It occurs me to that there is a very basic lack of integrity in the republican party. I know what you're thinking: "No kidding," right?
Of course it seems obvious when you step back and view the philosophy, motives and methods used by those on the right. Right wing philosophy is based on Ayn Rand (fiction) with a wide range of conspiracy theories thrown in for good measure.
Selfish Motives
The obvious motives for all of the positions held by the right are selfish in nature. They place themselves ahead of the rest of society, demanding that our country's policies benefit them personally, while patently disregarding what's best for society as a whole. It's easy for anyone who is paying attention to see that republicans are not about doing what is right for the the country. Anything done for the common good (and not their personal good) is labelled as 'Communism,' or 'Socialism,' and somehow connected to something that is evil, in spite of the fact that the policies will clearly accomplish good.
When looking at individualism (Ayn Rand doctrine) verses collectivism, it really comes down to whether it's ME or it's US. There are many different ways to spin the 'Virtues of Selfishness,' and the crowd that is seeking permission to be wholly selfish and self-centered, has found what it's seeking in the likes of pseudo-preachers and Koch puppet politicians, who've devised their own theories and justifications for doing the wrong thing, while still convincing yourself that it's OK.
This absolutely includes their 'right to life' nonsense. When you boil it all down, the only 'human' that it is totally free to care about, is one that it isn't born yet. An unborn embryo actually requires nothing from anyone, except for the body that carries it. What it requires from that body is very basic, nourishment and safety. I find it quite sick that republicans refuse to help provide nourishment or safety for pregnant women, while at the same attempting to limit their right to choose what happens to their body, claiming they care so deeply about the lives of the unborn. To take it one step to the further extreme, while they oppose maternal healthcare and supplemental nutrition programs which can help pregnant women have healthy babies, they are not opposed to keeping a brain dead woman alive on life support, against her wishes and that of her family, even as the fetus inside the dead body grows more and more deformed and unrecognizable. That is not pro-life, that is purely twisted and sick.
If you think I'm off on this point, just observe the behavior of any republican who is asked to contribute to maternal healthcare, or medical treatment for an unborn fetus. The first and only response they have is "Why should I pay for that?" Again, look at their attitude toward the federal Women Infants and Children food assistance program (WIC), which only provides the most basic, life sustaining food items for pregnant women and children under six. Look at their attitude towards the family leave act, toward equal pay for women and toward labor laws, which ensure a safe working environment for men and women, including pregnant women. There's no sense in looking at their attitude towards war. It's all too clear that their desire to save life ends the moment their leaders tell them their own necks are in danger. Baby killers? Of course they are. They kill with tanks, bombs, guns, poisons, depleted uranium, they kill by destroying water supplies and blowing up infrastructure and turning a blind eye to the true body count that results from their violence, too busy pointing fingers at others to notice the blood that's all over their own hands. It is very plain to see that their 'compassion' and 'passion for life' begins and ends at their wallets. It's not speculation, it's a fact. The claim that they care about the unborn is as bogus as their claim that they care about vets or the poor or kids or anyone else. The caring begins and ends at the point where a contribution is required.
Dishonest Methods
As far as the methods that right wing uses to accomplish its goals are concerned, you'll find the entire spectrum of dishonest tactics, from doctored videos to studies based entirely on pseudo-science. You'll find a party that believes there is nothing it can't get away with, and in truth there isn't anything they can't get away with, as long as they can convince the simpletons that follow them that it's all in the name of God. From robbery to murder, and everything in between, through manipulation they easily get their base to go along with the most vile of acts, either by convincing them that God ordains it, or by telling them that their very lives and freedoms will be forfeited if they don't go along. They come in the name of Jesus: "Hallelujah. Amen. Drill baby drill, steal baby steal, kill baby kill."
