What Did You Expect?

Today, people are bemoaning the choices that Americans have to make in their selection of a new president. This even after the adage, “people get the government they deserve.”

I believe the real problem began in America as Democrats sat around letting Republicans bash the Federal government and the hundreds of thousands of employees whose sole purpose in life is to make everyone’s life better. This process began with Ronald Reagan. Under Reagan, with reckless abandon, Republicans began trashing Federal employees and harassing them in the process and this election cycle is proof that their inflammatory practices are still at work. This caustic approach to governing has its roots in the Republican party’s dystopia where government attention to their misadventures is highly limited, if not entirely absent. Their mantra that “government is the problem, not the solution” is a false premise, more so when one considers just how much trouble people would be in without a properly functioning government. The hypocrisy of a modern “Tea Party” supporter with its Republican and conservative roots who screams at rallies to “keep the federal government out of my life” would resort to physical violence if the federal government actually stopped paying their Medicare insurance or allowed them to get food poisoning at their local Chipotle.

Republicans who want the government’s activities limited also want limits on the number of people who are actually hired to assist them and millions of other Americans with everything from ensuring trains move on federally-inspected tracks to airplanes that fly without falling out of the sky when not regularly maintained per federal mandate. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when there are not enough people at the Internal Revenue Service office to process your income tax forms, accept your payment and then have that money available in the federal coffers to keep the government running efficiently. Under the Republican-controlled Congress, the IRS has lost millions in government funding for its mandate over the years which has suffered egregiously. Only Republicans have actively sought to close down the government which costs taxpayers billions of dollars and results in lost services, closed facilities and eroded any positive feelings towards federal employees.

This brings us to Donald Trump. Trumpalumps have yet to grasp that the two reasons he is running for the highest office in the land are his narcissism and his belief that as president, he alone can roll back regulations which have been keeping the US from financial destitution. These criteria are Republican mainstays. The other things which Donald Trump has been caught doing recently are also part and parcel of his nature and profound lack of character. The Washington Post’s unveiling this week of a conversation Trump had with Bush scion, Billy, were not made in a vacuum. The flock of Republicans who have now officially disowned Trump as their party’s beacon have only themselves to blame. Trump won the nomination of a party of millions of people without any vetting whatsoever. Marriage infidelities and poor business practices aside, there is something more sinister in Trump’s attitudes; namely, that he shares his beliefs with a vast majority of his fellow Republican conservatives. For generations, the party has held the belief that women should stay at home, raise the children, clean the house and serve their husband’s whims. This is why the Republican party attracts violence-approving anti-abortionists like Ralph Reed and completely ignorant women like Marsha Blackburn. One only has to look at the number of Republican women historically serving in either house of Congress to see this is true. If you want to look for female role models in Congress, you have to look at the Democratic party which includes the likes of Barbara Jordan and Elizabeth Warren.

The reprehensible comments made by Donald Trump do not belong to him alone, nor should he be singled out as if they are. His locker room comments from a few years ago may be worthy of a 15-year-old pre-pubescent boy with serious psychological issues about girls and women, but they are part and parcel of what is wrong with the Republican Party today. It is outdated, backward-looking and in no way representative of a serious political party in the 21st Century. The fact that only Republicans with female offspring stepped up to criticize and/or shun Donald Trump merely shows the positive influence of current attitudes by women. I give him another week before having to resign. The Republican party should get what it deserves — their misogyny and backward thinking do not belong in the halls of Congress much less on the bench of the Supreme Court. Likewise, they do not deserve anyone’s vote.