Evil GOP Bastards

Most people that vote Republican aren't bad people, they're just
easily manipulated into believing ideas that exploit them. I should
know, I was one of them. In May of 2001 I moved to Washington DC to
pursue a career within the Repub-
lican party. This is a little of the story of how they exploited the darkest parts of my personality in their agenda power at all costs. It's the story of how the GOP cynically
spreads lies and disinformation, all the while blissfully unaware of how
deceitful it's behaving.

By far the greatest lesson I learned in working for the Republican Party is there's nothing more important in life than always telling the truth. In trusting the media you read, understanding the research meth-
odology and fact-checking appara-
tus needs to be your paramount concern. Because I care so deeply in presenting to you a factually accurate account of my tales within the party, I wish I could put my name to this account. But frankly, you would be a damn fool to
try to cross the Republicans. They have brought the art of personal
destruction to an art form, and would undoubtedly retaliate. I should know, while working in DC I've seen it done to people all the time.

There is nothing you could have told me before I went to work
for the Republicans that would have made me believe that a sleazy
right-wing attack machine existed. Why would it? The Republican mind is built to only accept infor-
mation that confirms what it knows or thinks it knows. It's not a coin-
cidence that the Religious Right votes Republican hands down. These are people that fall easily into systems of control. I was so brainwashed that the right could do no wrong, it took two years of seeing pure sleaze in person to make me understand.

It all started in January of 2001 outside the Capitol in DC. I was in town visiting a friend, and I was very eager to attend the inauguration. I'd always been very involved in Repub-
lican politics, but George W. Bush had me more excited than any other candidate to date. I remember the very first Newsweek article I had read about him with Carl
Rove's scripted lines. Uniter, not a divider. Reformer with Results,
Compassionate Conservative, I bought every one of them hook line and sinker. Partisan bickering had gotten progressively worse for each year of my adult life now, I believed President Bush could change that, which is honestly just embarras-
sing.

There was a huge protest of the inauguration, my friend and I had tried to avoid it by exiting at a further back Metro stop, but with
little result. Totally to my surprise, I ran into Alice* (All names have
been changed), a friend of a friend from Undergrad. Back then she'd been quite reserved and laid back, it was shock to see her marching so militantly with a sign that said Hail to the Thief. "Someone has got to change this," I thought. "It's up to people like me to help stop this
partisan bickering."

Today it's almost four years after that moment, and I am here to
tell you the entire Republican Party agenda is nothing but a fa�ade to
keep the powerful in power. We've seen this many times throughout
history, systems of right-wing control that control the populace through lies and propaganda. They wield religion as a political tool, and value the establishment over the populace. The irony is that even as
Republicans vote to stop "corrupt" Democrats, they don't understand that almost all corrupt governments throughout history have had the same right-wing message as the Republican party.

Republican lies and propaganda are put into your head before you can think. My earliest political memory is the Iran-Contra hearings. I was asking my parents what was going on, and out came the right-wing
lies. Democrats were ruthless and despised patriotism. They were
undermining the security of the nation because they loathed the
military. Throughout my formative years I was fed a steady diet of lies
by Rush Limbaugh and propaganda magazines like the Weekly Standard.

My family is reasonably wealthy, so in deciding to move, getting
a job in Washington DC wasn't hard. It didn't hurt that I'd spent years volunteering in Republican offices, and organized several Republican events. A simple maximum donation as allowed through McCain-Feingold by
all my family members was all it took. Sooner than you could say "rugged individualism" I was working in DC for the party of Reagan.

Washington DC is truly an awe inspiring place to live. It's one
thing to see the Capitol as a background shot on CNN. It's quite another to walk past it every day on the way to work. It's the little things
that overwhelm you, I once saw Justice Stevens pull into the secret
entrance to the Supreme Court on my way to Taco Bell. It slowly divorces you from reality. One night it's a special interest throws a party in the Capitol with exotic wine and cheese. The next you're at a four star hotel being asked to accept money for a coal interest, Picasso couldn't have made a painting to capture the surrealism of it all.

I started in DC as a reasonably honest liar. The idea behind our Democracy is that the constituents voice their will to their represen-
tatives, and they vote accordingly. But something like that would encumber the Republican agenda to empower themselves and their special interests. Welcome to my first job and the Constituent Opinion Database.*

f you enjoy sending messages into an endless void, feel free to call or write a Republican congressman. There's a form letter where someone like me will cut and paste a perfectly boilerplate response. If your letter deviates from the approved script, it has just been accidentally lost in the mail. Occasionally, just for show, I might summarize a random sentence "Feels government is wasteful" into the database. Then my boss does the same at the end of the week summarizing my summary into a three-paragraph letter to Republican leadership. There is no apparatus within the party that cares to listen to constituent opinion, other than polls that measure how well the right-wing message of the day is working.

