Climbing Walz

 My apologies for posting a day late. I’ve been running around so much lately that I literally forgot that yesterday (Labor Day) was a Monday and therefore I needed to post.

My mom has been in a seniors rehab facility for the last several weeks, getting therapy on some broken bones. My siblings and I take turns staying with her to support and advocate. The TV in the room is usually tuned into MSNBC, the only channel Mom watches. I rarely watch TV news unless there’s an event happening, so it was all news to me.

But this was how I came to see some of Gov. Tim Walz’s Labor Day speech. It was a real corker, too. I can see why Kamala picked him. By the time he was done, I was ready to run through walls for the guy. He’s loaded with Everyman Charisma and common sense.

He basically hung TFG out to dry with his own words:

“This guy has made it clear how he stands. He’s sitting down at Mar-a-Lago after he got elected president, and this was his exact quote, he’s talking to a bunch of folks at Mar-a-Lago: ‘You’re rich as hell, and we’re gonna give you a tax cut.’ At the same time, he was telling workers they get paid too much already. That’s who this guy is.” [snip]

“You tell me who in Wisconsin is sitting around saying, ‘damn, I wish they’d give billionaires tax cuts and screw me over. Damn, I wish they’d take my health care away. I wish they’d underfund my public school. I wish they would make my job more difficult and more dangerous. And then at the end of the day, I wish they’d make me work ‘til I’m 75 years old.’”

It’s no wonder the Republicans are grasping at any straw they can to tarnish the guy. Rather than anything of substance, they’re talking about how he was only an assistant coach and not a head coach, and that he had a DUI 15 years ago, and the other garbage about his 24-year-long military career. It’s all they have so they have to use it.

It certainly pales compared to the garbage that’s been found coming from their VP candidate. Talk about toxic. It’s like he’s saying, “All you single women, single men, women over 50, cat owners, and Swifties, your vote doesn’t matter to us and probably shouldn’t count, so go ahead and vote for the Democrats.”

Walz also managed to work in his catchphrase that the Republicans should “Mind their own damn business!”

I love this angle because I’ve been pushing that sentiment for decades. Republicans are all about “small government” and “limited government reach” when it comes to shielding businesses from regulations that cost money, regarding trivial things like worker safety, pollution, quality of goods, and livable wages. There is no ripple too high to surpass the importance of increasing the next quarter’s profits.

But they’re just fine with the government reaching into your personal lives and private bedrooms to judge you on or ban you from the exercise of your own free will. Everyone would be so much better off if we just Mind our Own Damn Business!

But as long as there are Evangelicals, there will be a push to make us get in step with their out-of-step views on morality and religion. They’ll never be content until this country becomes a theocracy with their views enforced as the National Religion. And that means controlling education, what people read, what people say, how they dress, how they love, and how they reproduce. Does that sound like a free country to you?

It’s really an unlikely pairing under the Republican banner; the business people, and the religious people. The business people don’t care what the wingnuts do as long as it doesn’t interfere with raking in money. And the religious people don’t care what the business people do, as long as they can ban abortion, shove gays back in the closet, and trumpet their holier-than-thou status. And then you can add the racists in there who don’t care what the wingnuts or businessmen do, as long as they can deport brown foreigners and re-marginalize the Blacks. It’s a match made in Self-Interest Heaven.

I presume it’s no accident that the rich guy looks like Rupert Murdoch, Owner/Creator of Fox “News.”