As Hurricane Helene careened toward Florida’s Panhandle, numerous Republicans voted against extending funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Last week, Congress approved $20 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund as part of a stopgap spending bill to fund the government through December 20. But the measure left out billions of dollars in requested supplemental disaster funding.
The Senate approved the measure by a 78-18 vote on September 25 after it passed the House in a 341-82 vote. Republicans supplied the no votes in both chambers.
Some of the Republicans who voted against the bill represent states that have been hard hit by Helene, including Florida Representative Matt Gaetz.
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I’d imagine they’ve proven otherwise many times. People aren’t one-dimensional pain-inflicting villainous caricatures. But nothing I say would convince you of that.
If you can give me a single solid event, I might be willing to believe it. But when people ask for proof and you respond “it’s happened, many people are saying it, but you wouldn’t believe me” that’s not a very convincing argument. Nor are the actions of local Republicans a convincing argument in favor of them not being mustache-twirling comic book villains. I believe this about them because this is all that they have given me reason to believe about them. If your every action is in service to evil then I label you evil. I will change my labels if and when they choose to act outside of them. I have seen precious little acting outside of that label since I’ve been old enough to pay attention to politics.
Ok, if you say “show me one single act where a Republican acted with any singular other interest besides the explicit directive of making people suffer” I’ll spend my time finding an instance. Or you can just admit that you didn’t mean what you said, and no matter what I say you won’t change your mind, and we can go about our days.
You find me one example of a conservative in office who has acted like an objectively good person, and acted in the interests of other people without a profit motive, within the last 20 years and I’ll admit right here in the public forum that some conservative officials are good people.
Whether you take me up on that or not is up to you. I’m not really going to lose any sleep over it either way. My intention here isn’t to make you do homework to try and prove me wrong about something. My intention is to highlight that people are their actions, and if we pay attention to the actions of sitting Republicans, every action they make is in pursuit of personal profit or of harming the other. There are almost certainly isolated cases here and there where one of them has acted in a manner befitting a public official, but I couldn’t name any of those times and if you go searching for one I expect you’re going to have quite a bit of homework attempting to find one.
If your every action serves evil then I label you evil. If nearly every action serves evil but not all of them we promise, that’s still not a great look and I am not sympathetic to it.
You are right, in a way, in that I’m pretty confident you aren’t going to change my opinions in any fundamental way here today. But that’s not because I’m unwilling to listen to an alternate point of view, it’s because I come armed with knowledge. I already know what these people do. I have already tried to discuss, and share, and debate with conservative supporting citizens for many many years already. My open mind has led me to the conclusion that some percentage of them are truly genuinely wonderful people that are tragically misinformed about the world around them. Many more are just ignorant, some willfully so. And the small percent that remains are the ones that typically end up in office under Republican colors, who are the ones who discovered they can espouse these views in order to amass personal power beneath the eaves of a massive propaganda network set up and abused by the generations preceding and feeding off the energy (and donations! Somehow!) of the poor, misinformed, typically rural, american.
Please note that “all Republicans are evil” does not also mean “all Democrats are good” nor does it mean that all republican voters are evil. Most of them just aren’t being presented with a factual view of the world that surrounds them. They are victims in this system. But what it does mean, and this is the hill I’ll die on regarding this subject, is that all Republican officials who currently hold office in the United States of America are horrid, vile little shits and it’s an order of magnitude easier to find evidence corroborating that rather than refuting it. You have a pretty good chance of being able to reply to this with an article showing that the governor of Indiana built an orphanage once in 2018 or something, and feeling good that you’ve got one over on me, but if that’s the case then you’ve really missed the point of what I’m trying to communicate here. You don’t seem like an unreasonable person. You haven’t called me names or rage quit the conversation and I respect that and wish to respond in kind. I do not think that you, personally, are an evil or stupid person. But I do think you need to take a critical look at most of your representatives in our government, and really see what they’re up to. It’s easy to be blinded by propaganda, I am not immune to it and neither are you, and it’s been getting really bad these days. But just listen to what they say from their own mouths and ask yourself if that’s what you want representing you to the world at large.
