggressions increasingly dominate public discourse, and when books written in a different time and place are suddenly being banned, there are a lot of us that, quite frankly, are fed up with it all. 

Our Constitution and its Amendments grant us many rights. But not the right to be protected from hurt feelings. You can't do that and maintain a free society. When you limit which words or phrases can be used -- or substitute euphemisms for otherwise factual descriptions -- you not only inhibit freedom of speech, but alter what's being expressed.  When you attempt to censor or ban artistic works -- be they books, TV shows, movies or whatever from years ago -- simply because they might offend someone today, where does it stop?  Who decides?       

That’s the real danger of political correctness.