If You Can’t Beat Em…

Fuck em.

This seems to be the new GOP mantra. They simply will not concede that the American people disagree with them on nearly every important issue of our time. They have so fully closed the door on any dissenting voice, or inconvenient facts, that they’ve lost all touch with reality. Which is why we see their party leadership saying things like this.

“It’s not the platform of the party that’s the issue,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said Friday after being easily reelected to a second, two-year term. “In many cases, it’s how we communicate about it. It is a couple dumb things that people have said.”

A slide presented during a closed-press strategy session said that Mitt Romney might be president if he had won fewer than 400,000 more votes in key swing states.

“We don’t need a new pair of shoes; we just need to shine our shoes,” said West Virginia national committeewoman Melody Potter.

It’s always bumper-stickers with those folks.

So what was it in their AWESOME platform that was such a hard sell? Was it the part about forcing women and girls to bear children conceived through rape and incest? Or was it the part about turning Medicare into a worthless voucher system? What about the section dedicated to repealing the Affordable Care Act and throwing sick people to the wolves of the “free market”?

Most of the policy positions in that document are grossly unpopular, completely unworkable, or full of vague nonsense like “free-market solutions”. It’s hard to market a low-grade turd heap as a truck load of tulips.

Which is why they’ve now decided that since American voters won’t open the gates to their looting hordes disguised as “Patriots”, then they’ll just dig under walls and burn the place to the ground.

Basically, Republicans who have control of states that went for President Obama in the 2012 election are pushing for their states to change how they award electoral votes. While almost every state awards electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, Republicans want these states to instead award one vote to the winner of each congressional district.

The other two electoral votes that each state has likely would be given to the statewide winner, as they are in the two states that currently employ this method: Maine and Nebraska.

The new system would allow Republicans to consistently win electoral votes (and quite possibly a majority of electoral votes) from states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia, regardless of whether they win the statewide vote.

All five of these states went for Obama in 2012. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have consistently gone blue at the presidential level, and Virginia is tilting in that direction, which would make winning any electoral votes in these states a victory for the GOP.

The Republican party has decided that our elections are a game of Dumb and Dumber tag.

All jokes aside, this is a naked power grab designed to circumvent the will of the electorate. It’s nullification by gerrymandering.

The GOP, and conservatives in general, have openly called for nullification of federal laws they don’t like. They have abused the filibuster in the Senate to nullify the power of progressives on the federal courts, and the functionality of regulatory agencies, most notably the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the ATF. GOP Governors and Legislatures across the nation are refusing to implement whole portions of the Affordable Care Act. Conservatives in State and local governments have passed cruelly oppressive laws against abortion providers making it nearly impossible for women to find Constitutionally protected abortion services, with some States having only one such provider left.

This is a huge problem. It’s one thing to attack laws and agencies they don’t agree with, but it’s quite another to nullify the will of  American voters. If conservatives in rural Virginia don’t like being out-voted by the cities, then they need to convince people to vote differently. If they can’t sell forced-birth theocracy and climate change denial to the more liberal leaning city folk,  then tough shit. Just because you think you’re right doesn’t mean you get to win every time. Lord knows liberals don’t win every time, hell we don’t win even a quarter of the time. But we don’t try to rig the rules to win regardless of the vote count.

Fascists do that.

Fascists and the Republican Party.

Or is that being redundant?