Nixon’s Southern Strategy failed miserably this summer. Republicans LIED, cajoled, fear-mongered, had Sarah Palin piss in her pants, and called a duly elected BLACK president an illegitimate Kenyan socialist.
Incredibly, the dead on the rails elephant is vowing to fight on — on the same mindless obstructionist path.
“If they beat us in the Senate, we will fight them in conference. If they beat us in conference, we will fight them in the House. If they beat us in the House over healthcare, we will fight them over cap and trade. We will fight them over immigration and amnesty. We will fight them over the deficit. We will fight them over the debt. And we will fight them in 2010. We will fight them in the House. We will fight them for Senate seats in Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, and Arkansas. We will fight them in Colorado and North Dakota and California and Washington State. We will fight them in Illinois and in New Jersey. We will never, never, never, never give up! Our country is at stake!”
LOL!
Dick, we already know that you are a THIEVING MEDIA TERRORIST, pontificating to a racist, bigoted constituency of mostly Southern whites, while sucking in their hard earned dollars.
Desperate and insecure, Republican whites see years of unfettered privilege slipping away, and it terrifies them. They are scared stiff as the pillars of white supremacy are being torn down systematically, for a better America. The politicians and pundits who have been exploiting racial fears to win elections are equally terrified, as their constituency shrinks.
The “Change We can Believe In” train is rolling — all over a prostrate and defeated GOP elephant.
[ Adapted From: EvilGOPBastards.com ] — Since the New Deal, Republicans have been on the wrong side of every issue of concern to ordinary Americans; Social Security, the war in Vietnam, the criminal war in Iraq, equal rights, civil liberties, church-state separation, consumer issues, public education, reproductive freedom, national health care, labor issues, gun policy, campaign-finance reform, the environment, tax fairness ….and now HEALTHCARE.
No political party could remain so consistently wrong by accident.
The only rational conclusion is that, despite their cynical “family values,” “small government” and “lower taxes” propaganda, the Republican Party is a racist criminal conspiracy bent on betraying the interests of the American people, in favor of plutocratic interests, absolutist religious groups and white supremacy enthusiasts.
From Publishers Weekly – Clint Willisis mad as hell, and he isn’t going to take it any more. For readers similarly mad-who think Republicans are “insufferable stinkers” or that they’re “small-minded, selfish, arrogant, power-mad, murderous little twits” – this book will surely satisfy. This anthology gathers dozens of pieces, including excerpts from bestselling books by Michael Moore, Molly Ivins, Eric Schlsosser, and pieces by Paul Krugman, Paul Begala and other well-known liberal voices. Alan Dershowitz highlights the injustice of the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2000 presidential election; Hunter Sl. Thompson remembers Richard Nixon after his death (“He was the real thing-a political monster straight out of Grendel“); Paul Begala recounts the “mutually beneficial relationship” between former Enron CEO Ken Lay and George W. Bush. As election time nears and the 2004 presidential election gears up, liberals will appreciate this handy reminder of Republican wrongdoing. [ READ ALL REVIEWS]
3. Republicans believe that when Christ comes back he’ll be a social conservative with a trickle-down strategy for salvation — including HEALTH CARE!
4. Republicans care more about their dogs than they do the homeless
5. Republicans live in suburbs where they never have to confront their RACISM
6. Republicans consistently include electric chairs, firing squads, gas chambers, hanging, lethal injection, and the Right to Life as planks in their party platforms
7. They prefer property rights to civil rights
8. They define the pursuit of happiness as the pursuit of dollars
9. They prefer redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the truly wealthy
The highest office in the land is occupied by a black man, and some whites, even those with NO TEETH, NO HEALTH INSURANCE, NO FUTURE …Zero! NOTHING!,…and would benefit from Obama’s policies, are up in arms — scared of a “BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE-HOUSE!!!”
Right-Wing media “blood-hounds” know this and they are drumming up the FEAR like never before, while laughing all the way to the bank.
These “poor souls” have been played, duped, cajoled and mis-used by Republican politicians for years, through fear-mongering and race-baiting. However, the demographics have clearly shifted around, though the Republican Party seems nearly blind — and tone deaf — to the fact, writes John Ridely, for the Huffington Post.
Conservatives have gotten too complacent playing race-bait-your-way-to-victory and failed to notice that in 2008, it’s minority voters who decided the outcome of the presidential election, and will continue to do so in the future!
Apparently, it’s not “dead”: Dobbs finds “new developments” to report about Obama birth certificate “controversy” on CNN
1. Playing With Fire:The Obama White House may see political advantage in exposing the ‘Birthers.’ But they shouldn’t discount the dangerous sentiment of the radical rejectionists.
The Republican party rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. As part of its Southern strategy, the G.O.P aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks. For Republicans, there is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry — It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough. Nevertheless, there is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.
The Howls of a Fading Species
[ By: Bob Herbert ] One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.
It’s hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination. Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist,” apparently unaware of his incoherence in the “Latina-woman” redundancy in this defamatory characterization.
