Why I Will Never Ever Vote for a Republican

It's personal.

It is in the last of these failures -- painting dissent as treason -- that the president, his administration and the accompanying pundits (or rather, the choir of sycophants) all have affected us all personally, and badly -- because that view has become the worldview of mainstream conservatives in all walks of life. It's manifested itself not just in nationally prominent scenarios like the attacks on the Dixie Chicks and other entertainment folk, but in other smaller and lesser-noticed ways, too, like the way conservative officers are reportedly driving liberal soldiers out of the military. The clear message in these cases: Dissent is disloyalty.

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But I no longer much trust in the moral strength of my conservative friends. Whereas once I believed that the basic decency of average, mainstream conservatives was more than an adequate bulwark against the possibility of right-wing fascism from ever manifesting itself, I have been forced to conclude that, when swept along by the combination of a movement and the fearmongering of public officials, they are as susceptible to doing the wrong thing as their ancestors were in 1942, when they shipped off 110,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps.

Too many of them have been all too willing to aid and abet the worst features of conservative rule under the leadership of the Bush administration: the invasion and occupation of another nation under false pretenses; the assumption of near-dictatorial executive powers under the aegis of “wartime powers”; the willingness to engage in torture and wiretapping of citizens in defiance of the law, both national and international; the deliberate malfeasance in the handling of domestic policy, especially regarding the environment, education, immigration, and the economy. When confronted by these massive failures, they either concoct half-baked diversionary excuses or blame it on Bush’s incompetence. They never, ever, acknowledge their own complicity in Bush’s policies or his failures.

But most of all, they have turned a blind eye to the ugly reality of conservative-movement politics so far in this 21st century – namely, that it has become infected with a divisive worldview that divides America into Us and Them, and in doing so dehumanizes and demonizes anyone it deems Them. Anyone deemed Them is not only targeted for attack and suppression, but for their outright elimination.

Why I Will Never Ever Vote for a Republican