Am I Stupid?

As I have oft-mentioned I play golf with a group of guys who are Republicans.  Don’t get me wrong.  I like Republicans.  Talking with them, listening to what they have to say, gives me an opportunity to try to understand how, what, and why they think as they do.  After a round of golf yesterday, I sat and talked with George.   To him, Obamacare is wrong because it interferes with the natural operation of the marketplace.   That was his response after I pointed out that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted thirty seven (maybe thirty eight) times to repeal Obamacare.   It is not the role of government, they say, to interfere with the natural process of things.  Government should stay out of the business of trying to control peoples’ lives because that is socialist thinking that has no place in the democratic process. They vote to repeal Obamacare because it will distort the natural operation of the markets. 

However, Republican thinking says that there are exceptions to this rule.  One exception is that government should involve itself intimately in the private sex lives of women with regard to their pregnancies.  Apparently, because women are too stupid to make decisions involving their own lives, the elderly white male-dominated governments (state and federal, around our country) try to impose invasive, costly and burdensome measures on women who find themselves pregnant at a time in their lives when to continue these pregnancies will cause undue hardship.  I try hard to understand Republican thinking about this, but I am at a loss as to how and why they think on this subject.

Another exception to the rule of “natural selection’ is governmental support to farmers for growing and not growing various crops.  However, this support is by and large limited to Republican-controlled states and fat cat farmers who, even without such support, earn greater than $750,000 per year.  For those Republicans whose major mantra for the past umpteen years has been it is wrong to take taxpayer money and give it to someone else, I found it extremely difficult to understand this giant governmental giveaway to farmers, particularly when the incidence of fraud and corruption in this program is so great.  The total money given to farmers, directly and indirectly, since 1995 approaches four billion dollars!

These are the same guys who will spend 31 billion dollars of our hard-earned money to hire additional federal employees (shrinking the size of the federal government is part of their mantra) to stand side-by-side guarding the Mexican-U.S. border.

Examples like these illustrate why I have so much trouble understanding Republicans?  Am I stupid or what?

Just saying . . .