Conservatives Do Not Love America. They Are Devoted to an Illusion.

Despite the required American flag lapel pin or patriotic scarf and the hyperbolic rhetoric, today’s Tea Party conservatives clearly do not love America, not the America this country’s founders envisioned. What they do love is a fairy tale version of America created from a thoroughly scrubbed and sanitized history, a totally fabricated understanding of the founders’ beliefs and motivations, and a deeply flawed reading of the Constitution and how it is to be interpreted.

No, conservatives don’t love America, they love their made up country that, if they could magically conjure it up, would be a corporatacracy with a thin veneer of theocracy laid over the top to appease the already self-deluded evangelical wing. We live in something like that now, but in their version, there would be no social safety net, no social security and everything that could be privatized, would be. If you think homelessness and poverty are bad now, America a la Cruz would make the Great Depression look like a family picnic.

George Bush once famously said that terrorists attack us because they hate our freedoms. The same can be said for the Tea Party crowd. They hate the idea that women should have freedom over their own bodies, they hate the idea that the government should help elderly Americans to have the freedom to live lives of dignity in their final years, they hate the idea that American workers should have the freedom to demand living wages and benefits from their employers, and they hate the idea that two people in love, who happen to be the same sex, should have the freedom to marry,

I wish I could give conservatives their own country to ruin instead of trying to ruin mine. Not interested in working to fix the problems that truly matter to Americans, like climate change, rampant gun violence, income inequality, a crippled public education system and soaring college debt, they want to waste precious time and energy on the War on Christmas and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Benghazi!!!

Conservatives want to destroy American to try and save it. They want to tear down the country the founders envisioned and replace it with something else that is to them a dream come true, but to the rest of us a living nightmare.

The Republican Party: Draping Unfettered Greed in American Flags

In response to a question about income inequality, Sen. Rand Paul said this:

"I think it's both government policy and some of the way that economic fruits are distributed. And I think it would be foolish for anyone to argue that it doesn't have something to do with work and effort, and also doesn't have something to do with the way the public approves of the way you're doing, whether the public approves of something you're selling."

"Wal-Mart is phenomenally successful cause everyone votes every day that they like their products and their prices," he added. "And that's the way the market economy works."

Donald Trump and the Koch brothers are where they are because they work harder than I do? Wal Mart is your shining example of capitalism at its finest?

The Republican Party is no longer a political party, but a political action committee for this country’s one percent, a propaganda machine for the elite tasked with dressing up unfettered greed in American flags and white cowboy hats.  The greatest con job ever perpetuated in American political history is the Republican Party’s ability to convince average Americans that the GOP cares about their interests.

Peppering every speech and interview with time-tested buzzwords — tax and spend Democrats, the makers and the takers, political correctness, culture of dependency, stifling rules and regulations, the list goes on — Republican candidates mesmerize the faithful while at the same time working behind the curtain to beat down, divide and subjugate middle and lower class Americans.

Yes, Democrats have their issues as well and play the same money games as Republicans do to get in and stay in office, but I don’t believe many of them actually want to destroy the America of our founders and replace it with a corporate funded theocracy.

President [add Republican name]? Welcome to America’s nightmare.

The Poisonous Influence of the Tea Party in American Politics

I used to be counted among the camp of lefties who believed that there was fundamentally very little difference between Democrats and Republicans. Members of both parties pander to lobbyists, allow the rich and connected more influence than the average citizen and are desperately afraid of upsetting the status quo in Washington. While I still believe that’s true in many cases, the growth and influence of the Tea Party among Republicans has pulled its members farther to the right than ever before into a dangerous fantasy land that bears little resemblance to the democracy in which we claim to live.

An incredibly disturbing example of this appears in today’s news. Ever searching for ways to enhance his Tea Party creds, Florida Governor Rick Scott recently issued an unwritten ban on state employees from using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming.” As pernicious as this is, he followed up his warning with action when an employee of Florida’s environmental protection department used the terms in official notes from a forum he attended.

Okay, you might think, the guy probably got a warning or a nasty email, but no, it went far beyond that into the realm of 1984 totalitarian thought control. The employee was forced to take a leave of absence and told he could return to work only after a mental health evaluation from his doctor that verified his “fitness for duty.”

A mental health evaluation?

This, friends, is the kind of pre-enlightenment, fact-denying, authoritarian direction the Republican Party has taken of late. It almost seems as if there is a below-the-radar weekly contest among conservatives to see who can spew the most ignorant, hate filled comment. Rick Scott, you are without question this week’s winner. But let this be a serious warning to voters, in 2015 there is a stark difference between where Democrats and Republicans want to take this country. If you prefer a democracy to a theocracy, freedom of speech to thought control, reality to fantasy, you cannot in good conscience vote Republican.