Scott Gurvey

If you are voting for Democrats, you can leave now. This isn’t for you.

If you are voting for Republicans, or not voting at all. Stick around. I have a question for you.

What the hell are you thinking?

Do you hear the words, “Democracy is on the line” and chuckle? Don’t. It is.

There are more than three hundred people running for election who believe the Big Lie that Donnie Trump won in 2020. He didn’t. Sixty judges and scores of election officials, many of them Republican, said he didn’t. There is hard physical evidence that HE knows he didn’t. NO evidence of improper voting that changed the outcome of the election was discovered anywhere.

The big lie is a politically expedient cover for a coup, a takeover of the government. If these three hundred co-conspirators win this election, your vote in 2024 won’t matter. If their right-wing cabal wins, they will declare the election legitimate. If they come up short at the ballot box, they will throw away your votes and substitute their own. Heads they win, tails everyone else loses.

Just remember, Hitler was elected. So was Mussolini. So was Putin.

And why are you voting against the Democrats and in favor of the insurrectionists? Because your gasoline prices are too high? Guess what? So are mine.

You sit on your rears and let the MAGA Republicans, I use that term because Republicans in the mold of the party of Lincoln could never win a primary in today’s Republican party, tell you that President Biden is to blame for the higher gas prices, and for inflation overall.

Those lies are amplified by the jackals of the right-wing media, led by the Rupert Murdock brigade at Fox. Anyone with a high school education in arithmetic who is willing to do a little research can demonstrate that these are lies. But that takes a little work, and you can’t be bothered.

The principal cause of the current inflation is pent-up demand. We are making up for the Covid years. Remember them? For two years we stayed at home. We didn’t drive. We didn’t fly. We didn’t buy gasoline. Now we are.

There is little President Biden or Congress itself can do in the short run to lower prices. The Federal Reserve can, and is, raising interest rates. That will snuff out the flames of inflation eventually. But the Fed will have to be very skillful, and lucky, to do that without causing a recession.

The Republicans also complain that the Covid stimulus spending was inflationary. Yes, it was. But it was a tradeoff and well worth the balance. Inflation now while cushioning the impact of Covid then. The stimulus kept food on the table. It kept people from losing their homes. It raised disadvantaged children above the poverty rate.

And it helped make the huge loss of jobs a temporary phenomenon. The unemployment rate is now fully recovered from the Covid spike. And this all happened on Joe Biden’s watch.

In fact if you check you will see that the Covid impact was much worse in America than other countries. That’s because of the denial by Trump and the Republican governors. It cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

The national debt, which grew during the Covid downturn, has stabilized under the Biden administration. And despite all the caterwauling by the Republicans, the debt does NOT historically rise under Democratic administrations. It DOES rise under Republican administrations because their one and only economic strategy is to lower taxes on the wealthy and corporations so that the richest people in the country get richer and many of the most profitable companies pay little or no tax on their profits. Cut revenue and the debt goes up. Got it?

Go ahead. Look it up. “America,” as the great writer Aaron Sorkin once wrote, “isn’t easy.” Do the work. Stop listening to the lies of Trump, and Steve Bannon, and Rupert Murdock, and Tucker Carlson. Think for yourself.

The Republicans have no plan for inflation. Give them control and all they will do is cut taxes for the rich. Then cut Social Security and Medicare for the rest of us. They will reverse attempts to lower the cost of medicine. And investigate and impeach anyone and everyone in the Biden administration, tying up the government with a few shutdowns along the way until 2024.

And if crime is what’s bothering you, do the homework. Violent crime rates are NOT skyrocketing. Violent crime rates are higher in the red states than in blue states. MAGA Republicans are lying to scare you. And you are falling for it.

Republicans do have plans to convert most government jobs from civil service into political appointments, creating a huge patronage army of loyal subjects. They will make sure the only promotions in the real army go to officers who are willing to use force to achieve their right-wing goals. What Trump, called, “My generals.” They will place a religious litmus test on judicial appointees, who Donnie called, “My judges.” And purge the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, and the offices of inspectors general of anyone who would follow the law and stand in their way.

They will delete references to science in government studies, websites, or in Department of Education approved curriculum. They will remove the United States from world organizations and from the world stage and give a green light to and support any authoritarian government the holds out a hand.

And of course, they will enact national restrictions or even a ban on abortion. MAGA Republican Mehmet Oz, running for the senate from Pennsylvania, the state next to his home in New Jersey, told us so. He says the federal government should have no say in a woman’s decision to have an abortion. He believes that decision should be made by the woman, her doctor, and her local government representatives. You can’t make this stuff up

They will also legislate against LGBTQ rights, affirmative action, free speech, immigration reform, and any other so called “woke” movement most of us call civil liberties. They profess to favor civil liberties, but that in their eyes means the liberty to be whatever they believe in.

This is not debatable. The MAGA Republicans have made their intentions clear. And every political poll that I follow indicates they will win.

Samuel Adams said to have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune. To elect him yourself was a disgrace. The disgrace is upon us. It has been nearly 250 years since the founding. As representative democracies go, it was a decent run.

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