Brodie Farquhar: Defeat the Party of Trump
For most of my journalism career over four decades, I was registered as an independent. After all, a partisan registration would make it all too easy to call into question my journalistic objectivity and integrity.
I’ve received both bouquets and brickbats from Republicans and Democratic politicians alike — a sign that I’ve done my job without fear or favor. I’ve also won 21 national, regional and press association awards in five states. I’ve made some people squawk, but I’ve never been sued for libel.
That being said, I’m calling for the complete and utter defeat of Republican candidates this Nov. 6. In my considered opinion, the GOP has turned into something both obscene and extreme as the Party of Trump, with most everyone too cowardly to admonish or rein in his worst ideas and pronouncements.
It has turned into the party of the 0.01 percent, the 1 percent and maybe the top 10 percent of the economic spectrum, as can be most clearly seen in the passage of a $1.2 trillion tax cut that primarily benefits millionaires and billionaires — not the 90 percent. And the GOP is coming after Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid next.
The GOP, and way too many establishment Dems, have facilitated the rise of a new Gilded Age aristocracy that believes dollars — not votes — should run governments.
It has embraced Nazis, racists, white supremacists and neo-Confederates — a result of Nixon’s Southern Strategy. We may not have Jim Crow laws anymore, but we’ve got the biggest prison system in the world, populated disproportionately by black and brown inmates.
It has been captured by a minority of radical evangelicals who want to roll back women’s reproductive rights, equal rights for women and even voting rights for women. These so-called Christians might best be called Yahwehists for their fixation on the Old Testament and ignoring Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and his injunction to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, shelter the homeless and welcome the stranger. These extremists would welcome a theocracy and dismantle the Constitution.
The GOP loves science when it produces bigger and badder weaponry but denies it when science says climate change is real, is happening right now and portends economic and ecological catastrophe. The GOP sold its collective soul to Big Oil and Big Coal, to keep those campaign contributions rolling in.
If you’re not alarmed, you’re not paying attention. Vote.
Sincerely,
Brodie Farquhar
Hayden
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