When Ron Paul meets Michelle Bachman
Right wingers who think the tea party movement and the “Republican Revolution” are precisely on the same page watch out … I read a bit of Ron Paul’s “The Revolution: a Manifesto” this afternoon at Barnes and Nobles. Funny how it doesn’t quite fit in with the Big Brother neoconservatism of right wing talk radio (which used to include Glenn Beck before he suddenly discovered he’s an “Independent,” after eight years of lapping up to George Bush…) Case in point:
Yesterday, the Young Americans for Liberty sponsored an event at the University of Minnesota that brought together the odd pairing of Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Ron Paul (R-TX). Bachmann solicited Paul for the event, hoping that his presence would help her attract support from young conservatives and libertarians.
Writing for The Daily Beast, Maureen O’Connor notes that the event melded two “wingnut worlds“: “the fanatically religious Bush-era neocon, a flag-waving patriot who likens gay sex to bestiality and fantasizes about lobbing nukes at Iran” and the libertarian “Ron Paul Revolution.” Indeed, for Bachmann, the presence of Paul created numerous awkward moments, particularly as the Texas congressman sermonized at length about his isolationist views. For example, Paul said:
– We should never go to war if they’re telling us a lie about what’s happening. … We took the position, over my strong objection, we took the position that we had to have regime change in Iraq.
– What they’re getting ready to do is put very, very strong sanctions on Iran. … But sanctions, and blockades, and prevention like this is an act of war.
– The proper foreign policy under the Constitution is non-intervention and mind our own business.
– I say bring all the troops home — Japan, Korea, and Germany.
For Bachmann — a typical neoconservative on foreign policy issues — Paul’s rhetoric stunned her into stone-cold silence…
Read the rest here (with video). The funny thing is, Republicans in the Bachman wing (the Sean Hannity crazy corner) used to call Ron Paul a nut. And Bachman, well … pretty much everybody thinks she’s nuts. So which wing of the wingnut party is nuttier? Inquiring minds.
UPDATE: The HotAirian nation doesn’t like Ron Paul.
The astroturf wars: no reform = more Republicans
From the Plumline:
On a private conference call, a group of top Tea Party and conservative organizers offered a surprisingly frank description of their goal, according to a source on the call: Completely blocking any kind of bipartisan compromise, and completely preventing any type of health care reform bill at all from ever becoming law.
The source who got himself on the call was an organizer for the AFL-CIO, and AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale provided me with the organizer’s notes. …The call consisted of representatives of top conservative groups, such as the American Liberty Alliance, the “Tea Party Patriots,” and RecessRally.com, the AFL-CIO’s notes say.
The moderator on the call, whose name could not immediately be determined, told listeners that bipartisan compromise on the Senate Finance Committee, where senators are holding talks, must be stopped at all costs, AFL-CIO’s notes say. The moderator called on members to pressure GOP Senators seeking compromise with Dems, like Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi, and Olympia Snowe, to stop the negotiating.
“The goal is not compromise, and ANY bill coming out this year would be a failure for us,” the moderator said, according to AFL-CIO’s notes. The moderator added that “the Democrats will turn even a weak bill from the Senate Finance Committee into Canadian-style single-payer through underhanded implementation.”
Another organizer on the call, according to AFL-CIO, added: “The purpose of Tea Parties is not to find a solution to the health care crisis — it is to stop what is not the solution: Obamacare.”
So one goal of the astro turf protests, lynching re-enactments and tea party hysterics is to prevent any changes to the current healthcare system, which most thinking people realize is making a lot of people rich. But there has to be more to it. Some elements of the healthcare and business lobbies have embraced at least some version of reform, if for no other reason than it will serve their bottom lines. Well clearly there is more. Here’s an email Human Events sent out just two hours ago, right at the close of the news cycle:
Help Bring About a New Republican Revolution
Dear Fellow Conservative,In November 1994, a great tide of conservative Republicans swept to victory in races all across America, wresting control of Congress from the stagnant, liberal Democrats and bringing principled, reform-minded energy to Bill Clinton’s “big government knows best” Washington, D.C.