They've perfected their methods, learning to exploit the masses through fear; fear of others, fear of change, fear of government, fear of medicine, fear of God, fear of men, fear of everything. They pander to religious fervor and right wing zealotry. They appeal to the selfish nature of some men, who think in like terms, especially the Christian Dominionists, whose desire for power and control, combined with their greed and doctrine of selfishness, has already corrupted both church and state. They've perfected the dog whistle, sending out signals that appeal to the lowest common denominators, drawing the KKK and the white supremacists, along with the closeted bigots and racists, to their side in no short order every time. They party is like a magnet, drawing the worst and ugliest elements of society to itself.
Promising to Break Promises
And all of this is just the introduction to what I really wanted to write about today, which is the republican platform of promise breaking. Here's the truth. No man of integrity can run on a platform that is entirely based on breaking promises. No person worthy of trust advocates for breaking commitments, or promotes the idea that promises are made to be broken. Just think about it.
As a nation we've made commitments to our veterans, to our senior citizens, to our children, to our poor and to ourselves. The entire platform that republicans are running on is 'Sorry, but promises don't mean anything'.
Sorry veterans, we promised to take care of you when you came home from war, but you know, we just can't afford it. Sure, we promised you an education, we promised you that if you were wounded we would see to it that your healthcare needs were met. We promised to be there for you, because you were there for us, but you know how it is. Now that the war is all over, now that you're injured and emotionally scarred, we realize we just can't afford to do what we said we would. Sorry about that. Thanks for everything though, really.
The fact that republicans have consistently voted to cut funding for veterans programs and services is nauseating. Some advocate for doing away with the VA altogether, because, you know, we just can't afford it now that our vets have fulfilled their end of the bargain. There's no money for veteran's jobs programs or training programs or mental health treatment or homelessness prevention. Funny, if you ask them they'll tell you there's always enough money for more wars, but never enough money to take care of those they send to fight them.
There's always money for recruiters in high schools, for radio and televisions ads telling American kids that the military is the road to success, the way to get ahead. Yet, there's never enough money to back up those ads by actually doing what was promised. How's that for integrity?
Social Security?
And our seniors? "Yes we took your money throughout your working life in the form of social security payments. I know we promised to give it back when you reached retirement age, but you know, that's just not working out now. Sorry about that. Thanks for everything though. You're on your own".
Pensions? "Oh those, well sorry again. Thanks for the lifetime of work in your city, state or country. Sure we made promises. We really did intend to keep them, honest we did. But sometimes you just have to break your promises. That's just how it is, no big deal."
Republicans have, somewhat successfully, convinced Americans that the programs they've paid into their entire lives are just 'entitlements.' The very word entitlements somehow has been transformed so that it implies something people are actually not entitled to. Something they don't deserve. Something they're getting for nothing. Except that every person in the United States who has a job pays into Social Security, and no-one who has not worked and paid in can get anything back. Every person whose pension is being robbed worked for years to accrue that pension, on the basis of a promise. Those things are not entitlement. Those are program that people have paid for, and republicans want to steal from. Pure and simple.
To balance the budget by going back on your word is not fiscal responsibility. It's theft of services. It's no different than if you hired the kid down the street to mow your loan, promising to pay him $50 when he was done, but then deciding after the fact that you don't want to pay him. Not because he did lousy job. Not because anything, except that you know you can get away with it.
It's sad but there are a lot of people in the world who will eagerly engage in that kind of behavior. It's why few business establishments extend credit any more and why most service providers now get their money up front. I imagine that most republicans are the type of people that are always on the lookout for someone to exploit in some way. I suppose that's why it's so easy for them to accept this type of behavior from their political representatives.
Education
Public education is a promise that we as a society made to our children and grandchildren. It's a promise that we made to the future of our nation. It's also a promise that we need to keep if we hope to compete in a global economy. But all across the country republicans are raiding the children's coffers to pay their banker friends and provide more tax breaks for their wealthy donors. The entire premise behind what they're doing is a lie. It's theft.
The taxpayers are charged for the schools, then the funds are spent on something besides schools. As a result, the schools are driven into economic ruin. Doors are closed and then the private sectors moves in. In this way private corporations with no education experience are getting their greedy hands on public money, money which was originally meant for the public schools. It's criminal.
