I am still having a hard time understanding how any relatively sane, normal, reasonable person could call themselves a Republican these days when you survey the current crop of Republicans.
The GOP has gone deep into right-field. They are so far right they're out in the parking lot. If that bothers you and you are an old-fashioned Republican in the mold of Barry Goldwater, maybe you should protest this lurch into lunacy by renouncing your membership in the GOP? If they don't see their membership decline significantly, what impetus would they have to change?
You could always rejoin the Republican Party later, once they come to their senses. But you really should not be encouraging the current crop of crackpots. They are tainting the entire country with their stink. Do you want to associate with that?
Slaves to Prejudice
by Maureen Down - The New York Times
WASHINGTON — WHEN a cranky anarchist in a
cowboy hat starts a sentence saying “I want to tell you one more thing I know
about the Negro,” you can be dang sure it’s going downhill from there.
The unsettling thing about Nevada rancher
Cliven Bundy’s ugly rant on the Virgin River on Saturday, The Times’s Adam
Nagourney told me, was that there was no negative reaction from the semicircle
of gun-toting and conspiracy-minded supporters who had gathered round to hear
it. The oblivious 67-year-old Bundy, who has refused for 20 years to pay for his
cattle to graze on our land, offered a nostalgic ode to slavery.
Recalling that he saw African-Americans
sitting on the porch of a public-housing project in North Las Vegas who seemed
to have “nothing to do,” Bundy declaimed: “They abort their young children, they
put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And
I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a
family life and doing things, or are they better off under government
subsidy?”
The man hailed as a “savior” and “folk hero”
by Fox News doubled down Thursday, declaring: “Cliven Bundy’s a-wondering” if
the black community was happier during slave days when “they was in the South in
front of their homes with their chickens and their gardens and their children
around them and their men having something to do.”
By Friday, he was saying that all Americans
are slaves to the government and comparing himself to Martin Luther King Jr. and
Rosa Parks. Just another dark-ages bigot who goes nuts at the idea that whites
are losing clout in an America run by a New Age black president. What’s the use
of being white, after all, if you can’t be king of the hill — even if the hill
really belongs to the government?
Conservatives saw no hypocrisy in rallying
around Bundy for breaking the law, refusing to pay between $1 and $2 a month per
cow to graze on federal land, while they refuse to consider amnesty for illegal
immigrants committing Acts of Love.
Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from
Kentucky who wants to be the Republican presidential nominee, took almost a day
to distance himself from the self-immolating Bundy. Paul was so worried about
alienating the segment of the party that will decide the nomination, he couldn’t
even respond quickly to say the most simple thing on earth: Racism is bad.
As BuzzFeed
reported, Chris McDaniel, a G.O.P. state senator mounting a strong challenge
to Thad Cochran in the Mississippi Republican primary, has written blog posts
blaming the “welfare dependent citizens of New Orleans” for not finding higher
ground during Katrina, charging that “Mexicans” entering the country are hurting
“our culture” and calling racial profiling of Muslims a “victory for common
sense.”
From cockfighting
rallies to online
gun sweepstakes to cracks about “wetbacks”
to waxing nostalgic about slavery, the Republican fringe has gone mainstream.
When the younger stars of the G.O.P. race to embrace a racist anarchist lionized
by Sean Hannity, it underscores the party’s lack of leadership or direction.
After making noise about reaching out to women
(even as Senate Republicans unanimously blocked a vote on the Paycheck Fairness
Act and Republican legislatures around the country pass more abortion
restrictions), the G.O.P. now has the delightful Det Bowers out there doing
marital counseling. Politico
reported that the wacky 62-year-old evangelical minister, who is challenging
Lindsey Graham in the South Carolina G.O.P. Senate primary, once asserted that
95 percent of broken marriages are caused by women giving more attention to
their children than to their husbands. “He did run off with some other woman,
and you packed his bags,” Bowers said, adding: “You just ran him off. You paid
more attention to your children than you did to him. ‘Oh, he doesn’t need me?’
He needs you more than they do. He chose you, they didn’t. An abominable
idolatry.”
It’s a measure of how hallucinogenic
conservatives are that they are trying to re-litigate slavery during the second
term of the first African-American president.
Earlier this month, Jim DeMint, Tea-Party
godfather and president of the Heritage Foundation, bizarrely told a Christian
radio station that it was not “big government” that freed the slaves, but “the
conscience of the American people” and Abraham Lincoln, a Republican. (Umm,
wasn’t he big government along with his hundreds of thousands of
troops?)
In another case of inexplicable foot-dragging,
Rand Paul was reluctant to cut loose Jack Hunter, his social media director and
co-author on a Tea Party book, after the media wrote about his past life as a
shock jock named the Southern Avenger who advocated secession, wore a
Confederate flag mask, toasted John Wilkes Booth, and complained that whites are
“not afforded the same right to celebrate their own cultural identity” because
anything “that is considered ‘too white’ is immediately suspect.”
At Harvard’s Institute of Politics on Friday,
Paul said that “The Republican Party will adapt, evolve or die.”
He might want to listen to his own advice.
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