I am very proud to have been a part of that historic achievement, unseating the Democrat incumbent to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate. But I couldn’t have done it without the difference-making support of the Republican National Committee.
I believe that we are facing a very similar opportunity today.
Across our nation, voters are waking up to the disastrous consequences of Barack Obama’s presidency. Americans who were willing to take him at his word when he campaigned as a supposedly “reasonable,” “moderate” candidate are beginning to understand what lies behind the media hype and insincere charm.
President Obama and his Pelosi-Reid Democrat allies in Congress are radical leftists determined to remake America into a socialist “utopia.”
They jeopardize our future, with activist judges who disregard the Constitution, wholesale takeover of banks, manufacturers, insurance companies and health care, outrageous and unsustainable taxation and spending which saddle our children and grandchildren with trillions of dollars in debt, rising unemployment and inflation, and a foreign policy of apology and dithering in the face of deadly global threats.
A new tide of popular grassroots opposition to the Obama Democrats’ senseless policies and insatiable hunger for power is rising across America.
In the spirit of our great Founders, Main Street Americans are voicing their opposition with a renewed sense of patriotism. Tea Party protests, enthusiasm for less government, and anger at Washington’s derisive attitude toward America’s bedrock values are growing.
There is real enthusiasm for a truly conservative alternative to the leftist Democrats. And RNC Chairman Michael Steele and I know that our Party can ride that wave of enthusiasm to victory in upcoming elections.
That is why I’m asking you to stand with us as we work to recruit and elect principled, conservative Republican candidates who will work to reverse the Democrats’ damage and govern with humility and respect.
Please help us lay the groundwork to win back government for the American people by making a contribution of $25, $50, $100, $500, or $1,000 to join the Republican National Committee today.
The next Republican Revolution starts with you. Please help the RNC support tomorrow’s leaders the way they supported me.
Please join our fight today. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Rick Santorum
P.S. America needs new leadership, and we must be ready to provide it. Help us support real conservative Republicans who will sweep to victory and provide the good governance Americans deserve. Please take this opportunity right now to help my friend Michael Steele and the good folks at the RNC support strong, conservative Republican candidates by making an online contribution of $25, $50, $100, $500, or $1,000 to the RNC today. Thank you.
This ginned up, phony “revolution” isn’t about healthcare. It isn’t about “the constitution.” It’s about getting Republicans elected in 2010. But here’s the problem: the RNC bluebloods know what they’re doing and why. But the crazies they’re stirring up are angry (over the election), hysterical, irrational, and looking for action. Some are even packing (thought this guy seemed to be a ron Paul devotee, not a birther.) As Gawker puts it:
But let’s be clear: anyone watching the mounting rage over, of all things, health care — perhaps one of the most boring and complex policy subjects — has to worry that these people are going to try to kill Barack Obama. That’s not an extrapolation from unhinged rhetoric, or a partisan reading of the imagined intentions of our political enemies. It’s a rational reading of the anticipated behavior of a man who brandishes a gun at the location where the president is expected to imminently arrive while holding a sign that openly advocates his assassination. And the astonishing, breathtaking, maddening fact that he hasn’t been violently taken to the ground by large men wearing suits and earpieces is an open encouragement to anyone else so inclined to give it a shot.
There are always people who want to kill the president. Generally speaking, they are politically marginalized, insane, and/or too incompetent to come close to achieving their ends. But in the past six months, people who would be inclined to do violence to our political leaders have been affirmatively embraced by the Republican Party and its messaging operation
Meanwhile, the Republican who invented the so-called “death panels” basically calls Sarah Palin nuts. And the Moderate Voice flags a Marc Ambinder post about what Republicans may have lost in the teabagging translation. Ambinder’s bottom line:
Democrats are beginning to notice that opponents of health care reform have discredited themselves. They ramped up much too quickly. When smaller, conservative groups Astroturfed, they inevitably brought to the meetings the type of Republican activist who was itching for a fight and who would use the format to vent frustrations at President Obama himself. There were plenty of activists who really wanted to know about health care, and some who were probably misinformed — scared out of their chairs — to some degree, but the loudest voices tended to be the craziest, the most extreme, the least sensible, and the most easy to mock.
