Athenae, Political Crack

Redoing the Damage

All we’re hearing from the collection of fascists and fools running for office on the Republican side is how they’re going to walk back everything Barack Obama did as president. Back to unregulated health insurance! Back to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell! Back to blowin’ up anybody who looked at us funny.

But back to the state of our relations with Iran prior to the past week? Like how even would they accomplish that? Reinstall a shah and then hire some people to depose him again?

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js I laughed my head off watching the Republican debaters last week try not to step in it when asked about Iran. Three or four of them, maybe, could find it on a map if you labeled all the other countries first. Wingnut Twitter was going full force over the detained sailors, and the main complaint was that Obama had to kiss some mullah’s ass to get them out and they all should have fought to the death. Of course nothing of the sort happened, not that it stopped the howling.

As Weinstein up there points out, HOW? How do you plan to undo the entire Obama era? People have health insurance. In some cases it sucks, but they have it. Are you going to take it away? How? Come to their house and take the prescription cards physically, like you always think Obama will do with your damn guns? Because that’s what you’d have to do to a hell of a lot of people, who are not going to pay one extra dime for their medicine and will cut you if they have to.

How will you un-marry all the gay couples who’ve gotten married in the past decade? Okay, you can prohibit future marriages, or even overturn the law in 20 years if your entire legal team does nothing but that AND you get all the Supreme Court justices you want, but what happens to the people who are already getting federal and state benefits? Where do they go? I suppose we could deport them, to somewhere gay marriage is still legal, like Ireland or something. Will their families be herded on the buses with them, at gunpoint?

Will you send all the troops who’ve come home back to Iraq and Afghanistan? Good luck with that, pal. Nobody can ask or tell about sex anymore in the military? Are you supposed to just un-know your platoon leader’s orientation? How does that work? Does the military actually have one of those Men in Black memory wipe things?

Osama bin Laden. Will you resurrect him so you can kill him yourselves? Just find a dude who looks like him? How much farther back can we go on on gun laws, anyway? Make gun ownership mandatory and do firearms training in middle school, replacing sex ed maybe? If you want to erase the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act, you can have my cash when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Guantanamo Bay is still open, even though we’ve transferred a lot of those prisoners out; would you send them all back? How would you find them, anyway, especially the ones who’ve fucked off to Yemen or whatever? If they’re really terrorists, do you think they’ll come back to your lawless prison without a fight?

These are questions I’d like answered the next time somebody in the Republican field says they’d like to “repeal and replace” or “take America back.” Like … how?

A.