threat to America

Some things bear repeating. You know they say that the best way to learn something (and remember something) is through repetition, and I believe it. Hear something only once and it might be cogent and witty, but you likely won't remember it months later. Hear it again and again and you are going to remember it. Unfortunately, the same process works with lying as it does with truth-telling.

The GOP has been trying to dumb down America for years now: cutting funds to public education, demanding creationism in schools, re-writing history to gloss over the warts.

One can only hope that enough educated Americans will step up and do the right thing: that is, keep the wanna-be fascist dictator Donald Trump out of the White House, but with those unverifiable electronic voting machines all over the country....who is in control of them now?

The editorial below appeared in The New Zealand Herald in July 2015 and is, to my mind, the truth. And it does not speak well of America.

The greatest threat to America? Republicans

...The takeover of American conservatism by evangelical Christianity, Fox News and a handful of shadowy billionaires has transformed the Republicans into the party of willful ignorance: doctrinal purity is more valued than intelligence; tolerance has been supplanted by persecutory moralising; paranoia has replaced realism.

This process may be reaching its logical conclusion with the emergence of property billionaire Donald Trump as the front-runner for the party's presidential nomination.

Trump personifies everything the rest of the world despises about America: casual racism, crass materialism, relentless self-aggrandisement, vulgarity on an epic scale. He is the Ugly American in excelsis.

You might expect a tycoon/buffoon cross to be a political player in some Latin American failed state or backward former Soviet republic, places with no democratic tradition or public institutions that have stood the test of time and no such thing as "the people" in the sense of an educated, civic-minded citizenry.

The fact that so many Republicans are comfortable with the thought of this monumentally unqualified individual in the Oval Office shows how warped the party has become. To borrow the rhetoric of their candidates, the party is now an existential threat to America's leadership of the global community.

There is more to the editorial here.