Those Lying Republicans...

My father used to tell me that anyone who will lie to you will steal from you. Most voting citizens focus on politicians stealing or taking bribes when testing them for honesty. Unfortunately, this is not the only way politicians can be dishonest in office. 

We currently have massive lying to all of us which apparently goes unchallenged or simply passed off as “politics as usual.” Over the past 200 years the media has convinced the American public that there is an unwritten portion of our constitution which states that the people have a right to know. It has always been my position that if people have a right to know anything from politicians, they need to know the truth. However, in the last several years, the Republican Party has mounted an effort to not tell the truth about their true intentions with their legislative agendas.

One only needs to examine the public positions taken by the Republican Party, both at the national and state level, in four areas to determine their lack of candor, or outright lying. 

Those areas are abortion, civil rights, lawsuit reform and environmental regulation.

Abortion is a hot-button issue, and I quickly acknowledge there are large numbers of citizens on both sides who are passionate in the debate over abortion. Personally, I would not ever favor abortion, but I do believe it is a matter of personal belief which should not be dictated by law any more than whether or not I choose to attend the church of my choice on a given day.

It has been well established for a number of years by the Supreme Court that a woman’s right to seek and have an abortion is constitutional and legal as declared by the Supreme Court of the land. Particularly in recent years, there has been a war favored by the Republican Party to diminish that legalized right of women. Measures being passed through various state legislatures to close women’s health clinics who might counsel a woman concerning an abortion--requirements that physicians who run clinics which grant abortions must be credentialed by a hospital, requiring women to have invasive testing procedures before being granted an abortion--all are passed with the sponsors of such legislation unabashedly telling the tv cameras they are only doing so to protect the health of women. Most of us know this is pure baloney, and the only objective of such legislation is to deter or make the availability of abortions to women throughout the United States almost non-existent. 

In the area of civil rights, the Republican appointees of the Supreme Court fell right in step with the on-going subterfuge strategy of the Republican Party; not having guts enough to stand up and say, “We want fewer minorities to vote because they tend to vote Democratic.” They proceed to create obstacle after obstacle in the field of voting or fair reapportionment of legislative seats following census years.

The last impediment and safeguard for having voters protected from such shenanigans was a section of the Voting Rights Act recently declared unconstitutional by the Republican majority in the U.S. Supreme Court.  The basis of the finding again was a fiction. Supposedly, racial discrimination in Selma, Alabama, and similarly situated states, no longer exist according to Chief Justice Roberts.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, accurately likened the action of gutting the Voting Rights Act to throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you’re not currently getting wet. Clearly, the phoney reasoning for emasculating the Voting Rights Act was to protect the ill-gotten state majorities through voter IDs and similar measures which are supposedly to protect us from voter fraud where none really exists.

A third area of the false-face put on by Republicans is in the area of so-called tort reform. Advocates of such tort reform groups claim it is necessary to deny citizens access to trial by jury for their civil claims to avoid frivolous lawsuits. Again, the objective is not to deter frivolous lawsuits, but those with merit which take a few pennies away from the profiteering, major corporations and insurance companies in our country.

Finally, in the field of our environment, conservative politicians will say with a straight face, with millions of people watching on television, they have scientific evidence that man-made global warming does not exist. Again, 98% of scientists in the world have told us that man is contributing to destroying the ozone layer which ultimately will allow the destruction of the earth. Their position in this matter that it is false and will destroy jobs is meant not to save the earth, but to save money for those corporations who are reaping huge profits by spitting several tons of poison into our atmosphere on a daily basis. Such dishonesty is the same as stealing from those of us who wish a future for our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Sadly, the false argument that protecting the environment equals fewer jobs lacks vision. An all-out search for alternatives to fuels currently used could not only save the atmosphere, but could very well be the salvation of our moribund economy. It is often said necessity is the mother of invention; and should we concentrate the nation’s wealth and resources on finding alternative sources of fuel such as hydrogen to power our vehicles, it is highly likely we could have an explosion of technological development and economic growth unparalleled since the same was brought about by our nation’s commitment toward space exploration. 

It’s time that we, as voting citizens, start demanding politicians to say what they mean and mean what they say.