There are a lot of problems with today’s Republican Party.  They appeal to the worst in Americans; they have a major hypocrisy problem, particularly on the “Family Values” front; and they see their base as reactionary ego-maniacs.  As if this all is not mortifying enough, Chris Cillizza’s recent blog post at the Washington Post highlights a problem that says more about American voters than it does about the Republican Party:

Republicans have taken considerable flack — mostly from their Democratic rivals — for being the “party of no”, blocking President Obama’s major agenda items but offering few big picture solutions to the problems of the day.

And, Republican strategists and even some elected officials have acknowledged that the party has not done much on the issue front. “This lurch to the left in public policy is helping Republicans even though we have not done that much to take advantage of it,” said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour recently.

The “party of no” charge has set off a serious debate within Republican circles about whether or not the GOP needs a set of policies on things like energy, health care and the economy to bring to the American public to maximized their chances at gains this fall.

Why would any voter find this okay?  The Republicans don’t feel they need to have any ideas, any solutions, to massive problems the United States faces in order to get back into control.  They just need to be against the Democrats.

That’s hardly a recipe for success for a country: that people support those who have no ideas about how to move the country forward.  Not every Democratic proposal is good, but it’s better than having no proposal when evidence is everywhere that we need to fix quite a few national problems.  We need as many ideas for solutions as possible; the party that doesn’t feel the need to have ideas for power is the party hurting the country.

Image:  Chan Lowe.

The Republican party’s base has to be suffering from some severe self-image problems.

Never mind that it was shown that smarty-pants Gretchen Carlson dumbs herself down to appeal to the Fox News core demographic; now the Republican National Committee has highlighted the unflattering ways they see their own party faithful.  You wouldn’t think that the RNC’s money man would spell out liberal charges [emphasis added]:

That’s exactly what RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart did, however, as part of a presentation he gave to donors and fundraisers last month. The presentation, obtained by Politico’s Ben Smith, includes several slides that portray the GOP’s own supporters in a very negative light, giving the impression that the RNC believes its donors are stupid, and that it plans to treat them that way.

One of the slides (three can be seen below; the full presentation is available for download in PDF form here) divides donors into two groups — major donors and smaller ones who are reached through direct marketing efforts. The latter group, the slide says, gives for visceral reasons: “Fear” and “Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration” are listed. The slide also tags this group with a term usually used in an less-than-flattering sense: “Reactionary.” The major donors don’t fare much better; they give, the slide says, for “Networking Opportunities” and “Access” and they’re “Ego-Driven.”

Another slide sums up the message this way: “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House or the Senate …? Save the country from trending toward Socialism!” [Salon.com]

This might upset the Republican base, but it makes a lot of sense.  You can’t raise money unless you’re (internally) honest about what appeals to the people who you want to give you the money.

But do they have to be so insulting about it?  That’s the point raised by Kevin Huffman at the Washington Post, who once was a fundraiser for a non-profit:

First, your plan divides Republican donors into two main categories: small donors who are “visceral,” “reactionary” and motivated by “fear,” and large donors who are “calculated,” “ego-driven” and motivated by “access.” I don’t know these guys as well as you do, but my experience in the field suggests a potential need for rebranding. What if, instead of labeling your small donors as “reactionary,” you thought of them as “passionate”? And for the large donors, instead of “ego-driven,” you could consider them “thought leaders.” You see what I did there? It’s a slight nuance, but if you give your donors a teeny bit more credit, it sets up a different framework to address some of the message and outreach challenges delineated below. Plus, these days, you never know what will wind up on the Internet — it’s probably best to word things in a way that won’t alienate your supporters.

File this under: The Truth Hurts.  File this also under: it hurts the country when either of our parties is this whacked out.

“Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.” John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776

“I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill [Health Care] passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), 2009

Americans have a hard time admitting to themselves that they are more moved by emotion than common sense; they are so pulled by emotion that too often their beliefs and votes make little sense.

We’re a country where politicians make what type of car they bought central themes of their campaigns, and it resonates with us.  What you drive has absolutely no bearing on how good of a leader you will be.  It’s little more than a conscious consumer choice, something everyone does.  But such marketing theatrics work.