It's hard to say when exactly I became a Democrat. I quit my job as the Iraqi war was starting, I was
Iabsolutely appalled by the behavior of my party.

I had always fancied myself a mod-
erate Republican, a tool to reach

out to both sides. But I wasn't a machine that would robotically obey the GOP. I started talking to Demo-
crat friends about my disillusionment with the party, and they were kind enough to explain what the actual position of the Democratic Party was on the issues.

You see, thanks to Republican brainwashing I believed the lies Rush Limbaugh had told me about their positions. I believe in fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, and personal freedom. It turns
out the Democratic Party is the only party represen-
ting those values. Republicans say they are, but it's just another sleazy lie. Republicans are the ones responsible for the current deficits, Republicans are the ones leaving corporations unaccountable, Repub-
licans are the ones taking away my freedoms and liberties via the Patriot Act.

Before I understood I was a Democrat, I explained away things I witnessed as "part of the political game." When I would see my colleagues lie or do something blatantly dishonest or illegal, I justified
it with a "We must stop the Democrats at all costs." When I would run into blatantly racist conservatives, I would justify that the party wasn't racist because of Condoleezza Rice and Powel. Wrong, the Republican Party is blatantly racist, and they need to know it.

You honestly cannot imagine the depths to which the Republican Party goes through in order to never say anything of substance until you've been taught to do it yourself. There was a lot of buzz when former Senator Bob Dole got into a lot of trouble when he revealed that before appearing on any news show, you are required to call the White House so they can tell you what to say. It's not just Bob Dole, Republi-
can operatives like me are told exactly what to tell the public. It's a nice game that leaves Republican staffs and staffers all but completely unaccountable to the public. How can you get in trouble with
the public when you never say anything at all?

From the moment I arrived in Washington, I was stunned by the inimitable gall of the Republican Party to lie and distort. The Republican National Committee is right next to a shady liquor store/Subway shop in
Washington DC at the Capitol South Metro stop, it's as to foreshadow the sleaziness. If you go up to the second floor and walk towards the liquor store, you will find yourself in a massive room. This is disinfor-
mation central, it's the very room where the bald-
faced lie that Al Gore claimed to "invent the internet" came from. The room is filled with cubicles, where deeply unhappy human beings spend all their times taking things Democrats have said out of context to send out to the press.

Often, they just completely make it up themselves.

Republicans do not care to fact-check the information they feed the public. I was made keenly aware of this when researching an article on the deficit for my office's website with an unreliable source. My source was the Congressional Budget Office, a fiercely non-partisan office with no other purpose than to give honest accounting. "These numbers don't look good," I was told, "use the White House figures." The
White House figures weren't true, but my boss had a point. It's not like people that would be reading it would wonder if things they're told are true, especially when it fits their pre-established right wing worldview.
The right knows it can misrepresent any policy that's bad for ordinary Americans into a reason to keep the establishment in power. Observe the following...

Problem: The Iraqi war is a war crime, thousands have died for no reason whatsoever.
Right Wing Lie: The liberal media isn't reporting the good things we do there.

Problem: Our health care system is absolutely appalling compared to other industrialized nations.
Right Wing Lie: Government health care is worse than no health care.

Problem: With total Republican control of all three branches of government, never in our history has this nation been so in debt.
Right Wing Lie: Shamelessly exploit 9/11

So what do we do about it? We have to fight back hard, fuck getting along. The right controls their populace through propaganda, and one of the very first rules of propaganda is to deny the other side the
very right to exist. That's what we're up against. I've answered tens of thousands of angry phone calls from Republicans, and this post I found online pretty much gives you a feel of them all.

OH MY GOSH YOU PEOPLE!!!!!! This is so ridiculous. The reason I'm on here is because I was watching the news this morning and saw this idiot
maureen talking about bush and I have no idea how to call in to the new station or whatever but I definitely have something to say about it. I cannot believe what ya'll are saying about Bush. This Maureen woman obviously doesn't like the idea of "church" or God in the U.S.---- "In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq, even as they increasingly merge the two in America." -Maureen Well guess what! The whole reason that America EXISTS is because of God! In case you forgot, the reason we started this country is for freedom to worship God. The purpose of the law that separates church from state was to protect the church from the state, not the other way around! You people are twisted, backward thinking son of a guns and if you have a problem with a president who tries to serve the Lord YOU CAN GET OUT OF THIS COUNTRY and start your own because THIS IS WHAT IT'S ABOUT FOLKS!

Clearly, We're not going to win through reason or
bi-partisanship, these people cannot be reached.
Facts and logic have no effect on them. The Rep-
ublican Party is a cancer, and the populace of this nation must rise up and stop them.