GOP Down Wit Tha Uf

As if there were any doubt that Republicans are out of touch with normal people, their new GOP web site helps hammer that point home good and hard.

It's taken a while but Republicans have began to realize that there are only so many elections you can win if your base is a bunch of old white people and religious nut jobs. So they have taken the first awkward steps in the re-branding process, beginning with their shiny new web site.

The launch was not without technical glitches. When the 'beta' site first went live the prominent link to Future Leaders resulted in a blank 404 page. Oops.

Various critics have already pointed out a few other embarrassing facts. For example in the section for great Republicans past and present they include Jackie Robinson who said this in his autobiography;

“I admit freely that I think, live, and breathe Black first and foremost…Every chance that I got, while campaigning (for Nelson Rockefeller), I said plainly what I thought of the right-wing Republicans and the harm they were doing…By and large Republicans had ignored Blacks and sometimes handpicked a few servile leaders in the Black community to be their token 'niggers.' How would I sound trying to go out to sell Republicans to Black people? They’re not buying. They know better.”

Hardly a resounding pro-Republican analysis.

The 'hip' new (50 year-old) Republican leader Michael Steel even has a blog on the site, which was originally called, "What Up?" What up indeed. When they realized that the borrowed (and largely misunderstood) language of youth together with various animated patriotic 'bling' made them look like dicks, they hastily changed the blog name to "Change the Game."

But probably my personal favorite is the time line of Republican achievements. In the last twelve years, there are only currently four achievements listed, and they are:

1. Starting the war in Afghanistan in 2001.
2. Introducing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in 2001.
3. Invading Iraq in 2003.
4. Giving vouchers to school kids in DC to buy a private education in 2004.

Oddly there is no record of any Republican achievement in the past half decade.

A close look at the above list also doesn't hold much water either. Invading Afghanistan hasn't exactly worked out all that great for us. We've been losing over there for many years now, and our only real achievement is push the crazy people and terrorists into Pakistan which has the net result of destabilizing a nation that has nuclear weapons.

Introducing tax cuts for the most wealthy in America has simply increased poverty in the middle and working classes. The trickle down theory ended up being bullshit, and our decimated economy is a testament to the failed Republican policies of the Bush administration.

Invading Iraq is clearly not a high point of the Bush administration. At the time of writing the combined cost of both wars is nearing a trillion dollars, and this does not even consider the ongoing costs that will be with us for decades, even if we pulled out of both countries tomorrow.

I honestly don't really know if the vouchers for kids in DC was a good thing or not, but when stacked up against the horrific No Child Left Behind policies and Abstinence Only sex education policies, there is simply no way the success of the DC voucher program could offset the carnage caused by the aforementioned monstrosities.

I can't say I am surprised by any of this though. Out of touch Republicans will try just about anything to get their way. They will road block health care reform that costs Americans 45,000 lives each year. They will blatantly lie and act as if previous statements they have made were not recorded on camera. And in the case of this web site, they will try desperately to recruit youth votes by pretending to be something they are not.

Let us hope that American youth who are just now reaching voting age are smart enough to see through this latest Republican scam. Of course if they were victims of No Child Left Behind, who knows if they even posses the cognitive function and reading skills to objectively evaluate the Emperors New Clothes, in web site form. I certainly hope so.