The GOP’s Greatest Enemy: The GOP
– by David Matthews 2
I hate cheaters. I despise cheaters.
It really goes back to when I was a kid and the other kids would cheat to get their way.
The only thing that I hate worse than cheaters are the cheaters that are allowed to get away with their games.
Cheating is anarchy in its purest form. It is the complete and utter voiding of the rules that the rest of us either agree to or are otherwise obligated to follow. Cheating spits in the face of those rules and it spits in the face of the rest of the people and they say “Nya-Nya! I’m special! Rules don’t apply to me! I’m better than all of YOU!”
People like that are the reasons why we invented things like the guillotine. No, seriously. It’s true. Read up on the French Revolution if you don’t believe me. In fact the whole period of time from the French Revolution to the reign of Napoleon could be considered society’s reaction to the blatant and institutionalized cheating done by the ruling class.
Of course we LIE to ourselves and we say that “cheaters never win” or “cheaters never prosper”, but in truth they do. They DO win. They DO prosper and profit from what they do. And they ARE allowed to get away with it. And sometimes they’re very BLATANT in being able to get away with it. In fact they are so blatant about it that you have to possess supernatural willpower to refrain from inflicting grievous bodily harm on them, partly because YOUR violation of “the rules” would not be tolerated even though THEIR violation of “the rules”, which predicated it, apparently is allowed.
But the worst cheaters, the ones that you REALLY want to inflict prolonged and grievous bodily harm on, are the ones that are able to get away with their anarchy by changing the rules. It doesn’t matter if it’s something in the fine print or some exception they managed to get passed into law, they are able to codify their cheating so that they are allowed to get away with their criminal activities and don’t even have to apologize for doing them.
And that brings us to the biggest cheaters in the world… yes, even bigger than Big Multinational Multi-conglomerate Corporations… I’m talking about the Grand Old Party, or the GOP.
I can’t even call them “Republicans” anymore, because their very continued existence is an out-and-out hypocrisy to everything that the original Republican Party stood for. In fact, the best way to describe the GOP of today is not “Republicans” but rather “Oligarchs”, “Kleptocrats”, “Plutocrats”, “Fascists”, or just plain “ANTI-Republicans”. And that last part should become clear when you compare their history with what they claim to support today.
And please spare me the endless email rebuttals saying that oligarchy, kleptocracy, plutocracy, and fascism are totally separate concepts. I KNOW they are! The problem is that the GOP borrows from ALL FOUR of those political philosophies whenever it suits them.
And also spare me the endless email rebuttal of “Well, the DEMOCRATS are even worse!” This article is NOT ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS! Again, this is another attempt by cheaters to get away with their criminal activities by changing the rules. It is nothing more than a cheap tactic to justify their own various crimes against society by simply saying that other people do the same thing or worse.
Hey, how many times are you able to get away with that in your own personal lives? “Well gee, Officer, you shouldn’t write a ticket for me speeding because OTHER PEOPLE do far worse things than this!” Yeah, go ahead and DO that the next time you get caught doing 70 in a school zone! I DARE YOU!
In fact the diversion itself is yet ANOTHER crime against society committed by the GOP and their supporters, because you cannot claim to support “law and order” and “the rule of law” while at the same time saying “well, we should be allowed to get away with anything we want to because the OTHER dominant party does even worse things. We won’t say what they are and we don’t have to come up with any evidence, but we know they do even worse things and that justifies our own actions.”
This is about the GOP, the ANTI-Republicans. The champions of the very opposite of everything their predecessors supported and fought for.
Case in point: the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Here’s a little history, folks. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 9th, 1868. It was written to bolster the efforts of Congress, as led by the brand-spanking-new Republican Party, to eliminate all efforts to negate the Emancipation Proclamation, which outlawed slavery. In fact, we had just waged a bloody Civil War over that very subject. Oh, and yes, the Southerners are still in denial about it and claim that it was about “States Rights”, but when you pin them down on what specifically they objected to, they will grudgingly admit it was about slavery, but I digress.
Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, you had three groups covered in the Constitution. First you had Congress, which was told what it could and could not do. Then you had the States, and they were told in the Tenth Amendment that anything that Congress doesn’t cover and what has not been reserved for the people, they were free and clear to do. And then you had the general public, which basically got the leftovers.
So for the longest time, state governments were saying “Well, just because CONGRESS can’t do something doesn’t mean that WE can’t either!” And that’s where we ended up with a whole bunch of restrictive freedom-hating “blue laws”. It basically was the state legislators slapping the American people in the face and saying “Nya-Nya! We can get away with this ‘cuz we’re not Congress!”
After the Civil War, those same slave-loving state leaders looked at the Constitution and they said “Well, CONGRESS may outlaw slavery and prohibit discrimination by race, but that doesn’t mean that WE have to!” And then they proceeded to write a whole bunch of new laws that would do everything in their power to NEGATE what the REAL Republican Party tried to implement. They wanted the newly-emancipated former slaves to not be treated as American citizens. They wanted to be able to deprive the former slaves of the very Constitutional protections that they themselves enjoyed.
