We Are Awash In Unsavory Bad Actors. How Did It Get So Bad?

[TheMastersNemesis]

There have always been bad actors around. I am 73 and remember a time when we had some sanity to our politics. Even in the Nixon era we had some GOPPERS who were able to do the right thing. And the rhetoric was more reasonable than it is now.

Now I hear so many things being said that would have been totally unthinkable 30, 40, 50 or 60 years back. Now we hear so much rhetorical filth and hate and insanity that it boggles the mind. On top of that we have so many extremely bad and even evil actors about spewing their vomit and invading our space.

Someone like Trump would have been completely and totally impossible in any other era. He simply would have been run off the stage and maybe even out of the country. Now we are awash in just about every imaginable bad actor you can think of. Damn the entire Cabinet is now infested with them.

What is worse is that 30% of the population is pro Trump. They are all a bunch of incorrigible hateful racist bigoted pieces of crap. They are people who openly celebrate their stupidity and racism. If all those bastards got the plague I simply would not care. The sight of them at that Trump rally makes me want to gag.

We are not yet a year into this madness and it is already unbearable in so many ways. This is not the kind of America I went to Vietnam to save. Sure I did not volunteer because I was drafted. And as scary as it was to get on that plane I went. And as bad as it was for others, it was not as bad for me by pure luck. There are so many moments right now that I feel my service was wasted. And I just do not understand those crapola veterans sitting behind that piece of garbage.

[elleng]

1. A large part probably Citizen's United,

ANYTHING goes due to $$$ and greed.

[Warpy]

2. Nixon, with his buddies Hoover and Roy Cohn, brought in the crooks

because he knew he was an unsympathetic character who couldn't win on his charm, time to do dirty tricks to try to swing the election away from people who actually knew what they were doing, for the most part.

It has gotten worse and worse, year after year. Now cheating, money laundering, bribery, and stealing is such an integral part of that party it should be reclassified as a racketeering organization not to mention their nationwide efforts to decrease suffrage, purge voter rolls, and do voter caging years after they were caught, tried, fined and told to knock it off.

[rpannier]

5. I think my brain must be melting or at least the heat is causing short circuits

When I saw Hoover I thought, "Hoover. What the hell did Herbert Hoover do? He was a crappy president, but..." then I remembered, "J.Edgar. That's right."



I t did make me laugh when it came to me

[Warpy]

16. Yes, old Jedgar. He always admired the mob

both for their discipline and the way they kept them damn women out of business. He was a real peach.

[Ligyron]

18. I remember him saying there was no such thing as "organized crime".

[Warpy]

19. Yes, he had a huge blind spot

He was furious when Bobby Kennedy started going after the big crime families.

[dchill]

3. Because Republicans do things for the same reason...

that a dog licks its own genitals. They want to and they can. Also, in a corollary sense, the love of money is the root of all evil. With cheese.

[Doug the Dem]

4. Newt Gingrich

1994.

[SharonAnn]

20. Absolutely. He took his scum and spread it around to all the GOP.

It began to be their standard operating procedure and now it is so ingrained that I don't think they could shed it.

Demonizing the opposition party, disparaging everything about them, using pejorative words every time they spoke about the opposition or its proposed policies.

[bluestateboomer]

6. Couldn't have said it better!

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

7. Newt Gingerich...

... He brought in the class of, "businessmen first, statesmen last", in 1994. The GOP was incensed that Clinton knocked off Poppy Bush, setting back the MIC plans to invade Iraq again before 1998 (see letter from PNAC begging Clinton to invade Iraq 1998). It delayed their racket, war for profit. Everything else, the brouhaha over a stained blue dress, George Conway's dirty games with Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp, the ridicule of Democratic Party members for, "teaching my kids what a "810W j06", is. And the DLC efforts to co-opt come GOP development programs, ie... catering to the banks and big business in exchange for some of that money they kept throwing at the GOP and Phil Gramm and his ilk.

Money, Money, Money... from the corps to pay for hate radio, quasi-official think tanks funded by PAC money, brought to us by... Nixon.

