Carly Fiorino

Carly Fiorino and the other GOP candidates have railed about for months over a faked video that claimed that Planned Parenthood was harvesting baby parts. It’s been discredited by everyone, and the guy who made it admitted it was fake, but that hasn’t stopped them from repeating the lie.

cartoon by Rob Tornoe

They even managed to get a Grand Jury to investigate this supposed terrible crime. Yesterday, the Grand Jury came back and exonerated Planned Parenthood and instead indicted the guys who made the fake video.

So all the Republicans finally admitted they were wrong.

Ha ha! Just kidding! They instead doubled down on the falsehood, insisting that, despite all evidence to the contrary, they were still right.

Is anyone at all surprised by this? This is the party that regularly denies facts that are inconvenient to their ideology. They refuse to accept climate change and evolution. They insist that trickle down economics work. They claim Obamacare has killed jobs, that gun control doesn’t reduce gun deaths, that “voter fraud” is a major problem, that Obama has raised the deficit, that a majority of Americans are against gay marriage, and that some sort of conspiracy happened in Benghazi (I still haven’t quite figured out exactly what they are talking about there).

And they are easily proven wrong every single time.

While this mindset is not limited to Republicans, one does not see it at the top levels of the Democratic party in the same way you see Republican leaders spout out untruths like that.

I can kind of understand the people at the top repeating these lies as a way to give them more power. Evil leaders have done that forever. But are there no honest people any more in the Republican party? No one who will say, “Hey, that’s not true. We shouldn’t be saying that.”

Apparently not.

I predicted a while ago that the GOP would rally around one of the sane candidates, aware that they would have no chance with the crazies who want to run. I predicted Scott Walker, and maybe Jeb Bush.

Guess I was wrong. The GOP has become crazier and stupider than even I had imagined.

Scott Walker and Jeb Bush are doing terribly in the polls and Walker is about to announce that he is dropping out.

And the leading candidates among the Republicans left are the three least qualified of the bunch, not one of which has ever held an elective office.

There’s Donald Trump. His claim to fame is that he inherited money which he then used to get really rich while declaring bankruptcy a bunch of times. He spouts off hateful, racist, and sexist comments which his followers love because they say he’s “telling the truth.” I have an uncle exactly like that, but he’s not rich (although he has never declared bankruptcy). I have yet to understand why Trump is more qualified than my uncle.

Doctor Ben Carson also thinks it’s a perfect step to go from running a medical practice to managing the biggest organization in the history of the world. He hasn’t quite explained how he would be more qualified than any other random doctor you could find, but somehow his followers are thrilled with the hateful and downright stupid things he says, so he’s doing just fine.

Closing in fast is Carly Fiorino. She couldn’t get elected in her home state, and she got fired as CEO of Hewlitt-Packard after she ran it into the ground, so naturally she decided that made her eligible for the most important managerial job in the world. She’s a bald-face liar who makes up crap about Planned Parenthood that even Fox News calls her out on.

These are the front-runners, representing the worst parts of our society.

And that’s the key — somehow we have all underestimated the racism, sexism, homophobia, and downright evil of a large section of the Republican base.

It even surprises the Republicans.

At a recent rally, one speaker spoke about how wrong it was for liberals to mislabel the Tea Party. “When many people think of the tea party,” he said, they assume it is composed of “racist, homophobe, xenophobe, gun-toting radicals.” The room broke into applause, cheering that label. “Didn’t expect that,” the speaker said.

But that’s exactly who these people are. They’re happy to be racists, as they fly their Confederate flags and whine about the black man in the White House. They love being sexist as they scream about whores who want birth control from Planned Parenthood. They cheer on people who are trying to take rights away from gay couples. They hate all Muslims and Mexicans and anyone who isn’t male, white, and Christian. And they rant against “intellectuals” who want to use their “knowledge” to inform them about climate change and evolution.

They’re proud of being wrong and stupid.

But even I didn’t think there were that many of them. I was wrong.

This is why many of my conservative friends refuse to call themselves Republicans any more. Let’s just hope the Republican party destroys itself so something better can replace it.