The pro-death party

The news has been awful lately.

I know, that seems like an evergreen statement in the year 2025. It kind of is. Every day there's more nightmare fuel.

Since I last posted anything we've had another school shooting, more decimation at the CDC, concrete orders from RFK Jr.'s HHS to stop vaccinating people, the U.S. regime assassinated 11 Venezuelans in the Caribbean on suspicion of drug-running (prior administrations would have impounded and searched the boat, these guys just blew it up), the Russian regime assassinated a Ukrainian official in the midst of continued Russian attacks in their war, and our wannabe despot added Baltimore to the list of cities he wants to deploy troops to in violation of posse comitatus. And that's just off the top of my head.

Remember when Republicans branded themselves the "pro-life party"? Yes, yes, we knew it was bullshit then too, but even Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, the GOP's propaganda masters and spiritual disciples of Joseph Goebbels, would have a hard time spinning today's Republicans as "pro-life" when they are so clearly, actively, and zealously pro-death.

Pro-gun massacres. Pro-disease. Pro-pandemics. Pro-war, so long as it's the tyrant's pals Vlad and Bibi doing the warring and/or it's a convenient excuse to shoot at Spanish-speaking brown folks.

The modern Republican party is the Death Party.

The latest school shooting will not move a single Republican lawmaker to support any curtailment of the availability of assault weapons to the general public. They have accepted—with enthusiasm!—that the occasional massacre of children is an acceptable price to pay for the gun lobby's political support.

The illegal deployment of military to American cities to combat "crime" is, of course, an attempt to intimidate political opposition and an to incite violence; the longer it goes on, the more likely there will be people killed on the streets by government thugs.

We're not three years past a global pandemic that was only (mostly) overcome because of the herculean feat of creating and mass-distributing vaccines, so naturally the guy who mismanaged the start of the COVID-19 fiasco put a guy in charge of public health that opposes not just vaccines but public health measures in general. Because of this moronic regime's first go-round, COVID-19 is still a thing, and now you can't get the vaccine unless you're over 65 or have compounding risk factors. And we have to worry about diseases we thought were behind us again. Measles, anyone? HPV? Tetanus? Fucking polio, perhaps?

And if you do get sick, well, your health insurance is going to get worse and more expensive next year thanks to the one and only piece of legislation this traitorous excuse for a Congressional majority passed so far. Medicaid is basically going away, Medicare is next on the chopping block. For most of us this would be a problem, but Republicans, in the words of Senator Joni Ernst, think "we're all going to die [anyway]" so why fight it when we could instead give more money to rich people?

And this doesn't even touch on the destruction of USAID and the environmental damage being done by deregulation and callous incentives to polluters.

Death Party would be consistent with, you know, how words work. Which is antithetical to how this group handles things like names and labels. This year's HR1 was literally named the "Big Beautiful Bill" when it was the ugliest legislation to see a vote in ages. Back in the George W. Bush Administration there was legislation the Republicans named the "Clear Skies Act"; Al Franken rightly noted that the only way that would be an accurate label is if you added a couple of words and made the the "Clear the Skies of Birds Act." Atwater and Rove pioneered this for Republicans—call the worst things you can think of something positive and you can fool enough suckers into supporting it.

Even the name of their party.

Republican: Supporting a form of government known as a Republic, a governing body made up of Representatives of the Public. Modern Republican officeholders do not represent the public in any way, shape, or form.

The GOP: The "Grand Old Party" is not grand—at its outset it was a regional party, continued to be so in the aftermath of the Civil War, and despite some spans of electoral domination has never been comprised of a majority of the electorate by registration or identification—nor is it old in comparison to the Democratic party, which had already existed for 25 years when the Republican party was formed. If they want to maintain the monicker "GOP," perhaps it should stand for, oh, "Greedy Obnoxious Pedophiles" or "Getting Oligarchs Paid" or "Grotesquely Onerous Policies."

So call them the Death Party. Death by gunfire. Death by disease. Death by environmental cataclysm. Death by starvation. Death by negligence.

Death by a feckless Congressional caucus of neo-Nazi toadies. Death by tyrannical narcissism in the White House. Death by Republicans.