THE LINK (you'll need it cause there are a brazillion imbedded links)
The Republican Party of the United States goes on for ages about its "core values." But as our grandparents told us, there is a big difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. If we stopped paying attention to what the Republican Party says, and instead paid attention to what the Republican Party does, what would we find? (Think "Bill Bennett"...)
This website is dedicated to answering that question. Working from observable patterns in the behavior of Republican politicians, we have identified the real planks in the platform of the Republican Party. We have cobbled together from those pesky little things called observable facts the real Republican party platform. But don't just take our word for it! Follow the links below for documentation. As you read on, ask yourself: Is this what George W. Bush meant by when he said the Republican Party would "restore honor and integrity"? Is this what you want your government to do in your name?
The Real Republican Party Platform:
Live it Up, Avoid the RiffRaff
* News Item: The New York Times (December 1, 2003) reports that for George W. Bush's coronating convention in 2004, the Republican Party is trying to hire a luxury cruise liner so that its delegates and "special guests" won't have to, you know, STAY in New York City during Bush's coronating convention in 2004. Instead, they'll have the best of amenities and avoid the riff-raff.
* Uncovering the Republican elite: The Republican Club for Growth insults the middle class. For what? For watching movies and drinking gas station coffee!
* Who's the real elites? GOP victory cigars and gold pocketwatches tell the real tale of the new power elites
Cultivate Chummy Corruption
* News Item: Republican-controlled House of Representatives chooses anti-liberty, anti-progress, anti-environment, anti-prudence, anti-equality, pro-secrecy, pro-corruption, pro-autocracy, pro-irresponsibility, consumate beltway insider Rep. Roy Blunt to lead them.
* News Item: Past House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and current House Majority Leader Roy Blunt engage in finance scheme to launder each other's questionable campaign cash.
Sick, Schmick
* Legislation: George W. Bush and the Republican majority in Congress are on the verge of passing a law that would send researchers, doctors and their patients to jail and levy million-dollar fines. The crime? Trying to cure chronic disease. The offense? Not adhering to fundamentalist ideological purity.
Spy on the American People
* News Item: Bush Administration Wants the CIA and U.S. Military to Spy on American citizens without a warrant from a court.
* Documentation: Republicans Inaugurate Information Awareness Office
* Documentation: Republicans Draft Legislation to Take Dissidents' DNA and Remove Some Americans' Citizenship
Plagiarize
* News Item: Republican operatives plant identical letters to the editor across the country -- signed as if by "plain folks", but written by party operatives.
* News Item: STILL at it! The Republican Party continues to officially endorse plagiarism in public discourse.
* Alert and Action: How to Stop the Latest (yes, yet again) Episode of Republican Astroturf in Seven Easy Steps.
* News Analysis: Republican Secretary of State uses plagiarized and falsified fake "dossier" in desperate push for war.
Lie to the American People
* The Republican Party, the Wall Street Journal, and the Blogosphere: At it Again!
* Caught on Film: The Bush Credibility Gap. Bush makes promises at press conferences, then breaks them behind the scenes. "Honor and integrity," indeed.
* News Analysis: George W. Bush Lies about education, health care AND the environment. He hit the trifecta!
* News Analysis: Wealthy Donors and Political Players told to take off their ties when standing next to Bush...so it will look like ordinary folks support a tax cut for the rich.
* News Analysis: The Litany of Bush's Lies about the Iraqi threat.
* Fuzzy History: Republicans Fudge the Evidence on yellow cakes and nuclear mushrooms.
Crush Dissent
* Legislation: Republican introduces legislation sentencing Protesters to Life in Prison.
* Legislation: Alabama Republican introduces legislation to ban and bury books that don't agree with conservative Christian ideology
Cover It Up
* Analysis: Bush Team Covers Up "Made in China" Labels Before Speech
* News Item: Freedom of Information Requests Stymied
* Information Graphic: Bush Declares Reagan-Era Government Documents Off-Limits
* News Item: To deliver talking points on Iraq War, Bush Administration relies on blue curtain to cover up pictures of bombs.
* Documentation and Analysis: The Richard "Dick" Cheney Non-Papers.
Purchase Political Office
* Analysis: What happens when a political office is purchased? The depressing case of Rich Republican Rick Renzi.
Go Soft On Crime
* News Item: Republican Legislators sanction the flooding of America's streets with Uzis and Machine Guns.