I could be wrong, but these are my views. I lived through it, read of it and experienced it.

[Garrett78]

8. Moral Majority, Powell Memorandum, media consolidaton, Third Way Dems, whitelash, etc.

[mountain grammy]

13. Etc etc etc

[Willie Pep]

9. Great question and a tough one.

I think the Great Depression and World War II severely weakened the Old Right and produced a generation of leaders in both parties who felt that policies had to be enacted to address some of the issues of ordinary people. The 20th century produced powerful extremist ideologies like communism and fascism and there was a belief even in some elite circles that capitalism had to be reformed to work better for ordinary people or else they might become attracted to extreme ideologies.

That is not to say that there weren't bad actors at the time. You still had segregationists in the South, for example. But they were clearly on the way out as seen by the post-war success of the Civil Rights movement. We seemed to be making progress and this accounts for the optimism of the 1960s notwithstanding the fierce battles over the Vietnam War, segregation, feminism, etc. Things seemed to be getting better. But the economic problems of the 1970s shattered the post-war economic consensus and with it you saw a backlash by some white Americans over issues like busing and rising crime rates that were blamed on blacks and Hispanics.

Meanwhile wealthy interests were working on reviving old school Gilded Age conservatism by funding think tanks, magazines and a whole host of organizations to revive the Right. The economic problems of the 1970s were blamed on liberal economic policies and this allowed the Right to come roaring back especially in the 1980s. I think the 1980s produced a real cultural change in the country. Now greed was good, it was cool to be openly contemptuous of the poor and "liberal" became such a dirty word that even some Democrats dropped the label.

Sorry for being so long-winded but this is what I think happened. I think a lot of emphasis has to be put on the Right's development of an alternative media and alternative academia in the conservative think tanks. I have relatives who consume nothing but right-wing media, largely Fox News, right-wing talk radio and websites like Breitbart and Red State. They are often woefully misinformed and sometimes believe things that are contrary to reality. For example, I have an uncle who told me that unions are more powerful than ever despite the fact that union coverage rates have been declining precipitously for decades. I won't even get into the more outlandish conspiracy theories that exist on the Right.

For a time I thought that the Internet would make things better but I am not so sure about that anymore since people still stay within their partisan bubbles. Granted Democrats can do the same thing but the Left doesn't really have the same media presence that the Right does. Contrary to what people say the mainstream media isn't really liberal. If anything they let a lot of GOP nonsense slide in order to try to appear fair and balanced and to promote "horse race" politics to get views and clicks.

[TheMastersNemesis]

11. See My Post "The Problem ----" You Are Correct On All Counts.

[TheMastersNemesis]

10. The Problem Is That The Right Wing Has NOTHING Good To Offer Anyone.

I look at the GOP like I look at the Taliban or ISIS. If you follow the economic or cultural policies they offer they are just poison to every living thing. I cannot think of one thing that the GOP wants that is decent. And I think that having Trump as president is the best example.

Look at what happened in Afghanistan with the Taliban or the Middle East with ISIS. Did anyone but the leaders or participant in that madness gain anything. Why would anyone want to live in a hell like those places became. And in a sense take every GOP policy that has been, is or will be put forward and take it to its logical end. For the ordinary person or working person it ends up in slavery and misery. If you are not in the upper crust with all the money your life is about the same as the Middle Age peasant endured.

We have a new "aristocracy of the rich" where the privilege to be as evil as you want is ok.

[smirkymonkey]

14. Well, unless you are in the 1%, but otherwise you are correct.

They are nothing more than a hate cult.

[Donkees]

12. Liberal Republicans disappeared as a counter-balance

[ananda]

15. Yeah, that lowest common denominator ..

.. just keeps getting lower.

We are so screwed!

[Bettie]

17. W and Cheney got away with what they did

Reagan is held up as an example.

Fact is, they have learned that there are no consequences for their behavior whatsoever.

Each Republican administration from Reagan on has pushed the envelope a little farther and each time, they get away with it.

This is the natural next step. If this one gets away with it? I don't even want to think about what comes next.