Today's Republican Party Is Morally Corrupt

These two guys and, hell, the whole lot of them.

I don't say this lightly, and I admit the charge that a political party with whom I disagree on every policy position is morally corrupt might seem non-controversial, especially among members of my progressive-liberal-socialist tribe. I also feel comfortable inside the Democratic Party's big tent. There's room for radical progressives in there.

My tribe doesn't need to hear this, though it might help to rile them up to be sure to vote this November. I would hope to reach true independents whose fiscal conservatism pulls them to consider voting Republican. Don't do it! They're morally corrupt, and, to make matters worse, they're not actually fiscally responsible (they never met a war they wouldn't fund with deficit spending, admit it).

Now, as we approach the 2014 midterms, I find it a compelling use of my time to make it clear: On every level I can identify, the Republican Party has morphed, over the past decades, into an institution that is essentially morally corrupt. I'll write posts on every issue that demonstrates this.

Of course I'm not talking about every single Republican in the country simply because I don't know them. So I'm directly targeting the political leaders and the punditry that promote the Republican message. I could use the terms conservative, tea party, even libertarian somewhat interchangeably, but Republican works just fine. The party has essentially distilled itself into its most rabid, tea-party form. The Republican base and the politicians and pundits (including its blogosphere) have devolved into an entity whose near-total moral corruption is obvious.

And I can -- as anyone who possesses a moral compass -- offer empirical evidence across a broad set of policy statements and political positions of the GOP's immorality. Here's a list of areas in which moral corruption rules Republicanism:

• Climate change.
• Health care.
• Labor.
• Cutting Social Security and Medicare.
• People of color (yeah, they're pretty much racist, face it, they're predominantly white for a reason).
• Women's issues.
• The plight of the poor.
• The economy.
• Tax policy.
• Campaign finance.
• Anti-science, anti-intellectualism, historical revisionism to whitewash American history and its role in the world.
• Public education.
• Stance on technological advances versus fossil fuels (drill, baby, drill).
• War and the military-industrial complex.
• Obsession with guns.
• Use of the First Amendment to promote religion instead of using it to enforce, as the founding fathers intended, the separation of church and state.
• Favoring business over just about anything, pushing privatization while destroying public institutions.
• Encouraging the growth in student debt, opposing means of mitigating it.
• A consistent willingness to mislead, misinform, and deceive in order to move their policy prescriptions forward.

Okay, some members of the Democratic Party don't distinguish themselves, either. Rahm Emmanuel and Andrew Cuomo come to mind. But their antics tend to resemble Republicanism rather than actually corrupt Democratic Party ideals. Even blue dog Dems tend to err by promoting Republican ideas in order to cling to power. I'd work to replace the Emmanuels, the Cuomos, and the blue dogs with better Democrats, but never, ever with Republicans. Liberal Republicans like Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits, and Nelson Rockefeller simply don't exist anymore. They'd be Democrats today.

So, until the election, I'm going to hammer on the morally corrupt and repugnant Republican Party, and I'm going to relish the opportunity.

Oklahoma's Sen. James Inhofe: The poster child for anti-intellectualism.

Note.  I could, like Republican governor Bobby Jindal, refer to Republicans as "the stupid party" instead of the morally corrupt party. But in the evil/stupid dialectic, I've always considered it polite to not call them stupid. So morally corrupt it is.