What kind of lowlife, greedy scum steals from kids? The republican kind. Not to worry, folks, they're doing it all for the glory of God! If you believe that, I bet you're also on their list of folks who want to buy a piece of that bridge in California...
The promise that every child in America will receive a free education is just one of many that we cannot allow republicans to break. To go back on that promise will devastate the country, throwing us further and further behind in every area in which our children will need to be able to compete. Education is an investment in the future of our America because today's kids are tomorrow's Scientists, inventors, developers, business owners, product manufacturers, service providers and on and on and on. An uneducated population cannot build a strong economy, solve the world's problems, advance the fields of medicine or technology, write the next great novel, discover the secrets of the universe etc... We owe it to the next generation and the one after that and after that, to make sure that our government keeps this basic promise to all children.
Labor
In the early to mid 1900's life in America was horrible for the average citizen. Survival was the basic tenant of life. Men, women and children were willing to do even the most grueling and dangerous work for mere pennies, just to try to survive. The promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was far off for the vast majority of people.
But the labor movement rose up and people banded together, tired of watching their friends and families lose life and limb, working long hours in dirty and dangerous environments, just to live in the poor house, in spite of it all. When we talk about our nation's founders, we should never forget our less than famous ancestors, the men and women who risked everything to bring us the promise of a minimum wage, a safe working environment, a chance to rise out of poverty and to live a life that includes something apart from morning, noon and night servitude to the company stow.
Some of those promises are still in tact today, many are not. Our children have been robbed of the rights that our parents and grandparents risked everything to give to them. Republicans claim that the rights of working men and women are job killers. They claim that we can solve unemployment by getting rid of workers rights, safety and yes, the minimum wage.
The promise that, in America, if you work hard you will be able to provide for yourself and your family has been undermined by the lie of trickle down economics and the ever advancing agenda of corporate fascism, which comes in the guise of 'economic freedom.'
Republicans tell us that we can best achieve our goals by forfeiting our rights. We can best fulfill the American promise, by breaking the promises already made. If we give up more, we'll get more. It's all double talk. If trickle down is real, why is it that the people who are supposed to be giving back never stop taking, no matter how much we give them?
The social safety net
The social safety net, which includes things like food assistance, cash assistance, unemployment insurance and health insurance for children, the disabled and senior citizens is another promise that republicans want to break. It's a promise that our nation has made to those who are struggling, to the family members of those who are struggling, to the working poor, to the disabled, to those who have reached retirement age. The promise is that if you fall on hard times or if you are too young, too old or physically, mentally or emotionally incapable of providing for yourself, we won't just let you rot. I personally believe in that promise, because it's not just good for those who receive benefits, it's good for society in general.
What's not good for society? Letting our children go hungry. Letting our working poor live in tent cities or in cars or abandoned buildings. Forcing our disabled citizens to resort to begging on the streets to survive. Letting people die on the streets. Letting them freeze to death in alleys or die from toothaches, because they couldn't afford to see a dentist. What's bad for society is filling our jails with homeless people who committed no crime beyond existing. It's bad for society to arrest poor people for being poor and to use our criminal justice system as the only means of dealing with the mentally ill. We pay for the police and the courts and for the jails too. We pay to feed and house the homeless and the mentally ill in jails, why can't pay to feed and house them out of jails? We pay for their healthcare in jail, why can't pay for it outside of jail?
The social safety net is good for the businesses that also reap the benefits of government food, housing and cash assistance. It's good for communities that reap the benefits of lower crime rates, when people are not backed into corners so that crime becomes their only means of self preservation. But republicans run on a platform of throwing the weakest and most vulnerable among us under the bus. Their promises focus on breaking our promises to our own people, diverting the tax dollars meant to help the poor to the richest people in this country. And what then happens to those dollars? They're used to create jobs in China or they're stashed in foreign bank accounts, while the corporations that got them are allowed to exploit prison labor, paying wages of just pennies an hour.
If we break our promises to the poor, we deserve what we get. If we can't step back and see how insidious all of this is, how we're allowing our fellow citizens to be exploited, how our lack of compassion and our lack of concern for our fellow man is becoming our own downfall, then maybe it's already too late to save the soul of our nation.
