The Republicans gave themselves a report card this week.  Completely failing grade.  They seem to understand lately that their party is struggling, but due to their failure to support education of any kind,  they will again fail to learn why.

May I offer some suggestions?

It’s the racism.  There are racists in your party, and none of you call them on it in public.  It’s the religious hypocrisy.   You keep trying to legislate  morality according to your view of Christianity.  You keep failing to use our country’s pooled resources to actually work on Christ’s mission of feeding, teaching and healing.  The legislating of morality issue wouldn’t be so objectionable if you actually understood Christianity.  None of you give any credence to Jesus’ actual examples.  All you do is close your eyes and shout rules, rules, rules.

The crucifixion and the resulting New Covenant compel us to place grace above Old Testament rules.  It’s the economic selfishness combined with stupidity.   When corporations and billionaires are given tax breaks, they don’t add jobs, they pay their upper level employees more.  If they had been taxed reasonably the past ten years, the spending on infrastructure would have grown and stabilized the economy.

Your stance on “obamacare” is stupefying.  You chant “socialism,” and refuse to consider any ramifications of universal health care.  Imagine businesses not having to offer health benefits, or to have the entire workers compensation  program removed.  Imagine workers not tied to jobs for healthcare.  Minimum wage workers are never going to make enough to pay bills, save for retirement and buy health “insurance.”  Healthcare is not a reward for exceptional people, it is a basic need for a stable economy.

It’s your hypocrisy about cutting spending and waste.  Fraud and graft committed by rich republicans cause more waste and instability than any social program .  You call social security a program for moochers, and have no comment on all of the retirees who lost everything to criminal actions by the executives at Enron.

It is your failure to regulate businesses whose shortcomings affect the entire world and its future.  Instead of ruining the earth even more with your fracking schemes,  choose to invest in renewables now.

It’s your war on women.  Women are not property.  Your “traditional marriage” interpretation is based on the tradition of women being “owned “by their fathers and husbands.  It’s your failure to understand that you don’t get to decide what sexual morality is.

It’s your failure to understand that population growth does not equal economic growth.  We need to a)  increase the percentage of current population productively engaged in our economies, and b) use birth control to control population growth.  We face serious land and water distribution problems.

It’s your disrespect for working class people.  Workers deserve an inclusion in the teamwork concept at their jobs.  This is not communicated by the attitude of “take it or leave it, I can hire ten other people at your current wages.”

It’s your attitude towards education.  The Bible is not a science textbook.  Smart, poor kids deserve all the help we can give.  It is your refusal to admit that you want to gut education programs because most corporations benefit financially from having a larger pool of uneducated workers to take advantage of.

It is your failure to adequately define family values.  Does “octomom’s desire for more children than she can afford fit the definition?

Maybe we need to tax members of  “right to life” groups a special tax to cover society’s costs of inadequately raised children.

Maybe we should charge Republicans a war tax to pay for Bush’s war.

Obviously an incomplete list.

Laura Twing lives in Cedar county, with her husband and various animal companions.