With the election right around the corner I have to ask, are there really people that don’t know if who they will vote for or are there people that are deciding if they are going to vote at all? For me it took a long time to vote against a Republican for the very first time. Of course that was about 25 years ago and I still remember it as being an unnatural thing. Why? Because my father was a Republican so like my father, that made me a Republican. I think that is the case in too many voter’s mind, my family was always this and my family was always that so I was going to be the same. Funny thing was when I was growing up there were actual liberal Republicans. They were known as Rockefeller Republics that took a more moderate, too liberal approach to social issues. Those White Christian Nationalist?, why they were Democrats like George Wallace that left the Democratic Party when they felt betrayed by Johnson when he signed the Civil Rights Bill.

The Liberal Republican is gone. They ended with Reagan in my opinion. The day of the Moderate Republican is gone. They ended with Trump. The day of the Rebel Republican is gone. They ended with the death of John McCain. McCain is the last Republican that I voted for when he was running against George W. Bush for the Republican nomination. John McCain was a good man that had sacrificed a great deal for his Country and I felt he would continue to keep the best interests of all Americans in all of his decisions. You could see the change with Bush when he made the statement that you were either “With Him or Against Him”. No middle ground, no negotiating, what he said and what he wanted to do was it and that he had final say and no one should question him. To question him was unpatriotic and un-American. I thought not to question, it was unpatriotic. I was against the war then and I am still appalled that we had a preempted attacked another country that poised no real threat to us.  We started a war with no exit strategy. We started a war we knew we would easily win but didn’t have a clue what to do after we won. A million people died, mostly Iraqi’s, because we did not do enough questioning of our own government by both parties. That was the biggest point of our American Revolution; we were not supposed to give blind obedience to our government. That is, was, our duty to question is.

Today many want the Republican Party to be the party of one voice and that voice in Donald Trump. If you disagree with him you are not a real Republican. You are called a RINO, Republican in Name Only. They are a party that does not want to debate or compromise. They have called the Democrats the enemy of the people. They tried to destroy a branch of our Government and put an unelected person on the throne of the United States. They are a party that only wants power. They wanted to do away with healthcare but had nothing to replace it with. They now want to do away with Social Security but you don’t hear of any plan to take its place. I have paid into Medicare and Social Security all my working life. They call it an entitlement. I call it mine. They claim to be protecting our Constitution but I don’t know what document they are talking about because it isn’t the Constitution of the United States that they are trying to protect. To be honest with you, the Republicans starting with George W Bush have scared me. Freedom just seems to be such a hollow word to too many of them.

The first time I saw someone use the name DINO to describe a Democrat that didn’t vote with the rest of the party I cringed. As I have gotten older that is the one thing that I liked about the Democrats is that they could disagree on issues but still be Democrats. Too many Democrats wanted to crucify Manchin because he wouldn’t just vote along party line. The issues that he held out against I wish he hadn’t but I couldn’t fault him for wanting things to be more bi-partisan. I too want things to be bi-partisan but I know that in today’s political climate that is not going to happen anytime soon. If our nation is going to survive the party of my father needs to fail and fail so badly that they have to die or reinvent themselves. I do not feel that you can truly represent such a small proportion of our society and continue to be successful on the World stage. We are lagging behind too much of the world when it comes to basic human needs that we run the risk of truly becoming one of those Third World Countries.

We throw around words like Communist and Fascist and some people don’t even know what they are or what they have in common. The most glaring thing that they have in common is that they are a one party system. No one benefits from a one party system and we have to work here to make sure that doesn’t happen. In the end, whether it is Communist or Fascists too many people will be suppressed and too many people will die.  I have to admit that I have never heard someone say that the Republicans are enemies of the people. I have heard people say that MAGA people are enemies of the nation and I agree with them, they are enemies of not only our country but the Constitution that we are supposed to hold dear. I have heard Republicans like Donald Trump and like Marjorie Taylor Greene say that Democrats are our enemy. I will have to tell you that I have never felt threatened by a Democrat.