Wednesday, July 19, 2017

In WI, and DC, GOP perfects the full flip

Sure isn't your grandparents' Republican Party:

*  In Wisconsin, Senate Republicans are breaking out the credit card to borrow more hundreds of millions of dollars and stick our grandkids with the bill for a highway-building bloat of their own creation. Remember when Republicans sold themselves as fiscal conservatives?

*  And Gov. Walker, along with key GOP state senators and corporate servants like Tom Tiffany, have forgotten that former GOP Gov. Warren Knowles put his name on the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund - - a land conservation and public access program - - not a state-run, big-business-serving timber stand and wetland filling policy. Now Republicans only respect the green if it's on a greenback.

*  In Washington, as House Speaker Paul Ryan promotes his Draconian budget  which would gut many programs including the the EPA, and Trump wants to eliminate the Great Lakes Restoration Fund and a similar Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort, who remembers that dozens of Republican House and Senate members voted to override then-President Nixon's veto of what is now the Clean Water Act?

When did so many Republicans sign up for the pollution party, or as private-sector leader and former Milwaukee Sentinel business editor John Torinus puts it, "the Republican party and its war on conservation."

*  Also in Washington, with support from many Republican Trump voters nationally, sucking up to Vladimir Putin and grasping after election assistance from Russian operatives is the GOP's foreign policy and campaign strategy new normal. 

As Trump has said of his son's eight-person get-together with seven of his best friends in Dad's campaign and Putin's network to chat about sanctions adoptions and maybe the Giants upcoming season, "most people would have taken that meeting."

The same way Trump took that second meeting he forgot to disclose with Putin that most people no other GOP politician/US President/sane human of either party would have taken, without a translator, witness or third-party - - so screw Reagan's old-timey "Trust, but verify" nonsense.

Because what are friends for?

P.S. Don't get me started on local control, that long-gone Republican hallmark - - whether ballot access, land use, clean water, immigration rights (sanctuary cities), clean air, collective bargaining... 

1 comment:

Raven said...

> “... have forgotten that former GOP Gov. Warren Knowles put his name on the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund — a land conservation and public access program....” — The Republican Party has also long since forgotten that just over a century ago its man in the White House was Theodore Roosevelt, conservationist and creator of national parks, forests, and monuments to preserve our natural resources. Speak-Loudly Trump is his diametric opposite.

> “... human of eight party....” — 'either'?