Frank Rich, one of this blog’s favorite columnists, fell victim in his latest column to the almost irresistble urge not to tell Americans that they are hurting their own country with their foolishness.  After going through the disingenuous and empty rhetoric that is coming from all corners of the Republican Party, he ends with this paragraph [emphasis added]:

So it went with Palin last weekend. Her only concrete program for dealing with America’s pressing problems came in the question-and-answer session. “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country,” she said, “so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.” That pretty much sums up her party’s economic program, at least: divine intervention will achieve what government intervention cannot. That the G.O.P. may actually be winning this argument is less an indictment of Palin than of Washington Democrats too busy reading the writing on her hand to see or respond to the ominous political writing on the wall.

Frank, if Americans are choosing to follow people whose solution to our economic problems is “pray to God” instead of for a government comprised of the people, by the people to fix them, that’s hardly an indictment of the Democrats.   Say what it really is: an indictment of us.

However flawed are the Democrats proposals, on their face they are better than “proposals” based upon the intervention of a supernatural power.

That Palin gets any meaningful support or taken seriously shows how problematic is the state of our union.  The quality of the leaders we have in this country is nothing more than the quality of thought that goes into choosing them.  The problem is us: we have high standards for our politicians only for all the things that don’t matter at all.

Dick Cheney, America’s Torquemada, came out from the shadows this Valentine’s Day to defend his use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”:

Mr. Cheney said interrogators should have had the option to use the “enhanced interrogation techniques” his administration approved—including the use of simulated drowning, or “water-boarding.” He called himself “a big supporter of water-boarding,” which critics say amounts to torture.

“Now, President Obama has taken [those techniques] off the table,” Mr. Cheney said. “He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army Manual which doesn’t include those techniques. I think that’s a mistake.”

Cheney forgets that the Army itself considers waterboarding torture and banned the practice under his own administration in September 2006:

The service issued a “strategic communication hot topic” alert to its senior leaders two days before the Senate confirmed Mukasey, asking them to make sure every soldier, family member and Army civilian employee understands the ban on waterboarding. Mukasey was sworn in Nov. 9.

“The U.S. Army strictly prohibits the use of waterboarding during intelligence investigations by any of its members. It is specifically prohibited by Field Manual 2-22.3 and is not a sanctioned interrogation technique in any training manual or any instructions to soldiers in the field,” the statement says.

Here is how the pork cuts across party lines and the Senate gets nothing done in the process. It wasn’t just porkstar Democrats like John Murtha.  Alabama Senator Dick Shelby, a Republican who dabbled in birtherism, showed everyone that he will hold up Senate business in the name of pork for his state.

How’s that for tea in your eye?

[continued]

What's a guy got to do to get a little pork?

With all the talk of tea parties, it’s easy to forget that fiscally reckless Bush Republicanism is still with us, and that if Scott Brown is anything he is an untested moderate who won an anomalous election.  Ron Elving’s column was spot-on about Shelby:

Shelby has placed a blanket “hold” on 70 nominations pending before the Senate, nominations for federal agency jobs and seats on the federal bench. Does he have a case against each and every one of the 70? No, he isn’t really talking about any of them.

His problem has to do with a couple of government contracts he wants to see benefit his home state of Alabama. To date, these Shelby “earmarks” have not come to pass, and the senator wants to change that. He is tired of being stiffed. He wants to force the Senate and the Obama administration to cede to his preferences for the granting of these contracts.

That they allow this chicanery in the Senate procedural rules is without doubt evidence that both parties fail at doing the people’s business.  Shelby released some holds Monday night amid a growing public uproar, but he still has retained others and continues to threaten to do so.

These are bad times!  Don’t hold up the business of the people because you aren’t getting your earmarks:

What is this mysterious power to place a hold on appointments and bills? How is it that one senator can delay or even cancel the filling of these jobs? The hold is simply a senator’s way of notifying the majority leader that he or she intends to use the right to extended debate against that name or bill. It is an implicit threat to filibuster, in a time when such threats are as effective as filibusters themselves ever were.

