Remember when John Kasich was the reasonable guy in the room?  Maybe you don’t even know who John Kasich is. He’s one of the white guys trying for the GOP presidential nomination. He’s also governor of Ohio, which arguably makes him one of the whitest guys running for the GOP presidential nomination.

If you watched or heard about the first A-Team GOP debate (that’s the one in primetime with an audience, not the junior version), you know Kasich came off as super reasonable and got lots of good press for not saying he’d disown a daughter who told him she was gay. Woo-hoo! Big points to the guy who said he’d actually be a parent and not an ideological jerk. I’m impressed.  

Actually, I thought he might be a little less awful than the rest. Republicans innately have no sense of the implications of most of what they say – particularly when it comes to social issues. I used to work for a Norwegian-owned company whose owners were constantly flummoxed by the employee reactions to bad management decisions they made. “Why can’t they just think what I tell them to think,” one of them asked me. “Because they won’t,” I told him. “They have minds of their own.”

The Republicans are like that. They call Latinos rapists and plot to deport even those who are citizens and wonder why they can’t get through to the wetacks. They call LGBT people sick and evil and claim our marrying will cause the downfall of the United States and wonder why the fags can’t just focus on their economic policies (which are also worthless, but that’s another post). They show no empathy or concern for African-Americans, condemn them as the only cause of their difficulties and wonder why they won’t come over to the dark side.

Women care about jobs and the economy, they say. African-Americans care about jobs and the economy. Latinos care about jobs and the economy.

Of course we do! We all care about jobs and the economy. We all have to make it in this world. That’s not news and it’s not going to get you into office nationally. As much as the GOP wants to concentrate on the easy things (for which they have no answers), they will not admit that there are differences among us that affect our attitudes, our priorities and the way we vote. They want to love in the part of the world that we all share (to some degree or another) and denigrate the rest at every opportunity.

Women want to have sex without necessarily having kids? They’re whores. Real women want their husbands to have good jobs so they can stay home and take care of the all the kids they should be having because they have sex.

Gays and Lesbians want to get married? They don’t need that. We let them live together, don’t we?  Why are they so self-centered and greedy? Why do they want to bring down America? The Bible says they’re unnatural and they should be stoned to death, anyway.

Latinos care about immigration? The only ones who do are illegals themselves and they can’t vote, so who cares about them? No one who is in the US legally would care about them, either.

Now Kasich has added another in a long line of stupid and insulting ideas to the GOP Pantheon: taking away teachers’ lounges. That’s right, Kasich says if he were king of America (I’m not even going to spend time on that), he’d take away all the teachers’ lounges so they can’t “sit around and worry about ‘woe is us.'”

Are you freaking kidding me?

There’s a whole book’s worth of wrong in that. How about some respect for teachers? How about some respect for any adults who aren’t just like you, Governor? How about considering this your STFU moment? No one who thinks in terms of being “king in America” and so blithely brushes off the concerns of constituents deserves to be elected blackboard monitor, much less president.

I only hope this is the unforced error that sinks the Kasich ship and I hope a lot of people who keep foolishly voting Republican will see him as symptomatic of the entire party in 2015. There isn’t one of them who can see beyond his own experience or the party line.

I’ll be blunt: Anyone who thinks teachers are the problem is both a moron and a lunatic. No one becomes a teacher for the fabulous salary or the cushy benefits. Teachers can’t segue into lobbying positions that pay seven figures or posh assignments at Fox “News.” Teachers often can’t even afford to live in the communities where they work. What exactly is the threat imposed by underpaid people who work long hours, make no money? Ask the Republicans because the threat exists only in their heads.