Republicans Eat Their Young

This government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support.  Respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty.  The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.  The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.
All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.  They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force;  to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community;  and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
—    President George Washington
From his “Farewell Address“, September 19, 1796
[What happens when the minority party, the opposition party, dedicates itself to making the President a one-term President and a failed administration the first day after his inauguration?
In Republican Presidential candidates Trump and Cruz, we are seeing the results of almost a quarter century of putting a political party ahead of the good of the country as a whole.  The Republicans attempted the destruction of two eight year administrations simply because they were Democrats and then blindly supported their own eight year Republican administration which refused to raise taxes to pay for an unnecessary war which cost trillions of dollars.  The Republicans, the “party of business, fiscal responsibility and defense / security”, carried the war funding “off-budget” so they would not have to disclose the cost to the American public.
Now Trump wants to build a multi-billion dollar wall on our southern border and have Mexico pay for it.  (I guess he doesn’t feel “off-books” will work again.)  Now Cruz, who has spent the whole of his time in the Senate alienating himself from his own party (let alone anyone else who might be a Democrat) wants all the other Conservative  Republicans to fall in behind him because Trump is not a “true” Conservative.  (Now he wants friends.)  If they both weren’t so pitiable, they would be laughable.  It is truly frightening to think a major American political party would put either of these men forward as nominees for President of the United States.  But then again, what can we expect from a party which offered up Sarah Palin to be one heartbeat from the President eight years ago.
Okay.  I will now climb off of my soap-box and return you to your normal programming…    —    kmab]
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On This Day In:
2022	What Really Hurts
2021	Republican Governors Don’t Help
	We’re Coming To Your Town
2020	With Friends Like This…
2019	Still Better Than Third
2018	A Tough Row To Hoe
2017	Just In Case
2016	Republicans Eat Their Young
2015	Still 99%
2014	Affirming The Wall
2013	Maintain The Freedom
2012	All Good
2011	Fountains Of Life
	Staying Alive

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