In this case, Shelby’s communications director tells us, the issue is the coddling of terrorists. The Obama administration has not yet granted a certain contract for the building of tanker planes to refuel U.S. warplanes in midflight. And the Obama administration has not let a contract for a lab that will analyze forensic evidence from bomb-making materials found in Iraq and Afghanistan. The communication from the senator’s office suggests this shows a lack of commitment to anti-terrorism.

It neglects to mention that both these contracts involve, or might involve, large business interests in the state of Alabama.

Let him filibuster.  Let them filibuster.  Let the filibusters begin should be the new mantra of the Democrats as people watch Dick Shelby stop government to filibuster his pork.

Read Ron Elving’s Washington Watch post at NPR, Why All Americans Should Thank Senator Shelby, and the New York Daily News op-ed about this abuse of process.

Sarah Palin June 2009:

She opens the introduction praising Reagan’s son, a talk radio guy, for his willingness “to screw the political correctness that some would expect him to try to adhere to.”

She blasts “self-proclaimed intellectuals, and the smug lobbyists who dominate Washington, and the liberal media.”

Sarah Palin February 2010:

Sarah Palin took out after White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel today for referring to a group of liberal activists as “retarded.”

“Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the ‘N-word’ or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities — and the people who love them — is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking,” Palin wrote on her Facebook page.

I find this kind of shameless, in the way values-crusaders like David Vitter and Mark Sanford are shameless.

It’s very difficult to converse in a country when there is no consistency in the arguments that our leaders make.  Which is it: are we going to be politically correct, or not?  If you decide to take a stand against political correctness as Palin did–to Republican cheers–then to back-track for cheap political points is…shameless.

It’s also confusing to those of us who care to try to figure out what our leaders believe and how they think.

Regardless, the N-word has a long history of use for oppression of blacks; whereas the word “Retarded” has simply fallen into disfavor and is akin to calling someone “Insane” instead of “Pathological”.

Additionally, there are many uses of the word “Retarded” that could apply to, in the words of Rahm Emmanuel, “fucking retarded” liberal activists:

• retard – cause to move more slowly or operate at a slower rate; “This drug will retard your heart rate”
• retard – be delayed
• retard – check: slow the growth or development of; “The brain damage will retard the child’s language development”
• retard – decelerate: lose velocity; move more slowly; “The car decelerated”
• retard – idiot: a person of subnormal intelligence

Source: Princeton Wordnet

Of course, he probably meant the last, but I’m just sayin’.  Don’t forget all the hot water people have found themselves in over the word “niggardly“.

Birther Congressman Trent Franks: What, me stoke the fires of irrational hatred and fear amongst my countrymen?

With nuts bringing guns to his healthcare town halls and Facebook taking down a poll asking readers if President Barack Obama “should be killed”, Arizona U.S. Congressman Trent Franks–a Birther Legislator!–called Obama an “enemy of humanity” [emphasis added]:

“Obama’s first act as president of any consequence, in the middle of a financial meltdown, was to send taxpayers’ money overseas to pay for the killing of unborn children in other countries. Now I gotta tell you, a president that will do that, here’s almost nothing that you should be surprised at after that. You shouldn’t, we shouldn’t be shocked that he does all these other insane things. A president that has lost his way that badly, that has no ability to see the image of God in these little fellow human beings, if he can’t do that right, then he has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity.”

You’re doing the country a whole lot of good, Congressman!  Ah, Arizona voters – electing someone who is recklessly speaking to dangerous undertones in our politics today.  It does not speak well about the people in his district.

You may remember that Franks is the only Congressman to have threatened to sue the President over his birth certificate.

Why would anyone want this party back in power as long as they are composed of such shameful extremists (never mind the hypocrisy).  Even out of power the Republican Party is a national embarrassment.

Here’s the video, if you can stomach that people in Arizona actually elect people like Trent Franks to represent them:

I feel bad for Bob Herbert at the New York Times. His column yesterday has the same tone many of my posts on this blog have had: what in the hell is going on in the United States?

(post continued below)

"Am I now ready to go to the healthcare town hall debate with the President, Dad?"

Right before the election I had dinner with a gay friend of mine who is a nuclear physicist.  He told me that he was voting for McCain.

“Why?!” I asked, not hiding contempt in my tone.  He smiled as if he had been confronted with this exact response dozens of times.  “Well, I vote with my checkbook,” was what he managed through his toothy grin.

