If you watch a lot of CNBC, you might think all Republicans are misogynist, racist A-holes. If you watch a lot of Fox News, you might believe that Democrats are all socialist commies who hate puppies. It’s hard to understand one another when we don’t listen, and we seem to be more divided than ever before.
This episode takes a look at the partisan divide and how it affects our opinions and perspective. We also talk about herd immunity, Infrastructure, filibusters, and Karma.
TRANSCRIBED FROM AUDIO
Hey, everybody, welcome and thank you for turning in today. This is our first podcast officially on the Apple and Spotify platforms – So you can now find us anywhere you listen to podcasts. If you would be so kind as to subscribe and leave a message or a rating, it would help us increase our audience, so I would really appreciate it.
So I’m coming to you today, as usual, from my what I used to call the Closet of Solitude, because it’s the only place in my entire house quiet enough to record. But today it’s the Closet of Despair because my system keeps crashing. So, Lord only knows when this is going to actually reach your ears… hopefully sometime before the Rapture.
Anyway, today, we’re going to talk about a few good things and a few things that aren’t so good. Today, we are going to talk a little bit about America’s new partisanship, I’ll give a refresher course on herd Immunity, we will look at Biden’s infrastructure plans, I’ll give you something to watch out for and we’re going to talk a little bit about something called Karma.
Tribes & Bunkers
So I read an article this last week about America’s uptick in partisianship, which really surprised me. While it shouldn’t surprise anyone that America is more partisan than ever, it’s a different type of partisanship. When I grew up, political partisanship was a pride in your team, you were a proud Republican,” or a proud Democrat. Now, it’s more of an it’s more of a negative partisanship – upside down partisanship. So you find conservatives that don’t like and don’t really believe in the Republican Party, but they really, really hate the Democrats. And you have Democrats who aren’t in love with their party or their leaders, but they just loathe the Republicans. it’s more of an anti-partisanship than traditional partisanship. and if you look around, it comes through loud and clear – its all so negative – particularly on my side. The Republicans cannot tell you what we are for, but we sure know what we are against. You can only be that way for so long and continue to attract new voters – even then, the types of people you attract are probably not going to be the types that you want long term. I’m going to get to that later in the episode. Anyway, this was outlined in an article I’ll put on my website called Hidden Tribes.
There are a few reasons we are so tribal, and it’s pretty fascinating. Number one, the more news you watch, the more likely you are to overestimate the other side’s extremism. For example, If you watch a lot of CNBC, you might think that all republicans are misogynist, racist a-holes. If you watch a lot of Fox News, you might think all Democrats are socialist commies who hate puppies. We are listening to a lot of stuff, but what we’re not listening to is one another.
We don’t talk to each other, we don’t listen to each other & we don’t understand each other. It’s exceptionally hard to empathize with somebody you fundamentally (no pun intended) do not understand.
The second contributing factor is education – but the specifics are surprising. Republicans without a college degree are more likely to pigeon hole and pre-judge Democrats than Republicans with bachelors degrees and higher. However, Democrats with college degrees are more likely to pre-judge Republicans and make assumptions about what kind of person they are… further, the bias increases with the amount of education they have. So, if you are a Democrat with a doctorate degree, you are statistically as likely to judge perfect strangers as a completely uneducated Republican.
What we are all doing is making assumptions about people’s character based on the colors of their jersey. It’s like hating a person merely because they play for a particular football team – it’s ridiculous, you wouldn’t do that… It’s just dumb. What we must find a way to do is to peel off these labels and climb out from under the wreckage and rubble of the last four years, and realize that everybody is probably just doing the best they can. We need to Brene’ Brown this thing, people. Everyone comes to the table with what they’ve got… and maybe if we could all give each other a little bit of grace, a little bit of forgiveness, and a little room to turn around, we would all be less anxious and less angry. So I’m going to put my pushback in the middle of the podcast… this time, I’m gonna let my friend Wynonna Judd help me out with it.
AUDIO ” Love Can Build a Bridge”
So this is the infrastructure episode…we need to build bridges, not walls. We don’t need to be calling each other nazis and fascists and commies and dumb and elitist. Yes, Wynonna, I do…I do think it’s time.
In Case You Haven’t Herd...
Okay let’s talk about where we are with COVID. I’m so happy to make this transition. We are about to have enough vaccine for everyone in the country to get vaccinated within the next 60 days. So if everybody does what they’re supposed to do, by this summer things are going to start opening up and looking a lot more normal. By this fall, we could actually start living our lives again with a high degree of normalcy – football games, parties, travel, school… That said, this all is contingent upon us doing what we are supposed to do and reaching something called Herd Immunity.
AUDIO – cows mooing
You’ve heard this a lot so I want to clarify what this means because herd immunity is misunderstood. This is not a binary choice – meaning either everyone is safe or everyone is in danger. if you’ve been immunized, you’re (mostly) safe from COVID….mostly. If you’ve not been immunized, you’re not safe from COVID. The way herd immunity works is that enough people get vaccinated, so it stops the ability of the virus to jump from host to host and continue to survive. If enough people can’t get the virus and can’t pass it along, the virus cannot survive. I mean, it’s kind of like lice…without a host to feed on, it eventually just dies… It doesn’t just live on the coffee table, you know, forever….
