Category: Republicans

Rooting Against America

The Republican Party and the conservative press, led by Glenn Beck, are going all in with their opposition to Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. Media Matters has put together a great compilation of these assaults against what would be one of the most profitable and distinguished events in the next decade in the United States.

Of course, President George W. Bush supported this bid. From a White House press release:

THE PRESIDENT:    I want to thank the members of the 2016 Chicago bid to get the Olympics. Listen, Mr. Mayor, you and your committee have put together a great plan. It’s a plan that will make America proud.

They say that the Olympics will come to Chicago if we’re fortunate enough to be selected, but really it’s coming to America, and I can’t think of a better city to represent the United States than Chicago.

This is a well thought out venue. There will be — the athletes will be taken care of.    People who will be coming from around the world will find this good city has got fantastic accommodations, great restaurants. It will be safe.

And so I — this country supports your bid, strongly. And our hope is that the judges will take a good look at Chicago and select Chicago for the 2016 Olympics.

Well it turns out Chicago just got knocked out of consideration for the 2016 Olympics. It’s what it is. But what is most shocking is how the Republican Party actively and forcefully rooted against America from winning the honor and treasure that comes with hosting these Olympic Games. They rooted for America to fail and that’s what happened.

Grayson, Republicans & the Press

Bravo, Representative Alan Grayson. Grayson is speaking truth to power and standing up for what he believes in.

What’s particularly sickening is how offended, how incensed Wolf Blitzer and his pundit colleagues at CNN are that Grayson had the gall to actually challenge Republicans for bald-faced opposition to any reform. But beyond that, what makes me want to pull my hair out is that the press is freaking out over Grayson’s words, but never once said a peep when Republican members of Congress said similar things. The Huffington Post reports:

By contrast, charges that the opposition’s health care plan will kill people have been about as common on the House floor lately as resolutions naming post offices.

Take Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-Fla.), who said in July: “Last week, Democrats released a health care bill which essentially said to America’s seniors: drop dead.”

Or Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), a doctor, who reviewed the public health insurance option in July and diagnosed that it is “gonna kill people.”

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), not one to pull punches, suggested on the House floor that Congress “make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans and that ensures affordable access for all Americans and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.”

July was a busy time for House floor death sentences. Also that month, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), noted: “One in five people have to die because they went to socialized medicine…I would hate to think that among five women, one of ’em is gonna die because we go to socialized care.”

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) had a similar assessment. “They’re going to save money by rationing care, getting you in a long line. Places like Canada, United Kingdom, and Europe. People die when they’re in line,” he said on the House floor in July.

So far, none of the members of Congress who made such charges have apologized.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/30/despite-outrage-many-hous_n_304175.html

Of course they haven’t, because it would never occur to either the press or Democrats to demand apologies for the lies and smears Republicans have used to obstruct reform. But as soon as a Democrat finds the spine to say something that is functionally correct, all hell breaks lose. No one could have predicted…

Fundamentally Confused

Over at Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz quotes a reader’s email on the outrage espoused by former Bush administration assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey at President Obama’s economic policies, comparing them to the fascist economic policies of Hitler and Peron. The reader’s email concludes:

I teach Latin American studies and have a pretty deep knowledge of right wing and left wing economic populists and I can tell you that were Ms. Ellen Sauerbrey my student that comment of hers would earn her an solid F. Not just because of her mistakes about Peron, or her utterly dangerous misunderstanding of Hitler, but for her obtuseness in confusing being a minority party with being under tyrannical oppression. [Emphasis added]

It’s that last part that is key. One of the dominant threads in the extreme Right’s narrative of the Obama administration is that he is creating a tyrannical, fascist government. That includes the following sub-narratives: he is destroying the Constitution; he is stealing the country from “us”; he is establishing a Nazi youth corps; he is marshaling an armed civilian army; and, of course, he is not legitimately President. Naturally none of these claims have any basis in reality, which begs the question, what the hell are the tea baggers on about?

Those that are most able to marshal coherent thought from the right surely recognize that this sort of outrage has utility in blocking President Obama’s agenda. But the answer that most comes to mind for the general tea bagger set, which it seems Sauerbrey is a part of,  is that they are confusing the consequences that stem from losing a democratic election with oppression. Elections have consequences. When the nation overwhelmingly elects a Democratic president with massive Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, it is only natural that these Democratic elected officials will produce some combination of liberal and centrist policies that you would not have seen under a Republican administration (see: everything the Bush administration did).

As I’ve said before, the inability of the tea baggers to accept President Obama likely stems in good measure from underlying racism and a fear of the Other. But it is nonetheless driven by a lack of acceptance of the 2008 election results. The result is a fundamental confusion of what it means to be the minority party, to be subject to the policy aspirations of the majority, in a democratic system of government. It’s not tyrannical oppression, it’s what happens when you have bad ideas that the rest of the country does not like nor wish to see enacted.

What Carter Said

It looks like former president Jimmy Carter has been reading Atrios:

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American,” Carter told NBC in an interview. “I live in the South, and I’ve seen the South come a long way, and I’ve seen the rest of the country that shared the South’s attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans”

Continued Carter: “And that racism inclination still exists. . . . It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.”

The irony of Duncan Black’s writing style on the critiques, questions, and attacks on Obama lies in the confrontation of something that America is generally not comfortable to confront. It surely was a great triumph and step forward in race relations that we elected an African-American president last fall. But it was not the end of racism. It was not the end racial tension. It did not mark the end of hate.