Republican politics tend to be one of the ways gay men who don’t feel comfortable with who they are escape themselves.  Some people join the military; others join the priesthood; and others become Republicans.  They think it’s the “Daddy Party”, so they join it to separate themselves from the nancyboy Democrats.

As they grow up a little and realize they are voting against their interests, gay Republicans usually have to come around with the “vote for the checkbook” argument.  I had a response:

“Leaving aside the arguments that you are choosing your checkbook over your civil rights; what, exactly, about the last eight years made your checkbook stronger or was in any way exemplary of fiscal restraint and prudence?” I asked.

He had  no answer, but instead looked embarrassed.  As a former Teenage Republican, from a conservative standpoint the George W. Bush years lost the fiscal issue for the Republicans.  Anyone who still says they vote for them for fiscal reasons is apparently still living in 1988.

Herbert is one of my favorite columnists, and the tone of his writings are imbued with a sense of dumbfoundedness.  Back in January he saw the beginnings of the Republican mode of attack against Obama:

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

[....]

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?  Tax cuts. [....]

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

Yesterday, Herbert’s column almost nine months later sounds even more exasperated:

The political debate has been poisoned by birthers, deathers and wackos who smile proudly while carrying signs comparing the president to the Nazis. People who don’t even know that Medicare is a government program have been trying to instruct us on the best ways to reform health care. [....]

The wackiness is increasing, not diminishing, and it has a great potential for destruction. There is a real need for people who know better to speak out in a concerted effort to curb the appeal of the apostles of the absurd. [....]

But there is another type of disturbing behavior, coming from our political leaders and the public at large, that is also symptomatic of a society at loose ends. We seem unable to face up to many of the hard truths confronting the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

There is no end to the craziness. The entire Republican Party has decided that it is in favor of absolutely nothing. The president’s stimulus package? No way. Health care reform? Forget about it.

We’ve also been unable or unwilling to face the hard truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrible toll they are taking on our young fighting men and women. Most of us don’t want to know. Moreover, we’ve put the costs of these wars on a credit card, without so much as a second thought about what that does to our long-term budget deficits or how it undermines much-needed initiatives here at home. [....]

There are many other issues that we remain in deep denial about. It’s not just the bad economy that has thrown state and local budgets into turmoil from coast to coast. It’s our refusal to provide the tax revenues needed to pay for essential public services. Exhibit A is California, which is now a basket case.

The serious wackos, the obsessive-compulsive absurdists, may be beyond therapy. But the rest of us could use some serious adult counseling. We’ve forgotten many of the fundamentals: how to live within our means, the benefits of shared sacrifice, the responsibilities that go with citizenship, the importance of a well-rounded education and tolerance.

The problem is our national discourse, and that the Republicans appear to have crafted Obama and Liberals as enemies, as opposed to reasoned opposition.  It’s a dangerous step, for either side.  Winning political skirmishes to advance your ideology is fulfilling; turning a society against itself in the process is dangerous.

The current political climate is at best creating a country that is unable–and unwilling–to solve its most serious problems.  At worst, it is turning the country against itself, which can have far more violent and disastrous repercussions than the right is willing to admit as they carry guns to public debates.  The moment something big goes wrong with the emotions they are stoking, the current state of Republican politics is going to come back to bury them.

Bob Herbert, you’re not the only one exasperated, confused and concerned.

There are very, very few senators I would call a nutcase, but Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is one.  A few days ago he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that started out ridiculous [emphasis added]:

I spoke with thousands of voters at town-hall meetings this summer. What I gathered from them is that it’s not just the proposed overhaul of health care that has them upset. Many also expressed a sense of betrayal. In spite of their hope for change, it still appears that the government in Washington is run for its own benefit and the benefit of special interests—not for the benefit of the American people. The folks I met with also don’t trust politicians in Washington to address mounting long-term challenges to our economy. It’s not just the attendees of town-halls meetings in Oklahoma.

