I saw this retweeted from a friend of mine. This second-degree person tweeted this cover story from last week's/this weekend's New York magazine about what Republican voters in Iowa want in a president and which GOP asshole they are going to caucus for. After an introduction this becomes a printed version of a man-on-the-street first-person interview. The guy who tweeted it singled out four people and the quotes they said, and he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "No, this is not from The Onion."
After actually reading the shit these Republican caucus-goers said, I can see that he needed to tweet that disclaimer.
Seriously, these people are nuts. Well, that's a blanket statement. Many of them are nuts. All of them are wrong for voting Republican. A few of them are clearly sane, who raise good points and are thus people I think I can deal with while respectively disagreeing with them, if I ever go to Iowa willingly. Some of them have fears I don't understand. Several of them are downright stupid (the stupidest one: This Jamie Demers dickhead, who said that "If you're on some kind of society program ... your right to vote should be suspended." The hell?). And a couple of them are racist. The worst of these is Allison Doyle, a student who said she backs Trump: "If it's banning Muslims ... I don't know." Hey, you should copy your hero Trump and just say you're a bigot. Then you'll be showing your true colors so we don't have to waste time figuring out whether or not you are. And she's shown holding her daughter. Hate leaches into the next generation like lead from a Flint water pipe.
But put making fun of these people aside. This MOS story exposes what is really wrong with this country right now, and I don't think a lot of people are calling it like it is. Many pundits, including Charlie Pierce of Esquire, seem to believe that this xenophobia, this hate of The Other (and y'all know what I mean by that) germinated in the Republican party 30 or 40 years ago, right around the Reagan presidency, trickled down toward the masses through repeated lies about why the citizens of this country is getting screwed and who is to blame, and it has born fruit this millennium with the election of Barack Obama in the form of racism and paranoia.
I think this hate is being directed in the wrong direction. I don't think politicians have planted the seed of enmity in voters. I think people have been taught to hate by other authority figures, namely their parents, and that hate germinates out and up for someone to capitalize it for personal gain. In other words, I don't necessarily blame Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or any of these other GOP crackpots for sowing the seeds of hate; it was there well before they started running. If anything, they are cultivating that hate in the hopes of being elected Leader Of The Free World. And once that happens, they will do whatever they want, which either is exercising their power for fortune and fame, or helping their cronies exploit the people of this country for money ... which they will then blame immigrants or blacks or gay people (The Other) for stealing money from their wallets and purses because the rich plutocrats who really are stealing their money are telling these stupid people that they are stealing their money.
That's what this comes down to. We are the problem. The people of this country are the problem. And in this case, as made manifest in that New York article, it is these stupid, racist people, with this outlandish hate in their hearts for people who have done them no harm, that are the problem. These people voted on Monday, and they will vote this fall, in mobs, and they either are too stupid or don't care that they are voting against their own self-interest. So you see, Donald Trump isn't the problem. Ted Cruz isn't the problem. It is the sheep who follow these bigoted charlatans that are the problem, because it's these stupid people that have the power. And it is up to us, the correct-thinking people of this country, to rise up, in exceeding numbers, to defeat these enemies that walk among us. I hope that come November, people are going to wake up and see that the Republican presidential nominee is just a shiny object behind which lies the real cancer that's destroying the United States -- the people profiled in this piece.
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