GOP Goes Bat-Crazy, Enjoy It

Update: See Media Matters - Fox News openly advocates against Democratic Congress, White House and watch Beck's Witch Hunt: The New McCarthyism.

Democratic strategists are enthralled by the 9-12 project, Rep Joe Wilson (R-SC), deathers, birthers and the GOP as the hatred of our black president becomes apparent, branding not President Obama but rather the Republican Party.

The last time the GOP went this crazy, actually impeaching a president after the GOP was trashed in the November 1998 election, President Bill Clinton’s approval ratings spiked upward. Look for more of the same.

Democratic strategists, if they were inclined, do not need to craft a straw man.

The GOP is building its own: Themselves, and apparently are not aware of this development as they scream how much they love America and want America back from the black man who took it a short eight months ago.

Rush, Glenn Beck and company are offending not only the fastest-growing demographics of our electorate, but also are turning off independents and firing up Obama’s progressive base.

And make no mistake. Beck, Rush and Fox are mainstream Republicans.

A Madison business owner with whom I often talk politics — an activist Republican and respectful, old-school politico — assures me that the 9-12 movement is mainstream in the GOP.

Even as President Obama delivers a message of inclusion, service and respect as we honor 9/11 this weekend, the GOP and the tea-bag types are drinking deep of McCarthyite hate. Reports David Paine in the Huffington Post:

This past August, a few months after the 9/11 community finally secured passage of bipartisan legislation that established 9/11 as a National Day of Service and Remembrance, a writer for the American Spectator published an article entitled ‘Obama's Plan to Desecrate 9/11.’

The opening sentence read this way:

‘The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry.’

Add to this bizarre but typical reprise of McCarthyism an even stranger development: The old-time segregationist religion is being openly revived with such enthusiasm that one wonders if the GOP knows that the 1950s-60s civil rights movement actually occurred.

The ignominious gloom of Ronald Reagan who championed foes of the civil rights movement by kicking off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi — the site of the 1964 murder of civil rights workers Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney (depicted above)— by calling for "states rights" and other anti-civil rights initiatives is casting its fetid vapor today.

As Ed Kilgore writes in Tim Pawlenty Climbs Aboard the Crazy Train:

The ‘state sovereignty movement’ is not, it's important to understand, just a group of people who think the federal government has too much power. Its central feature is the crackpot nineteenth century theory, revived most recently to resist civil rights legislation, that states have the inherent right to nullify federal legislation and court rulings that fall outside the enumerated constitutional powers of the federal government. And Pawlenty knows its extremist provenance: that's why he identified himself with Rick Perry, who's flirted both with nullification and with secession as part of his high-minded contributions to the ‘state sovereignty movement.’

Most Americans find open displays of racial hate and McCarthyite lies genuinely disturbing and indecent.

But we can watch and enjoy the GOP digging its political grave in one of the most outlandish moments of modern American political history.

'Democrat Socialist Party,' Says Official RNC Resolution

Update: Obama, Congressional Leaders Vow Passage of Health Care by June 31, GOP will call it socialist though it will be anything but socialist.

Just read this from Ed Kilgore at the Democratic Strategist:

Like a lot of non-Rush-Limbaugh listeners, when I first heard that a large faction of Republican National Committee members was pushing for a formal resolution calling on GOPers to start referring to the Democratic Party as the 'Democrat Socialist Party,' I thought it was a puerile joke that the adults in the Republican Party would quash.

Apparently not. According to sources speaking to Politico's Roger Simon, the Republican National Committee will approve the resolution at a special meeting of the RNC called for that very purpose.

These guys really are grade-schoolers. You might think after getting the U.S. into this mess that the GOP might offer serious solutions. You would be wrong.

Dick Cheney Stays on Point

Update: Not Even Chuck Norris Can Save the GOP

Dick Cheney is competing with Rush and Newt as the leader of the new GOP.

We wish him luck.

