Tag: Republicans

You. Yeah, you. You pontificating white males (so unrepresentative of the vast majority of your fellows in race and gender) that think that one bloody word in one speech years ago, a membership to an organization with a Spanish name and a decision upholding a city’s move to limit its liability and scrap a bad test because its results uniformly favored one racial group over another one…

…get real.

You think that Judge Sotomayor is worse for the country than the Confederacy winning the Civil War? You seriously believe that Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would have locked arms with you in protesting her nomination to the Supreme Court?

You believe that if Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today he would be on the Sunday talk show circuit talking about how she’s a “reverse racist”?

Paul Krugman has a short but withering post about the fraud that was American conservatism. Riffing off a link to Crooked Timber, which has Richard Posner becoming the latest conservative to jump the movement’s ship, Krugman writes:

And yet – why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.

Why, indeed, would anyone pretend there is any shred of credibility in anyone who found the Gingrich and Bush eras credible? But Krugman gets to the real point in the next paragraph:

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back – and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

They fought civil rights, and voting rights, and the creation of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. They fought the environmental movement. They fought science and education and basic human decency. They launched wars that shouldn’t have been launched, they supported terrorists and terrorist regimes all around the globe, and countless millions suffered and died for their greed, hypocrisy and plain old murderous evil. They were and are, in every way that matters, morally degenerate.

There was no golden era of the conservative movement. It held political power for many years, and if we are not vigilant, it could, yet again. Because there is literally nothing its dwindling band of deranged supporters won’t try, to regain power. But it’s time to stop acting as if it was a serious intellectual enterprise, or that its methods and ideals were even worth debating. It was sick. It was demented. It represented the very worst of humanity. It’s time to stop pretending that it was deserving of respect or legitimacy. It wasn’t. It was a blight on humanity, the human spirit, and the entire planet. It should be treated as such and remembered as such.

The Dog has talked about the downward spiral of the Republican party but until yesterday it was all based on gut feeling and perceptions of their actions filtered through a lifetime of political thinking and work. Now Gallup has come out with some data which confirms not just that the Gopasaurs are in trouble but that they are in trouble in every single demographic!  

ONCE UPON A TIME…

Once in a blue moon I stumble across  an essay by Mark Morford and, as always, I am automatically compelled to share it with other Progressives. For better or worse, Morford has a style you don’t easily forget. He can make you laugh and cry all in the same sentence.  

Evil overlords to flaccid clowns in the blink of Jesus’ eye. Adorable!

Mark Morford:

This much we know: Hand evil a big, sticky gob of power, and it quickly becomes a feral monster, dangerous and cruel and willing to sell its own shriveled heart and the heart of its very remorseful mother for a shot at everlasting infamy, even more power and maybe some fresh, raw kitten blood, intravenously, just for the hell of it.

Oh, but take that same vile leviathan and suddenly strip away all its power and influence and capacity for wickedness, and watch it deflate like a wheezing circus tent, quickly turning into a trembling caricature of its former self, a tiny, elfin thing small enough to fit into a shoebox of panic and pathos and residual Godspit.

[…]

But weep not for Miss California, who’s happy as a Prozac clam to take on the title as the new face of Republican hetero marriage. Isn’t she lovely? A skinny, fake-breasted blonde mouthful of air who does exactly as she’s told and never questions her scary Bible and doesn’t really like sex and you want to stick that thing where? Ewww! She’s perfect.

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Cross posted at Passive Ranting.

This is beautiful.

Saw it via Big Orange. Here’s the short and skinny:

TEA PARTY CAUTION! DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING – FROM ANYONE – AT ANY TEA PARTY ANYWHERE IN THE USA — NO EXCEPTIONS!Federally-funded ACORN operators will be at all Tea Parties to get signatures which they will give to Obama stating that the signatures are in support of his policies or to get the names of people who oppose his policies and report dissention.

  NO MATTER WHAT, DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING! IF YOU HAVE FRIENDS WHO PLAN TO ATTEND, WHO DO NOT HAVE EMAIL, GET ON THE PHONE TO WARN THEM.  TRY TO CALL OR EMAIL RADIO TALK SHOWS AND LET THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG.

  PASS IT ON!

This is utterly fantastic news for liberals and Democrats, and it’s pure comedy gold for everyone with an iota of common sense.

“We will impose our reality on them.”

       — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,

          in a meeting with CIA

          and State Department analysts

          before the invasion of Iraq

Glenn Beck, well-known wingnut, has come loose from his bolt!  His “We Surround Them” campaign seeks to let other wingnuts know that they “are not alone.”

How ’bout those principles?

The Nine Principles

Rush: I hope Obama Fails!

 Said Jesus, as quoted in Matthew 19:24 — “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

Well, if it’s market-moving manipulation, it’s not really a lie.

Unless you tell your spouse to hit the highway!

   * Ronald Reagan – divorced the mother of two of his children.  Married Nancy Davis who bore him a daughter only 7 months after the marriage.

   * Bob Dole – divorced the mother of his child, who had nursed him through the long recovery from his war wounds.

   * Newt Gingrich – divorced his wife who was dying of cancer.

   * Dick Armey – Former House Majority Leader – divorced

   * Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas – divorced

   * Gov. John Engler of Michigan – divorced

   * Former Gov. Pete Wilson of California – divorced

   * George Will – divorced

   * Sen. Lauch Faircloth – divorced

   * Rush Limbaugh – Rush and his current wife Marta have six marriages and four divorces between them.

   * Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia – Barr has been married three times.  Barr had the audacity to author and push the “Defense of Marriage Act.”

     The current joke making the rounds on Capitol Hill is “Bob Barr, WHICH marriage are you defending?”

   * Sen. Alfonse D’Amato of New York – divorced

   * Sen. John Warner of Virginia – divorced (once married to Liz Taylor)

   * Gov. George Allen of Virginia – divorced

   * Henry Kissinger – divorced

   * Rep. Helen Chenoweth of Idaho – divorced

   * Sen. John McCain of Arizona – divorced

   * Rep. John Kasich of Ohio – divorced

   * Rep. Susan Molinari of New York (2000 Republican National Convention Keynote Speaker) – divorced

   

Unless your name is Rove, Bush, Cheney, Libby, etc.

Especially if you control the results.

Well, maybe for a tax write-off.

   

We are supposed to applaud philanthropy–the very word connotes altruism and “giving back”–but Walton and Wal-Mart giving serves as a reminder that philanthropy provides an alternative to taxation, a way for rich people and corporations to decide what to do with their extra money, as opposed to letting the rest of us decide through our elected governments. Since charitable donations are a tax write-off, as Krehely points out, “they are supposed to benefit the public good.” He thinks it is reasonable to ask whether a family’s–or a company’s–philanthropy serves the common good, or at least enough good “to make up for the public revenue that we’re losing.”

Funny he should mention taxes: Wal-Mart and the Waltons have, after all, been notably reluctant to pay them. Not only has the company lobbied for tax breaks in communities all over the nation, the Waltons–the family that former Wal-Mart board member Hillary Clinton has called “the best America has to offer”–have campaigned vigorously against the estate tax. They have donated money to its opponents, Republicans like John Thune of South Dakota and David Vitter of Louisiana, and enlisted one of Washington’s top lobbying firms, Patton Boggs–a leading anti-estate tax lobbyist–to represent their interests.

   

Oh, really?  Tell me more!

   Ari Fleischer:

   There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.

   

I’m Henry Paulson, and I hold this principle dearly!

Section 8. Review: Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.