Keep the Racists Happy
* News Item: The College Republicans at Roger Williams University have sponsored a scholarship for which only white students are eligible. (Source: Associated Press February 15, 2004)
* Analysis: Two Hundred Twenty Three Republican members of the House go on the record, taking formal legislative action to affirm that the notion that all Blacks are on drug treatment is inoffensive. Not one Republican member of the House goes on record taking offense at this claim (made, not surprisingly, by another Republican)
* Analysis: Republicans Refuse to Support Anti-Racist Legislation
* Legislation: Not One Republican member of the House of Representatives bothers to cosponsor a bill recommending that "neither the President, the Vice President, nor any Member of Congress, justice or judge of the United States, or political appointee in the executive branch of the Government should belong to a club that discriminates on the basis of sex or race."
* Legislation: Not One Republican member of the House of Representatives bothers to support a bill that would establish "a commission to examine the institution of slavery,...racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans".
* Report: Born in the USA? The GOP may not consider you to be worthy of citizenship.
* Legislation: Deport American babies and break up families in one fell swoop? That's the Republican Party way...
Mortgage the Future
* News Item: Republican Budget Sets Record Deficits, not even counting costs of Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns.
* News Item: President Bush Raises the Debt Limit by a TRILLION Dollars.
* Analysis: Republicans Raise Your Taxes More than Democrats!
Human Rights, Schmuman Rights...
* Analysis: George W. Bush asks "who needs the Geneva Convention, anyway?"
* Analysis: Republican Congressman Vito Fossella rubber stamps Bush's torture policy - at the same time he denies it exists!
Keep the Ladies where they Belong
* Legislation: Not One Republican Member of the Senate bothers to support a bill that would toughen the Equal Pay Act to prevent retaliation against whistleblowers in sex discrimination cases.
* News Item: Republican Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld scuttles a review board charged with investigating sexual assault of women in the U.S. military.
* Legislation: Not One Republican member of the House of Representatives bothers to cosponsor a bill recommending that "neither the President, the Vice President, nor any Member of Congress, justice or judge of the United States, or political appointee in the executive branch of the Government should belong to a club that discriminates on the basis of sex or race."
Fuck the Working Poor
* Legislative Analysis: The Republican Party continues to block legislation that would end wage slavery on Pacific islands that are part of the United States. What can you do about it? Read on.
* Legislation: Not One Republican Member of the Senate bothers to support a bill raising the minimum wage from $5.15/hr to $6.65/hr. This would raise the annual minimum pay of a worker who works 52 40-hour work weeks from $10,712 (well below the poverty level for a parent and child) to $13,852 (barely above the poverty level).
* News Item: Heard about that $400 child tax credit for working families? At the last minute Republicans conspired to make taxpayers earning less than $26,625 INELIGIBLE for the credit. By the odd logic of the GOP, the kids of better-off parents must be more needy.
Smear the Queer
* Exclusion: The North Carolina Republican Party have told gay Republicans that they're not welcome at the 2004 North Carolina State Republican Convention. Republican Ed Farthing says "you must be a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant and married for the Republican Party to pay any attention to you. I think that is a good 1950s voter profile." (Source: Associated Press May 20, 2004)
* Legislation: Only One Republican (Stephen Horn) bothers to cosponsor a bill calling for an end to the harassment of gay and lesbian high school students. Mr. Horn wasn't running for re-election.
* Analysis: Republican Rick Santorum says the government should control what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Kill Joy
* News Item: Republicans in the Virginia state Senate vote to make it illegal for a husband and wife to share oral sex!
* News Item: The Republican Administration's interpretation of the Republican-Passed Homeland Security Act is that model rocketry hobbyists must be fingerprinted.
* Republican Elites push a 1.5 billion dollar government program to nag young people to get married! A federal bureaucracy of marriage management?
* Analysis: National Republican Party supports Rick Santorum's statements suggesting that Americans do not have the right to have sex in private, and should be arrested if they violate conservative standards about where and how to have sex, making consensual sex between adults, behind closed doors, a crime.
Destroy the Separation of Church And State
* News Item: Republican U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige suggests American public schools should be used to promote Christianity or abandoned altogether.
Don't Give Peace A Chance
* Legislation: Only one Republican Representative bothers to support a bill that would establish a Cabinet-level Department of Peace. I guess a department organized to:
o "promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights"
o "strengthen nonmilitary means of peacemaking", and
o "prevent violence, divert from armed conflict and develop new structures in nonviolent dispute resolution"
must not fit with Republican Party principles. Read more about the Department of Peace initiative here.
Show Bad Manners
* A quick guide to Republican Manners: Pointing fingers is bad. Picking on the vulnerable is funny.
Promote With Propaganda
* The unsettling underside of Republican imagery
And now compare with the Democratic party
We Are the Conservatives
Time and time again, I hear the punditocracy complain about the Democrats. An editorial columnist writes that "All the Democrats seem to able to do is criticize. What's their plan for the country?" "If only they would stand for something, I might give those liberals a little more respect," a radio talk show host intones.
