Last Night's GOP Debate was Grotesque: "UnAmerican?" Dalton Trumbo Versus the Republican Party

We are in the middle of the week of the annual December fundraiser here at ChaunceyDeVega.com. I would like to thank the folks who donated yesterday to our annual fundraising drive. I will send out thank you notes at the end of the month. I like sitting down and doing those all at one time, as it really moves me to respond to the generosity of folks all at once, instead of piecemeal.

We are at about 75 percent to the goal for the December fundraiser. We have two weeks left. Several hundred dollars and I can pull the begging bowl back in. I will be putting the kind monies offered up by the friends of my online work towards a video podcast next year. The monies will also go to getting head shots done by a professional photographer.

I have two big announcements about forthcoming projects that those funds will also help to fully actualize. I will be sharing that info imminently. I am superstitious about such matters.

If you can throw some copper, gold, silver, or paper into the donation bucket and virtual begging bowl it would be much appreciated. Your support keeps me moving forward.

****

Tuesday evening's CNN Republican Primary Debate was a disgusting spectacle. All parties involved should be embarrassed. CNN should be ashamed for aiding and abetting lies. The GOP's 2016 presidential candidates should walk out of the public square and exile themselves for the crimes they committed against the truth and the Common Good. What CNN and the GOP offered up in Tuesday evening's primary presidential debate was a recruitment video for ISIS.

Alas, I was not surprised.

The most disturbing aspect of the GOP debate was the casual use of the word "unAmerican". Goodness. Is this the 21st century or is it McCarthy's 1950s? Is America in the midst of a Cold War where sacred Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms are thrown into the garbage because of fear mongering and for Right-wing political expediency?

The GOP claims to love America. In its present iteration the GOP and its candidates and media remind all people of conscience and with even a minimum understanding of American history how they actually hate America's best values, freedoms, and sense of itself. "UnAmerican" is a word that has killed people and ruined lives.

The GOP candidates and chattering class who would use such ugly and dangerous language needs to take a visit to the cinema and watch the wonderful movie Trumbo.

Trumbo is a docudrama about those Hollywood writers and others whose lives were destroyed by Joe McCarthy's wicked witch hunt for "Communists"--assisted by Ronald Reagan----during the 1940s and continued for years later.

Dalton Trumbo, one of America's greatest writers and creative minds, went to prison, had his life almost ruined, worked from the shadows under a pen name, and never surrendered his core ethics, morality, or principles, as a man who stood up against American tyranny and did not back down from his political freedom to be a "Communist".

Dalton Trumbo was and is an American hero.

It is so sad that the Republican Party worships the ugly past of Joe McCarthy, internment camps for the Japanese, racism, bigotry, hatred of the poor, hostility to women, war mongering, prejudice against gays and lesbians, and any group they identity as weak and vulnerable.

Its candidates look to the near future of the 2016 election in order to turn America back to the beginning years of the Cold War, Jim and Jane Crow, and unapologetic white Christian male supremacy and unearned advantages. Because of that agenda, the Republican Party of today is not "conservative". They are a reactionary, revanchist, backward, throwback, political organization and movement.

The Republican Party and the neoliberals have already put a dagger in the heart of normal politics. The crop of near (if not actual) sociopaths who comprise the current crop of Republican presidential candidates would push the knife all the way in, pull it out, lick the blade, and then stab normal politics (and a functioning, healthy democracy) one more time just to be sure it is dead.