Freedom of religion
One of the first promises ever made in this country was the promise of freedom, expressly the freedom of religion. The Constitution clearly says that Congress shall make no law in regards to religion. Republicans are more than eager to break that promise. We have right wing politicians that claim our country needs "laws based on the God of the Bible." (Michele Bachmann) We have others who claim that this is a Christian nation, in direct contrast to what the Constitution clearly spells.
The fact of the matter is that this country was founded in no small part by people who were fleeing a government that persecuted its citizens, based on personal interpretations of religion. The US was founded by intelligent men, who realized that nothing would destroy the country faster than laws that were based on religion. Men who spent far too much time listening to the various 'Christians' argue over whose interpretation of the Bible was correct and whose wasn't, and those who did not accept the existence of a God, arguing against the threatened oppression of those who did. 
Our Constitution wasn't created lightly, and it wasn't created by idiots who didn't know what they were doing. It was created by men who had seen the abuse of the state, as it was directed at those who didn't accept the state religion. It was founded by a group of men who had challenged the official interpretation of religion, some members of Christian sects that did not believe in the teachings of the Catholic church, some who were free thinking men that denied the existence of God altogether and who wished to be able to do so freely and without fear of persecution. It was founded by men who were entirely suspicious of both church and state and hoped to keep the two as far away from each other as possible. Those men included representatives from various groups of Christians, from the Quakers to the Ana-Baptists, who came to this country to escape the persecution of the Church of England. To say that anything else is true is just a flat out lie.
The freedom of religion is the most fundamental promise that we have as American citizens. It's a promise that the state will not intervene in matters of conscience, or in matters of spirituality. We now have a group of religious zealots in government that are promising to break that promise. These are the people that want their interpretation of religion to be placed into the text books that our children read in school. These are the people that want indoctrination into their various religious cults, to replace the educational system altogether. These are the people that demand that everyone follow the God that they perceive to be real, the people who would surely take away your rights to question their God, to research other views, or to seek God in your own way and in your own conscience. 
Unlike the founding fathers, these are not men of conscience. They're people who seek to use religion to subjugate others, to silence people they don't agree with, to eliminate the need for critical thinking, to destroy everyone's ability to find out for themselves what they believe is true and is not. Basically they're the people many of the founders of this country fled from, centuries ago.
Freedom of conscience is not just a right that was granted by the Constitution. If there is a God, then free will is a right that was quite obviously granted to men by that God. Throughout history, various religious groups have sought to take away people's right of conscience and the right of free will. But it's impossible to do so, since by nature people are created with independent minds. Sooner or later every nation that has attempted to suppress freedom of religion has been challenged by men of conscience, such as those who helped to found this country.
The danger of allowing the state to assume powers to interpret religious teachings is all too obvious. Historically such governments have severely abused their power to suppress dissenting views and persecute 'heretics'. And yet throughout history, only after much bloodshed, freedom of religion has been achieved by men who refused to blindly accept the official state doctrine of religion.
On the right there are many hypocrites who are all too happy to claim that the state has no right to interfere with the church, while at the same time screeching that the church does have the right to dictate state policy. No it does not. In fact the church enjoys tax exempt status in the United States as part of the promise of the separation of church and state.
There are more than 450,000 churches in the United States. As of 2007 there were 33,000 different denominations of Christianity alone. All of these people disagree with one another on interpretations of the Christian Bible, yet somehow republicans claim to represent all 33,000 different types of Christians? And they would impose a single interpretation on the other 32,999 groups that don't see things the same way that they do. And those are just the various Christian groups, not including those who embrace a religion that is not labelled 'Christian' such as people of the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu faiths.
As of 2013 there were 6.6 million people of the Jewish faith living in the United States. Republicans would gladly impose Christianity on those citizens, as a matter of law. What about the anywhere from two to seven million Muslims living in the US? Again, forcing their beliefs on others is the primary focus of the fanatical right wing.
