Conservatives Hate America, Part 2

Within days of Barack Obama's election to the presidency, Mitch McConnell, who was Senate Minority Leader at the time, declared that the number one priority of the conservatives in the Senate and the House of Representatives was not to create jobs, not to strengthen our ailing economy, not to defend our nation against terror or foreign aggression, and not to serve We the People... to the best of their ability.  No, the number one priority of the conservatives was making Barack Obama a one-term president.

Since then, the conservatives have tried to block every move the Obama administration has made.  Every proposal, every policy change, every appointment, every military decision, every funding decision, every enforcement decision made by the president and his staff has been opposed by the conservatives.  No exceptions.  There are no counter-examples.  Everything, no matter how necessary, no matter how inexpensive, no matter how innocuous.  The conservatives are perfectly happy to allow America to sink if it gives them a chance to paint Barack Obama as the bad guy.  They are willing to allow our economy to go down the tubes, and even to damage the security and well-being of the American people, if it means they stop Barack Obama from succeeding at anything whatsoever.

I'm quite convinced that if they could sneak someone into the man's bedroom, they'd try to sabotage the president when he was tying his shoes.

This tactic of blocking and saying no to everything reached its absolute low-point when Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy took the full faith and credit of the United States of America, not to mention the idea of a democratically elected government, hostage by threatening to not raise the debt limit, thereby forcing the United States to default on its loans and debts that previous Congresses had promised to pay.  Conservative grand-standing earned the United States the very first downgrade in its debt rating since the country was founded 238 years ago.

And with no shame whatsoever, they then blamed Barack Obama for the downgrade.

In 2013, they did it all again by actually shutting down the government unless President Obama defunded the Affordable Care Act.  There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that allows any branch of government (much less any political party) to shut down the operations of that government in order to prevent another branch from doing its job by enacting a law that was passed by Congress, signed by the president, and verified as legal and constitutional by the Supreme Court.  They had no authority granting them this power.  They just did it.  In my opinion, this crossed the line into "treason" territory.  They were actively working to harm the nation.  Treason.

And believe me, you can bet that if the roles were reversed, if a Republican president had been in office and it had been Democrats who shut everything down, the conservative-controlled media would be howling for blood.

One of the standard conservative tactics is to claim the sky is falling.  They did it with public education, the rights of workers, women's suffrage, Social Security, Medicare, voting rights for minorities, the Americans With Disabilities act, Equal Employment Opportunity, and many other programs.  These things cannot be put into place, they argue, because it will harm the nation and ruin America.  Except, of course, none of those things ruined America.  They never have any facts to back up their nonsense, mind you, but they're going to tell you its bad over and over and over and over until some gullible schmuck starts believing them.   And now the "train wreck" is the Affordable Care Act.

Again and again, conservatives try to impose a rigid ideology on the people of the United States that is based purely on myth and is totally lacking in what intelligent people call "empirical evidence".  This ideology has been repeatedly proven to be nothing more than a total disaster for the country.  Multiple times in American history, so-called "laissez-faire" economic policies (that is, those policies whose central tenets are "just let the market run, it will sort itself out") have torpedoed the American economy.  Conservatives are either too ignorant to change or are actively refusing to learn this lesson.  Either way, they continue to place America at risk with their recklessness and their dedication to a debunked economic theory.

These days they seem to be doubling down on it.  They bellow constantly for less and less regulation of business, less and less oversight, less and less control.  And they do this just a short time after this very thing -- a wildly speculative banking and investment industry -- nearly drove the economy of the entire globe right into the toilet.  These conservatives, who would gleefully bankrupt the entire planet just so they can personally accumulate a few more millions of follars in their personal accounts, are the greatest threat our nation has ever faced since the Civil War almost tore us into two countries.  Abraham Lincoln said, "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher."  He was speaking the truth.  We're not going to be destroyed by any other nation, and we're certainly not going to be destroyed by terrorists.

No.  Sadly, its going to be people who call themselves Americans who bring this country to its knees from within.  Don't believe me?  Consider this statement made by an anonymous writer in the the newsletter of the Virginia Republican Party, back in 2012.

We shall not have any coarse (sic) but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November.  This Republic cannot survive for four more years underneath this political socialist ideologue.

Right.  Barack Obama, whose personal politics and voting record reveal that his ideals are those of a moderate Republican despite his membership in the Democratic party, on whose watch the economy has mostly recovered and on whose watch the stock market value has doubled, is a socialist ideologue.  The Virginia Republican who wrote this quote is either an utter moron, a deliberate liar, or (most likely) both.  He and those who agree with him are threatening to thwart the democratic system, and thus are skating on the thin ice of treason.

To quote the president, let me be clear.  A real patriot loves America.  He (or she) loves the land, the people, and the ideals on which this nation was founded.  A conservative has absolutely no respect for any of that.  A conservative doesn't give a tinker's damn about protecting America's natural beauty from environmental damage.  A conservative doesn't give a damn about the animals who live on that land.  A conservative hates pretty much all other Americans.  And a conservative absolutely does not believe in the founding principles of this country, including the ideal of democracy itself.

Instead, they bitch and moan about having to pay their fair share of the tax burden, obstruct and endanger the operation of the government, thereby harming the American people, and actively hate (and promote the hating of) America itself.

Patriots?  Not even close.

On the contrary, conservatives are a temper-tantrum away from committing High Treason.