Can anyone else tell me why Elton John, one of the biggest and richest gays that is out there, would accept at any price to perform for the country’s biggest homophobes and demagogues at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding?  The absurdity all around is incredible.  From Ken Layne at Wonkette

Beloved American comedian Rush Limbaugh met a lady while he was divorcing his third wife a few years back, and now that new lady is Limbaugh’s fourth wife. Exciting! But how do you make such a special once-every-couple-of-years event even more exciting? If you’re Rush Limbaugh, you pay One Million Dollars to a very famous singer and piano player who is also very famously homosexual and British and a gay-marriage supporter and AIDS activist — and that’s how, we guess, Sir Elton John wound up performing at Limbaugh’s latest wedding. But the sexiest men at the Miami occasion were the guests. Karl Rove, Fred Thompson, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, Clarence Thomas … it wouldn’t have been any more fantastic if God Himself decided to rain burning poison shit from the sky, forever.

And some of the comments:

• It’s one thing to be gay. It’s another thing to be a gay whore. What the Hell was Elton John doing serenading the most obnoxious bigoted swine in America?!!  Dolmance   says at 8:27 am, June 7th, 2010

• All whores, not just Elton: how could anyone kiss that guy’s ass unless they were getting paid? charlesdegoal says at 8:38 am, June 7th, 2010

• Jesus. That guest list. Too bad the oil slick couldn’t have washed up on shore and mired them all in icky, flammable goo.  Elton John is a whoooorah.  freakishlystrong says at 8:43 am, June 7th, 2010

Elton John: whore.  Enjoy the million!  Not only are you known as an asshole, you’re also now known as a whore.  Goodbye yellow brick road, indeed.

The audience he played for: hypocritical demagogues.

Rush’s audience on the radio: idiots who don’t see that many of these people just feed your prejudice, without really believing what you believe.  See, they are demagogues who are sane, ranting to insane people who give them money for those rants, who then turn around and give that money to gays.

Remember Republican Governor Bobby Jindal mocking volcano monitoring in response to President Obama’s first State of the Union address?  At the time, it seemed like such a nancy-pants, Libtard idea that we should monitor natural threats to ourselves.  It’s a Libtard idea that the government should do anything but build prisons to house black people for smoking pot.  That’s more-or-less what Jindal said:

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a “magnetic levitation” line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called “volcano monitoring.” Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C

Here’s him saying it:

And the prize for calling all this what it really is goes to…Ken Layne at Wonkette:

It’s unfair to blame only Bobby Jindal, the boy exorcist of the bayou, for this asinine response to Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address. Why? Because the entire national GOP leadership shares the blame for this dumb bullshit. [....]

Wow, $300 million to buy American-made cars for the American government’s fleet of cars? And $8 billion for high speed rail projects in America, when China has spent $170 billion on fast trains in the past decade and will have invested $300 billion by 2020? (”Disneyland” is apparently what Jindal thinks is the real name for “Los Angeles,” which is actually the nation’s second largest city and not some tiny swamp suburb like Baton Rouge, and the only California high-speed rail project ready to build connects LA/San Diego and San Francisco/Sacramento, the two population centers of America’s most populous state.)

But, chuckle chuckle, the *real* outrage is spending $160 million on the monitoring of active volcanoes in the United States. Ha ha, what kind of science nerd thinks volcanoes even exist?

Ken forgets to mention that two months after Jindal’s SOTU response, Alaska’s Mount Redoubt erupted, but J. Thomas Duffy at Gather.com remembered.

Seriously – how do these arguments hold sway with conservative voters?!  It beggers the imagination how they reason.

The conservative philosophy has done a lot to make America great (as has the liberal philosophy); but something is incredibly wrong with the country when one or the other does not mind simply lying to advance its goals.

If you can’t beat ideas with the truth, then maybe your own ideas are pretty bad.

The thing is, most Americans don’t like to feel stupid, and whenever people willingly believe lies and deception, it makes them the very definition of ignorant (actually, willfully ignorant). That might be fine for the 25% of America that is the Republican hardcore base–whatever happened to Christian values?–but most Americans eventually turn their back on the people who don’t tell them the truth. Voters don’t like that.

Editorial: Greed is not good
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Defeating any initiative of President Obama’s is the GOP’s preferred course these days. And so Republican senators are decrying more bailouts for big, bad banks while meeting behind closed doors with Wall Street executives and pocketing all the campaign contributions they can grab from banks.

