Where you at? I been here for years.

Politics from the inside looking out

Apologies for not posting something sooner. I’ve had a lot on my mind and just haven’t been able to get the words out for some reason.

Anyhow, it occurs to me that unlike a lot of folks on Team Red these days, I never had a moment when I decided to switch from the Democrats to the Republicans, because I was never a Democrat in the first place. I was never there for them to leave me behind. Maybe my parents did, but we never talked much about politics, except for my Dad’s half-serious quip about voting to re-elect President Nixon in 1972: “By God, Trainors stay bought.” And why not? Nixon had given him the first raise since 1952 that he hadn’t earned from promotion, raising us from the kind of poverty where your living room couch is the middle seat from your ‘63 Microbus to a decent middle-class life.

I think another part of it was that he was getting a faceful of the New Left every day when he went to work at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, and those people pissed him off. I didn’t care much for these spoiled rotten brats calling my Dad a babykiller neither, and I remembered that when I started seeing people like Tom Hayden and John F. Kerry* becoming powerful in the Democrat Party. These people weren’t much better than the Communists we were fighting in the Cold War as far as I was concerned, and I wanted nothing to do with them or their party.

So when I went off to Germany in 1980 and got my absentee ballot, I voted for Ronald Reagan and the straight Republican ticket, and did the same after I got out, got married, and moved to Minnesota in 1984. I was moderately active in the Independent Republican party for most of the time I lived in Minneapolis, though I think after my second unsuccessful run for the Minnesota House in 2000 (IIRC) I didn’t do much until I sold the house and moved to Bloomington in 2003. Still went to the polls, still voted Republican, still listened to Rush Limbaugh when I could.

And that hasn’t changed. It’s been interesting watching the Grand Old Party change, and people I used to respect (like our -former- Dark Lord Dick Cheney) turn coat and start acting like the honorless assholes a lot of people said they were back in the day…but the people saying that were lying fuckers then and now, so…all I can do is try and keep my own nose clean and not vote for obvious crazies when they come along.

I think a lot of people Trump has brought on board aren’t the kind of people I would have voted for on my own (RFK Jr. being the best example) but they seem to have the right ideas about cutting the Federal government down to size and weeding out the Deep State, so I’m willing to wait and see. And if the next four years make life better for the working man & woman, then maybe, just maybe this MAGA/MAHA fusion will give us another eight years of Vance after Trump’s second term. Guess we’ll see. I’ll be almost 70 by the time the 2028 elections roll around.

“And I could say I’m trying to change/But that’s just another lie…” Kid Rock

*”Who, by the way, served in Vietnam.” - Rush Limbaugh