Quote of the Day: Republicans Pass Big Cash Bonus For Don the Con

Here’s a quote from New York magazine, the last two paragraphs from an article about the tax cut passed by Congress a couple of days ago:

The Republican Party has decided as a whole to enable President Trump to conceal his tax returns, and further decided to pass a tax cut that rewards him personally. They have likewise formed a protective shield against the Russia probe, which is investigating Trump’s opaque ties to the Russian regime and criminal underworld.

The regular Republican Party of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of polluters and the financial industry once seemed to be set apart from its clownish demagogue presidential candidate. In rapid order, the strands have merged together into a party disdainful of transparency and united in self-enrichment.

Naturally, the Con and his press secretary have claimed, without evidence, that the bill would hurt Don financially.  That assertion is, of course, absurd, given the nature of Don’s business and the size of the estate that he will soon pass on to Don Jr. and Ivanka.  The merger of the victorious Republican Party’s image with that of Don the Con will only hurt them at the ballot box if the Democrats are able to cut through the propaganda being spread by organizations like Fox News with better propaganda. 

The best propaganda is the truth and the truth is that the Republicans are deliberately trying to aggravate the disruptive wealth inequality that has developed since the end of World War II and worsened since Nixon was elected in 1968.  What’s more, using the excuse of moral propriety, lies about in-person voter fraud, spurious ethical claims, and asserting religious freedoms that amount to discrimination, the Republicans are trying to enforce inequality in voting (creating an equivalent to the poll tax by enacting an ID requirement that poor people would have difficulty satisfying), prevent women from exercising their choice not to reproduce (by making birth control expensive and not covered by insurance, and restricting women’s access to abortion clinics), prevent people from poor families from going to college (by restricting college’s ability to attract able students without funds), allow segregation and discrimination in housing by private parties, make it impossible to form unions to represent workers and equalize the power relationships in the workplace, and so on and on– an ultimate libertarian wet dream for the wealthy and a nightmare for the rest.  

Don the Con has successfully fooled 60 million voters with his warm, friendly voice and his ability to lie without compunction to satisfy his current audience.  His real goals, other than enriching himself, are vague and malleable.  He has no over-arching philosophy of the ideal state nor any understanding of economics or science.  He is happy to hand over administration of most branches of government to those who have paid him the largest campaign contributions– people like Betsy DeVos, a vastly wealthy woman with no knowledge of the science of education but a fixed desire to promote home-schooling for religious reasons.  Don has no understanding of the intricacies of foreign relations and takes the campaign donations of Sheldon Adelson as instructions to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem– a move that virtually every other country in the world opposed in the United Nations.

Republicans with more political experience understand that they can’t blatantly expose their ultimate aims without incurring the displeasure of the average voter.  So they introduce the changes they want incrementally, on slippery slopes.  Just like Adolf Hitler in the 1920’s, they depend on the failure of their enthusiasts to actually read their “Mein Kampf” manifestos; their supporters merely watch and listen to their speeches and believe their lies, which change from day to day.  Like the Communists (and the post-Communist Vladimir Putin), they make use of democratic means to destroy democracy from within; once they attain ultimate power, they rig the voting process so that they can control the outcome.