You have to give it up for those clever Republicans. They’ve taken the child’s retort — I’m rubber; you’re glue — and turned it into their most effective campaign strategy. In fact, they’ve turned it into an art form.
Witness Rudy Giuliani’s latest broadside:
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Here’s the deal: the Republicans have learned over the last 50 years to take every single charge and criticism leveled against them and turn it around to fling back at the Dems. It started a long time ago when the term “special interests” meant greedy, rapacious corporate lobbyists. The lawyers and lobbyists for auto manufacturers and the tobacco cartel were the original special interest villains. The GOP then turned it around to mean civil rights activists, antiwar marchers, environmentalists, etc. The argument from my side of the fence was “How can civil rights, peace, and the environment be special interest issues? They’re the issues of the people.”
See, the Left’s original intent in using the term implied that the special interests had only their own selfish desires at heart. GM and Ford didn’t want federal safety regulations — even though more people were getting killed in their woefully unsafe cars every year than during the entirety of Vietnam — because the changes they’d have to make would cut into their obscenely huge profits. Tobacco companies didn’t want states and municipalities to regulate smoking — despite the fact that lung cancer and emphysema were approaching national epidemic proportions — because, well, who cares about those dead and dying suckers? We’re making our big dough.
Civil rights, peace and the environment, by definition were not — are not — special interests.
It worked so well, marginalizing the burgeoning peace and environmental movements that GOP strategists have gone back to that well time and again in the ensuing decades.
Unions became “special interests” as the Age of St. Ronald fast approached. Before that, organized labor was the mouthpiece for the little guy (and gal) fighting for every precious dime against powerful corporate (read: special) interests. As the nation grew weary of Jimmy Carter and turned its lonely eyes to Reagan, the Republican narrative — spurred by the Saint himself — turned unions into monolithic, tyrannical, crushing forces oppressing the good people of the United States. Oh no, good ol’ Ronnie was going to protect us from “special interest” of labor.
Environmentalists became special interests, too, although they have to shoulder a lot of the blame for it. In fighting against every conceivable environmental threat, be it global or local, the mostly-white, mostly-well-off on the front lines of the eco movement never paid the slightest heed to the thousands, even tens and hundreds of thousands, of jobs that would be lost should they win their battles to save this niche species or protect us from that chemical pollutant. They were right — only to an extent. The environmentalists should have strategized re-training programs and incorporated new job ideas into their rhetoric for the likes of lumberjacks, oilers, chemical company workers, and many others who stood to lose their livelihoods.
The reassignment of the term “special interest” even carried over to women who, census takers tell us, comprise some 51.5 percent of the pop. The nation’s majority demographic was trivialized by the “special interest” label, given them by Republicans who loathed the very idea of equal rights by gender.
As recently as 2008, Republicans screeched that criticisms of Sarah Palin were sexist and anti-woman, this despite her long-held opposition to reproductive rights, equal pay, and other sex-type inequities. They simply latched onto the critical label and turned it into something it was not and was never meant to be.
They continue to do it to this day. To wit: The narrative thus far has been that D. Trump is pretty off his rocker. Shrinks and skull jockeys all around this holy land are chiming in on his neuroses bordering on personality disorders.
So, what do they do? They turn it all around. No, no, no — it’s not D. Trump who is deranged. Why, it’s Hillary! She’s nuts! We got proof!
At least Rudy Giuliani has proof — albeit visible and evident only to him thus far.
Make no mistake, the rest of the party will be jumping on his shit cart. From now until Nov. 8th, Hillary will be known, among many other things, as the mentally unbalanced candidate.
See, D. Trump’s rubber; she’s glue.
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