I like this guy. I’ve liked him for a long time. He’s one of the very few Republicans who, as a leftie, I can look across the aisle and see not an opponent but a fellow American with some differing opinions but who is still a patriot. I see a person who puts country over party.
But I also see a man who is, now, without a party. His version of the Republican Party no longer exists.
Edit: my point in this, I should have gone on to say, is that he, and other classical Republicans like him, should form a new party. This country needs more parties. Like a further-left Progressive party. With ranked choice voting in every state, this could become normalized.
Currently, we have the Libertarian and Green parties, but they’re… weird. If we had 3rd parties that were, well, not weird, politics in this country would be a lot healthier.
I don’t know if there is a polite way of putting this, but 3rd parties are a bit crazy. It’s not that 3rd parties are inherently bad, but we’re a first past the post system. 3rd parties tend to act as spoilers to whichever party they are closer to. Until the spoiler effect is fixed, you have to be a little crazy to run as a 3rd party candidate.
And like you mentioned, ranked choice is one of the options to making 3rd parties viable. But the leadership for the democrats is luke warm on it and republicans are actively working against it. It’s going to take a bipartisan grassroots effort to drag these curmudgeons into a better system.
I have no opinion on this guy. I’ve never heard of him before. However, I will say that what you’re describing is what I want out of an opposing party. So often the term “the other side” is thrown around, that most people forget it’s supposed to be “The other side of the coin” with the coin itself being America. The other party isn’t supposed to be your enemies. You’re supposed to have a problem that needs solved. This group has this set of ideas to solve it, and that side has that set of ideas on how to solve it. Then the voters come along and say “Oh, l like this set.” and another person will say “Well I like THAT set”. Then, after the votes are tabulated, and everybody has had their say, a clear winner will come out, and that’s what we’ll do.
Somewhere along the way, it became more about WHO is in power, rather than WHAT they represent. Then it becomes more about playing a series of immoral games that go against the very fabric of what this country is supposed to stand for. When your play against the spirit of your country, your country becomes a different country.
So now we use things like gerrymandering, and vote manipulation, and using dead people to vote in current elections, and trying a coup against the government itself.
Is this America now?
Is this what America represents? Because if so, I’m NOT a patriot. I’m NOT proud of my country. I’m here because my family is here, and I have a stronger connection to my family than I do leaving the country. But what have we even come to in the modern day?
So for you to say that this guy represents what I’ve said the other side SHOULD represent, it means that maybe, just maybe, there are still some hard working, moral, honest republicans out there. I still will won’t vote for them, but not because I hate them. Simply because they represent THAT set of ideals, and I want THIS set of ideals. Which is how it should be. But I don’t see them as my enemy.
Very well said. The key question is how do we, as a society, turn politics back onto that course, of considering the what and the how, not the person or the party.
The problem is more widespread than just America, it seems to take root anywhere you have an elected representative system and the electorate forget that they are the key part of the system.
Kinzinger lost his job because he was one of the very few Republicans who sat in the Jan 6 Committee and actually did his fucking job. And he did it honestly and well. For that, he got maligned by Trump and the rest of his party and voted out of office.
But, through all of it, he did his job and spoke out against the corruption he faced. The man was an honorable public servant and served his district, state, and country.
I strongly suggest you look into him and even watch some of his interviews.
Dude, Reagan suffocated the soul of the GOP. And Nixon before him. Back in the Eisenhower days when the Democrats were the racist party, they had some solid things to stand for, but those people are in the ground at this point, and have been for a long, long time. McCain was arguably the last of his kind, back when you could be a decent person and still have some standing in the GOP, which is why they’ve now edited him out like Emmanuel Goldstein.
A lot of the Democrats are shit, too. But the thought leaders of the Democratic Party are, by and large, the relatively decent ones. We’ve reformed (somewhat) since Clinton. The Republicans have been digging down to new levels of hell with every new generation for roughly 50 years now, and Nixon was already psychotically bad.
