A Party of Trolls

See the happy trolls. See them use Twitter! Troll them libs, trolls, Troll!

Remember when the Republicans put forth polices, proposed new bills, and fought for their passage? Remember when they composed a party platform that clearly stated their ideals, their values, and their plans for America?

You remember that?

Well, you’d have to be somewhere in your late 40s, because they haven’t done much of that since the 80s, and it wasn’t pretty even then. The 1980s was when the GOP’s ‘War on America’ started in earnest, with hacking at the social infrastructure, huge tax cats that were supposed to ‘kickstart’ the economy (they didn’t) and other draconian measures that undermined the middle class and increased poverty while increasing the number of billionaires.

More Billionaires demanding more tax cuts to be paid for by an ever-shrinking middle class.

Because more billionaires is just what the country needed, of course.

After a while of attacking the poor as lazy, cutting taxes for the rich, defunding or under-funding social programs, and starting wars based on lies (Thanks, George W.), the Republicans grew exhausted, (and lost the White House for eight years) and decided instead of trying to govern, which was hard, they would just… not. Not govern, not try to pass anything particularly helpful, even to their own voters (their donors are another story), just not really do much of anything except make sure nothing that they didn’t propose themselves (and they proposed next to nothing) would pass. Didn’t matter if it might be beneficial to the American people, if the Democrats like it, it must die. No Republican would be allowed to vote ‘yes’ on any Democratic legislation.

Mitch McConnell’s stated goal was to make sure Obama was a ‘one-term president’. If it hurt America in the process, well, tough. The stimulus Obama and the Democrats managed to pass after the crash of 2008 was too small, and everyone knew it. But it was all they could do because of McConnell and the GOP. The Republicans didn’t give a F. Economists now say it lengthened the recession by probably four years. That was McConnell’s plan, to screw the country to kill Obama and the Democrats to gain power, America was just in the line of fire. And it worked.

The GOP has passed one major piece of legislation in ten years, the Trump tax cuts which has already added trillions to the debt, and will add trillions more. As usual, they were sold as a revenue ‘enhancer’ and failed to be so. Sold on lies, just like everything else the GOP has advanced in the past 40+ years. Passed, btw, though reconciliation, which is good when they do it, but totally unfair when the Democrats do it.

Feh.

The Republican party is not a party of policy, it’s a party of trolls. I mean that literally; they don’t live under bridges (if they did they would know how badly those bridges need repair and pass the infrastructure bill) but they live for bullying and trolling others, especially liberals and everything they classify as ‘liberal’. It’s not just the only thing they got, since they’ve abandoned policy (and don’t have the votes to shove through far-right judges anymore), trolling the libs is the only thing on their agenda, it’s what they live for. Troll tweets, troll appearances on Tucker, Hannity, and Pirro, troll bills, troll amendments to bills, troll commercials (that idiotic ‘taking-my-Glock-to-congress thing? What the F was that about?), troll signs outside congressional offices, troll calls for ‘debates’, even chasing after their fellow congresspersons in the halls to scream at them for the cameras. Liberal bait, thrown out to catch liberal outrage. Fox News is a 24/7 troll bait/outrage machine. It’s how they keep the ratings up.

Throw in some White grievance and you got yourself a network.  

The GOP is a proud party of proud trolls. Especially the ones elected in the last few cycles, the younger ones with social media savvy got themselves elected not to change the country, to make anything better, but to tweet, Facebook, Tic-Tok, Instagram, and get in front of as many cameras as possible. Screw policy, their job isn’t legislating, it’s being a media star and then moving on to a berth at Fox, or, in a pinch, OANN, or even NewsMax if they have to. Maybe they’ll start their own media empire using the taxpayer’s salaried position as a stepping stone.

That’s right, we’re funding their own little troll staircase to better things. This is where we are, an entire party that acts like a frat’s twitter account. All performative, all bad faith, all smug and snort, not an honest click of the keyboard among them.

Now this is the place I’d say what we should do to combat this. I don’t have much for you, except to ignore the worst of it, but that’s hard to do with the amplifiers they have. It’s not just the right-wing media turning up their volume, it’s also the left and the mass media helping spread their nonsense. The left gets pissed, and the MSM both-sides the ‘controversy’. Just hunker down and keep doing the work that makes them troll in the first place. Don’t engage. Be like AOC and keep walking. Let them collect their embarrassing campaign b-roll, they will anyway.

They’ll keep pushing until they humiliate themselves, if they can actually feel shame or humiliation.