Tuesday, October 30, 2018

BTYFO, Joe

It’s a little mean to pile on Joe Scarborough when he finally, at long last, gets it.

I never believed what liberals said about us all along. I never believed there was this undercurrent in the Republican party of racism, nativism, anti-semitism. We spent our entire lives telling people it wasn’t true. I’ll be damned, I’m 55 years old. Bingo, they had us exactly right. They had the party exactly right. What are we to do now?

‘Bout time you found out, Joe.  Granted, at the age of 55 you weren’t really around to remember Nixon and Agnew and the Southern Strategy in all it’s George Wallace-emulating glory.  You came of age when it was all bundled up in the cozy and gauzy quilt of Ronald Reagan’s morning in America for white Christians, and so you don’t remember the distinction between the Southern Democrats of Strom Thurmond and the rest of the party when they split in the 1950’s and ’60’s over where a six-year-old black girl should go to school or where her father could go to the bathroom or stay the night while traveling.  Your Republican party happily picked up the torch from the cross-burning and ran with it, and fifty years later passed it on to a maniac.

Where were you, Joe?  You ran for Congress from a district in the Florida panhandle where the only distinction between there and Selma was the color of the license plates and the remnants of the old way of life are still visible in the two sets of bathrooms in the old courthouse in downtown Miami.  But you fell for the smaller government/more freedom line and smugly thought that the folks who bought your tactics of being scared of black people voting and women controlling their bodies could be controlled and mollified every election cycle.  It never occurred to you that they would one day find someone who could actually exploit them beyond the sop of cutting taxes and hating gays?

Yeah, it’s easy to pile on to Joe and any other Republican who is finding out to their horror that their party is just as mean and nasty as a lot more people than just “liberals” have been saying about them since the days of Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater.  But it’s about time, and it’s probably too late.