This. People who think that the Republican party has been honorable in recent memory haven’t been paying attention. There have been honorable Republicans in my lifetime like John McCain, but the party as a whole has been little more than a cabal of grifters appealing to the worst parts of us with the sole purpose of enriching themselves and punishing the “other” in sociopathic glee. Trump didn’t start this. He just pulled off the mask and made it OK to speak and act openly.
honorable Republicans in my lifetime like John McCain
L. O. L.
I don’t know if your definition of ‘honorable’ has a low ad bar, or if you’re just calling him ‘honorable’ in comparison to a flock of shit birds, but that statement is fucking laughable.
Dude. If you have dinner with Nazis, you’re probably a Nazi.
McCain had dinner with Nazis
Ha - I thought the exact same thing; I just edited my thing specifically to talk about McCain. Yeah, he was the last of the old guard; already out of step (telling that woman at his rally not to attack Obama as an enemy of America). But at least in his day you could be decent and run for president as a Republican. Now they’ll throw you out of congress for trying to be a normal human person as a Republican. Maybe next year it’ll be prison.
Didn’t McCain call his wife a harlot for playfully messing with his hair?
Edit: it was a trollop and the c word. I don’t know how I only remembered the mild insult
You should check out the Behind the Bastards episode on him. He was not a swell dude, he just played one on TV.
Kinzinger is a special kind of stupid.
Doesn’t matter if Kinzinger believes it; the target audience is reachable Republicans and swing-voters to flip for Harris.
Naturally the GOP was fucked long before Trump.
Reagan started the descent. Gingrich finished the race to the bottom with stuff like the Contract with America, holding speeches in an empty house chamber, and directing R’s to never interact with Dem’s at all and always oppose anything they do even if it’d benefit R’s. Trump is just the natural consequence of that mindset.
They fuckin leaned into it. They do not get a fucking pass.
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He’s doing exactly what he was always going to. If the GOP ever had a soul they’d have kicked his ass to the curb back in 2016.
They made the bed, now they get to lie in it. And if the left doesn’t vote then we’re all gonna get dragged in with them.
That “soul” was already vanta black. He didn’t have to do much.
The GOP has been mustache twirlingly, comic book villain, shark jumpingly evil since they weaponized religion.
My coworker, a Republican, will slightly-too-gleefully tell stories about how she thinks her dad was probably a klansman. She has a history degree, she says, and will swear to the end of time that the civil war was not about slavery.
I don’t think she has a soul.
Trump is a demon summoned by Republican cultists who were hoping for exactly this result, and we will never let you forget it
For that to be true wouldn’t they need to have souls to begin with?
auto-erratic asphyxiation
lol gimme a fucking break. he’s doing everything y’all always wanted, just isn’t afraid to say the quiet thing out loud.
This was his speech at the DNC tonight. I saw it. This was also for a republican who lost his seat due to agreeing with the Jan 6th committee that trump should be impeached and prosecuted for inciting an attempted coup. That cost him his re-election.
He may be a republican, but he’s been anti-trump and has put his money where his mouth is, so to speak.
His speech was very fair and rousing. He’s a good orator, and he’s been criticizing trump for many years.
I’m not doubting that he said or believes these things. The point is this one guy does not define the soul of the GOP. by all means, trot him out there to sway independents, but let’s not act like the GOP was some paragon of virtue before trump came along.
Exactly. Adam is the guy in the corner of room calling out the psychopath on stage who’s being defied by the audience. It’s still a conference for people who want to make the richest richer at the cost of everyone else
I have watched the GOP spiral towards this for literally my entire teenage and adult life.
Republicans are a party of dumbass idiots led by greedy fucks convincing them they didn’t need to listen to reality and now the dumbass idiots are fully in charge.
yeah. trump definately kicked it up a notch but its been kicked up since at least reagan, maybe nixon, maybe before that.
When the majority of the party bends the knee to a person such as Trump, I’m not sure they had a soul to begin with. Most doing so certainly have no honor.
Is that your bible?
“It is a Bible.”
What’s your favorite Bible verse?
