Introduction
Reasons Not to Read This
If you consider yourself at least reasonably well-educated, reasonably intelligent, and reasonably compassionate, and yet you still somehow inexplicably find yourself voting Republican, or running for political office as a Republican – then this was written for you.
That is, it's written with you in mind. Being a Republican, you may not actually care what I think, since I'm not a Republican – indeed, I oppose most or all of what the GOP has come to stand for – and therefore am not to be trusted or taken seriously (because, of course, everybody else is wrong). If that's true, you can stop reading here, because I'm not going to be saying much of anything nice about your party as it now stands – though I do have a few harsh things to say about Democrats as well, if that's any consolation.
You may also be tempted to reject it in that it seems to present a highly unbalanced picture in which Republicans are almost always awful and despicable, while Democrats are more inclined towards occasionally performing useful and productive acts of legislation – a view generally described by the right-wing media as "biased" or "partisan" – but it is neither of those things. If it were "biased", then I'd have a tendency to ignore bad things done by Democrats, or good things done by Republicans. If it were "partisan", then I would be cheering on Democrats and their policies and actions regardless of their outcomes. In fact I have gone out of my way to find examples of Republicans behaving sanely and Democrats making bad calls, and these are both celebrated in the Nobody's Perfect chapter.
All that said: if you're curious as to why so many people (read: damliberal scum) find your party and the people who vote for it to be despicable human beings, read on. I can promise you that it won't be "politically correct" or coddle your sensitive feelings in any way. (That's good, right?)
Not to Put Too Fine a Point On It
In short: your party is a blight upon civilization, a virus that infiltrates all the right and proper functions of society and exploits their hard-earned legitimacy to support nothing but its own cancerous growth. It is everything it habitually accuses everyone else of being: a useless parasite, a menace to humanity, a threat to everything we hold most dear.
That which appears principled, it uses only to excuse its most heinous excesses – and ignores when inconvenient. That which is based in rigorous scientific research, it either distorts for its own ends, claims that the opposite is true, simply ignores, or even suppresses.
That which is grounded only in ancient ambiguity and can be interpreted one way today and another one tomorrow, however, is exalted and held aloft as moral guidance for all to follow – often under penalty of law (see Christian Extremism).
[a summary of the following chapters should go here]