Republicans

Once upon a time I looked at the candidate and voted according to how I thought that individual's priorities matched my own. I've voted for Republicans, Democrats & Libertarians. For many years I leaned Republican. I voted for Ford, Reagan, Bush 41 & Bob Dole. I voted for "W" twice, although I wasn't too firm on him for his second term. During this time I voted for both parties in state and local elections. I voted for Obama in 2008 & 2012. It was during this time that I began my trek away from the Republican Party. As Obama started his term I considered myself a moderate. During the Clinton years, Rush Limbaugh defined a moderate as someone who looked at the Liberal & Conservative positions and then deliberately took a position midway. I rejected this characterization. I viewed a moderate as someone who was the opposite of an extremist, someone who looked at the issues dispassionately, and took a position according to what they believed was the best alternative. Sometimes these positions would fall dead in the middle, sometimes they would be closer to what the conservatives believed, other times more aligned with liberal views. But things changed for me during the opening months of the Obama presidency. It became evident that the Republican Party was totally uninterested in working with Obama and the Democrats and made it their mission to oppose anything that he proposed, no matter how beneficial to the country, or even if it was totally innocuous. The rise of the Tea Party faction, and the party's embrace of their point of view only solidified the Republicans' intransigence. Even at the state level, governors who previously had been competent administrators, concerned mainly with property taxes, water rights, roads & other infrastructure, now became as partisan as the politicians in Washington. Republican office holders enabled the racism of many of the Tea Party followers, including the allegation that President Obama was not an American citizen.

And now that they have completed their takeover by retaining their majorities in Congress and with a nominal Republican as President, they can finally do what they have been talking about for eight years: repealing and supposedly replacing the ACA, aka Obamacare. The problem though, is that even though they've had almost eight years to come up with a replacement plan, they still have nothing. Millions of Americans are now in danger of losing their health insurance. They have been celebrating their victory, not as a victory for the country, but as retribution. Vengeance.

It will be a long time before I can ever hold my nose and vote for a Republican.