Shelby County Democrats

UNCHANGING REPUBLICANS

Well, as I predicted, Steve King will not be running for Tom Harkin's Senate seat.  My reason was simple:  the man is a coward, but a coward who is smart enough to know that his own extreme positions on most every issue makes him an unpalatable choice for a statewide office.  So, we here in Iowa's 4th Congressional District are stuck with him, unless we can come up with a candidate who can defeat him, a candidate who will stand up to his bullying ways and expose him for the publicity-seeking, idea-deficient fraud he is. 

With his announcement that he's not running for Tom Harkin's seat, all of Iowa's more prominent Republicans have stepped aside.  In my view, that leaves Matt Schultz, our tea-guzzling, tea-partier secretary of state as the probable front-runner for the Republican nomination. 

One only has to watch his speech before Iowa's Faith and Freedom Coalition to know that he has aspirations beyond the office he now holds.  He should follow King's lead and stay out of it, but unlike King, Schultz's ego is not tempered by political experience.  I'm sure he actually thinks he has views that are in lockstep with a majority of Iowans. 

What he doesn't understand is that he came to office in 2010 during that whole tea-party belching period that gripped the nation, and I'm sure he has read too much into his victory during that off-year, low-voter-turnout election.  Things have changed with the electorate since then as seen here in Iowa in 2012, but those tea-party Republicans who won office that year have not. They're stuck in 2010 with the same mindset that carried them into office.  The voters who put them there have moved on. This means those same tea-party Republicans have reached the nadir of their political careers.  They will rise no higher, mostly because they are just too damn stupid, inflexible and extreme.   But if Schultz thinks he needs to test the waters, then he should by all means do so.  Bruce Braley will crush him.  We will not be caught napping again in 2014.

The Iowa Republican Party is a microcosm of the national Republican Party.  Remember the talk after the General Election from certain Republicans about the need for the party to broaden its appeal?  Remember how RNC chairman Reince Priebus commissioned a postmortem on the 2012 elections? 

That report came out in March.  Here's one eye-catching paragraph from that report: "Public perception of the Party is at record lows. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us."

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal called his party the "stupid party."  The media was filled with stories about the introspection Republicans were doing about their party.  Some Democrats were hopeful that maybe the logjam in Congress, imposed by Republicans in both houses, would begin to break up. I didn't buy it at the time.  In fact, I'm more convinced than ever that the Republican Party will veer more to the right going forward.  We're not dealing with smart people here.  Jindal was right about that.

Again, look at Iowa.  Look no further than Pottawattamie County, our neighboring county to our south.   At their annual Lincoln/Reagan dinner on May 31st, they've booked Rep. Louie Gohmert from Texas as  their guest speaker. 

Louie Gohmert.

This guy makes Steve King look like Florence Nightingale.  In a big can of mixed nuts, he's the Brazil nut, you know, those big ones that you go for first.  Just watching him on C-Span should come with a warning-label crawl at the bottom of the television screen about a hazard to one's IQ.

Meanwhile, in the Iowa Senate, all twenty Republican Senators have come out in favor of putting a personhood amendment in the state's constitution.  Well, a personhood amendment would ban all abortions even in the case of rape, incest or life of the mother.  America as a nation is decidedly against such draconian measures.  Does anyone remember Todd Akin from Missouri?  It wasn't that long ago.

In solidarity with their Senate colleagues, the Republicans in the Iowa House on the appropriations committee have voted to ban the use of any state Medicaid dollars for abortions in cases of rape, incest or life of the mother.  Last year there were twenty-two such cases, fifteen for severe fetal deformities, two for rape and five for life of the mother.  Now, Iowa House Republicans want to cut off such funding.

While this has been going on, a group of five House Republicans have put forth an amendment that would lower the pay of four of Iowa's Supreme Court justices, the four remaining justices on the court who ruled in 2009 that same-sex marriage in Iowa should be legal.  It's obviously vindictive and punitive.  Here's a link to that story.

They're a mean and nasty bunch, these Republicans.  Their kind has never been seen before.  They're brazen about their extremism.  They use the abortion issue as a hammer to try and give themselves some sort of moral high ground, but make no mistake, these people lack morals.  They pretend to be pious and righteous, but they're frauds.  They lack common decency.  They lack compassion.  They lack empathy.  They lack good sense. They lack intelligence.  They lack humanity.  They are a miserable lot. 

Further down the road when the 2016 campaign season starts, another Republican clown show will roll into Iowa.  Who's going to be on that bus?  Rand Paul?  Rick Santorum?  Ted Cruz?  Paul Ryan?  Marco Rubio?  Mike Huckabee?  Iowa Republicans will embrace them all, because there's nothing Iowa Republicans love better than political clowns and a tea party circus, and Iowa will be ground zero for another freak show.

So, nothing has changed for the better with the Republican Party here in Iowa or across the nation.  They will double and triple down on their previous extreme positions.  They will continue to do their utmost to paralyze the country and keep us from achieving new greatness. 

And they don't care.  They don't care who suffers in the process.  As long as they can exact some misery upon the electorate, they will do so, for they take comfort in the misfortune of others.  That is the sad and sorry state of the Republican Party in 2013.  There are no saviors on their horizon.  They will eat any savior before he or she can save them.