More than 26 percent of Americans identify themselves as atheist, agnostic, having no religious affiliation and/or embracing a religion other than Christianity. Additionally, ever growing numbers of people who do identify as Christian do not embrace the type of Christianity espoused by the right wing. In fact, a survey conducted by Pew Research in 2013 shows a very large number of Christians rejecting the narrative of the right wing. Today, Christian conservatives make up only 28 percent of the population, while those who identify themselves as progressive Christians or the Christian left are increasing in number each year, now accounting for 19 percent of the population. Additionally, a full 83 percent of young people reject the politics and severe religious views of the Christian right. That fact suggests that these views are soon to go out altogether, in the same way that humanity once moved beyond the extreme state and church doctrine that led to the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials.
When we think of what it means to be an American citizen, most of us think of the promises that our country was built upon. The freedom from religious persecution being one of the most fundamental promises there is. Yet republicans want to destroy this promise, in essence assuming the role of a man's conscience and inserting themselves into everyone's relationship with God.
To me this is the biggest threat that the right wing represents. The double sided argument that the government cannot be trusted, therefore we must give the government the power to dictate spiritual matters, is probably the scariest thing I hear coming out of their mouths. It is not the job of the state to enforce religious doctrine on its citizens. Yet we see republicans slowly undermining our freedom of religion in all areas of life, as they seek to give employers, public businesses and state entities the right to discriminate (read persecute here) against others, based on religious views.
Again, it is not about what is best for everyone with them. It's not about what's best for the country, for the community or for society as a whole. Instead it's about self interest, their perceived right to not have to come in contact with anyone who holds a different point of view, practices a different religion or maintains a different lifestyle. It's about their perceived right to never be uncomfortable, never face their unfounded fears and never allow anyone 'not like them' to enjoy the same rights they claim for themselves.
Is it really based on their religion? There's little by way of the New Testament to back up their views. Jesus said things like "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and "Love your enemies and do good to those who spitefully use you." These are commandments that they prefer not to follow, so they've written them out of their religion altogether, replacing those teachings with ideas from the Old Testament, and from the Testament of right wing nut jobs such as Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck.
Throughout this country's history many people have come to the United States to escape persecution on religious grounds. It's a fundamental right and a promise extended to every citizen of this country. It's also a promise that republicans are chomping at the bit to go back on, although they seem not to realize that their own churches exist solely because of the separation of church and state. Newer versions of Christianity, such as Christian Dominionism, practiced by such right wing fanatics as Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, and even older religious sects like Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses would have been quickly stomped out by a government controlled by Catholics or Baptists or Lutherans or Presbyterians or some other denomination of Christianity. If we approach the subject with the same amount of historical relevance that the founders did, we come to the realization that whenever Christians do succeed in suppressing all non-Christians, the next step is to begin suppressing other Christians. It's happened time and time again, but those who don't learn from history are bound to help the religious fanatics of the world repeat it. That's what worries me. As a follower of Jesus and not right wing doctrine, I am already under attack by them. They claim my liberal views are a threat to their way of life, and you can believe that, even though I am a Christian, they hate me as much as they hate any Atheist or Muslim or Jew.
No promise is too big to be broken
The republican mantra seems to be that no promise is too big to be broken. The idea that a good portion of our population thinks it's a good idea to put their trust in people who are literally running on a platform of 'promises don't mean anything' is quite astonishing to me.
It's astonishing not just because I believe in the promises that we've made as a nation to our children, to our elders, to our veterans and to each other, but because I believe that promises should be kept and our word is our honor. It's hard to imagine myself putting my trust in people who flat out tell me that promises have no meaning. That alone has to be the standard by which cognitive dissidence is measured. It goes two steps beyond ignorance, highlighting how easy it to manipulate a dumbed down society, through fear, through selfishness, through hate, through division and through religious exploitation.
"Dear America, we're here to tell you that promises don't mean anything. And by the way, we promise to do right by you, and of course you can trust us to keep our promises..."
Yes, I do find it amazing that people vote for this double-speak. I do find it amazing and appalling that even one person in this country puts their trust in the party that literally runs on a platform of breaking America's promises.
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