Not to mention fun to mock …
Frank Shaeffer vs. America’s radical radio clerics
Frank Shaeffer, author of Crazy for God, and the son of one of the architects of the Christian right, delivered a devastating commentary on Rachel Maddow’s show last night, including the conclusion that for some on the far right, the election of Barack Obama “broke their brains.” Shaeffer makes a devastating and compelling argument that the loudest voices on the right, fueled by corporate money, including from the insurance industry, are stoking the truly crazy fringe elements among their base, who as authoritarian personalities, may well believe that it would please their dogmatic leaders — people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannithy and their new queen, Sarah Palin — if the n—er in the White House wound up dead. Said Shaeffer:
When you start comparing a democratically elected President who is not only our first black President but a moderate progressive to Adolph Hitler, you have arrived at a point where you are literally leaving a loaded gun on the table and saying, ‘The first person who wants to use this, go ahead, be our guest.’
Now, all these people, when something bad happens, will raise their holy hands in horror and say, ‘Of course we didn’t mean that. We were just talking about being American. It’s American to protest.’ B.S. They know exactly what’s out there. There is a whole public out there that went out and stocked up on ammunition and guns, thinking Obama would take away their weapons. One such person shot down three policemen in Pittsburgh. I’d like to know exactly what Glen Beck, and Fox News, will say the morning after someone takes a shot at our President, or kills a senator or congressman. And if it’s one of the people who, we find a little note in their car or the literature or their television watching habits who’s tied to these people who are stirring the pot, or tied to these foundations that people like Dick Armey are running and trying to use insurance company money to make these fake grass roots movements, then we’ll see what happens. But at that point, we’ll be in a new zone, and it’ll be too late.
Watch the entire, chilling, segment:
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For those on the right who dismiss Shaeffer’s critique, or who are shocked … shocked!!! … that anyone would call THEM Brownshirts (as opposed to their leaders calling a black man — President Obama — Adolph Hitler, and calling healthcare reform a modern-day “final solution…”) surf over to the Free Republic, or the Jawa Report sometime, and don’t read the posts, read the comments. I do so often, just to see what’s out there, and what’s out there on the right is truly scary. Does the left have its crazies? Of course. But the extreme lefties are, in the end, “anti-gun” pacifists. The worst they’re going to do is call George W. Bush illegitimate (due to the Supreme Court’s role in his ascension to the presidency in 2000) or not too bright, or launch the occasional pink-clad protest in the halls of Congress. On the right, their crazies are often fueled by racial animus, often angry and indulgent in violent, anonymous rhetoric and threats. Worse, some of them are heavily armed, and seriously dangerous.
People like Limbaugh and Beck are, in reality, no different than the radical Muslim clerics who insight their followers to murderous euphoria, and then send them out into the world, knowing — maybe hoping — that some of them will do violence. If there is a difference between the two, it is only in terms of religious sect. The smart people who program and perform on talk radio and Fox News (and in the halls of Congress) know exactly what Shaeffer knows, but their willing to risk the lives of everyone from police officers to members of Congress to the president of the United States anyway, just to keep their followers listening, and the cash rolling in.
If that isn’t un-American, I don’t know what is.
Related: A Koskid treats the fascism question from the other side.
Obama calls out Republicans on healthcare
With special thanks to Senator Jim DeMint for exposing the Republican playbook, which is about “breaking Obama” — not about helping the American people afford quality healthcare. Watch:
Meanwhile, the GOP keeps rowing toward Elba. And why not hand Bobby “Big Country” Jindal an oar, too!Senator
Gorilla glue???
