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Stepford Republicans: All Caught on Tape!
By Jeff Cohen
03/02/08 "CommonDreams"
---- “The Stepford Wives” tells the chilling story of once
smart, independent women who get abducted and turned into tamed,
mindless robots.
I have a theory about a
similarly subversive process that turns grown men once capable
of independent and reasoned thought into robotic extremists.
Call them Stepford Republicans. The nefarious transformation
always occurs before the individual gets close to becoming a
Republican president or vice president.
Stepford Wives become
robotically subservient only to their husbands; they pose no
threat to the rest of us. But Stepford Republicans become
subservient to right-wing forces of corporatism, war and
prejudice. Once converted into mindless ideologues, Stepford
Republicans are a threat to us all.
The prototype of a Stepford
Republican is President Ronald Reagan. After
his apparent abduction and alteration, he became an instrument
of corporate power in the White House: union-busting,
downsizing, cutting school lunch funding. This is the Reagan
many remember: champion of the overdog.
But when Reagan was still a
sentient being, he was actually a bleeding-heart advocate for
working people. He denounced budget cuts (”millions of children
have been deprived of milk once provided through the federal
school lunch program”) and tax cuts that “benefit the higher
income brackets alone.” He assailed corporate profiteering, and
labeled a top Republican “the banner carrier for Wall Street.”
He hailed unions and complained that “labor has been handcuffed
by the vicious Taft-Hartley law.”
In other words, before he was
robotized, Ronald Reagan could be a warm, compassionate human
being - and I offer a
remarkable tape to prove my theory.
Many Americans have long
suspected that Vice President Dick Cheney is an
android. What they may not know is that - before being
Stepfordized into a neoconservative drone - he was capable of
non-ideological thought that would allow him to choose a peace
option over war, able to use human reason to figure out why
invading Iraq would inevitably lead to “quagmire.” This
short video clip offers compelling evidence.
Today, Mitt Romney
is such a robotically rabid spouter of social-conservative dogma
that he’s won the praise of radio rightists like Rush Limbaugh,
Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Offered as evidence of his
Stepfordization is this
video revealing a once human and tolerant Romney who seemed
to care deeply about women’s rights and abortion rights, and
resisted any connection to the policies of Reagan-Bush. It was
this pre-abduction Romney who boasted that he would do more for
gay equality than Ted Kennedy.
John McCain was
also horrifically rewired toward servile courtship of the
Religious Right. Dramatic evidence of McCain’s Stepfordization
is caught on
video: “Before” footage shows you a strong human speaking
bravely against right-wing “agents of intolerance” like Jerry
Falwell; “after” footage reveals a lifeless, docile tool of
those same forces.
Perhaps you can’t accept my
theory - despite the powerful taped evidence I offer - that
these Republican icons are victims of Stepford-like abduction
and transplant.
If so, I’d like to hear an
alternative theory as to why these individuals betray their own
principles or intellect - why they turn themselves into fawning
servants of economic forces or ideologies or social movements
they once abhorred.
The blind pursuit of power, you
say? I’m simply unwilling to believe that human beings - even
top Republicans - are so inherently opportunistic and corrupt.
I’ll stick with my abduction
theory.
Jeff Cohen
is a media critic and author of “Cable
News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”
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