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A Lesson in Republican Hypocrisy and Distortions
Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree
A Lesson in Republican Hypocrisy and Distortions
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Is the modern Republican Party really “the party of Lincoln,” and responsible for freeing the slaves? I don’t think so. But the GOP regularly, routinely, and with a straight face makes that claim. One Republican recently confronted me and stated the following:
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“It was Republicans who beat Democrats in the Civil War, thus freeing the slaves. It was Democrats who started the KKK as its military wing to intimidate the (largely black) Republican party who were running the south after the war. Can a leopard change its spots?? Are the Democrats now the party FOR the black people after being against them for so long? So many of you are duped by the Devil’s trickery. a few table scraps from massa’s table and you run right back to his side. The Democrat is the racist.”
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The above assertion is a prime example of how many Republicans can take a kernel of truth and create a banquet of lies. The truth is, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and so was Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King. But since the Civil War the Republican and Democratic parties have completely changed their relative political positions, so relative to political philosophy, the modern Republican party bears absolutely no relationship to its predecessor.
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Prior to the Civil War the Republican Party was made up of big business interests and Northern aristocrats, and the Democratic Party was made up of Dixiecratcs and Southern agrarian interests – farmers and slave owners. Thus, the Republicans were progressive liberals and the Democrats (or Dixiecrats) were Southern conservative slave owners.
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But that began to change during the Great Depression when Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came out against the corporations and to the aid of the poor with his “New Deal for the American People.” With the “New Deal,” Democrats ushered in workers’ rights. They created Social Security so the elderly wouldn’t have to go to the “Poor House” or become a burden on their children when they became too old to work.
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The Democrats also created unemployment insurance so people would have something to fall back on if they lost their jobs, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set rules of conduct for corporations that allowed workers to work with some semblance of dignity. The new law set a minium wage, overtime pay, child labor standards, and many other regulations protecting workers.
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Prior to the FLSA corporations could work employees for as many hours as they liked, and they often set wages so low that families had to send their children to work just to survive – and many of those children were maimed or killed because they had to work under the most horrific conditions, such as in coal mines and the like.
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But after President Roosevelt brought relief to the people with these “big government, socialist programs,” the Democratic Party began to become associated with the common man, and the Republican party embarked upon a single-minded mission to reverse these “bleeding heart liberal” policies and return America to what had previously been the status quo.
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Then during the fifties the Democratic Party came out in support of the Civil Rights Movement. As a result, during the fifties and sixties the Southern Dixiecrats became disenchanted with the Democrats and migrated to the Republican Party. At the same time, many Southern Blacks began leaving the Republican Party to become Democrats.
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Thus, the Republican Party is now a coalition of three separate constituencies with confluent interests. The first group is made up of traditional conservatives. These are highly patriotic Americans who believe in limited government, the primacy of the people over government, and fiscal responsibility. But the other two groups that have coalesced within the GOP are much more malevolent – international business interests, and social bigots.
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It is the former of these two, international business, that controls the GOP. It’s made up of wealthy and highly educated individuals with huge amounts of monetary resources, and thus, political influence – and they use every bit of that leverage to manipulate what has become their citizen army – the social bigots. These are the people who hate any and everybody who doesn’t look, think, and act like themselves.
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The social bigots are the people we see armed to the teeth at presidential speeches, disrupting town hall meetings, and fighting against their own interests. In short, these are the “Joe the Plumbers” of the world who are being deluded by corporatist propaganda. Also among their ranks are the diehard racists who are still fighting to promote a segregationist agenda.
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But the social bigots are merely the soldiers of the party. The corporatists, who control the GOP, have never lost sight of their seventy-year-old mission to undo the New Deal. But they’ve found that the safety-net that President Roosevelt provided for the people is much too popular to attack head on, so they had to devise a plan to chip away at it.
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Then came 9/11, so they decided to used the war in Iraq to ravage the national treasury. They then gave themselves a $4 trillion taxcut to further deplete the treasury, and now they’re telling the poor and middle class, “Sorry, but we no longer have the revenue to fund the programs that you’ve come to depend on for the past seventy years. And in the meantime, Gov. Scott Walker is hard at work in Wisconsin trying to dismantle the Fair Labor Standards Act.
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So, can a leopard change its spots? Yes it can – and with regard to the Democratic and Republican parties, the leopard has changed in a very big way. But the modern GOP has never been prone to allowing the facts to distort a well-crafted lie. That’s why they have such a fierce aversion to a well-educated electorate.
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Thus, the facts dictate that the modern GOP’s claim to have any connection with President Lincoln whatsoever – other than the enemy of everything he stood for – is not only a gross misrepresentation of history, but a blatant lie. The fact is, if the Civil War was being fought today, the GOP would be the Confederacy.
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. . . Don’t mention it, Abe. I got this.