AUDIO “Ewwwwwww!”
So lets talk about a little bit about Biden’s big plans. The first thing he did was pass the American Rescue Plan (Covid relief) – I covered that topic in Episode #4. So we now we have moved on to his second priority… everyone’s favorite topic… Infrastructure! Everybody gets excited about infrastructure, right? bridges, highways, tunnels, airports… eh, not so much. It’s kind of like getting a new roof or new tires – really super important, really hard to get excited about. So we can see why congress gets more excited about investing in theings like tanks and missiles and the Space Force because, you know, aliens…
AUDIO CLIP : ” Na Noo Na Noo.”
The Party of No
But heres the catch – this particular bill has elements that aren’t traditionally considered Infrastructure- like expanded broadband, particularly in areas that are underdeveloped rural areas, and areas with a lot of economic disparity. And then a lot of the focus for this $2 Trillion Infrastructure bill is toward building up (and making up) for some of the economic disparity in the country. This is the part where the Republicans come in and object – because its a lot of money and goes well beyond a normal infrastructure bill. Now, let me be clear, Biden really, really wants Republican support of this bill. He wanted it for COVID as well, but they didn’t give it to him. Even though the Democrats did vote for Trump’s relief package, Republicans did not vote for Biden’s – so he passed COVID relief anyway, with no Republican support. Their argument then, as well as now, is that there’s stuff in this bill that doesnt belong in the bill. But they aren’t sitting down to negotiate – eventually, they’re going to have to come to the table with some alternatives, or they’re just going to become the Party of NO, which is what they’re kind of known as already. They are not course-correcting, they are not re-branding, they are not cooperating and they are not legislating. They are neither leading nor following. They are merely obstructing.
And, you know, Republicans, you can sit around and complain about the things that you are against… like how you want to replace Obamacare. And yeah, there were a lot of problems with Obamacare, there are a lot of problems with every big govenmental program that gets enacted – we could talk about No Child Left Behind, as well. A lot of these programs need tweaking, but it doesn’t mean that the idea is terrible. We tend to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater every time there’s a change in power, and its making Americans heads spin. So when Trump won the White House and they also controlled the House and Senate, Republicans finally had their chance to overturn and replace Obamacare. What did they do? What was their big idea?
AUDIO: crickets chirping
Nada. They had no plan, they had no ideas, they just continued to bitch about Obamacare. You can’t replace something with nothing. But actually, this Republican party can – because the goal is no longer legislation, and it’s not policy, and it’s not fixing problems for the American people. The goal right now is to regain and retain power. And so they’re gonna do whatever they can to obstruct this president and the Democrats because they don’t want to give them any victories. They see a Biden success as a Republican loss… and unfortunately, the American people are the ones who pay the price.
Let me say this again – for the record – I do not like big government. But we have to do something at some point… we keep voting no, and kicking the can, and problems keep getting worse. Whether it’s guns, like I talked about last week, or the environment, or infrastructure, these problems aren’t going to wait forever for us to all you know, join hands and sing Kumbaya.
AUDIO: children singing
Okay, so back to this bill. One of the big arguments is how we’re going to pay for this $2 trillion dollar package. Biden is proposing that we raise the corporate tax rate from 21% up to 28%. (Quick history, it was 28% for a very, very long time, then it was raised to 35% and then Trump brought it down to 21% because he was trying to incentivize corporations to remain in the US and not incorporate overseas to avoid paying taxes…Nice idea, but it didn’t work. In fact, worse than not working, between the lowered rates, loopholes and deductions, there were 55 companies that paid no taxes in 2020 and 26 major companies that paid absolutely no taxes at all during the Trump era…companies like Nike, FedEx Duke Energy Dish Network.
So when Biden says a police officer and a teacher who jointly make $140,000, are taxed around 22% and Nike pays nothing, and FedEx plays nothing, does that seem okay to you? Cause he ain’t lying. It’s a thing. Now, I will also say about Biden, he needs to stop the exaggeration and hyperbole because it undermines his argument. It’s more like grandpa exaggeration than blatant psychotic lies like Trump – but Americans need to get back to knowing what the actual facts are. We could stand a little less of the apocalyptic language and the my hair’s on fire talk…right?
Filibuster & Cloture
Okay, real quick, let’s do a refresher on what a filibuster is versus what a cloture vote is, because you’re going to hear this a lot in the coming weeks. This is a little hard to explain simply becuase there are a lot of exceptions and legislative nuances that I don’t want to get into for fear of putting you to sleep… but in a nutshell…
A filibuster is the ability of the minority party to “slow the roll” or stop a vote on legislation. You saw Jimmy Stewart do it in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he just talked and talked and talked and talked to delay the vote on a bill. If you never vote on the bill, it cannot be passed, right? Ok, so in order to go to the vote, you have to get enough people to vote for something called cloture, which is 60 people to say, “Okay, enough already, we’re done talking about this. Let’s take a vote.”
