Great article at Truthout about the rise of authoritarianism in the GOP. I called it a while back in this blog, and it’s good to see I’m not alone. The time has come when comparing the GOP to the Nazi party really is valid and not a sensationalist ploy in an argument over policy. It’s part of a sane debate.
In my religion, we have a book of scripture known as The Book of Mormon. In it, there’s an episode when the nation of the protagonists is under severe attack from without and a group of people that want to subvert the freedom and justice of the protagonists refuse to help in the struggle. They obstruct the government of the nation at every step of the way. The protagonists refer to them as “the King-men” and call them traitors to their nation because of their willingness to betray the freedoms of the land for their own benefit. They hate the poor and despise the needy, while proclaiming their own righteous superiority. More and more, this sounds like a description of the Republican party to me.
Yes, there’s rot in the Democrats, as well. But it’s not anywhere near as bad as what’s surfacing in the Republicans. The Democrats can mess up the economy and get us in a foreign policy jam. The Republicans are on a course to create a republican dictatorship. Their politics are ruinous and their ideology poisonous. I know I have friends that are in the GOP, and I know they’re good, principled people. The problem is that the top ranks of the party are shot through with madness, money-grubbing, and megalomania.
To me it seems that people who align themselves too far on either the right or the left cause alot of the problems in our political system. I’m not talking about people who believe strongly in one ideal over an other, I’m talking about the ones who refuse to consider another point of view or a compromise. It’s often these people who create the “sound bites” and make both sides look bad.
I think majority of the politians, Democrat or Republican, are selfish. There are just a hand-full of incorrupt politians, because the corrupt ones say what majority of the people in the party want to here and that’s why the bad ones are elected into office.
I agree with Susan in that political parties are the problem altogether, and it is the people that place themselves at the extremes that deserve scrutiny. And while both parties are extremely flawed, the democrats are the lesser of the two evils. The GOP promotes and perpetuates the plutocracy in America and is obviously infected with greed. I found one section of the article interesting and amusing: it said that the media’s fear of bias has actually made them biased.