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Eric L. Wattree
http://wattree.blogspot.com/
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
http://wattree.blogspot.com/
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
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Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=84310
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Posted by Eric L. Wattree on Mar 3 2011, With 0 Reads, Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Posted by Eric L. Wattree on Mar 3 2011, With 0 Reads, Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Corperate and political interest (and ordinary greed) bring inflated oil speculation prices, send American manufacture and industry to China and other countreis and have effectively ruined our economy. President Obama and the Democratic Party (expecting opposition from the Republicans and their corperate owners) need to tax imports. Ruin the Chinese economy! Think China, Mexico, India and other countries can do without our markets? No, they can not and we should not care.
Union Soldiers – Grunts and some cannon cockers had a bit to do with freeing enslaved people during the course of America’s Civil War. The treatment of the people freed from slavery for 100+ years after the Civil War is horrible – really beyond description. Post cards of African American Men murdered by crowds of white people were openly sold and mailed in The United States of America in the first half of the 20th century. An unkown minister – Reverened King and many, many other very brave people with organizations like the NAACP (that has been around for a very long time) took on politcal systems and after a lot of terror, disappointment and brutality, forced their way into American society. (I say forced because us white guys did not welcome minority folk with open arms. It tooks federal law. Federal Marshals and a lot of Naitonal Guard and Federal Troops to make us let African Americans into society.)
There are people in America today – and this is plain wrong – that want the issue of immigration to be put on the backs of infants – literally. For example, it is settled law that persons born inside of our borders are Americans. Real simple – not complicated at all. Yet – there is a real serious move to change the status of these innocents! Cowards does not adeqautely describe those who argue policy at the expected expense of infants!
Our country has policy, law and practice that makes people full citizens. I know – there are issues, problems, concerns. This will never change. People have failings. One thing is very true – the day to day American man and woman is a very decent person who believes in helping other Americans. To bad so many of the nice guys and girls in D.C. and kids in corperations make life hard on others. Not going to change folks. Our votes is the only way we can influence naitonal and state policy.
Don’t vote? To bad. Every day people need all the votes we can get.
Please support the health, welfare and future of babies born in America and the rights of all Americans to a decent standard of living.
Great article. Thank you, Sir.
Respectfully
Dale R. Suiter
Thank you, Dan.
I agree with virtually everything you said here, but too often we tend to forget the White Americans who believed in freedom and justice so passionately that they chose to sacrifice their lives during the civil War for that American ideal. More of them died than in any war that we’ve ever fought.
It’s important that we remember these men in order to keep race relations in perspective. For much too long we’ve allowed the political debate in this country to be controlled by the fringes of our society.
Eric
Yes nice history lesson…
It might be worth mention other hypocrisies like:
Gay rights, when many of their Representatives and Senators keep getting caught.
Fake Tea Party, sponsored by Murdoch and the Koch Brothers
The GOP filibustering when they do not get their way, that by the way is no longer filibustering, but just the mention of it. It’s more like a military operation.
This uncanny support for the US Corporate Health Care saying we have the best medicine in the world, yet ranking 35th worldwide in overall health, ignoring that most industrialized nations have a socialized healthcare system.
Absolute blind support for a fetus, but could care less about it once it is born to only be interested in it again once it reaches military age is ridicules at best.
If it isn’t obvious, Republicans are only interested in paying as little as possible or no taxes and getting the working class to pay their share. They think their pseudo political sleight of hand magic call trickle down economics was or is a reality. As we have seen in the past 2 years with their war hero Bush Tax Cuts, nothing further from the truth has been a result of this trickle down bull**it.
Nice lesson on the Republican party, but I don’t think there is much difference in the two parties. Where you get your money is the biggest difference but, I do agree that to a certain extent that race plays a part in party affilation. There needs to be a redistrubution of wealth in this country and the only way to accomplish this is through our tax system. If you agree with this, then you have to agree that Obama is a republican.
David,
You’re right. Both parties are corrupt. As Mort Sahl pointed out in the sixties, the difference between the Democrats and Republicans is if a Republican is late for an engagement and a homeless person is lying in the street, the Republican would tell his driver to roll over him. If a Democrat found himself in that situation he’d do the same thing, but the Democrat would weep when he felt the bumps.
So while I agree that both parties are screwing the people, there is definitely a difference between the two parties. The Democrats are just wimps, and they’re allowing the people to be screwed. But the Republican party is the screwdriver. Look at what’s going on in Wisconsin.
Nice piece! The correlation is an easy one to make, but needs to be made nonetheless. I appreciate the blunt manner in which you have done so. With simple observation it is plain to see the consensus of the GOP would prefer Jefferson Davis to President Obama.
Thank you, Andrew.
Your observation is right on the money, but of course, the GOP would vehemently deny it. “The party of Lincoln”- how could they even fix their mouths to say such a thing? That statement alone should render them either too stupid, or too disingenuous to be trusted to hold public office.