Opposing Obama in this case would give Republican lawmakers a twofer by thwarting proposed regulation of an industry that historically has been friendly to their candidates. Since 1990, 60 percent of the bankers’ campaign donations have gone to the GOP. Small wonder that McConnell’s recent private meeting with Wall Street moguls included Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the Senate Republicans’ campaign chairman for this year’s elections.

Fake populists in the GOP take us all for suckers
Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A while back, I wondered how the Republicans were going to both defend their buddies on Wall Street while simultaneously placating their Tea Party constituents to whom helping Wall Street is anathema. How could they manage both?

I should have known the answer: Lie. Lie often, lie repeatedly, lie shamelessly.

It’s now clear that Wall Street bitterly opposes the financial reform bill proposed by congressional Democrats. After meeting with Wall Street leaders, Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have made it equally clear that they too will oppose the financial reform bill.

So how do the Republicans plan to sell that approach to Americans sickened by Wall Street’s arrogance and selfishness?

By claiming that it’s the Democrats who are siding with Wall Street. While they do the Street’s bidding and collect the Street’s campaign money, the Republicans intend to cast themselves as the populists who side with Main Street over Wall Street.

Obama: McConnell’s Arguments on Financial Regulation ‘Cynical and Deceptive’
Jake Trapper, ABC News

“The leader of the Senate Republicans and the chair of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee met with two dozen top Wall Street executives to talk about how to block progress on this issue,” Obama said. “Lo and behold, when he returned to Washington, the Senate Republican leader came out against the common-sense reforms we’ve proposed. In doing so, he made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts – when he knows that it would do just the opposite.” [....]

Today, Obama countered, “We’re going to put in place new rules so that big banks and financial institutions will pay for the bad decisions they make – not taxpayers. Simply put, this means no more taxpayer bailouts.”

Borderline-Useless Senate Democrat Suddenly Interested in Regulating Wall Street
Alex Pareene, Gawker

We know that the GOP has already begun to engage in attacks so ridiculous that it will make “death panels” look like responsible policy debate. And we know that when Mitch McConnell says something that is literally the precise opposite of the truth, it will lead to a lot of people debating whether or not his blatant lie was “fair” or not, and responsible, respectable outlets will say “most experts dispute McConnell’s characterization of the financial regulation bill currently under consideration” instead of saying “Mitch McConnell is a shameless liar.” [...]

Hah, and there was word earlier today Republican Susan Collins, formerly of the “one of the good ones” caucus, had not signed on to the letter from Mitch McConnell about how all the Republicans hate the financial regulation bill because it is “permanent bailouts,” that talking point we mentioned earlier that is actually literally the exact precise opposite of the truth, but it looks like she’s signed on! They’re all fucking idiots. Once again, the political calculations trump everything else. America’s Senate still proudly broken!

It was in March 2007 that I realized I was behind Barack Obama, and what he said that day rings true with today’s Tea Party movement.  I even  remember the day, March 28th:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama accused the Bush administration on Tuesday of pursuing a policy of “social Darwinism” that leaves every man and woman struggling.

“It’s a strategy that we’ve seen this administration pursue over the last six years, that basically says government has no role to play in making sure that America is prosperous for all people and not just some,” Obama said to applause during an appearance before the Communications Workers of America. [MSNBC]

That was three years ago.  In the interim, we now have the Tea Party.  Who makes them up? From Fox News:

Of the Tea Party supporters who responded, 20 percent make more than $100,000, versus 14 percent for the general pool of people polled. Fourteen percent of Tea Party supporters have a post-graduate education, compared with 10 percent for the general public. Twenty-three percent of Tea Party supporters have a college degree, compared with 15 percent for the general public, according to the poll.

The 18 percent of people who counted themselves among the Tea Party crowd are also mostly white, male and older than 45 years old.

And what do these Tea Partiers think?

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people. [New York Times]

Big surprise:  Older white male voters who have more money than the rest of us, and also have the benefits of government programs like Medicare and Social Security, don’t really care about the poor.  Not their problem.

Even though Obama cut taxes for 98% of Americans, they think he only cares about the poor:

Bruce Bartlett, a fiscal conservative and columnist for Forbes who worked in the George W Bush and Reagan administrations is shocked by what he sees happening on the right these days. He became a conservative, he says, because he saw liberalism as driven by lofty unachievable or unreal motives whereas conservativism he believed was pegged primarily to concern with consequences and so based on cold hard reality. He reports that the Tea Parties have turned the world around. Tea Partiers yelling about taxes are delusional, he writes. They know nothing about taxes.

