Thing is, I don’t think any real evaluation of GOP candidates is possible anymore, post Citizens United and now post Walker (not that these are the only two factors, far from it). We aren’t allowed to know who is funding candidates- which goes for both parties of course but I think we’re seeing where the biggest bullshit manouvers are coming from. And Walker has made it clear that GOP candidates know the public would not vote for them if they were upfront about their agenda. And so they hide it and you won’t find out what it is until after they take office. Surprise! They want to run Wisconsin on behalf of and for the benefit of the Koch brothers, and gut the teachers’ union to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.
This isn’t something the public has been asking of their representatives. Clearly the GOP has no intention of representing the interests of a vast majority of Americans. On the contrary, their intention is to remove any and all protections for the general public so that the wealthy can screw them as much as possible, via hijacking the government. Under the circumstances it just doesn’t matter what a GOP candidate says anymore. One of them could present the perfect dream agenda, and once elected it’ll be, “Gee, I really should have mentioned this, but our penultimate goal is the repeal of the 14th amendment.”
Energy and the environment are the perfect example to illustrate this. DID YOU KNOW: if you factor in the methane released from the fracing process and add that to the greenhouse gasses produced by burning natural gas, the total greenhouse gas emissions of frac gas is worse than that of coal? That’s right, the energy source the Republican’s would have us base our energy future on is dirtier than coal. How do they deal with it? By lying and misleading of course. They stress that it is “clean burning”, which is true and yet a lie by omission. Then they gut the EPA, arrange for fracing to be exempt from the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and make it illegal for measurements of the air around frac mines to be measured. If nobody knows, what’s the big deal right? There’s money to be made. Then they trumpet that natural gas is cheaper than wind power- only because they extract it in an unacceptable (but cheap!) way, and are trying to tie the country to it before the alternatives become clearly cheaper in all cases. Lock 'em out and tie us to the option that benefits their sponsors, that’s their Plan for America.
So it appears that a world which becomes uninabitable they day after these guys die is okay with them.
Sorry, it isn’t that I intend to vote party-line democrat. It is that the GOP is our enemy and will never, ever get another one of my votes. Not even for oily-pelican catcher.