The New GOP - Even More Disgusting Than The Last

As far back as I can remember, I had always perceived a rather nasty narrative emanating from the conservative right in this country.

This goes at least as far back as Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" homey anecdotes, I suppose. While she  was certainly a real person who committed real crimes, as Mark Levin wrote in Slate:

Linda Taylor, the haughty thief who drove her Cadillac to the public aid office, was the embodiment of a pernicious stereotype. With her story, Reagan marked millions of America’s poorest people as potential scoundrels and fostered the belief that welfare fraud was a nationwide epidemic that needed to be stamped out. This image of grand and rampant welfare fraud allowed Reagan to sell voters on his cuts to public assistance spending. The “welfare queen” became a convenient villain, a woman everyone could hate. She was a lazy black con artist, unashamed of cadging the money that honest folks worked so hard to earn.

By magnifying the reality, the GOP was able to redefine everyone on welfare as possibly or even probably a "lazy black con artist, unashamed of cadging the money that honest folks worked so hard to earn." With that they were able to assert that the welfare state, for the sake of those honest Americans, needs to be dismantled.

Never mind the real suffering such a dismantling based on a dishonest magnification of one person's crimes caused.

However disgusting that was, it's rather different from the current disgusting.

From The Hill:

A White House official mocked Sen. John McCain’s brain cancer diagnosis at an internal meeting on Thursday, a day after the Arizona Republican announced his opposition to President Trump’s nominee for CIA director, Gina Haspel.

Special assistant Kelly Sadler made the derisive comments during a closed-door White House meeting of about two-dozen communications staffers on Thursday morning.

“It doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway,” Sadler said, according to a source familiar with the remarks at the meeting.

And on Fox this happened:

Former Fox News military analyst Thomas McInerney on Thursday condemned Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) rebuke of President Trump's CIA director nominee Gina Haspel, saying that torture "worked on" McCain, whom he referred to as "Songbird John."

You can agree with Senator McCain's politics or not (and I definitely do not) but such open attitudes abound in Trump's GOP.

 And we all know where this comes from, right? Here:

Appearing on Saturday at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, the real estate mogul took his running feud with Arizona Sen. John McCain to a new level.

“He’s not a war hero,” said Trump. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

But even that wasn't exactly new to the disgusting GOP. Take a look at what I found back in 2008. The "Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain" called him a "songbird" ten years ago and the story had enough traction that Politifact had to address it - ten years ago.

Can we not take a lesson from Reagan's "Welfare Queen" anecdote and now safely assume that every Republican, unless they publicly denounce this current GOP disgusting narrative of Senator McCain, actually agrees with it? Can we not ask, every Republican to answer for it?

Yea, I think we can. And we should.