Bartlett was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and Deputy Assistant Secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department. In March he wrote: “Federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president…. and last year’s stimulus bill, enacted with no Republican support, reduced federal taxes by almost $100 billion in 2009 and another $222 billion this year.” [Forbes via the Colorado Independent]

So much for “Ask not what your country can do for you…” – it’s now all about “Give me back every dollar I earn, screw the country’s future generations, and screw the poor!  It’s all about ME!”

Orly Taitz, the bottle blonde Birther Queen who had her 15 minutes last year, has arrived at the point we all saw for her once the birther headlines died down: she is a public embarrassment.

Lawyer Orly Taitz has been told she won’t be allowed to speak at a Tea Party tax day rally in Pleasanton on Thursday because other candidates planning to be on the platform basically don’t want to be seen with her.

“We hadn’t done our research,’’ said Bridget Melson, who is organizing the rally in Pleasanton, which has one of the larger Tea Party groups in the states. “When some of the more defamatory comments she was making came out we realized that wasn’t what the Tea Party was about.’’ [OC Register]

I was thinking about this attorney/real estate agent/dentist, who when she wasn’t filing frivolous law suits, pointing out charming cabinet fixtures or drilling teeth, was so unashamed to be the face and voice of K-R-A-Z-Y.

What does she do with herself now?  At the time she was on the news and making headlines, she had a groundswell of support from other nutcases who did not have the balls that Taitz did, and for good reason: few want to be the face of birtherism.

But birther-branded she will be for the rest of her life, no matter what else she does.  That can really limit the options one has, to be so associated with a fringe movement that many consider racist.

Ms. Taitz, welcome to yourself as a public embarrassment best to be avoided.  Many of us saw it coming.

What’s sad is that all those e-mails and letters of support she got from other birther nuts–that must have made her heady with adoration–were only meant to keep her fired up to do things nobody else in their right mind would do.

For someone like me who grew up in the 1980′s to be a Catholic Republican (I was an associate chairman of the Georgia Federation of Teenage Republicans, and a youth coordinator for Newt Gingrich), it’s ghastly to see conservatives in such disarray today with their values.

Andy Schlafly: Before he can denounce, could you tell him if the molestation happened at a Catholic school or a public school?

Take Conservapedia.

I visit the site to get the mainstream conservative perspective on social issues.  While Conservapedia might seem like a ridiculous fringe site, laden with superstition and selective rationality, they do reflect mainstream conservative thought.

That should frighten you: their senior editors are now ridiculing those who want to see pedophiles and those who protected them brought to justice.

One of their arch-villains, atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, recently said he would try to have the Pope arrested in Britain for covering up so much pedophilia under his watch (never mind the worse crime of doing nothing to help all those abused kids).

No matter to Conservapedia, though.  The idea that an atheist would “bully” the Pope outrages Conservapedia’s Terry Koeckritz, one of the site’s senior editors:

The more a person strays from the mainstream and the less followers they have, always look for a rise in silly, kooky stunts on their part to try and seem relevant. Dawkins has long ago ceased to be an intellect and more a silly tool. I’m hoping the guy succeeds in trying to arrest the Vicar of Christ. He will only seem foolish and petty, and might get to spend some time in prison as well. –ṬK_/Admin^/Talk 21:42, 10 April 2010 (EDT)

Sure, trying to bring the Catholic criminal conspiracy to justice is just a “silly, kooky stunt” that will make the amoral atheist seem “foolish and petty”.

Everyone knows the ‘Vicar of Christ’ can’t be touched, no matter how much touching of children he knew about.

Mr. Koeckritz makes no mention of the crimes against 200 deaf boys, or moving pedophiles around so that they can abuse more children, or that it still goes on today, or that the Catholic Church has repeated this pattern in over 25 countries, including Austria, Australia, Ireland, Canada, Germany, Spain, the United States, and many others.  So much for your “Vicar of Christ”, Mr. Koeckritz.

But even more jaw-dropping was Andy Son-of-Phyllis Schlafly, the man who is re-writing the Bible, who took such umbrage at Dawkins’ publicity stunt with the Pope that he thinks we’ll all turn our noses up at Dawkin’s ‘true colors’:

Dawkins’ role is to make atheism look popular and friendly. He made a big mistake by showing the true colors of atheism here. I guess someone can put on a good show for only so long, before the real person comes out.–Andy Schlafly 21:52, 10 April 2010 (EDT)

I think this is a little unfair. Much as Dawkins is not a nice piece of work, the current Pope is not whiter than white either. His defence of the perpretrators of those horrible acts is shameful. MikeSorter 11:10, 11 April 2010 (EDT)

Abuse of kids by adults in public school is far worse. Why aren’t you demanding that action be taken there to address that bigger problem? See the latest news item, for example.–Andy Schlafly 14:03, 11 April 2010 (EDT)

