The New Reagan

Please, Sir. 

I don't want any more.

Because Freedumb!

The NeoConfederate Feudalist Party has always loved and needed it's Poverty Porn. Their tiny brains requir constant steeping in an open sewer of paranoia and rage at various imaginary Sekrit Commie Gummint plots to steal their stuff and hand it over to uppity Negroes, sneaky Mexicans and the ubiquitous Undeserving Poor.  They need to believe The Poors are poor because of moral defect:  it's the only way they can gleefully cheer on policies that kick the shit out of the poor Monday through Friday and still pretend to be Christian on Sunday.

Of course, by building an entire ideology on a foundation of fraud and fairy tales, then have made themselves hostage to every grifter and demagogue who promises to keep the party going.

30 years ago they had Reagan, dog-whistling about "young bucks" and "states rights" with a twinkle in his eye:

Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?

By BOB HERBERT Published: November 13, 2007
...
The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day. 

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.
...

30 years later, Paul Ryan works the same meatheads with the same fairy tales around the same, lurid  Randite campfire:

Paul Ryan Lied About a Hungry Kid To Justify Killing School Lunch.

The Pig People will be with us always, so thirty years from now there'll be some other grifting wingnut goodhair shaking down another mob of inbred hill folk for their money or their votes.  But whether he is doing it in front of a global audience from the Oval Office or out of the back of a van in some God-forsaken jerkwater town depends entirely on how successful we are at burning down the Party of Jefferson Davis between now and then.