The whack-a-doodle—and dangerous—intentions of GOP hopefuls (They can't help it, Republi-KUNTS...are...SCUM.
by Joan McCarter for Daily Kos
Daily Kos Staff
Monday, July 03, 2023 at 10:43:00a PDT
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...dangerous-intentions-of-GOP-hopefuls#comments
It really is a race to the bottom over on the Republican side of the 2024 presidential campaign. Don’t look to them for any idea of hope and change and a society that can hold together for longer than one or two more generations. Nope, with that crew it is all pain all the time for someone. Only a few—the usual rich, well connected, and primarily white people—will be allowed nice things. For the rest of us, it seems to be an experiment in finding the most creative, brutal, and maximalist ways to punish us.
Ron DeSantis is trying to out-fascist Donald Trump. The two agree on ending the birthright citizenship created in the 14th Amendment and any other anti-immigrant proposal they can come up with. We’re just a spiral or two away from a proposal to impose the death penalty for illegal immigration. DeSantis also wants to scrap Trump’s criminal justice reforms, but apparently so does Trump. They’re both calling for the death penalty for drug offenders.
Trump’s other ideas, the ones he’s saying out loud, are the kind of public musings that killed a bunch of people in the pandemic—the horse dewormer, drinking bleach kind of thing, but at least less dangerous in the immediate term. He has his flying cars and his “freedom cities,” a “scheme that treats the rest of America like a disposable cup that can be ditched in favor of something new, shiny, and only for the select few,” as Mark Sumner wrote. Even Trump has managed to make a Jetson-like proposal dark and dystopian.
It is kind of amusing to see how self-serving this crowd can be. Take Nikki Haley and her bright, extremely ageist idea that any candidate over 75 years old should have to pass some kind of cognitive functions test in order to qualify. Man. Woman. Person. Camera. TV. Haley is 51, so of course this is all about the age of the current president and the frontrunner on her side. She won’t actually call Donald Trump incompetent and dangerous for all the reasons—treasons—that are well known to everyone, so she makes it about age.
On the other end of the ageist spectrum, Vivek Ramaswamy wants to raise the voting age to 25, a thing that is unconstitutional. Somehow he believes that doing so will make the people aged 18 to 25 more civically engaged. Apparently the idea is that if you threaten to take away their right to vote, this group will react by participating more. Which is probably true. If Ramaswamy’s proposal gets enough national attention, the 18-25 year olds will swarm the polls to vote against him.
Speaking of age discrimination, pretty much all of them want to begin the end of Social Security and Medicare. Trump might make noises about not touching the programs, but when he was in office he repeatedly tried to cut Medicare. Haley and Pence have made the most noise about “saving” the program by making sure it’s not available by the time people now in their 20s reach retirement age, if retirement age is a thing by then. It might not be if these Republicans get their hands on it.
Of course Social Security and Medicare are featured prominently, and of course they are saying they’re “saving” the programs by making sure they’re destroyed in the next few generations when the programs could actually be saved pretty easily by making rich people pay more taxes. That’s the solution to a whole lot of the problems the country is facing: revenue from the rich.
But it’s the rich all of these candidates are representing, when it comes down to it. They try to paper over their elitism when they go to New Hampshire and Iowa and participate in all those town meetings and county fairs and barbecues. The people at those events are the ones they will have no problem screwing over if it helps them and their rich friends.
Don’t worry about these crazy ideas, though, CNN says. They are just “big ideas” with “little chance of becoming law.” As if a Republican Congress wouldn’t be happy to enact any of this stuff. And as if the Supreme Court weren’t there to rubberstamp the very worst of them.
