Should Republicans be allowed to run for President?

I’ve been thinking of all the Republican presidents there have been in my lifetime. I was born in 1956. The first Republican president I knew was Eisenhower. He was the last reasonable Republican president.

He was the last legitimate Republican president.

Ike was a moderate and a genuine hero. He warned us against the military industrial complex. He didn’t suck.

Richard Nixon was a crook, and he was elected in 1968 by conspiring with a foreign government to blow up peace talks to make Democrats look bad.

Nixon was reelected in 1972 by hiring a team of dirty tricks operators (they called what they did “rat fucking”), which included bugging the Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.

Reagan was elected in 1980 by making a deal with Iran (an unfriendly foreign government) to hold on to America hostages they were holding until after the election. He then secretly sold arms to Iran, the proceeds of which paid for an illegal war he secretly funded in Central America.

George W. Bush was elected in 2000 — or rather, appointed by Supreme Court Justices who were themselves appointed by his father, after his own brother rigged the vote in Florida. These shenanigans would mark any third-world country as a banana republic.

Bush was re-elected mostly on the fear he played up after the 9/11 attacks, and the swiftboating (i.e, a campaign of blatant lies and slander) directed toward his Democratic opponent, John Kerry.

Oh, and Ohio was stolen.

Bush and his VP, Dick Cheney, went on to become international pariahs, and are widely viewed as war criminals for their disastrous invasion of Iraq, embracing of torture, and creation of secret detention centers around the world.

I left out two GOP presidents.

1) Gerald Ford, who was appointed Vice Pres by Nixon when Spiro Agnew was forced to resign for corruption, and assumed the presidency when Nixon was forced out. Ford was not elected to a full term.

2) George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s VP, was elected on the idea of being Reagan’s third term. He was defeated when he attempted to be elected in his own right four years later.

In other words, neither of them could make it on their own.

That brings us to Trump. It took Crosscheck, voter ID laws, closing polling places in Democratic areas, purging of voter rolls in several states, Bernie Sanders, massive Russian psyops, misogyny, racism and a press hostile to his opponent — and he still lost the popular vote by almost three million, and won because of the electoral college and less than 80,000 votes in three Congressional districts.

Nixon, Reagan, W., and Trump all were and are crooks, and obtained the presidency not only by cheating, but often by conspiring with foreign powers.

Other than these four criminals, out of every other presidential campaign in my lifetime — more than sixty years — only one — G.H.W. Bush in 1988 — was won by a Republican.

And that was because he pretended for that election to be the criminal Reagan.

The lesson:

Republican presidential candidates cannot convince Americans to vote for them without breaking the law and conspiring with our enemies.

That should tell you all you need to know about the Republican Party.

End the GOP.