Posted by Bob Lord
I'm proud to report the start-up of Arizona's newest progressive blog, The Voice of Arizona Republicans. After reading my recent post regarding a crazy post I read at Sonoran Alliance, one of our commenters, Richard Grayson, was inspired to begin compiling the statements of Arizona Republicans as they move to broaden their base. I just visited the site, and likely will be back on a regular basis. It makes it so easy to appreciate how crazy these people are when you see all their wacko statements pulled together in one place.
If you take the time to visit The Voice of Arizona Republicans, you're guaranteed some good laughs, and you'll encourage Richard to continue his good work. I'm sure he'd appreciate your comments as well.
I put this up at the blog today:
After the 2012 election, much talk was made about the Republican party’s demographic problem and how it can’t win elections when it loses so many votes of segments of the electorate that are growing in number, particularly among Hispanic/Latino voters. In Arizona, of course, the Republican party has done everything it can to promote hatred, xenophobia, and vile and disgusting anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, homophobic feelings among the uneducated, unenlightened, and uninformed voters of Arizona, so many of whom are older people who’ve lived their early years in a pretend world that doesn’t exist and now seal themselves off from reality in their own gated communities of media and information.
I thought it might be interesting to show the voice of the rank-and-file of Arizona’s Republican party, the so-called base, who are the kinds of people who turn out to support the odious Joe Arpaio and the other politicians who have made Arizona either a laughingstock or a pariah in the serious world. So I compiled some of the crackpot posts and comments from some of the blogs that view themselves as the voices of the Arizona Republican party — not the official party people, who clean up their act, obviously, for public consumption and who may or may not have the decency to be embarrassed by the sentiments expressed in this hateful, ignorant, obnoxious, and utterly stupid comments below.
What bothers me almost more than the egregious comments here is how none of these bigoted remarks were refuted by less crazy Republicans who read these blogs, which also tend to be filled with posts that seem to be from the Arizona Republican party, its local affiliates, and conservative Arizona organizations like the Goldwater Institute. Sad. I thought my re-posting these base (in two senses) Republican voices would serve as a warning to any Latino, Asian-American, young, educated, gay and lesbian, or other people who might buy into what undoubtedly will be a GOP attempt to deal with its “demographics problem.”
But I’ve realized after a few weeks that there is no point to this, and more importantly, that having to read these blogs and their negativity was just too depressing.
After two runs for Congress in Arizona — in the old Sixth Congressional District as the Green party candidate in 2010, when I got 1.4% of the vote, and in the new Fourth Congressional District as the Americans Elect party candidate ins 2012 — I’ve decided to end my involvement in Arizona politics.
I’ve changed my voting address and voter registration to my home in New York City, to my native Brooklyn, a place where President Obama won over 81% of the vote and where I feel more comfortable. I think Arizona will become a better place — that the Republicans have lost their supermajority in both chambers of the legislature this year, that the Democrats now control a majority of Arizona’s U.S. House delegation — in the future, due to the same demographic changes that have caused the national Republicans to lose yet another presidential election. Arizona can return to its oft-forgotten progressive roots and shake off the bad reputation it has among educated people in the U.S. and around the world.
But I need to move on from all the negativity I encountered in Arizona politics. I’ll leave this blog up to let people know what passed for the mainstream sentiments among Arizona Republicans in a particular time and place. (If you want more, there’s plenty there covering recent years). I’m not young, and I can’t wait for Arizona to change. I need to move on to a better part of America where people don’t hate so much.