I don’t remember saying I don’t want action to be taken? Adults abusing kids in public schools is shameful, as you rightly say – if we are to shame these teachers, we should shame the priests doing similar things, and shame the man who is now Pope who attempted to cover the whole thing up – just as we should shame the headteachers who tolerate or tolerated it. MikeSorter 15:01, 11 April 2010 (EDT)

Andy Schlafly won’t denounce the Catholic pedophile conspiracy; he’ll denounce the straw man of abuse of kids in public schools.  At RationalWiki, a site that ridicules Conservapedia pretty much for the sort of stuff you just read, one postor pointed out the obvious:

I’ve been very pissed about this utter lack of law enforcement response to these people with power raping children since he story broke in Boston, what, ten years ago? Cardinal Law got a sinecure in the Vatican – moving him beyond the purview of local cops. He moved rapists with dog collars from place to place to cover up what amounts to a conspiracy to make it ok for grown men to touch children in ways we all despise. So what if the grandstanders happen to be atheists? In greater Boston a movement formed to make their “church donations” to a separate body pending the “outcome”… not up on the latest details because I stopped killing trees a while back. ħuman 03:10, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Who would you rather stand with here?  The supposedly amoral atheists who wants to expose the hypocrisy and pain caused by the Catholic Church heirarchy; or conservatives like Andy Schlafly and Terry Koeckritz, who are more bothered that an atheist has the audacity to question why this child molestation horror should not go unpunished at the top?

The Catholic pedophile apologists at Conservapedia are looking pretty disgusting (and Andy Schlafly teaches children, although if you’re a girl student he insists on giving you an easier test because you shouldn’t compete with boys).

Have you ever felt like there have been so many hypocritical moments in Republican politics over the last several years, that the task of coming up with a decent list seems overwhelming?

Well, now there’s no need to do so, because a Talking Points Memo reader blog does it for you. Thank you to “AmericanDad” for putting in the link work for what is a massive list of ridiculousness. A few gems:

• You can’t vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it’s done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against, is especially ugly) — 114 of you (at last count) did just that — and it’s even worse when you secretly beg for more.
• You can’t fight against your own ideas just because the Dem president endorses your proposal.
• You can’t call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own ideas.
• You can’t carry on about the evils of government spending when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts.
• You can’t flip out when the black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when the white presidents did the same. Bush. Nixon. Ike. You didn’t even make a peep when Bush held hands and kissed leaders of countries that are not on “kissing terms” with the US.
• You can’t throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Gitmo prisoners who later helped plan the Christmas Day undie bombing, when — in fact — only one former Gitmo detainee, released by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, helped to plan the failed attack.
• You can’t cry that the health care bill is too long, then cry that it’s too short.
• You can’t propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Dems put your ideas in a bill.
• You can’t vote to block debate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of ‘open debate’.
• You can’t spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare
• You can’t whine that it’s unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party’s former leader admits you’ve been doing it for decades.
• You really need to disassociate with those among you who:
  • assert that people making a quarter-million dollars a year can barely make ends meet or that $1 million “isn’t a lot of money”;
  • liken political opponents to murderers, rapists, and “this Muslim guy” that “offed his wife’s head” or call then “un-American”;
  • equate our disease-fighting stem cell research with “what the Nazis did”;
  • equate family planning with eugenics or Nazism;
  • advocate a traitorous act like secession, violent revolution, military coup or civil war (just so we’re clear: sedition is a bad thing).
• If you’re going to use words like socialism, communism and fascism, you must have at least a basic understanding of what those words mean (hint: they’re NOT synonymous!)
• You can’t just pretend historical events didn’t happen in an effort to make a political opponent look dishonest or to make your side look better. Especially these events. (And, no, repeating it doesn’t make it better.)
• You have to condemn those among you who:
  • call members of Congress n*gger and f*ggot;
  • elected leaders who say “I’m a proud racist”;
  • state that America has been built by white people;
  • say that poor people are poor because they’re rotten people, call them “parasitic garbage” or say they shouldn’t be allowed to vote;
  • equate gay love with bestiality — involving horses or dogs or turtles or ducks — or polygamy, child molestation, pedophilia;
  • casually assume that only white males look “like a real American”;
  • assert presidential power to authorize torture, torture a child by having his testicles crushed in front of his parents to get them to talk, order the massacre of a civilian village and launch a nuclear attack without the consent of Congress;
  • attack children whose mothers have died;

Sigh – believe it or not, this is an extremely abbreviated list. Read the full one here.

