I’m going to go vote tomorrow, and I’m going to vote a straight Democratic ticket.
I will not do this because I am a dedicated Democrat. I will not do this because I believe in the Democratic platform lock-stock-and-barrel or because I believe that the Democratic party is immune to the corruption rotting away our democracy right out from under us.
I will vote this way for one simple reason:
This Republican party must be stopped.
Not “the” Republican party. “This” Republican party. The one influenced by the Tea Party and bought out by ultra-conservative benefactors who only want laws and social policies that benefit them–the rest of us be damned.
Today’s Republican party is so corrupt, we must strike it down.
They have no trace of integrity. Its members are shamelessly changing their previous, documented positions in order to court the big dollars of donors like the Koch brothers.
They are completely dedicated to irrationality. They deny science and reason at every turn–rejecting policies that would protect the environment and combat global climate change simply to appease short sighted business interests, even though shifting to green energy and safer regulations would actually promote job growth in the long term.
They are dedicated to a vile form of partisanship. They reject any proposal from their political opponents out of nothing more than spite, fighting tooth and nail for months against health care reform to benefit millions that has already passed simply because it was proposed by a Democratic president (a black Democrat, at that) and despite the fact that the entire scheme was directly modeled on past Republican proposals.
They are mired in xenophobia, regressive sexual morality, and male-centered chauvinism. At every opportunity they truck in anti-immigrant sentiment, discriminatory policies, and backward ideas about birth control and reproductive rights.
They are hopelessly corrupt. As a body, they have pressed for voter identification laws–despite a complete dearth of voter fraud–to disenfranchise minorities, the poor, students, the elderly, or any other group more likely to vote Democrat.
This is the twenty-first century. We need serious, informed policies to guide us through the challenges of the day. Today’s Republican party, with their entrenched, dogmatic commitment to “small” government for and only for the 1% and their refusal to compromise, is a threat to the well being of this nation and to a world order founded on equality, progress, and freedom for all people.
They are the enemies of everything rational. They are the enemies of democracy.
If you vote for them, you are courting the decline of the United States as a world power–a regression into stratified power structures and a refusal to grow as a people.
We must defeat them and consign their ideologies to the ashbin of history.
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