Ever notice lately, how the “good” Republicans will not denounce the violent rhetoric of the Teabagger crowd, but insist they are not of that ilk? On Meet the Press it struck me just how resistant Republicans are to criticizing their own. Some anyway. There were a few who resign from the Republican National Committee over the fetish club flap.
When host David Gregory asked Minnesota Republican Marsha Blackburn whether she agreed with Michele Bachmann, her Minnesota colleague, after Bachmann called the government, read Obama and the Democrats, a “gangster government.” All Blackburn would admit to was that she wouldn’t use language like that, but she wouldn’t condemn it either. Don’t want to piss off the Teabaggers, she might need their support come Election Day!
When the House of Representatives was getting ready to vote on the health care bill, Black congressmen walked through a gauntlet of protestors, many of whom hurled obscenities and hatred at them, calling them nigger and in one case, a man spit on Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver.
This is all caught on camera by all the TV networks of course and the networks run the footage, some sharing the footage of Cleaver getting spit upon, for days. They had on some of the Congressman who talked about being called racial slurs.
Also featured were Republicans. All of them condemned racial slurs, but then questioned whether any of it happened at all. Did the protestors really call the Black Congressmen niggers, and for that matter, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank a faggot. And even though footage shows Congressman Cleaver getting spit on, they even question whether the protestor actually spit. Really? Even with all the TV video?
Bill Maher spelled it out though on his HBO program, Real Time. Many people want to claim the Teabagger movement isn’t partisan, that it has nothing to do with race — and yet, with a straight face, commentators will admit that the Tea Bag Movement members overwhelmingly consider themselves Republican and they are overwhelmingly White.
As Maher noted, the Teabaggers are the Republican Party’s base and when Republicans go on talk shows, they measure their words carefully so as not to clash with the very people who will decide who wins the Republican primaries in their states.
If they act as if nothing happened, despite the overwhelming proof that these things did indeed happen, or they don’t criticize their colleagues who use inflammatory language and lies to stir up this Republican base, the Teabaggers, then everyone aligned with them, most especially the Teabaggers, can have their veil of deniability.
It’s also evident when a talk show participant will ask a Republican, especially if that Republican is sucking up to the Teabagging base, why there was no tax revolt movement during the Bush Administration when the Republicans went on a three trillion dollar spending spree without any means of paying for it.
Oh, they will agree Republicans lost their way during the Bush years, but in just his first 15 months of being president, Barack Obama and his Democrat colleagues have been much, much worse than Bush in his entire eight years!
No, the real center of all this animosity towards President Obama and the Democrats has to do with two things: the president’s ethnicity and the hatred this small minority of voters feel towards anyone they don’t believe is “one of them.” Which is why they often can be tearfully exclaiming they want “their” country back, as if someone has taken it away from them.
Their view of what constitutes “their” country has, at it’s center, White Folks in charge, another reason the Republican Party is now a regional party, centered mostly in the South and West. Oh yeah, the Republicans now have a Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown.
Interestingly enough, the Teabaggers held a rally in Boston, trying to be like the original Tea Revolt, right there in Senator Brown’s bailiwick. For whatever reason, the good senator didn’t make an appearance. But, it’s not likely Senator Brown will speak ill of the Teabaggers, he may need their support in his state’s Republican primary.
Their country, as if the people who voted for Barack Obama and his Democrat colleagues are not Americans. That’s basically what the Teabaggers are saying. They had it their way for most of the previous eight years, save for a couple years between 2007 and 2009 when Democrats had just enough members in the Senate to slow down President Bush.
To them, a Democrat in the White House and a Democrat-controlled Congress is just about the worst thing that could happen. Knuckleheads like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, along with his other FOXNews cronies tell their viewers the Democrats are all Socialists, and then Fascists and the tea bagging base of the Republican Party gets whipped up into a violent frenzy.
It’s no coincidence the growth of armed militias has grown exponentially since Barack Obama was elected president. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has said in its most recent report on the militias, these are made up of people who are ideologically extreme right wing — the base of the Republican Party.
They are against taxes and anything they perceive as left wing, and therefore Socialist in ideology. And of course they want to protect the 2nd Amendment which they are sure Democrats are getting ready to repeal, never mind that an actual repeal of any amendment in the Constitution requires two thirds of Congress voting for it and two thirds of the states, 34 total, have to ratify the repeal.
Funny, the extreme right wing that is so bent on preserving the 2nd Amendment isn’t so keen on protecting the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights.
Which just made me think of this: the State Board of Education in Texas had Thomas Jefferson, the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, removed from the history books in that state because, well, he wrote this to the Danbury Baptists: “Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
He pretty much said this nation was not created to be a Christian theocracy, a view the Far Right does not share.
While the Far Right is passionate about the 2nd Amendment, they hold no such passion for preserving the 1st Amendment. Quite the opposite. They would like to declare, officially, this to be a Christian version of Iran.
In a humorous note, some from the Michigan and Ohio militias tried to claim the militias were non-partisan, but that bullshit seems to have faded.
But there was one voice of restraint from the Republicans, two if you count former Bush speechwriter David Frum. But I’m talking specifically about Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma who told his constituents that there is no provision in the new health care bill that will put people in jail for not getting health insurance, that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a nice person and added, “So don’t catch yourself being biased by FOXNews that somebody is no good. The people in Washington are good.”
David Frum famously said that at one time the Republican Party thought FOXNews worked for them, but now, the party is working for the network. Just weeks before that statement Frum was fired from the American Enterprise Institute for saying the health care bill would be a Waterloo for the Republican Party, not the Democrats. Frum had the temerity to criticize Congressional Republicans for becoming the “Party of No” and not cooperating with Democrats on the bill.
It’s funny, the Republican Party, which always claims to be a “big tent,” is driving away the moderates in the party who don’t walk lock-step with the base’s views. Even Senator John McCain, once considered to be a straight shooter, has flip-flopped on so many issues he looks like a newly landed crappie, just to garner the support of the Republican base.
Just recently McCain claimed he never considered himself a “Maverick,” even though he titled one of his books, John McCain: Worth the Fighting For: The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him. Chapter 11 is even titled, “Maverick.”
And let’s not forget, he campaigned for the presidency as the “original maverick” and declared his running mate, Sarah Palin, a fellow maverick.
Why did he lie so flagrantly? To suck up some of the Teabagger support from his Arizona Republican Primary opponent, J.D. Hayworth.
No, the Republicans won’t criticize the Teabaggers, they want that energy when the primaries come around, so the Republicans feed off all that hostility and some, like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, stoke that hatred.
There is one other reason the Republican Party and their base, which is about all they have for support these days, stoke and feed this anger: they are sore losers.
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