When you read some of the above, you immediately sense why our politics are so debased in America.

Predictably, a sketch on Family Guy last Sunday about Terri Schiavo raised the ire of all those creepy people who made the country suffer through one of the more agonizing tragedies in recent memory.  If you need to remember the last time Republicans controlled Congress and how they spent the country’s time, it’s worth watching this Jon Stewart archive clip on the circus that surrounded the Schiavo case (there’s even a healthcare angle!):

(post continues after video)

The spectacle that the Republicans, the Schindler family (Terri’s parents and siblings) and some evangelicals made of this poor woman was shameful.

Michael Schiavo wanted to honor his wife’s wishes, but the Schindlers and political opportunists used her for their own agendas.  It’s hardly surprising that after Terri’s body was allowed to pass, her brother Bobby and sister Suzanne set up and now work for their Terri Schiavo foundation.    Had it not been for the opening scene of Family Guy you can see in the clip below, the nation would have remained blissfully unaware of the Schindler siblings:

(post continues after video – sorry international readers: only on Hulu)

I thought it was a little too soon to be making jokes about a topic that was a stomach-turning national trauma.  To learn more about the complicated Terri Schiavo back story, check out the Wikipedia article.  It was the case of a woman who was struck down at 26 but kept alive by a family unable to let her go, and they forced everyone to live through it.

The autopsy showed that this woman had no chance to ever have a life (from Wikipedia):

Examination of Schiavo’s nervous system by neuropathologist Stephen J. Nelson, M.D., revealed extensive injury. The brain itself weighed only 615 g, only half the weight expected for a female of her age, height, and weight, an effect caused by the loss of a massive amount of neurons. Microscopic examination revealed extensive damage to nearly all brain regions, including the cerebral cortex, the thalami, the basal ganglia, the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the midbrain. The neuropathologic changes in her brain were precisely of the type seen in patients who enter a PVS following cardiac arrest. Throughout the cerebral cortex, the large pyramidal neurons that comprise some 70% of cortical cells – critical to the functioning of the cortex – were completely lost. The pattern of damage to the cortex, with injury tending to worsen from the front of the cortex to the back, is also typical. There was marked damage to important relay circuits deep in the brain (the thalami) – another common pathologic finding in cases of PVS. The damage was, in the words of Thogmartin, “irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.”

While I was sad for Michael Schiavo and the Schindler family’s loss, the Schindlers made sympathy for their grief impossible as it became more about them keeping Terri’s body alive for their own selfish reasons.

In the press release expressing outrage over the Family Guy episode, they are dishonest when they write, ”She made use of a feeding tube after some doctors determined it safer for her than swallowing food and fluids on her own.” As if any chance existed that Schiavo could ever eat on her own again when her brain had shrunk to half, amongst other issues she suffered.

When the Schindlers go on speaking tours, they talk about all the pain that Terri’s body suffered when she died, which is false:

Patients in a persistent vegetative state do not feel pain, nor do they “suffer,” says Michael De Georgia, MD, head of the neurology-neurosurgery intensive care unit at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation here.

Pain, as well as suffering, requires consciousness, which is lacking in a person in a persistent vegetative state, says Dr. De Georgia.

It was when the Schindlers smeared Michael Schiavo that I had enough of them.  They alleged that he beat and starved Terri to kill her and gain financially; they said Michael Schiavo caused Terri’s condition.  Not only did the Florida Department of Children and Families say there was no evidence of abuse whatsoever, but so did all the medical examiners in 1990 (from Wikipedia):

Regarding the possibility of strangulation or domestic violence as a cause of Schiavo’s initial collapse, the report states: “No trauma was noted on any of the numerous physical exams or radiographs performed on Mrs. Schiavo on the day of, in the days after, or in the months after her initial collapse. Indeed, within an hour of her initial hospital admission, radiographic examination of her cervical spine was negative. Specifically, external signs of strangulation including cutaneous or deep neck injury, facial/conjunctival petechiae, and other blunt trauma were not observed or recorded during her initial hospital admission. Autopsy examination of her neck structures 15 years after her initial collapse did not detect any signs of remote trauma, but, with such a delay, the exam was unlikely to show any residual neck findings.”

It’s no surprise that with their first event around the corner, the Schindlers’ foundation is releasing multiple e-mails and press releases about how offended they are on behalf of all disabled people that the Family Guy skit aired.  Therein lies the joke: of course the opportunists were going to be offended.  The rest of just moaned at having to relive what they wrought in 2005.

But thanks to Family Guy, the Schindlers’ event is sure to be a little more noticed.

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