The New Republican Party

[RANT]
Is not like the old Republican party, they were the champions less government and the balanced budget but that all started to change with Reagan. Under President Reagan the federal debt held by the public nearly tripled in nominal terms, from $738 billion to $2.1 trillion. He began what he called “trickle down economy” cutting the taxes on the rich, including his own taxes and as we now know money doesn’t trickle down.

Also under Reagan he started the attack on abortions. Why did the Republican make abortion an issue? Simply for votes, what Reagan and the Republican party realized was that elections are close only a matter of a few percentages make the difference between winning and losing. Evangelicals Christians can bring enough votes to cross the finish line.

They also learned another lesson… the white supremacists can also bring in votes and that they also learned that they fear that white people are become the minority. They are using that fear as a wedge to mobilize their base and the release of the census this backed up those fears.

So what are the Republican goals?

I believe to become the dominate party and lock out the Democrats from being a viable party, in other words making the US an authoritarian country.

This week Tucker Carson went to Hungry to visit strongman Orbán.

We asked Republican senators about Tucker Carlson's favorite authoritarian leader. Their praise and dodges underscore the danger to the US.
Business Insider
By Eliza Relman and John Haltiwanger
August 13, 2021

• Carlson's recent visit to Hungary sparked alarm among democracy watchdogs and Democratic lawmakers.
• But some Republican senators endorsed Carlson's embrace of Viktor Orbán and his authoritarian model.
• Romney, however, denounced Orbán as an autocrat who's "only a few clicks away from Vladimir Putin."

The host of America's most-watched cable news show recently spent a week in Budapest extolling the virtues of a small European country sliding into autocracy, triggering alarm among democracy experts and Democratic lawmakers.

Insider approached nearly a dozen Republican senators this week to ask them whether they endorse Fox host Tucker Carlson's promotion of Hungary's right-wing populist leader. Their answers — and nonanswers — underscore the ongoing erosion of support for democracy on the American right.

That is the Republican dream of creating an authoritarian government with them in charge.
Some Republican lawmakers either tacitly or explicitly portrayed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's regime as a model for US conservatives. Others insisted they weren't well-informed enough to answer questions about Hungary, which has attracted widespread condemnation while putting its EU membership in question.

Okay here is something to think about, the legislators who said that they didn’t know enough to make a comment. Isn’t that their job to be knowledgeable about what is happening in the world? I don’t know which is scarier not knowing what is happening in Europe and idolizing an authoritarian dictator.

"I haven't been tracking what's happening," Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty, who served as Trump's ambassador to Japan and sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, told Insider.

"Call our press office," Sen. Ted Cruz, who also sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, told Insider. Reached by email, Cruz's spokespeople declined to comment.

Why don’t they want to talk about it? Are they afraid antagonizing their white supremacists base?

Opinion: The GOP is accelerating its descent into authoritarianism
Washington Post
Opinion by Max Boot
March 17, 2021


When I was growing up in the 1980s, the Republican Party stood for freedom — freedom from big government at home and from communist tyranny abroad. It was why I, as a young refugee from the Soviet Union, became a Republican in the first place.

I am, therefore, agonized and appalled to see the GOP rapidly metamorphosing into an authoritarian party that has more in common with the Law and Justice party in Poland or the Fidesz Party in Hungary than with mainstream center-right parties such as the Christian Democrats in Germany. The transformation has been in the works at least since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, but it has accelerated alarmingly in the past year.

Amen!

The Republican party had no qualms of crawling in to bed with authoritarian dictators.

A newly declassified report from the director of national intelligence confirms that the Trump White House, the Republican Party and their propaganda organs colluded with, or at least worked on parallel lines with, a Russian campaign to defeat now-President Biden. The report notes that Moscow “sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.” Russian agents also “spread unsubstantiated or misleading claims about President Biden and his family’s alleged wrongdoing related to Ukraine.”

And they refused act on the reports of the Trump team working with Russia to defeat Clinton.

Senate Releases Final Report On Russia's Interference In 2016 Election
A GOP-led Senate panel released a report Tuesday that details extensive contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian intelligence in 2016.
NPR
By Ryan Lucas
August 18, 2020


Today we got perhaps the most detailed look yet at Russia's efforts to influence the presidential race four years ago. The Senate Intelligence Committee has released the final report from its bipartisan investigation into Moscow's interference in the 2016 U.S. election. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas has been sifting through the document - nearly a thousand pages of it - and joins us now...
[…]
And all of that digging has gone into this report, and the committee concludes that Russia conducted a sophisticated and aggressive campaign to influence the U.S. election to help Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton and that folks on Team Trump were more than happy to accept help from the Russians. But what's really important about that conclusion is that it is a bipartisan one. It is endorsed by both Democrats and Republicans.

Remember Manafort?

So the report documents the extensive connections between folks in the Trump campaign and Russia, some of which we already knew. But it goes into greater depth, most notably probably on Paul Manafort. The report calls Manafort a, quote, "grave counterintelligence threat." It notes that Manafort had access to sensitive information and that he was willing to share it with people who had ties to Russian intelligence...

Then Trump pardon him after being convicted of  filing false tax returns, bank fraud, and failing to disclose a foreign bank account.

Do you remember WikiLeaks release of Clinton’s emails? Well Lo and Behold!

There are a couple of interesting things on the WikiLeaks question. One, the committee concludes that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the operation to hack Democratic computers and leak the stolen materials and that WikiLeaks likely knew that it was assisting a Russian influence operation when it published those. The committee also concludes that the Trump campaign tried to take advantage of Russia's hacking operation by trying to play up the stolen Democratic emails.

So what did the Republicans do about the report?

Crickets. They did absolution nothing.

The Republicans are cozying up to dictators, they see what is happening in Poland and Hungary dream of making it happen here with them in-charge.

[/RANT]