OUR HARD-HEADED REPUBLICAN FRIENDS

        I have a Republican friend who hates Barack Obama. In an exchange of e-mails he has refused to acknowledge that President Obama has accomplished anything. He accuses the President of spending all his time playing golf and basketball and taking vacations.
        When I took strong exception to those charges, and pointed out some of the President’s many achievements, despite the unrelenting opposition of the Republicans, my friend wrote back, saying “I disagree and I don’t want to discuss it any further.”
        That is the attitude of too many Republicans, who simply refuse to face the facts. Their hatred of Barack Obama blinds them to the truth. They make some outlandish and totally unsupportable charge, and then close their ears. They will not listen to reason.

        It’s this closed-minded attitude that frustrates and annoys me and others who feel there is a strong case to make for electing the President to a second term, a case worthy of a fair-minded person’s serious attention. The disturbing reality is that my friend is not alone in his hardheadedness, and I believe that accounts for the closeness of the race, for there’s no logical or defensible argument for choosing Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan over Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
        Another disturbing fact is that our Republican friends and neighbors do not express any consternation about the voter suppression laws of so many Republican state legislatures. They are content to have their Party steal the election, if their ultra-rich superPACS can’t buy it for them.
        This is a serious concern, and a sad state of affairs for our nation. After the Republican National Convention there is no doubt that the Party of No has become the Party of Lies. To think that the Grand Old Party should sink to such a low level!
        I’ve always considered myself an Independent, and I have voted for the persons I thought would be the best leaders for our country and for the world, regardless of their Party affiliation. That applied to local elections as well.
        But because of the way the Republicans have been behaving for the past four years, and the things they now stand for —their war on women’s rights and labor unions, their jingoistic foreign policy, their unfair tax policies, their determination to repeal the Affordable Care Act, their opposition to the American Jobs Act and to the Dream Act, their opposition to Welfare and their disregard of the poor, to name just a few — and their overall obstructionism that has put their partisan interests above the good of the nation, I have to say that as a Christian I would be embarrassed and ashamed to call myself a Republican.
       The Democrats aren’t perfect, by any means, but they stand for most of the things I believe in, while the Republicans stand for almost nothing I believe in. Even on the things they say that I agree with, their policies are not consistent with the things they say they believe in. Neither do Mr. Romney’s personal practices agree with the things he says he believes in.
        So in this election I’ll be voting a straight Democratic ticket. I hope enough others will do the same to send a clear message to the leadership of the G.O.P that they need to free themselves from the ideological shackles of the Tea Party and return to the main stream of American political discourse.