Nikki Haley Will NOT Save the GOP

by Pearsonally · Published 2401.15 · Updated 2404.22

Her latest debate performance shows just how out of touch with reality she really is

Former South Carolina Governor and Secretary of State Nikki Haley is, for some reason, over 20 points behind pussy-grabber DJTrump in the polls. And although she is nowhere near the threat to the republic he is, after watching the latest tete-a-tete with Desantis, I’ve changed my mind. Originally I thought if the primary comes to TX and DJT and her are on the ballot, I’d switch my party to the letter R, despairingly cast my vote for her as a bullet against DJT, then the next day put my allegiance where it belongs, back in the D camp.

But holy fuck, she’s even more clueless than I thought. I won’t even eviscerate the hate-filled, book-banning, history-banning #Fuckublican gov of Florida, as he stands about as much of a chance of being Prez as a donut stands a chance of getting stale within 3 feet of Homer Simpson. Yes, I’m not even giving a look here at the POS who not only thinks slavery was a good thing, he actually said it.

The quotes by Haley are taken directly from the transcript of the debate which occurred on January 10. Her words are in bold, and I have kept her statements – theme-by-theme—in their entirety.

Here are some of her lowlights:

Haley:
“I have fought for school choice in my entire career because I think parents know their children best, and I think we should always do that. That’s why we passed charter school legislation in our state. That’s why we empowered homeschoolers in our state. That’s why we changed the funding formula. So, we lifted up challenged areas without bringing down the wealthy areas.

We wanted school choice. I had a Republican legislature that wouldn’t do it, but we pushed hard to get that done. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do it across the country. But what we have to do is we have to make it state centric. We’ve got to get these programs down to the state level. We’ve got to let the focus be on teachers. Teachers right now have to be the guidance counselors, the pastors, the nurses and everything in between. And, oh, by the way, they have to teach to a test. That’s not what teachers want. Teachers want to do what they were taught to do. And that means math, science, reading, history, English, arts. That’s it.

Schools can’t be all things to all kids. They need to let the parents parent. They need to let teachers teach. And we need to go back to the basics in education so we get our kids –“ (here she was cut off, thankfully, by co-host Dana Bash)

Why are #Fuckublicans so into what they call “school choice”? It’s a diversion from the final goal, the destruction of a federally-administered, or state-administered, education system. Let’s look back at the major beginning of this push within the GOP, which began taking form in the destructive years of the Reagan administration. One of that term’s biggest cheerleaders was David Koch, who stated

We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. … We condemn compulsory education laws, which spawn prison-like schools with many of the problems associated with prisons, and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.¹

The Network for Public Education Website has a great deal of information on both how and why white Southerners have pushed for the non-regulation of schools, beginning with the decision in Brown v. Board of Education², which meant white people and black people would be educated together. As NPE puts it: “This so outraged white conservatives that public schools were shut down altogether in some states and counties, and private, all-white “academies“ were opened, many by religious figures, across the nation.”³

From here, voucher programs were created, with funding amounts so low that lower-income people (GOP-talk for “black” or “people of color”) needed to borrow money to send their children to better educational options. It is here we begin to see the roots of a campaign to define education (and indeed anything with the word “public”) as a failure, despite any provable reality, in the name of political, not educational, outcomes. The resulting defunding of teacher pay has helped destroy the strength of teachers unions. Let’s not forget just how many GOP mainstays have called leaders of teachers unions “dangerous”. Yes, even Mike Pompeo called Randi Weingarten, head of the AFT, “the most dangerous person in the world”⁴.

Seriously? Not Putin? Xi? Jong Un?

For more information on these subjects, see also: https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/war-education-dismantling-public-schools-divides-americans-caste-system/ and the book The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America, edited by Kimberly Blaker.

So Haley is disappointing us here, continuing a #Fuckublican war on education, mainly because, as Founding Father of the American republic Thomas Jefferson observed, “Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.”

Why do you think Bill Bennett, the addicted-to-gambling alcoholic former Secretary of Education under Reagan, dismantled the teaching of civics? To the GOP, a public not familiar with the way the system works can always be informed — in their ways — of how it does. Doubt me? Check out this link and this link.

Jake Tapper, the other co-host, asked her “…should voters in their 20s plan on having to work until they’re 70?”

Haley:
They should plan on their retirement age being increased, yes. We’re going to change it to reflect more of what life expectancy should be.