This is a smart tactical move, because calling for a solution assumes the existence of a problem with the Democratic Party that may or may not actually exist. If you try to answer the complaints on their own terms, you have already implicitly agreed that the Democrats (or Liberals more generally) are bereft of ideas and have no substantive stances of their own.
It is really that first assumption, the one that talk jocks and spin doctors skip, that is most vital. So let's more fairly phrase it not as a matter of fact, but as a factual question: Does the Democratic Party stand for anything? If so, what?
To make this a more than trivial exercise, we must meet the "Pablum" challenge. Morton Downey, Jr. originated the term "Pablum-puking liberals" to refer to the notion that the stuff Democrats believed in was either so vaguely defined as to escape definition, or so obvious that everyone agreed already. To read Mr. Downey nicely (which he never managed to do for his own opponents), he was saying that if the Democrats' stands are taken for granted or unclear, then they really aren't stands at all.
So, to finally rephrase the question, do Democrats have any political ideas that are actually for something and not just against something, that are clear, and to which there is significant opposition? If we can identify such ideas, then we've put up and those Republican-leaning pundits need to shut up. If we can't manage this task, then the Democracts have some explaining to do.
WHAT DEMOCRATS STAND FOR
As it turns out, the core beliefs of members of the Democratic Party are easy to find, easy to state, and consistently opposed in the political arena by Republican Party operatives (if not necessarily by all people who have voted Republican).
Core Democratic values are simply identified and articulated because they are, as the punditerati imply, nothing new. Core Democratic values are old, representing a solid tradition in American politics that can be traced in some aspects as far back as the Revolutionary War, but can also be identified in more recent strains leading from Emancipation through Suffrage and the Civil Rights Era.
What do the Democrats stand for? Let's hum a few bars:
1. Liberty.
Democrats believe that unless people are hurting others, they should be able to do what they please. What people choose to do in their bedrooms, as long as everybody consents and nobody gets hurt, is their own business. Who people choose to love is their own business. Which god (or lack thereof) people choose to worship (or not) is their business. People should be free to hold and express any idea they wish to, so long as they don't try to force others to live by them.
The Republican Party can't stand this idea. Instead, they favor the criminalization of consensual sex acts that hurt nobody. Wherever they can manage it, they've passed laws that won't let you buy a beer on Sunday mornings, even if you're a moderate drinker. When someone disagrees with a Republican leader on foreign policy issues, GOP politicians don't do the civic thing and just talk right back. No, they label it "treason." If someone dying of an incurable and terminal disease makes the rational decision to spare themselves a final week of severe pain, Republican Party authorities push to have them arrested. If someone smokes a joint from a plant grown in their own backyard in order to relieve the persistent eye pressure of glaucoma, Republican policies send them to the jailhouse. Republican Party operatives justify their crusade against civil liberty by making the historically and legally inaccurate claim that "it's a Christian nation," which apparently means that everybody has to act by a conveniently Republican interpretation of Christian values. They say they want to make consensual and non-harmful conduct illegal because it is a "crime against God" or a "crime against Nature." It's possible that Republican politicians think that they have an exclusive phone line open to God and Nature, in which case they are simply insane. More plausible is that they know the "God and Nature" lines are bullshit, but use them as cover for personal tastes. This is even more disturbing, because it implies that the Republican Party (and hence our nation) is run by people who want to throw others in jail not because those others have hurt anyone, but because they personally find those others' conduct ICKY. The Democratic Party is committed to countering these imperious prudes.
2. Accountability.
This is the flip side of liberty: when people exercise their freedoms in a manner that causes harm to other people, they must be held accountable. If a person knowingly kills, maims, or molests someone, for instance, that person must be brought to justice. Accountability also applies to the activities of people working together in organizations: if a corporation pollutes a river, that corporation should clean up its mess and atone for any negative consequences. If a cigarette maker knows that its product is cancer-causing and addictive but hides that knowledge from its customers for decades, it should recompense those customers and the health care system that has spent so much picking up the pieces. If a conglomerate dodges its responsibility to pay taxes for upkeep of the roads, mail system, education support, price subsidies, securities administration, economic coordination and legal system it makes such extensive use of, then it must be brought to justice.
