Jeb, Marco, Rand, Rick, Scott, Donald, Mike, Carly and Ben — oh my — are among a cast of marginal contenders for president.
All of the eager Republican candidates are ginning up for war and tax cuts at the expense of the middle class and an end to the Affordable Care Act, now serving millions at low cost. Familiar?
“Blame the president” and “Impugn Hillary” trump all slogans.
With neither a complex thinker, despite the new eyewear, nor an informed idea about navigating the complexities of 21st century challenges, and deploying the limited vocabulary of the practiced ideological pose, Republican candidates articulate the same mean politics with smiling faces, sadly, in the glaring absence of a clear and unified counter-narrative from the Democrats.
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God, war, Benghazi, freedom, fear, Benghazi, liberty. Redundancy?
Republicans have also incorporated a nouveau-populist rhetoric pilfered from progressives — poverty, the shrinking middle class, etc., while effectively opposing workable solutions.
Rick Santorum, without a hint of irony, suggests we should “blast the religious extremists of ISIL back to the 11th century.”
Lindsay Graham whines, “We’re all gonna die” if we don’t go to war. Jeb Bush offers us “The Right to Rise,” whatever that means, and Paul, Huckabee, Carson and company continue to speak in fundamentally forked tongues about the ACA, the economy and foreign policy.
While the candidates play games with other people’s money, our planet melts, infrastructure crumbles, wages stagnate and members of the American media talk to themselves, our democracy stands at a dangerous inflection point.
Marylouise Markle
State College
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