Republican Bullies and their enablers

Republican voters like bullies. They say they like "straight talk" and "common sense" but they vote for politicians who are aggressive, abusive, and nasty when dealing with a variety of constituencies that conservatives dislike. These constituencies include the poor, Democrats, women, minorities, the Obama administration, and immigrants. Basically, anyone who doesn't agree with conservative dogma.

Just look at their slate of Presidential candidates. Donald Trump is a huge bully, immune to facts, and recently called Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, then attacked anyone who called him on it. Scott Walker has gone after unions, public schools, women and universities in Wisconsin in as assholish a manner possible. Ted Cruz shut down the government last year when he didn't get what he wants.

Then there's the uber-bully, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who loves to act the stereotypical New Jersey bully as if he's watched too many episodes of The Sopranos. Just to remind you, here's a fun incident that hurt the economy and will probably cost billions of dollars more to fix once the adults finally get around to fixing it. It involves Christie's rejection of upgrading the ancient, failing railroad tunnel infrastructure between New Jersey and New York.

As governor, he didn't just kill the tunnels so that he could divert the money to other New Jersey projects, thus sparing him from having to raise New Jersey's among-the-lowest-in-the-nation gas tax, he did so as part of the organized Republican effort to sabotage America's economic stimulus program and blunt the employment effects of those projects. Which, for a nation trying to recover from an economic collapse so severe that it was dubbed the Great Recession, was just about the most bastardly thing a sitting elected official could do, but there you have it.

And Christie didn't just kill the project and mock the notion of economic stimulus or shovel ready infrastructure improvements, he openly mocked the idea that one of the most highly trafficked transportation corridors in America would be important at all. Why on earth would anyone want to go to New York? Why would anyone from New York ever want to go to New Jersey? Why won't the rest of America's travelers just go around our little state and leave us alone? The two key roles of government, according to even the most anti-government conservatives, are roads and wars, but when the economic collapse happened and a president from the opposing party needed to goose the nation's employment right quick in order to avoid a true depression, even the roads part became a Republican symbol of things government had no business doing.  Link

Of course, these bullies wouldn't be Presidential candidates if they didn't have support among the party's base. Which just shows that Republicans like to talk about freedom, but really want to be lead by an aggressive, hostile tyrant. And they view that as totally worth it, so long as the tyrant smacks down all those pesky liberals, women, poor people, immigrants, blacks, gays, and other people who actually yearn for freedom.