In other words, the state legislators changed the rules to be able to get away with their continued crimes.
This necessitated the creation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which basically told state legislators that anything that Congress is prohibited from doing to the people, the states are ALSO prohibited from doing. You can’t overrule Congress (unless you’re the Supreme Court), you can’t usurp Congress (unless you’re the Supreme Court), and for good measure they also defined citizenship to being anyone born or naturalized in the United States, so the states could not re-define the former slaves as being foreigners if they were born in this nation.
In other words, the state legislators were told that they HAD to follow the rules, whether they liked it or not… and obviously they didn’t, otherwise this would have been a moot point from the get-go.
So now fast-forward almost a century-and-a-half… we have the GOP still around, we have the Democrats still around, and what is the dreaded bogeyman of the GOP? What is that “pressing issue” that they “NEED” to eliminate at the earliest opportunity?
The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
No, I’m not kidding. The GOP, the so-called “Republican Party”, is entertaining efforts to ELIMINATE the Fourteenth Amendment! The VERY CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT that their predecessors worked hard to get ratified!
And they’re doing this on TWO fronts.
First battlefield front: gay marriage bans. Well, actually it’s the “equal protection” clause that they want to attack, but gay marriage is a much better wedge issue for them and their theo-conservative base. As soon as certain states started thinking about allowing gay marriages, other state legislatures started panicking. So the GOP, following orders from their friends in the theo-conservative base, got a federal law passed that said that states can actually AVOID the Fourteenth Amendment and not recognize the legal marriage status.
No, that’s not a typo… the party that originally WROTE the Fourteenth Amendment turned around and got enacted a law that told states they were allowed to IGNORE it at their leisure.
So a federal judge rules that California voters can’t ignore the Fourteenth Amendment, so what do the GOP want to do? Yup, they want to once again find a way to get states to nullify the equal protection clause.
Now in all fairness, the GOP has been trying to get rid of this part of their own creation for a lot longer and for various OTHER reasons than just gay marriage. But the level of hypocritical polarization of this issue is so strong with certain Americans that they will use it to justify ANYTHING!
But if you thought the first battlefield front was low, the second one will really make you sick.
The second battlefield front: children of immigrants. YES THEY ARE ATTACKING CHILDREN! You know, children, their precious political sacred cows. And they’re being blatant about it!
You see, the big fear, according to certain neo-conservatives, is that people are coming into America illegally, having babies in the country, and then using those newly-born American citizens as the justification for them to stay in America. But rather than deal with the issue of immigration itself, the politicians find it better to simply attack the citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. They want it changed so that illegal immigrants can’t have babies here and make them automatic American citizens. They want to be able to take children who are born into this country and kick them out just because their parents were here illegally.
In other words, the GOP, which originally fought to prevent states from declaring huge segments of the populace to not be citizens of the United States, now are pushing for efforts to NEGATE THAT!
And it needs to be mentioned (although they would rather not) that this is the SAME general political group that firmly believes - or at least supports - or at least wants to explore the legal possibility - that the first African-American to be sworn in as President of the United States was not really born in this country… even though his birth certificate has been validated by TWO state agencies and every claim to the contrary has been proven to be fakes. Yes, they want to RE-DEFINE what “native born citizen” means so that having an American mother and being born in the state of Hawaii somehow “doesn’t count”. They would rather not TALK about that part of the deal in polite conversation, but that faction is still there and they are still making noise, and they ALSO want the Fourteenth Amendment to be changed, because they don’t like who is in the White House.
I could bring up plenty of other issues, other faults with the GOP, but I think I’ve made my point here.
Let’s get brutally honest here… the GOP’s worst enemy is NOT the Democrats. Their REAL enemy seems to be their own history. They were the ones that created the Fourteenth Amendment in the first place, and now, not only are the desecrating their own creation by doing everything to neuter it, but they’re using it as an election-time bogeyman, campaigning against the very thing they fought hard to implement. Why? Because it’s no longer working FOR them!
Here it is folks, the absolute epitome of a cheater: rules are only followed when they work FOR you.
And yet, that doesn’t even get to the lowest of low for this subject, because the next question that needs to be asked is… WOULD they actually get rid of the Fourteenth Amendment if given the opportunity to after the election? (Presuming, of course, that the voters make the mistake of giving them any more power than they already have.)
And here I would have to say they probably wouldn’t. After all of the fuss and the drama surrounding the various parts of the Fourteenth Amendment, the career politicians in the GOP would, no doubt, do what they have done with so many other political promises made during an election year… they will quietly dismiss it so they can focus their attention to other things that they would have a better chance of enacting. In other words,
You would think that the GOP, which tosses about words like “heritage” and “history” and “traditional” as though they suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome, would have a better appreciation of their own history. THEY CREATED the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent the VERY abuses that they are now guilty of, and now that it is no longer working FOR them, they talk about getting rid of it.
And in true cheating fashion, they will continue to get away with this double standard. They will continue to get away with cheating and bending of the rules simply because there is nobody left that can call them out on it.
Well, nobody except for certain Internet-based columnists.
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