By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times @mikemcgannpa
It hit me like a ton of bricks, Tuesday: Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican Party announced he would block immigration or entry of anyone who “don’t like our religion.”
“Our religion.”
What the everlasting Hell?
This is America, we don’t have a “Our religion.” We have dozens of religions and many people who aren’t religious. It’s right there in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — and was one of the factors that led to the U.S. rebelling from the United Kingdom and it’s Church of England. Freedom of — and from — religion is a bedrock of our nation’s founding.
Okay, maybe Trump is just a lunatic — a man under multiple indictments and increasing impairment snapping under the pressure to say something fundamentally unAmerican. Surely, there was a torrent of his fellow Republicans denouncing his comments.
Nope. Not a peep. It would be laughable if this wasn’t the same pattern over and over again. Trump does or says something beyond the pale — election denial and leading a literal insurrection against the United States, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans through awful and inept COVID management, theft of classified materials, his obvious and blatant sell out of America to Russia, Saudi Arabia and other hostile countries. I could go on, amazingly, but you get the drift: Trump is a political anti-Christ to the American body politic.
And the Republican Party response, with a few exceptions? Pathetic fawning. Scrambling to embrace crazy theories about Jewish Space Lasers, rushing to ban books, attacking the LGTBQ+ community, embracing racism and anti-Semitism, all in the hope of getting some praise from the Great Leader.
The recent drama over the Speaker of the U.S. House — or lack of one — would be an embarrassment for a third-world nation dipping its toes into democracy. For the United States — that alleged “shining city on a hill” — it is nothing short of a national disgrace. A deep stain on our reputation which will, sadly, endure.
I’ll touch base on Mike Johnson (R-LA) who, as of this writing, is the newest prospective Speaker and why people in Chester County should be really pissed that he is getting elevated, but you get the idea.
As I wrote in 2016 — and took abuse for (feel free to apologize) — the Republican Party killed itself. When I wrote a few years later, that voters in Chester County shouldn’t vote for a single Republican, to hasten the party’s demise and speed the creation of it’s replacement, I was raked over the coals on WPHT (the Delaware Valley’s modern version of The Völkischer Beobachter) by the bootlicking Dom Giordano, I held my ground.
And here we are, five years later, with the zombie GOP stumbling around, wrecking anything it can, its strings pulled at turns by crazed, greedy right-wing billionaires, hostile foreign powers and a senile, corrupt old man facing multiple criminal indictments. Fun things like election denial, vaccine denial, Moms 4 Liberty, overturning Roe v. Wade and such are fun side effects of this political cancer wracking our nation.
Like the Federalists and Whigs before it, the Republican Party needs to die off and be replaced by a sane center right party.
But it won’t happen if you vote for them. In school board, township supervisor, county row office, court of Common Pleas races — if you vote for Republicans, you are stopping the needed process of killing of a zombie party. Don’t do it — without a functioning center-right party, the left will get crazier, emboldened by the lack of a check. Trust me, at times, I already find some on the left insane — without credible opposition, it will get worse.
Now. Getting back to the whole Mike Johnson thing: he led an effort the nullify many of OUR votes in Pennsylvania, falsely claiming that Act 77 — a bill literally pushed through by a Republican legislature that really wanted to end straight-ticket voting — was illegal. He wanted to make your 2020 mail-in ballot not count, so Trump could be reelected. As we know now, the little fraud (less than a dozen votes statewide) were from people trying to boost the Trump vote. The Pennsylvania election result was fair and clean — and yet this next would-be Speaker of the House keeps telling us — the people of Chester County — our votes should not count.
Telling us which religion to follow, deciding which people get to vote, telling us who we can love, and open discrimination against those not white, male and Protestant is as antiAmerican as it gets.
I love this country, with a deep abiding passion, despite it’s many faults. We should be always striving for “a more perfect union.” To do so, though, we need to eliminate the cancer that is the Republican Party by denying it oxygen and votes. It must die, and soon, so the process of replacing it can begin.
You get to help that process this November, If you haven’t sent in your ballot, you know what you need to do.
Stat.