Amidst everything surrounding Joe Wilson’s screetch against Obama, yesterday right wing blogs and talk shows were up in arms that somewhere in America, a fight had taken place on a school bus and a white child was beaten by a black child. That, somehow, became presumed to be racially based and President Obama’s fault. Brad at Sadly, No! takes apart an anecdote that underscores the fundamental racism driving the right’s* critique of Obama. Responding to Dan Riehl’s account of being on the same DC Metro car as a number of African-American youths following the 9/12 rally, Brad writes:

Again, let’s consider what Riehl has just told us. He prefaced his own 9/12 story by referring to it as “dangerous times.” But what did these “dangerous times” consist of? That’s right — a couple of black kids talking smack in the back of a subway car!

Not every Republican criticizing Obama is being driven out by racism. But it’s clear that a significant, vocal, and visible contingent of the American right is fueled by racist fears. These fears lead teabaggers to denounce Obama as simultaneously a Nazi, communist, fascist, socialist, Muslim Kenyan. The commonality these conflicting concepts all have is that they cast Obama as a dangerous Other.

What happens next is to be seen. But I can’t imagine any sober observe will look at this situation where a significant portion of the gun-toting right believes the President is an un-American Other who is out to destroy the country and think it is not perilously dangerous. There is a serious onus on Republican leadership and media figures to beat back the racism they are currently promoting with abandon, before something awful happens.

*At least the tea party segment of the right and those in the media and elected office who support them.

A Complete Fisking of Megan McArdle

There’s been a lot of posts in the last week or so about Megan McArdle of The Atlantic’s insane post in which she poo-pooed the idea that teabaggers openly carrying guns to presidential town halls were in fact dangerous or likely to increase the risk of violence perpetrated as a political act. McArdle has repeatedly demonstrated herself as one of the most willfully ignorant members of the Baby Journalist set (though her pal Russ Douthat gives her a run for her money). But this post really helps redefine one’s perceptions of her idiocy.

Thomas Levenson of The Inverse Square Blog has what will surely go down as the definitive Fisking of McArdle’s puddle of drool in favor of bringing guns to political protests. After dissecting the numerous logical fallacies and intellectual shortcomings put forward by McArdle, he packages the overall rebuttal not with the specifics he’s just put forth, but the common force of history:

But the point I’d finish with here, to counter McArdle’s attempt at a conclusion, is to remind everyone of the intellectual and emotional poverty of McArdle, along with that of those on the right who like her are trying to turn our politics into a game of high-school debate, unanchored in lived experience.  She asserts, in effect, and almost in so many words, that the fear of political violence is a mere abstraction — her “symbolic belief.”

She is, of course, totally, utterly, and almost painfully wrong — as everyone knows who can remember back just a few years, read a book, perhaps, …or even managed to recall the fate of a couple of people who shared a last name with someone else famous who died on Tuesday.

Specifically:  I was born in 1958.  Since then, there have been ten presidents who have served before the current incumbent:  Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II.  Of them, one was killed by a rifle.  Another had guns drawn on him twice in two weeks.  A third was shot outside a Washington DC hotel by a deranged celebrity hound.  Three out of ten.

More:  Over the history of the presidency, ten out of the first 43 presidents were subject to attempted or successful assassinations.  Political violence is a fact of American history.

I think this is a point that most pundits simply refuse to acknowledge: “Political violence is a fact of American history.” It is even more pronounced, as Levenson notes, when it comes to African-American leaders. Yet to McArdle, it is an act so rare that it does not even merit concern at a time when teabaggers are openly carrying military-type rifles in close quarter to the President of the United States. Levenson’s right: she is “totally, utterly, and almost painfully wrong.”

“Political violence is a fact of American history.” We can only hope that it is not a fact whose empirical repertoire is enhanced during this administration or any other. But it is impossible to be aware of the role violence has played as a means of furthering political arguments in American history and not be deeply afraid for what might come next in our country. As Atrios is wont to say, “I wonder just what it is about Obama that inspires such lunacy…”  But we all know the answer to that question and as such, we must be reminded that a distinct subset of political violence in America is violence perpetrated by white racists against African-Americans. Levenson makes a similar observation regarding the historical danger and the need to take the threats against Obama even more seriously.

I hope with all sincerity that none of these nut jobs who bring guns to political rallies and Obama town halls, carrying signs that refer to watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, decide to act on their image and use the guns they carry.  But it is fundamentally naive and dangerous to assume that the addition of firearms to political protests does not increase the risk of violence, as McArdle does. We should all hope she’s right, but if she is, it won’t be because she’s made a persuasive argument and only that people aren’t as crazy as they seem and/or the Secret Service is phenomenally good at what they do. At this point in time, though, I would not bet against the Obama administration being free from political violence perpetrated by right wingers, though I hope I am wrong.

(Via The Poor Man Institute)

Political Terrorists

Steve Pearlstein is right, the teabagger healthcare townhall protests, Republican politicians, and conservative media figures like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are political terrorists. Plain and simple.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

Watching video from townhalls last night in Tampa and St. Louis, or early this week in Connecticut, it is crystal clear that the teabaggers only strategy is to disrupt events and silence opposition. They have no substantive idea. They have no proposals of their own. They simply don’t want this problem to be solved and are resorting to increasingly violent and threatening means to further their opposition.