Karl Rove sneered that Ms. Sotomayor was “not necessarily” smart, thus managing to get the toxic issue of intelligence into play in the case of a woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, went on to get a law degree from Yale and has more experience as a judge than any of the current justices had at the time of their nominations to the court.
It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry. It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough.
The amount of disrespect that has spattered the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is disgusting. She is spoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowest of the low. Rush Limbaugh — now there’s a genius! — has compared her nomination to a hypothetical nomination of David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan. “How can a president nominate such a candidate?” Limbaugh asked.
Ms. Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights organization. In the crazy perspective of some right-wingers, the mere existence of La Raza should make decent people run for cover. La Raza is “a Latino K.K.K. without the hoods and the nooses,” said Tom Tancredo, a Republican former congressman from Colorado.
Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!
Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.
Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”
Never a peep did you hear.
Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 with a salute to states’ rights in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the site where three young civil rights workers had been snatched and murdered by real-life, rabid, blood-thirsty racists?
We’ve heard ad nauseam Ms. Sotomayor’s comments — awkwardly stated but hardly racist — about what she brings to the bench as a Latina. But how often have we ever heard the awful, hateful position on race offered up by William F. Buckley, the right’s ultimate intellectual champion? He felt comfortable declaring, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of public schools, that whites had every right to discriminate against blacks because whites belonged to “the advanced race.”
Right-wing howls of protest? I think not.
Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination is a big deal because never before in the history of the United States has any president nominated a Latina to the highest court. Only two blacks have ever been on the court, and the one selected by a Republican has been like a thumb in the eye to most African-Americans.
The court is a living monument to America’s long history of exclusion based on race, ethnic background and gender. Where is the right-wing protest against that?
It was always silly to pretend that the election of Barack Obama was evidence that the U.S. was moving into some sort of post-racial, post-ethnic, post-gender nirvana. But it did offer a basis for optimism. There is every reason to hope that we’ve improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.
Those types can still cause a lot of trouble, but the ridiculousness of their posture is pretty widely recognized. Thus the desperate howling.
About The Author: BOB HERBERT — joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His twice a week column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends.
Prior to joining The Times, Mr. Herbert was a national correspondent for NBC from 1991 to 1993, reporting regularly on “The Today Show” and “NBC Nightly News.” He had worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily News from 1976 until 1985, when he became a columnist and member of its editorial board.
In 1990, Mr. Herbert was a founding panelist of “Sunday Edition,” a weekly discussion program on WCBS-TV in New York, and the host of Hotline, a weekly issues program on New York public television.
He began his career as a reporter with The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., in 1970. He became its night city editor in 1973.
Mr. Herbert has won numerous awards, including the Meyer Berger Award for coverage of New York City and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for distinguished newspaper writing. He was chairman of the Pulitzer Prize jury for spot news reporting in 1993.
Born in Brooklyn on March 7, 1945, Mr. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Manhattan on the Upper West Side.
Republican strength in the South has both compensated for and masked the extent of the GOP’s decline elsewhere. By several key measures, the party is now weaker outside the South than at any time since the Depression; in some ways, it is weaker than ever before. For decades, Democrats ardently debated whether they could elect a president who was not from the South. Before long, Republicans may debate with equal passion whether they can elect another president who is.
By Ronald Brownstein
National Journal: The Republican domination of the South “looked great when we were holding on to our Northeastern and Midwestern seats and continuing to sweep the South,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster who specializes in Southern races. “The challenge arises when the rest of the country says, ‘I don’t believe the same things,’ or ‘I don’t admire the same candidates,’ as the South does.”
In the view of former Rep. Charles Bass, R-N.H., who was defeated in 2006, “The current crisis of the Republican Party is whether it wants to be a regional party or whether it can try to expand ideologically and appeal to other regions.”
Bill Carrick, like many other Democratic strategists, believes that these ideologically assertive Southern Republicans are hurting the GOP’s appeal elsewhere, particularly because cable television has made each party’s leaders more visible than a generation ago. “It makes them look… extreme and that they are engaged in partisan political fights that are irrelevant to achieving success,” Carrick says. “It is definitely a losing spiral that… is reinforced every day by the 24/7 news cycle.”
But the growth of other nonwhite populations, such as Hispanics and even Asians, is strengthening Democrats across the region, especially in the outer South, and even in portions of the Deep South such as Georgia. These “new minority” voters functioned like a thumb on the scale last year for Obama in Virginia (where they reached 10 percent of the vote) and North Carolina (where they comprised 6 percent). They were also instrumental in tipping Florida to the Democratic presidential nominee. “When you add the Democratic vote among African-Americans with that of the new minorities, that means the share of the white vote a Democrat needs to win goes down,” notes Merle Black. –[ READ FULL ARTICLE ]
Nixon’s Southern Strategy failed miserably this summer. Republicans LIED, cajoled, fear-mongered, had Sarah Palin piss in her pants, and called a duly elected BLACK president an illegitimate Kenyan socialist.
One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.