I wish we lived in a time when you could challenge a nut to a duel.
Zell Miller strikes again!
Miller was the Thursday keynoter at the annual gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which ostensibly is a bipartisan or nonpartisan group of legislators. In practice, however, ALEC is overwhelmingly Republican, as evidenced by the the speakers Thursday who bashed President Barack Obama and the the Democratic majority in Congress. This morning at breakfast it was economist Stephen Moore. At lunch it was WSB radio host Herman Cain, a former Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, and then Miller, who served as a Democrat but famously rejected the party near the end of his time in Washington.
… Obama, “our globe-trotting president,” Miller said, “needs to stop and take a break and quit gallivanting all around. I think (chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel ought to get some Gorilla Glue and put it in that chair in the Oval Office and say ‘Sit here awhile.’”
Oh, he must meant a brand of glue … he wasn’t saying anything racist … right …???
Uh-oh…
UPDATE: The Gorilla Glue Company responds to the controversy. Politico summarizes:
“We Do Not Advocate Attempting to Glue the Leader of the Free World to His Chair”
News Facts
* In response to Zell Miller’s recent comments, The Gorilla Glue Company sends letter to President Obama.
* The response was sent today from the desk of Peter Ragland, President, The Gorilla Glue Company.
* The Gorilla Glue Company does not advocate the gluing of President Obama to his chair with their product.
* The quality adhesive products produced by the company are for the toughest building and repair jobs.
* Gorilla brand products are created with strength and toughness as the goal.
* The Gorilla Glue Company is a family owned business located in Cincinnati, Ohio.
* Gorilla Glue represents just the type of growing small business that President Obama mentions as the job creators in our country.
* Gorilla Glue continues to: create new jobs, boast of no lay-offs, provide healthcare for all full-time employees and proudly make all products in the USA.
And here’s the letter:
The conservative Facebook to the bottom
I normally don’t write this many posts about racial issues in one sitting, but the conservative movement is on a tear. … So I stumbled upon this write-up online and found it amusing. See if you agree. It’s from About.com:
Question: Are Conservatives Racists?Answer: While there are always rogue members of any political movement, conservatives are not generally racists and, in fact, abide by and espouse racial tolerance.
Conservatives see racial equality as a starting point, not a destination. They believe that if racial tolerance is an expected attitude, rather than an anticipated one, racial harmony will naturally follow.
Naturally. Like, for instance, when a Latina is nominated to the Supreme Court, and conservatives consider her qualifications … from a baseline of tolerance, of course …
The Republican establishment has often appeared worried that attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina nominated to the court, could appear racist. But the activists of the conservative movement are less concerned. In May, blogger Debbie Schlussel called Sotomayor “Justice J-Lo.” Now, the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel reports that Jason Mattera, the spokesman for Young America’s Foundation, has posted a blatantly offensive message about Sotomayor on his Facebook page…
Click here to read the message. And it just goes on and on. The Young Republicans’ new president has racist Facebook issues. The GOP’s point man on Sotomayor in the Senate couldn’t get confirmed to the bench himself because of his history of racially sketchy remarks … the FReepers can’t control their juvenile impulses and … well what else is there in this “movement”??? TDB’s John Avlon might have the solution:
Note to Republicans: Racist “humor,” the Internet, and political ambitions don’t mix.
Put down the keyboards people. You’re embarrassing yourselves.
John McCain continues to completely discredit himself
What is wrong with John McCain? Does he want nobody to respect him? McCain on MTP today called his horrendous vp choice, Sarah Palin’s decision to quit her governor’s job “consistent with qualities of leadership,” and he reiterated that he thinks she’d make a great president … and not of the fictional America in “The Beverly Hillbillies…” the real one. Watch:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Meanwhile, since non-Dixie Republicans apparently don’t want her anywhere near their campaigns, Typhoid Sarah says she’d stump for Democrats, too, if they’re wingery enough. Keep the phone nearby, Sarah!
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