Earlier this year, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin went on a radio talk show hosted by right-wing extremist Bill Bennett and made racist remarks about poor people in this country:
We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.
There were several racist dogwhistles in Ryan's remarks. "Tailspin of culture", "inner cities", and "culture problem" refer to either black people or urban areas in this country with significant populations of black people in a negative light.
Who gives racists like Paul Ryan bipartisan cover? Democrats like U.S. Senator Patty Murray of Washington State.
Late last year, Murray struck a budget deal with Ryan that forces federal government employees and those who serve in our country's armed forces to effectively pay for the sequester cuts that weren't repealed by forcing them to pay more money than necessary into their pension fund.
Ryan himself bragged that he thought the budget deal was a "step in the right direction". To put that another way, Patty Murray's budget deal with Paul Ryan is a step toward Grover Norquist's ultimate goal of cutting social services and other federal government programs to the point of being able drowning the federal government in a bathtub, which would cause massive job loss, even worse income inequality than we have now, and a Second Great Depression that would make the first Great Depression and the Great Recession look like prosperous times by comparison.
While Washington State's largest city, Seattle, is enacting the most progressive minimum wage law in the entire country, Patty Murray is more concerned about being bipartisan with Republican racists like Paul Ryan than doing anything to make America a more progressive place to live. The great people of the State of Washington deserve to be represented by a real progressive who will fight to restore America's middle class in the U.S. Senate, not someone who would rather help Republican racists like Paul Ryan implement their draconian austerity agenda than do anything to make America a better place to live. Replacing Patty Murray with a real progressive in 2016 would be, in my opinion, even more of a victory than replacing Republicans like Mark Kirk, Ron Johnson, Pat Toomey, and Kelly Ayotte with Democrats would be, as it would be a huge step toward making the Democratic Party a more progressive party.