Maureen Dowd and Juan Cole analyse Cheney's macabre machinations that apparently will not stop ever. From Cole:

This week's news is about the grand old pit bull's struggle to continue to define his own party. Cheney emerged last Friday to warn on a North Dakota radio program that it would be a mistake for the Republican Party to moderate its message. (Does that mean it is now radical?) Then on Sunday Cheney told Bob Schieffer of 'Face the Nation' that it was a mistake to stop using waterboarding and other forms of extreme interrogation, and that they did not constitute torture. He also poked fun at Colin Powell, questioning his credentials as a Republican and expressing a preference for the waspish Limbaugh as the party's leader.

It's D-Day, Shiller, Roubini, Stiglitz, Kuttner and Krugman Sound Alarm

Just saying.

- Roubini's Pissed-Off and Stiglitz Goes Ballistic

- Robert Shiller: Depression Lurks Unless There’s More Stimulus

- Krugman: Green Shoots and Glimmers

- Kuttner: Will Obama's Economic Team Lead Him Off a Cliff?

Politically, it's time for a for-us or against-us ultimatum to the GOP while people still recognize that Bush and his GOP brought us to this mess. The TEA Party was a joke, for now.

But the idea that we have to try the recovery program now and then try something else, more comprehensive, in the Fall ain't going to work while the economy continues its slide and the GOP continues trring to appropriate unfocused frustration and aggression.

Be bold and great forces of the American people will come to your aid. "Choo-choos," as some the Tea Set derogated the labor-intensive high-speed rail project should be just the beginning of a massive public works program. [I know we have some begun now.]

And everyone knows that the fare of Robert Gibbs' “you will see in a systematic and coordinated way the transparency of determining and showing to all involved some of the results of these stress tests” didn't play and appears emblematic of opacity.

This recovery needs to be framed as Obama against Newt, Rush, Sarah Palin and the GOP.

Spook them [the GOP] , scare them [the public], shake the markets.

I know this more confrontational political strategy is being considered; well now it's D-Day, and Gen. Patton-Obama ought to lead the landing this time and all operations thereafter.

A Vision for High Speed Rail

WhiteHouse.Gov: A True Resource

Want info on the budget, on the economic recovery plan, and on efforts to protect the middle class. WhiteHouse.Gov has a simple searchable application for this information.

This guy, Obama, actually cares about this stuff helping Americans. What a change.

And it scares the hell of out of Republicans who have praying for a financial Apocalypse and doing their worst to bring it about. Since Obama was elected, Human Events, the RNC, Newt, Rush, the whole bunch of them have been screaming bloody murder. Yesterday's TEA Party was more of the same bringing out the lunatic fringe and other useful fools.

Useful Idiots at the Capital

Update IV: MJS: Sign of anti-Obama protester reads "Keep your change. I'll keep freedoms. God bless the USA."

Update III: Time for TEA and a Fair Tax by Chuck Norris

Update II: Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo has an insightful piece on the astroturf-nature of the the Tea Party event. In sum, no grassroots uprising, just a bunch of GOP activists [and locally with a few crazies from Fondy].

Update: Human Events magazine (of Newt, Dick Cheney, Rush, Ann Coulter renown) is promoting a "survival guide" warning that the Obama government is Preparing a Military Response to Coming Social Chaos. I swear these people are praying for a depression, a catastrophe, something disastrous. Was that a black helicopter that just flew over?
Does the GOP want a depression or are they just acting like it?

As Robert Shiller and other economists warn that absent “massive pump-priming” stimulus spending a depression looks increasingly possible, the GOP holds "tea parties," protesting stimulus spending, like today's at the state capitol building in Madison. [Paul Ryan is going to be there.]

The GOP says it's just looking out for the average taxpayer, without mentioning the Obama tax cuts for the vast majority of Americans and that little problem of a looming depression.

So watch the GOP hold their tea parties with Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck cheering them on, while the country apparently can go eat cake.

Myself, I prefer the advice of the economists and the Obama administration who are trying to fix the mess.

From the Obama blog: "... in addition to the fundamental weaknesses of the economy, there is also a fundamental weakness in the political system that must be confronted."

That fundamental weakness in the political system is on display today as the GOP plays dress-up again, not as jet pilots like George W. Bush but as kamikazes.

Gary Kamiya Is Off Today

The Devil, strike that, the culture made me do it!

