If you’ve ever wondered, the Republican Party tastes like chicken. From its fear of voters exercising their right to vote to fretting that voters will discover its true agenda the Republican Party has become America’s chicken party, and not because its members eat a lot at KFC.

With state after state newly under full Republican control since the elections of 2010 taking partisan action designed to discourage voters from casting ballots, the Republican Party is submitting its abject admission that it has no hopes of appealing to, nor of winning the votes of vast constituencies of America’s voters, subsequently afflicted with consuming fearfulness of American citizens voting, reduced to ignominiously seeking to prevent them from doing so.

The party that has become America’s profile in cowardice likewise cowers from straightforwardly telling the American people whom it represents (the top one or two percent) unable to look middle class voters in the eye and tell them Republican policies will lessen their security and their share of national wealth, as well as perpetuate the decline of their portion of GDP. If it’s such a good thing to reduce discretionary spending invested in government initiatives designed to lift up all Americans in order to provide continuing tax reductions for America’s wealthy, Republicans should be able to say as much to America’s citizens without resort to obfuscation, subterfuge or cowardly concealment. Paul Ryan happens to be a perfect pick to represent our chicken party, what with his abiding adolescent crush on the silly Ayn Rand with her “looters” and “producers” caste system, both mentor and acolyte famous for painting something callous, hollow and foolish in virtuous hues, Ryan the ideal salesman putting his pasty white benign cover on despicable contents.

Republicans like to make the reference to government as a surrogate nanny (as if having a nanny weren’t highly desirable in the view of rational people) but you won’t see them demonstrate the courage of their conviction and state to voters their faith and belief in the wise paternalism of a wealthy business and financial elite to retain an outsized portion of our GDP due to the putatively superior wisdom this elite possesses in directing and managing national resources, a wisdom less affluent Americans ostensibly don’t possess. Forget the wisdom and purchasing power of the average American consumer, Republicans say privately or in their think tanks and ideological conclaves, put the money in the hands of the financial elite who know best.

Indeed, the fear of straightforwardly articulating this inherent belief is perhaps rational, given that these same financial elites, empowered and advanced by Republican policies only so recently gave the nation and the world the most calamitous economic collapse in 80 years. Perhaps if you were pushing this oligarchial paternalism that so recently reamed the country, you’d be a timorous little mouse about mentioning it too.

Still, it’s a sad state of affairs when a party that aspires to and competes for the opportunity of governance of a great and powerful nation can’t make a persuasive case to a majority of its citizens and must seek to achieve power purely through sneaky, partisan disenfranchisement of many of America’s people’s cherished right to vote, or by concealing its true beliefs and real intentions. Flimflam is the Republican ethos now, voters as suckers and marks and malleably dim consumers. Politically effective as this may at times be, it remains a form of democratic and ideological cowardice, its full embrace by one of America’s major political parties unfortunate to say the least in the world’s oldest democracy.

Minorities, elderly citizens, students and the poor absolutely must not let themselves be disenfranchised from the electoral process as Republicans clearly intend, and Democrats must holler to high heaven loudly and incessantly until every voter in the country understands how tenderly shy Republicans are about naming their actual beliefs and true agenda. By election day every American  should have been informed to the point of saturation that chickenshit Republicans are committed to nothing less weaselly and pusillanimous than evading the people’s democratic judgement. We must relentlessly and successfully expose the reality of the Republican agenda even if Republicans are too cowardly to provide it themselves.