The Republican Party believes in individual accountability, but cannot abide the idea that corporations should be responsible for the damage they cause. When corporations defraud investors, the Bush administration's "get tough" measure is to demand that the perpetrators ADMIT they've done wrong. That's it: no fine, no jail time, just an admission. Republican politicians have gutted the budgets of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service, whose jobs are to ferret out corporate fraudsters and tax cheats. With the remaining meager budget the IRS has left, the Republican administration has insisted that audits be directed toward the less wealthy, not the rich. Laws, you see, are for poor suckers in the Republican universe. Another great Republican idea: corporations with their administrative offices, their factories, their distribution centers and all other business activities in the United States can escape corporate income taxes by setting up a mailbox in the Cayman Islands and calling it their headquarters. These corporations use our roads, our mail, our education system, our hospitals -- but they don't contribute a penny to cover the expense. On Planet Republican, that's the job of the little people, the suckers. Also the job of the us little people is to suck it up and pay the price when corporations run roughshod over our lives. Chemical plant pollutes your river with carcinogens? Tough nougat: under Republican "tort reform," your ability to sue for compensation should you get sick is limited. Plus, YOU get to pick up the tab for cleaning up the mess. That's the Republican way.
3. Kindness.
The Democratic Party supports a social compact in which we commit as a people to look out for each other. This means that everyone deserves public education, and that no one should be without health care. This means that no one should go hungry, and that everyone should at least have a cot to sleep on at night. By the social compact that the Democratic Party stands for, those of us who are fortunate enough to have more than we need commit to chip in a little bit so that the less fortunate can survive. Of course, the Democratic Party isn't interested in imposing this dictatorially; rather, a vote for a Democrat is a vote for this compact. If enough Democrats are democratically elected, the social compact of kindness will grow stronger in policy.
The unfortunate converse of this is that the more Republicans are elected, the weaker the social compact of kindness becomes. The "compassionate conservative" version of kindness promoted by the Republican Party is simply to notice that others are less fortunate, but to do nothing about it except vocally hope that SOMEONE (someone else, that is) will lend a hand. Medicare? Cut it. Social Security? Cut it. Education? Underfund it. Head Start? Weaken it. That's the Republican way: talk a good game of compassion, but walk away from the Democratic compact of kindness.
4. Fiscal Responsibility.
Oh, the Republicans talk a good game about fiscal responsibility; they go on and on about how irresponsible the Democrats are.
But the facts are not on the Republican Party's side. Democrats Kennedy and Johnson contributed less to deficits than Republicans Nixon and Ford. Democratic President Carter borrowed less than Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush. It was Democratic President Bill Clinton who brought us out of deficit territory back to surpluses. It is Republican George W. Bush who has brought us right back into record deficit territory.
The simple historical matter of fact is that Democrats are amazingly better than Republicans at balancing their budgets. The Republicans repeatedly have shown a tendency to blow their budgets on credit. The Democratic Party is the party of fiscal responsibility, cleaning up after the mess left by the elephants.
5. Don't Start Wars.
Democrats fight wars, as history will show. But Democrats don't start them. The Republican Party has become so addicted to the jingoistic politics of war that it has crossed the line that the United States respected for so long: that One Does Not Start a War. War is supposed to be a matter of defense. With the war against Iraq, however, no imminent threat was shown. As each day passes and no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq, it becomes increasingly clear that not even a distant threat from Iraq was present. But to war we went anyway, thanks to the Republican Party and their Halliburton-Bechtel-Exxon defense and oil interests.
Democrats are more decent than this: most Democrats will fight a war in defense of their nation (in fact, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry served two tours in Vietnam, unlike the dodging Bush and Cheney). But they will not start a war, knowing that despite their use in propping up polling numbers, wars are acts of horror that cannot be won, only survived.
WE ARE THE CONSERVATIVES
Until recent years, the Democratic values enumerated above were so broadly supported among politicians, even among Republican politicians (indeed, at one time in the distant past Republicans were actually more likely to subscribe to them), that there was no need to articulate them in political debate as a means of distinction. But times have changed.
It is curious that the Democratic party, so often characterized as radical in the past, has now become conservative in the truest sense, acting to conserve these most traditional values of American civic politics. In the meantime, the efforts of the Republican leadership to overturn centuries of civilized precedent earns their party the adjective "radical."
The key difference today is that the radicals are not in the streets and at the gates. No matter how many times Bush Junior poses in Waco, the Republican Radicals are not outsiders. They are insiders. They are in the boardrooms. They have the Speakership and the majority of the Senate. They control the Oval Office. Given just one more justice, they will take the Supreme Court. The radicals have the keys to the car, gas in the tank, and the rest of the country strapped in the back seat. Considering their rejection of the basic traditions of American civic life -- liberty, accountability, kindness, fiscal responsibility and military restraint -- we have reason to fear their final destination. Before we're moved from the back seat to the trunk, before we've accelerated out of control, we true conservatives need to strain forward and pull the emergency brake. If we wait too long, it may be too late.