Not Conservative, Reactionary

The contortions that the conservative mind can go through to justify an action or choice is mind boggling. A case in point is the reaction to the claims that Hillary Clinton has classified information on her personal server and therefore risked national security. Only one actually was ever actually marked classified and it was inconsequential in content. Trump supporters chanted lock her up. Seven years later, it has become quite clear that Trump retained more than one hundred classified or higher level national security information after leaving office. Many of those documents were stored in boxes or scattered on desks at his Mar-a-Lago club behind doors with locks a ten year old could pick while foreign nationals wondered around un-escorted. I have yet to hear a single one of those chanting lock her up in 2016 say such a thing about Trump even though his behavior is far more egregious especially considering that we now know that he bragged to Australian business tycoon Anthony Pratt providing details on how stealthy our nuclear submarines are and how many nuclear missiles they carry.

Here in Texas the state legislature with the backing of Gov. Abbott passed a bill to provide incentives in the form of low interest loans to electricity generators that use fossil fuels, gas in particular. They did this claiming that it’s to brace up the electricity grid which is in danger of failing due to high energy demand. The reason we barely escaped the summer without blackouts is the record high temperatures experienced across much of the state. It is beyond doubt that climate change is causing the extreme weather and that human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and thus dumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, is causing it. We know all that and yet our governor and state legislature are all in on building more power plants that will dump more CO2 into the atmosphere exacerbating the problem rather than mitigating it. They’d rather give away taxpayer dollars to their fossil fuel friends than arrange to build out sufficient transmission lines to the west Texas wind mills and solar power facilities that investors are anxious to build but can’t get permits because there isn’t enough transmission capacity. Let’s not forget the big freeze in 2021 when most of the state was without power for 3 days was due to gas powered plants and pipelines not being sufficiently weatherized to deal with extreme low temperatures, and nothing has been done about that.

There many other examples of the hypocrisy and denial that Republican voters and their elected officials engage in but I’ll leave you with just one more. The pro-life crowd rants about the sanctity of life but does nothing to make that life better for either child or the mother. In reality they are simply pro-birth and are quite happy to leave children go hungry, lacking in health care, with inadequate education and worst of all no hope. They will lie about abortion risking the health of the woman when the fact is that carrying a child to term in Texas is much riskier especially if you are a poor black woman.

In summation Republicans can claim to be conservative but that’s a lie, they are reactionary and I’m sick of it.