Republicans Pull the Same Old Trick

And Democrats fall for it, just like always.  This is something that I've been meaning to write about for a while.  The recent dog and pony show in Arizona concerning Jan Brewer's veto of a piggish anti-gay law pushed me over the edge, so here goes:

Every time a Republican acts with the faintest shred of apparent decency, liberals fall all over themselves predicting that the fever has broken and Republicans are now going to return to sanity.  Even reliably left wing sites like Daily Kos and Crooks and Liars are acting as though this is true with the Brewer veto as well as with some other things the Republicans have said or done lately.

Well, everyone knows that the average American voter has the memory of a small mammal, but we expect our liberal pundits to show a little more retention than that- enough, say, to remember the last election cycle.  Apparently, that is not a reasonable expectation.  So, from someone who does remember, here is a pattern that the Republicans have repeated every two years for at least the last couple of decades:  They pass all the piggish legislation they can, squash the middle class, and pander just as hard as possible to their ignorant, vicious base, in the year after every national election.  In the year before every national election, they engage in a grand pretense of (relative) reasonableness, designed to fool the gullible voters into thinking that Republicans have at last decided to act on behalf of the American people, instead of the couple of thousand rich bastards whose money keeps them in office.

It works every time, too.  Right now, Republicans are running ahead of Democrats in generic election polling for 2014, and may well retake the Senate, despite the fact that everyone knows that the result will be a two year impeachment circus which will deal a death blow to any pretense of democracy in this country.  But at least we should expect our best pundits to recognize this inevitable phenomenon and make an effort to point it out.

I am sorry to say that, to date, I have not seen one single person except myself point this out.  Listen, I'm not any smarter or any more privy to inside Republican planning than any of these other guys, but somehow no one else has apparently noticed the latest chapter in this old, old story, guaranteeing that, once again, the Republicans' massive campaign of deception will defeat the truth, which seems to have no friends these days.

Comments

Poll P. said…
Why can the Republicans remember their game plan, and liberal pundits can't? Is it because one works and the other doesn't?
Magpie said…
About the dog and pony show itself:

Brewer vetoed because of the commercial pressures involved. No secret.
By now you will have read via Daily Kos of the bill called “The American Decency Act of 2014” which...

"would make it illegal for "self-declared homosexual football players" to join an NFL team unless it "provides facilities for homosexual players which are entirely separate and distinct from the facilities used by heterosexual players." A violation of that provision would result in a fine between $3 million and $8 million.”

the sickness of these homophobes is without measure, truly...

About the incapability of liberal pundits to see the cycle of Republican behavior that you describe:

The concept of basic decency presents both sides with a blindspot:

First of all, much of the Right has no idea what basic decency is.

Secondly, the Left often cannot imagine how someone could have no idea of what decency is.

I put my hand up as guilty of this same blindness from time to time. The number of times I have appealed on hostile Right wing blogs to the better nature of people who don’t have a better nature is beyond ridiculous. But you sometimes have to do this to be reminded of what it is the Left - lliberals, progressivism, science, civilisation, humanity – are up against.

Surely, says I, if I just point out that X is discrimination, that X leads to more general forms of discrimination, that such discrimination creates an environment that could get people murdered... But no. Long before I’ve got to that, their eyes have glazed over and they just start mouthing off about sin and how oppressed Christians are in America (hah!) and ‘liberal hate’ (oh God that’s funny…) etc etc etc.

It’s our version of the snake thing. Some still expect these creatures – the venomous Right – to act outside their nature.

But of course they won’t.
They can’t.
They’re snakes.
Green Eagle said…
Magpie, you are absolutely right. Republicans rely on the fact that the vast majority of Americans just cannot even conceive of the idea that one of our two political parties has become a seditious conspiracy consciously working to destroy the economy in order to seize power. I used to fantasize, semi-seriously, about Bush and Cheney lamenting to each other that the only thing Hitler had going for himself that they didn't was a depression. It doesn't seem like a joke any more- that is patently what many Republicans are up to, and most Americans will never be able to wrap their minds around that kind of self-serving viciousness.

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