You’re going to hear people talking about whether or not we should get rid of the filibuster….People, we should NOT get rid of the filibuster. The Senate is intended to be the deliberative body, as I said, you’re supposed to slow the roll in the United States Senate – not ram things through in 15 minutes.
The Senate is not the place where the majority party does whatever they want, while the minority party just has to eat a bag of dirt.
That’s not how it works. Speaking of dirt bags. Let’s talk about Matt Gaetz of Florida…
Step Aside, Florida Man
This guy stands out as a really bad dude – in Florida. Let that sink in for a moment. Like, “Step aside, Florida man…. hold my beer.” So, Matt Gaetz is a congressman with sort of a hair helmet and beady little eyes and great big teeth. He’s kind of the Jonah Ryan of the House (you know, Jonah Ryan from Veep) if Jonah Ryan was a creepy perv… or I guess I should say, creepier and purvier.
Anyway, this guy gets elected in 2016. By 2017, he’s already under investigation by the Justice Department (and this would be Trump’s Justice Department, so… not partisan) for his association with this ne’er do well from Seminole County named Joel Greenberg, who was a buddy of his and a former tax collector
(Tax collector? like in the Bible? is that even a thing down there? Is that a job?)
Anyway, he’s currently in jail for charges related to sex trafficking and sex with minors. He supposedly is the guy who supplied the, um, entertainment. Basically, he was Gaetz’ pimp and they are also friends, so he was kind of his pimp-friend. Anyway, Greenberg has been arrested and so he’s singing like a bird. And some of what has come up is that Gates has been accused of being with a 17 year old girl… otherwise known by non-criminals as…. a child. Disgusting. Anyway, Gaetz wrote a book and did not do himself any favors. In this eloquent tome, he describes how the Trump Era made it “a good time to be a fun loving politician.” He described DC distractions as taking two forms… “sex and money… getting paid and getting laid.” Just a little glimpse into this fellas character. Just warms the heart, doesn’t it?
Then he went on Tucker Carlson for one of the cringeist interviews I’ve ever seen. When he attempted to drag Carlson into his defense…Oh, yeah, Tucker, remember that time I introduced you to this woman, blah, blah, blah. Carlson, with a look that alternated between confusion and disgust, claimed to have zero recollection of the exchange. Awkward.
AUDIO: “Carlson left the interview sounding confused. ‘You just saw our Matt Gaetz interview.. that was one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted.”
You might may not have followed this, but I mentioned the poor treatment of Liz Cheney a few weeks ago, and Gaetz was one of the worst offenders. When Rep Cheney voted to impeach Donald Trump because of his insurrection, Gaetz was one of the guys who stood up and called for her to resign from leadership – but not only that, he flew from Florida to her district in Wyoming and held a rally against her in her own home state. She is a colleague and a fellow Republican. We just don’t do that. It is not done.
Eventually…The World is Round
You know that old saying, if you go to bed with a dog, you wake up with fleas, well, this is what happened to my party when they decided to climb into bed with Trump. We should not be surprised that we’re going to have a bunch of little MAGA wannabe sexual predators crop up everywhere… arrogant cretins who lie, disregard the law, and do whatever they want to do because they think they can get away with it… because their hero has gotten away with it… so far.
I had lunch yesterday with some dear friends who were colleagues of mine in the GOP – fundraising and campaign professionals. As we lamented the loss of dignity and civility in the Republican party and all that has happened. My friend, who always has little nuggets of wisdom, said, “You know, the thing is, karma is coming… but she rides a slow horse.”
Buzzzzzzz
Okay, I promised you something to watch out for, you know what else is coming?… or who else is coming? The Cicadas.…. don’t know why I love cicadas. It’s super weird, because I don’t like any other bugs. I don’t know if I like it that they come out every 17 years and it feels like an event, or if it’s because they have those little teeny tiny shells and they seem like miniscule dinosaurs, and you can put those shells in your friend’s hair or maybe on the back of your kid’s sweater just to mess with them a little bit. I don’t know…. Im pretty sure it makes me wrongheaded. But the Cicadas are coming… and I, for one, am happy about it. The other thing I’m happy about is that I’m headed to Dallas this afternoon. For everybody who heard Episode #1, I’m going to check in and see if Ben Ghazi happens to know Phil I. Buster… See what it did there? Oh dear.
16:07
Thank you all so much for listening. I know that your time is valuable and precious, and I truly appreciate you spending it with me. if you get a chance to subscribe, i would be grateful for that, too. One last shout out to Cole Purser and ZOOMST for this funkadelic intro music… I’m one proud Mama. There’s a full album coming out soon and I’ll be letting y’all know about it when it’s available. Thanks again for listening. Have an amazing week and I’ll talk to you next time.
Excellent episode, Gretchen Purser.
Thanks for giving me some more to think about.
Z
So excellent!!