“In spite of their hope for change” they now feel betrayed?  It’s as if Oklahomans were on the Obama Express last year, and now they have been let down like a bunch of liberals.  That’s an amazingly disingenuous way to start an opinion piece.  Oklahoma is what you could call a wing-nut state, and they have a wing-nut as a Senator.  From Wikipedia:

Oklahoma, one of the reddest states in the nation, was far from a swing state in 2008. A strongly conservative state located in the Bible Belt where evangelical Christianity plays a large role, Oklahoma has swung and trended more to the Republicans in recent years than any other state. Having voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election since 1968, Oklahoma once again showcased its status as a Republican stronghold in 2008 with Republican John McCain capturing 65.65% of the vote while Democrat Barack Obama took in the remaining 34.35%.

Look at Coburn in relation to public idiot William Kostric, who brought a loaded gun to a healthcare debate.  If you watch Kostric on Chris Matthews, he can barely answer any question cogently.  He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s unable to back up his beliefs, but he’s armed with opinions and loaded weapons:

Kostric, who carried a sign that read “It is time to water the tree of liberty”, said he “wanted to be heard” because Americans are losing a lot of rights in this country.

When asked by Matthews to name those rights, Kostric can only reply “a litany” yet can’t name a single one before expressing surprise that Obama is a Constitutional scholar.  Kostric hasn’t demonstrated he understands anything about the Constitution and our civil liberties at all, except that he gets to carry a gun like a Big Man.

"Because I can do it," he said when asked why he was armed outside a hall where Obama spoke about healthcare.

He just “believes” we’re losing rights, and on the right-wing that’s all it takes:  belief.  It’s one thing to hang on to belief when there are few facts; but when you hang on to beliefs that contradict all facts, it only makes you a fool.

Kostric’s sign paraphrased Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”  Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in Coburn’s home state because of his right-wing paranoia, had the Jefferson quote on his T-shirt.  Surely Oklahoma Senator  Coburn would express concern when right-wingers are arming themselves and showing up at public discussions:

The Phoenix Police originally said three persons were spotted with guns in downtown Phoenix near Obama’s appearance and later upped that count to 12.

Actually, Coburn defends them.  From Frank Rich:

[L]ast Sunday, when asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” if he was troubled by current threats of “violence against the government,” Coburn blamed not the nuts but the government.

“Well, I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in our government,” the senator said, “but we’ve earned it.”

Coburn is nothing if not consistent. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, he was part of a House contingent that helped delay and soften an antiterrorism bill. This cohort even tried to strip out a provision blocking domestic fund-raising by foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas. Why? The far right, in league with the National Rifle Association, was angry at the federal government for aggressively policing America’s self-appointed militias. In a 1996 floor speech, Coburn conceded that “terrorism obviously poses a serious threat,” but then went on to explain that the nation had worse threats to worry about: “There is a far greater fear that is present in this country, and that is fear of our own government.” As his remarks on “Meet the Press” last week demonstrated, the subsequent intervention of 9/11 has not changed his worldview.

[....]

Coburn’s implicit rationalization for far-right fanatics bearing arms at presidential events — the government makes them do it! — cannot stand. He’s not a radio or Fox News bloviator paid a fortune to be outrageous; he’s a card-carrying member of the United States Senate.

It’s hard to fathom how to make sense of how the right wing thinks any more.  We are only 8 months into a new Presidency that is trying to fix the mess of the previous administration, and now Republicans are speaking as if they aren’t the ones who got us where we are today.

I used to understand their point-of-view, but now the mainstream of the Republican party is so divorced from reason, education and history that it’s difficult to formulate responses to their views.  Maybe that’s the point.  While that might work well as a sugar rush to tongue-tie reasoned opposition with stupidity, it certainly isn’t a good strategy to get back into power.

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” — Abraham Lincoln

Quote of the week comes from Bill Maher:

When did intractability become a virtue? Mitt Romney’s new book is called No Apology: The Case For American Greatness. You can find it at Borders, in the “Suck-Up” section. It’s such a perfect title, combining paranoia with arrogance: “No one has yet asked me to apologize but, if someone ever does, fuck them.

Conservatives think apologizing is a sign of weakness. It’s what liberal pussies do, when they’re not busy driving electric cars and feeling empathy. When in fact it’s the weak and the scared who are too insecure to apologize. Apologies are actually a sign of strength. That’s why six-year-olds hate them.