A “disclaimer of sorts” before beginning: I won’t be issuing more than one blog most days...or maybe ever again, and there will be days when I don’t post any. However, this is a fairly recent one that was posted on another site, but I thought it was good enough to check out here.
It must be said that I have NEVER supported the Republican Platform, being resolutely a Democrat both in party affiliation and in terms of moral conviction. However, at least at one time, the Republican Party actually had a platform, as wrong as I thought it might be in terms of getting the cart before the horse on many issues. However, generally, they had an understandable platform. The platform was clear. It was a platform that obviously valued the rich, including corporations, over the average citizen. If you have doubt about that, look at how many bailouts and “tax subsidies” were awarded to big corporations and how many deductions the super-rich was able to claim on their taxes under Republican rule.
However, in 2016, something horrible happened to the Grand Old Party as it used to be referred to as. It allowed itself to be highjacked by a pompous, arrogant man who saw the Presidency as being permission to “do anything he wanted”. Unfortunately, too many people in his own party were convinced or scared into agreeing and went along with this madman. So, now we have an entire Party that is under the dictatorship of trump, a man who has more Fascist tendencies than any other person that has ever been in the White House by far. The Republican Party is no longer a party of values and principles, but rather a cult of ego — the trump ego.
So, now let’s look at what happened to the party platform. In 2016, the platform was one that addressed the theory that America was exceptional. This has always struck me as bragging with little sign of true value-added to justify but still, that was the claim that the party put out there. They also complained about the fact that in recent years our enemies stopped fearing us, and our friends stopped trusting us.
But let’s look at what happened once trump got into office. First of all, the platform implied that we were going to do something to make sure our friends trusted us and our enemies feared us. What actually happened is trump managed to praise and uplift our enemies with “love letters” to two of the worst dictators in the entire world, Putin and Kim of North Korea. At the same time, he undercut our intelligence bureaus by announcing that he believed Putin rather than the intelligence services about the Russian activity during the election of 2016.
Ok, so that tells us what happened with our enemies, and maybe they don’t fear us as much as they did even in 2016, but what about our friends. Do they trust us more? Well, there the answer would have to be resounding “hell no!!!” He did nothing the first year or two but attack Mexico, Canada, France, or Germany, or on occasion all four at the same time. He reneged on the most successful treaties that had a high success rate: The Paris Accord, which showed great signs of helping to save the environment (whatever its shortcomings, it was a move in the right direction), and the Iran treaty, which up until WE reneged on it, had yielded considerable gains in terms of world peace. A treaty, I might add, that had the involvement of the international community so we were not “one man out” ….well not until we decided to renege and make ourselves “one man out” and show our allies that we could not be trusted….at least under trump.
In 2020, in preparation for the future, the Republicans decided not to even address the platform and the tenets included. Supposedly, the 2016 platform was still in effect, but that had been violated for the last four years. All they did in 2020 was re-affirm their dedication to the “America-First” agenda of trump’s. In other words, they re-affirmed that trump was “the man” and that whatever he decided on an often minute-to-minute basis was what we, as Americans, were going to have to accept.
So what does “America First” look like? Well, American Exceptionalism was supposed to be about America being a sign to the world of what freedom was about. We were to be a “city on a hill” pushing justice and equality. But what did America look like under trump? Well, if you were part of the Hispanic community, you had a good chance of being deported or separated from your family if you happened to have varying degrees of status. If you were a refugee, under threat back where you came from, you might just end up with your children jerked out of your arms and put in a concentration camp-type environment.
Oh, and there was a new war on the LGBTQ community as well, with trump denying and trying to throw transgendered persons out of the military who had served their country honorably for some time. If you were an average wage earner, you got a temporary tax break in 2017. However, if you were super-rich, you got a permanent tax break at a higher level percentage-wise. So, the so-called tax reform served as another giveaway to the richest among us while the average citizen was given a temporary cut that was likely within five to seven years to be a high rate than what they were paying to begin with. In addition to that, the Republicans immediately started threatening the social safety net for the average citizen in order to pay for the huge break given to the corporations.
I wouldn’t call that America First…I would call it “the Rich first” but unfortunately, that misnomer is precisely what the Republicans decided to remain with going into the future. Oh and let’s not forget the health of Americans before we get through.
We all remember Covid-19. In fact, it is still going on. I have been told by some in the trump camp that I should thank trump for the vaccine. I do NOT. I thank the medical people that came up with the vaccines. trump did the absolute minimum and in fact, denied the seriousness of the pandemic the entire year. We heard only 2 people had, then 15, then it was going disappear suddenly one day. In terms of medical advice, he implied that drinking bleach or some sort of detergent might cure it, or even maybe intense heat introduced to the body.
The man was nothing more or less than a menace. Yet, the so-called Republican Party has decided to simply re-assert their alliance to trump and make THAT their platform. Meanwhile, we have Biden as President, and the world has started trusting us a bit more again, and our enemies are being a bit more careful knowing that we are not going to have a leader for the next 3 plus years anyway that will take THEIR word over our own intelligence bureaus.
Really, Republicans, and you wonder why seven million more people came out and voted for Biden?? Or worse yet, you refuse to believe that many people say the horror of what YOU did with the Trumpian captivity of your party???
http://www.blogster.com/amodpovw/amod-the-2020-trump-republican-party-platform-from-the-rnc-website-compare-it-to-the-2016-gop-platform-and-you-can-see-how-biden-won#comment-30lx6
http://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/media/documents/DRAFT_12_FINAL[1]-ben_1468872234.pdf
http://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_2020.pdf