Gary Kamiya strikes out today with his piece on cop killer Richard Poplawski.

The sub-headline asks "amid the deafening din of the right wing's anti-government rhetoric, how extreme is (Poplawski)?"

Kamiya should have stopped at the editor's sub-headline in his 1,100-word piece.

Kamiya's internally incoherent argument is a brew of sloppy reasoning with a misreading of Hobbes' social contract theory thrown in.

Kamiya attempts to connect rightwing killer, anti-Semitic nut-job Poplawski to rightwing, mainstream nutty political culture.

Writes Kamiya:

As his friend, Edward Perkovic, told the Associated Press, Poplawski feared 'the Obama gun ban that's on the way' and 'didn't like our rights being infringed upon.'

Such obsessions don't come out of a vacuum. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the GOP have been whipping up hatred and fear of Obama and 'liberal Democrats' for years. Joined by the National Rifle Association, which has run false and irresponsible ads claiming that Obama is planning to take away Americans' guns, they have encouraged and helped to create a pathological right-wing subculture in which free-floating hatred of 'the government' mixes with a maniacal fetish for guns. Poplawski is the diseased fruit of that ugly tree. ... Theirs is a Hobbesian world in which law enforcement cannot be trusted to stop criminals. Hence their favorite slogan, 'When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.' Poplawski proudly subscribed to that belief.

Hobbes Loved the State

To begin with, the social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes believed in the necessity of a strong state—a society in which protection and security triumphs over individual will—lest the individuals' lives be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". (Leviathan, yuck!).

Yet, Kamiya identifies Hobbes with the right-libertarian's skepticism of state and police power. If Kamiya has read Leviathan, he didn't understand it.

Myself I share the libertarian's skepticism of state power [this skepticism is healthy if one beleives in a classical liberal democracy], though I don't own or particularly value guns.

Feared Obama, So Poplawski Killed Three Cops

Kamiya writes of Poplawski, "He is responsible for his action. You can't tar every conservative because a pathological murderer shared some of his or her core beliefs."

Right, so what then does a pathological murderer have to do with the rightwing, whack culture? Not much.

But Kamiya tries to insinuate a causal connection: Feared Obama because of Rush and Fox , so Poplawski killed three cops.

Is Kamiya saying that Rush, Fox and the like are also anti-Semitic, like Poplawski? That they advocate killing cops so Obama does not take their guns, like Poplawski?

Kamiya instead lamely suggests that "they have encouraged and helped to create a pathological right-wing subculture in which free-floating hatred of 'the government'", qualifying his earlier admonition that you can't tar conservatives with a whack like Poplawski out of existence.

So the rightwing are political culture polluters, says Kamiya. Maybe then we should police and outlaw these culture polluters, right?

Look, Rush and Fox are slime because they have little regard for liberty, care about power and not people, and their political rants are poorly reasoned. But in this regard of uninformed, poorly reasoned polemical tracts, they have a friend in Gary Kamiya today.

- via mal contends

Today's Headlines

Steep Market Drops Highlight Despair Over Rescue Efforts

White House Lets Limbaugh Be Voice Of GOP Opposition

In Legal Memos, Clearer View of Power Bush Sought

U.S. Says C.I.A. Destroyed 92 Tapes of Interrogations

Twenty Years of Rush

Today, HUMAN EVENTS begins its week-long "celebration of Rush Limbaugh's 20th anniversary in national radio."

Well, I guess that we have to applaud Limbaugh's success (impressive) and the guy does have on-air talent.

But we can take solace in the fact that many red states full of Limbaugh listeners may soon end up voting Democratic for the first time in a generation.

Limbaugh made his mark by connecting to misogyny, assorted bigotries, and a frustration that elites (not corporate elites), this mythical New York-East Coast-Hollywood band of elites are keeping the white man down.

Facts never were important to Rush, just the joy and expiation shared by his listeners of mocking FemiNAZIs and anything Democratic and liberal, except Joe Lieberman.

But maybe Limbaugh is right about something: America is in such bad shape that the country looks to finally elect one of them in November.

What the hell is this country coming to?