From Pine View Farm

Confessions of a Repentant Republican 2

Edwin Lyngar describes his journey from supporting teabaggery to enlightenment. It is a fascinating read. Here’s a snippet:

In 2010, I couldn’t support my own Tea Party candidate for Senate because Sharron Angle was an obvious lunatic. I instead sent money to the Rand Paul campaign. Immediately the Tea Party-led Congress pushed drastic cuts in government spending that prolonged the economic pain. The jobs crisis in my own city was exacerbated by the needless gutting of government employment. The people who crashed the economy — bankers and business people — screamed about government spending and exploited Tea Party outrage to get their own taxes lowered. Just months after the Tea Party victory, I realized my mistake, but I could only watch as the people I supported inflicted massive, unnecessary pain on the economy through government shutdowns, spending cuts and gleeful cruelty.

I finally “got it.” In 2012, I shunned my self-destructive voting habits and supported Obama. . . .

I have a close friend on permanent disability. He votes reliably for the most extreme conservative in every election. Although he’s a Nevadan, he lives just across the border in California, because that progressive state provides better social safety nets for its disabled. He always votes for the person most likely to slash the program he depends on daily for his own survival. It’s like clinging to the end of a thin rope and voting for the rope-cutting razor party.

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2 comments

  1. George Smith

    August 3, 2014 at 1:07 pm

    This seems to be small but growing industry: people in the lower middle class with enough morality left in them to eventually make them really uncomfortable over their own cruelty. Not particularly impressed, though. Sort of related to the Republican candidate for governor in my state, Kashkari, doing the “living like a poor man” shtick this week “to see what it’s like” and to show “he cares” but mostly for the opportunity to write and get press about it, nationwide. In this case, he’s very much worse, doing the poverty tourism circuit. Fortunately, he’ll be annihilated in the general.

     
  2. Frank

    August 3, 2014 at 4:50 pm

    Republican Economic Theory (a. k. a. “voodoo economics”) is a faith, not a science in any sense of the term. Renouncing one’s faith is difficult. A late convert is better than none.

    I think that “Kashkari” is the perfect name for a Republican pol.