Classical “republicanism” was all about the sovereignty of the people: of the people, by the people and for the people.
I truly wish that our current Republican Party were truly in that category.
However, these ain’t those folks.
These are “Fox News Republicans,” dancing arm-in-arm and in lockstep to the music of Big Money. “Of the people, by the people and for the people” is the least thing on their minds.
These folks have taken the NFL’s “Lombardi Doctrine” to an obscene extremity in prostituting their pretend allegiance to our country at the feet of a corporate capitalist presidential shyster.
Led by Trump, the Fox News Republican Party has sold us out because for them winning has been the ONLY THING.
For years now we have seen, read and heard Republicans posturing as “patriots” who with ugly disingenuity proclaim that welfare corporate capitalism is really the ideal of American society. This has been a blatant attempt by Fox News Republicans to claim ownership of our cultural and philosophical high ground.
If you buy into the sales pitch that Fox News Republicans represent our purest American values you have purchased the snake oil. You have fallen for the so-called “art of the deal,” and in doing so you have probably assumed that such snake oil is the liniment for “making America great again.”
I agree with Shawn Vestal of Spokesman-Review
Recall, if you will, the words of Cathy McMorris Rodgers, uttered in a press conference in the Capitol on Jan. 10:
“Let me be clear. No one who has coverage because of Obamacare today will lose that coverage. We’re providing relief. We aren’t going to pull the rug out from anyone.”
This was a surprising, even shocking, statement from McMorris Rodgers, who is part of a team whose goal has always clearly been based on just that: yanking that rug, hard, to lower taxes for the wealthy.
But, because this is a difficult thing to come right out and say in decent company, McMorris Rodgers and her fellow House repealniks have danced and dodged, finessed and fudged, omitted and insinuated that what they’re doing will not be bad for the millions and millions of Americans who obtained health insurance under Obamacare.
Her statement on Jan. 10, though, was of a different order than the usual slip-sliding. It was a clearcut, seemingly humane, recognition of a sense of responsibility for the potential effects of what she and her fellows were trying to do.
Which is probably why it didn’t seem even remotely true. That was confirmed later the same day, when a spokeswoman for the congresswoman launched the moonshot of oily political weaseling: McMorris Rodgers, the spokeswoman said, had misspoken. She meant to say “people who are covered under Obamacare will not lose coverage the day the bill is repealed.”
Ah yes. The day of. After that, though …
Read the opening paragraph by Abby Zimet, staff writer at Common Dreams.
Let ‘Em Die 
Rant time. The obscenities and idiocies of Thursday’s proposed budget are almost limitless.
Egregious examples: Slashing Meals on Wheels, which feeds a half million veterans and many (often-Trump voting) elderly residents while allowing them to stay at home, when one $3,000,000 golf trip to Mar-a-lago would cover 419,000 meals and, by year’s end at this rate, 20 million meals.
Cutting an annual National Endowment for the Arts budget that will only cover Melania’s security at Trump Tower for almost five months.
Cutting National Historic Sites funding that will give her a couple more months, or PBS, which is only worth three weeks.
Hiking the defense budget $54 billion for more war, which could fund conflict resolution work at the Institute of Peace for 1,543 years; their funding will instead be cut.
Slicing funding for low-income housing that could cause a new epidemic of homelessness. And, in one more vote for death and destruction, slashing climate change and other environmental programs as “a waste of your money.”
And please tell me how the public good would be served – what socially redeeming effect – would justify this:
Are we willing to concede that the Fox News Republican politics, culture and philosophy are more American than anyone else’s?
Curmudgeon at Work 