What would a party of evil be?
It'd kill people for its own (its donors') benefit. It'd adopt policies bad for people, bad for the country, for some short-sighted gains.
How is the Republican Party anything but that? I'm talking about the party, not the voters who are duped over abortion/guns/flag-waving etc.
1. The classic example - tobacco. Tobacco donated to the party, so for years the Republicans fought limitation on tobacco and said 'the science isn't in', defending the industry while it killed hundreds of thousands of Americans annually.
2. Fossil fuels - the party takes big donations and protects the industry no matter the cost. In the past, that's meant allowing air pollution; now, it means the destruction of the climate, as the US is the only nation in the world not signing on to the too-little Paris accord.
3. Healthcare insurance - Republicans protect the healthcare insurance industry, allowing things like not insuring pre-existing conditions, unless it conflicts with an even more powerful donor - tax cuts for the rich. In that case, they'll throw 25 million Americans (or more) off of healthcare to free money for tax*cuts for the rich. Most Republican states refused Medicare expansion to hurt the poor.
4. Pharma - Republicans defend what is sometimes their top donor industry's profits, the biggest single policy lately being Medicare Party D, which banned the government from negotiating drug price discounts, adding $150 billion+ per year of pure profit (while RAISING the costs of the drugs to many seniors with this 'benefit').
But they also do things like deregulating the safety evaluations and allowing overprescription, which has led to things like the evolution of bacteria resistant to any treatment and the opiate crisis.
5. Tax Cuts for the Rich. The last tax cut that made economic sense was JFK's, after WWII and the Great Depression, cutting the top rate from 90% to 72%.
Since Reagan, Republicans have slashed the taxes on the rich - skyrocketing our debt now to over $20 trillion, skyrocketing inequality to record levels, keeping wages down, and forcing huge cuts to the government spending on the good of the people - Grover Norquist's policy to 'shrink government to be drowned in the bathtub'.
Bonus. The Republican War on Democracy
Given their evil policies, it makes sense the people oppose their policies - leading them to exploit countless ways to cheat elections, from appointing Supreme Court Justices who will rule that the constitution allows unlimited money in the elections, to disenfranchising millions of voters wrongly, to massive Gerrymandering, and many other such activities.
I haven't even touched on foreign policy.
I could go on with many more examples, but if you consider what evil policies would be, and what Republican policies are, they're hard to tell apart. There's just a small amount of restraint by Republicans in order to try to win elections, but if they could do worse and get elected, they would.
It'd kill people for its own (its donors') benefit. It'd adopt policies bad for people, bad for the country, for some short-sighted gains.
How is the Republican Party anything but that? I'm talking about the party, not the voters who are duped over abortion/guns/flag-waving etc.
1. The classic example - tobacco. Tobacco donated to the party, so for years the Republicans fought limitation on tobacco and said 'the science isn't in', defending the industry while it killed hundreds of thousands of Americans annually.
2. Fossil fuels - the party takes big donations and protects the industry no matter the cost. In the past, that's meant allowing air pollution; now, it means the destruction of the climate, as the US is the only nation in the world not signing on to the too-little Paris accord.
3. Healthcare insurance - Republicans protect the healthcare insurance industry, allowing things like not insuring pre-existing conditions, unless it conflicts with an even more powerful donor - tax cuts for the rich. In that case, they'll throw 25 million Americans (or more) off of healthcare to free money for tax*cuts for the rich. Most Republican states refused Medicare expansion to hurt the poor.
4. Pharma - Republicans defend what is sometimes their top donor industry's profits, the biggest single policy lately being Medicare Party D, which banned the government from negotiating drug price discounts, adding $150 billion+ per year of pure profit (while RAISING the costs of the drugs to many seniors with this 'benefit').
But they also do things like deregulating the safety evaluations and allowing overprescription, which has led to things like the evolution of bacteria resistant to any treatment and the opiate crisis.
5. Tax Cuts for the Rich. The last tax cut that made economic sense was JFK's, after WWII and the Great Depression, cutting the top rate from 90% to 72%.
Since Reagan, Republicans have slashed the taxes on the rich - skyrocketing our debt now to over $20 trillion, skyrocketing inequality to record levels, keeping wages down, and forcing huge cuts to the government spending on the good of the people - Grover Norquist's policy to 'shrink government to be drowned in the bathtub'.
Bonus. The Republican War on Democracy
Given their evil policies, it makes sense the people oppose their policies - leading them to exploit countless ways to cheat elections, from appointing Supreme Court Justices who will rule that the constitution allows unlimited money in the elections, to disenfranchising millions of voters wrongly, to massive Gerrymandering, and many other such activities.
I haven't even touched on foreign policy.
I could go on with many more examples, but if you consider what evil policies would be, and what Republican policies are, they're hard to tell apart. There's just a small amount of restraint by Republicans in order to try to win elections, but if they could do worse and get elected, they would.