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When Exactly Did The GOP Become The Party Of The Intellectually Dishonest?

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | March 10, 2017 |

By Emily Cutler | Late Night TV | March 10, 2017 |


Yeah, let’s just rip this band-aid off: The Republican Party is intellectually dishonest. They lie to everyone. A lot. And I don’t mean that in the run-of-the-mill, “all politicians lie,” policy interpretation differences created by conflicting ideologies. I mean, the GOP figures out what it is they want to accomplish, and then figures out the best lie to use to make that policy happen. Want to outlaw abortion? Just say that you’re trying to properly regulate abortion providers. Want to give rich people a significant tax-cut on their health insurance? Say you’re reducing the cost of healthcare while trying to undermine the Congressional Budget Office’s review of the bill. Want to ban Muslims? You might actually be able to just say you want to ban Muslims, but things get a little hairy when you try to turn that into a law. So maybe call it something like a temporary restriction, and then implement it in a way that most fucks shit up.

The point is, Republicans no longer feel beholden to integrity or “the truth” when attempting to pass legislation. And, because I’m clearly biased, it could be that Democrats are guilty of the exact same thing. But, also clearly, I’m not seeing it. Liberals want gay people to have all of the same rights, including marriage, as straight people. We say so. We want health insurance to be expanded as largely as possible. We say that too. And sure, to an extent, we’ve been trying to normalize marijuana by highlighting its medical benefits, but also marijuana has a lot of significant health benefits and should be 100% legal. Am I missing something? Are there times when we say, “We’re not trying to repeal the Second Amendment, we just want to pass this law saying that gun ownership should be so rigorous as to make it realistically impossible?”

Is this why Republicans are so insistent that Obamacare has death panels? They can only imagine if what we’re saying is that we want to make sure people don’t die or go bankrupt because of a gallbladder infection, what we must really mean is killing Grandma? Or how millions could believe that a Presidential administration that received an “F” from a Brady campaign is secretly coming for their guns? This is like when a cheater assumes that everyone else is always cheating all the time? And more to the point, this might be why it feels like the Republican party is so lost despite being in power. They have enough voters in on the secret doublespeak that they probably think they can do anything (“see we say ‘immigrant’ but we mean ‘brown people’”), but they haven’t really been able to accomplish much. Because it’s really hard to rally the support and dedication of people outside your base when you have to continually lie to them about your actions, the goals of your actions, and, I don’t know, reality itself.

I believe, at the heart of it, the Republicans see this as a white lie at best. Sure, they have to lie about excessive regulation on abortion providers, but who cares when all them babies are being saved? And sure, they have to lie about the travel ban, but that’s just to keep us all safe from foreigners. And also sure, they have to lie about the benefits of their new healthcare bill, but this is the only way to protect the makers from the takers. It’s not like they can just tell us that they hate sex, people of color, and the poor, right? Because who the fuck would want the party that says that?