Opinion/Editorial
REPUBLICAN BY BIRTH, BUT NO MORE
The writer of this article is old enough to have been a delegate for Richard Nixon, to have been the campaign manager for the successful congressman in Orange County, California, to be the Madison, Wisconsin campaign manager for presidential candidate Bob Dole and to belong to the republican party all thought those years until George Bush Jr. was elected and proceeded to allow the banks to loan money to indigent citizens, evict them when they could not pay the mortgages, keep the houses, and then have the U.S. government pay off the defaulted upon mortgages. The indigent citizens got to go to the street. For the most part, since those ‘Bushian’ days, homelessness has been a criminal offense in almost all local and state situations. Barack Obama succeeded Bush Jr. to serve an eight-year term, during which neither he nor his administration ever went after the banks criminally or civilly for the grand theft the industry committed across this nation and to its most helpless citizens.
Hard to be a Republican, but it can also be hard to find the same kind of heartlessness in the democratic party. The second grand theft that drove me from the Republican Party was over the war in Iraq. Dick Cheney, at the start of that war, indicated that the war would cost about 22 billion dollars of taxpayer money. The cost ballooned to over a trillion dollars over time. It is of interest to note that the current war in Iran was calculated to end up having a cost of 22 billion dollars by the Secretary of Defense under Donald Trump. How lying and thievery repeat themselves in near identical forms and amounts.
The next big theft took place recently during Trump’s second term. Tariffs were applied across the world to most products imported to the U.S. The administration constantly harped, and to this day, it continues to broadcast that tariffs help the people in the U.S. by bringing back manufacturing and adding money to the surplus, even though there is no surplus, and manufacturing has not returned at all to the U.S. The worst part of this republican abomination and applied deception is the court decision declaring 122 billion dollars of tariffs illegal and the money be returned to the people, plus interest. The theft is not in the disappearance of that money but in how it is paid back and to whom. It all goes back to the very businesses that raised the prices of their products to cover the cost of the tariffs, as applied, and not to the people who paid the increased prices. The tariffs themselves were the first stage of the scam, and then the unjust ‘payback’ was the secondary theft.
Although I had left the party years earlier, it was still disheartening to see the next grand theft the Republican Party has supported. This one is called the Iranian War. After the 22 billion dollar ‘Cheney’ approximation was requested for funding the war was raised, as a part of the next coming budget, to one and a half trillion dollars. And here we all, as citizens, Republican and Democratic, are to be told that the cost is in the replacement of expended munitions, which, as in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran, must be manufactured and supplied by the mostly Republican companies that continuously build the U.S. war machine. The writer of this article was gravely wounded as a Marine Officer serving in Vietnam, then recovered and served in the intelligence community in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent considerable time in Iran before the recent hostilities.
The democratic party is not the party of coldness, lack of compassion, the violation of children (whether immigrant or not), the creation and maintenance of concentration camps for men, women, and children who are mostly innocent of everything but being brown and trying to survive. The democratic party is not trying to get rid of all black representation in our government. I know the democrats can be ignorant, self-absorbed, and even complicit in some of the great thievery or simply ignoring it going on before or around them, but it is so much ore New Testament than what I see coming out like fire and brimstone from most members of my former party. It’s not that I have fallen in love with becoming a democrat. Far from it. It’s just that I do not want to spend my last years like a man named Cheney, or Trump, or Hegseth, or any of the abusive, punishing Republicans who must spend their last years alive on earth having to hope against hope that there really is no heaven or hell, with special emphasis on that last word.