More of the same. Here’s what one writer wrote about this crock:

Reagan, using the same rationalization of “rising life expectancy” lifted the Social Security retirement age from 65 to 67, made Social Security benefits taxable, and refused to index them to the inflation gauge that reflects the needs of the elderly. Republicans have hated Social Security — calling the program “socialism” or “communism” — ever since it was passed in 1935 as part of FDR’s New Deal.

Now they want to raise the qualification age to 70. As Haley pointed out about DeSantis’ years in Congress: “Three years in a row, he voted to raise [the Social Security retirement age] to 70 years old, three years in a row. Go to desantislies.com and you’ll see it. So, now suddenly he’s going to tell you because he’s running for president and he’s not going to do it, you can’t trust him.” Well said.⁵

Another zinger:
Haley:
“I am unapologetically pro-life, not because the Republican Party tells me to be, but because my husband is adopted and I’ve got my two sweet children sitting in front of me and I had trouble having both of them.”

Because Haley must think what worked for her and her husband must work for everyone. All the while ignoring the FACT that post-Roe restrictive abortion laws are literally KILLING women, and/or causing disparities based on economics.

Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick died on July 10, 2022 because of the restrictive abortion laws in Texas. Her baby also died. The #Fuckublican excuse they are protecting the life of the innocent is complete and utter bullshit⁶. DOZENS of women have died because of these restrictive laws, and in many cases, so have the unborn child. The reason? Read this to find out⁷.

See also: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/abortion-bans-will-result-in-more-women-dying/ and https://msmagazine.com/2024/01/12/amanda-zurawski-texas-abortion-kate-cox-republicans-womens-health/

So far, her bullshit is nothing new, repeating typical #Fuckublican bullshit: “Hey, we adopted, so if you have an ectopic pregnancy, you should die because you didn’t adopt”! Fuck You, Nikki.

Dana Bash asked her “Governor Haley, as governor of South Carolina you chose not to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. Forty states including this one where we are in Iowa did expand Medicaid covering more than 18 million Americans. As President, would you allow those states to keep their expansions in place?”

Haley:

Well, the first thing is we have to look at the fact that how can we be the best country in the world with the most expensive health care in the world? And so the way we’re going to deal with it is we’re going to open it all up from the hospitals to the insurance companies to the doctor’s offices to the pharmaceuticals to the PBMs, make them have to show us everything.

Because right now, I can tell you, we take care of my parents. They’re 87 and 90. My dad is in the hospital right now. When my mom was in the hospital, a nurse came up to her to give her a couple of Tylenol. And she said, I don’t need them. And she said, honey, you might as well take them, because you’re going to pay for them anyway. When we got the bill from the hospital, no one talked to us about that.

Right now, you have insurance companies and hospitals deciding what it is for us. We’re going to take the patient out of the back seat and put them in the driver’s seat. We’re going to make sure that just like when you get your car fixed, and you go and they say, we can give you a temporary fix, and it’ll cost this much money, or we can give you a permanent fix, and it’s going to cost that much money. We’re going to go and make it transparent so that we can see everything so that they have to show us their words.

The second thing is we’re going to pass Tort Reform around this country. I did that in South Carolina. Doctors don’t give you those 10 tests because they want to. It’s for the 90 percent chance they’ll get sued. And then we’re going to go and eliminate Certificate of Need in this country. I did that in South Carolina, as well. That basically says if you have a hospital here, you can’t have another hospital for X number of miles.

They do the same thing for surgical centers, for nursing homes. We’re going to put competition back in health care so that health care is fighting for the patient. That way, services go up and costs go down.

Although the issues of healthcare and tort reform are disconnected, it shows us she is also disconnected. For more information about the #Fuckublican effort at tort reform, see the HBO documentary Hot Coffee.

The actual healthcare aspects of her answer are about as sensible as cold fusion, and entirely miss the aspect of what would be a real answer to the healthcare dilemma. Why are things so bad here, the country with the most resources and the worst access? Even the National Academy of Medicine gets it, noting that the US is the only industrialized, wealthy nation without universal care. Why is this important? Put simply, the COST of providing healthcare goes DOWN considrably in a system without insurance company middlemen.

For an informative look at why this makes sense, see this brief clip, from Youtube:

Nikki here is navigating around any possible answer which would make sense for America. While the myth of our country having the best healthcare in the world, babies will die because we rank 23rd in infant mortality (down from 12th in 1960 and 21st in 1990), 21st in life expectancy for men and 20^th for women, and behind Botswana for immunizations of preventable illnesses. And while we spend at least 40% more per capita on health care than other nations, both access to healthcare and outcomes are unequal, with wealthier citizens having far better outcomes than working class or lower financial class people. All so healthcare companies can put their names on stadiums and pay off politicians.