One of reactionary Paul Broun’s ‘Bagger fan club asks him about who will shoot President Obama…to laughter and applause. Move over, Jared Lee Loughner, somebody is bound to take your place as the next Wingnut Assassin.
Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy
Gingrich has been gradually creeping out from the shadows into the limelight since his fall from grace when leading the impeachment crusade against the very popular Bill Clinton. But the Gingrich of the 90s seems relatively tame compared to the teabaggers and birthers of today – and even compared to Gingrich 2010!
In a recent speech to the reactionary American Enterprise Institute, Gingrich seems to have planted one foot firmly amidst the teabagger camp with his calls to forbid the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (which is neither a Mosque nor at Ground Zero), and the other solidly planted in the Wolfowitz/NeoConArtist era of never-ending war on Radical Islam:
“I believe [Bush] was right but in fact could not operationalize what he said. That is, there was an Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Well we’re one out of three. And people ought to think about that. If Bush was right in January of 2002 — and by the way virtually the entire Congress gave him a standing ovation when he said it — then why is it that the other two parts of the Axis of Evil are still visibly, cheerfully making nuclear weapons? And it’s because we’ve stood at brink, looked over and thought, “Too big a problem.”
“If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ‘41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won,” Gingrich said. The U.S. has to “over-match the problem,” he said, adding, “That’s what Americans are all about.”
I wonder if he got the memo that various Repug leaders were starting to bail on Shrubya’s Afghanistan Folly? Palin/Gringrich in 2012 – the worst of 3 eras of Repug misleadership! It would be kinda luck the Germans in WWII – invading a bunch of weak countries (Iran, N. Korea), then going crazy and attacking Russia from Palin’s house…I don’t even want to think about the hell they’d create.
A dispatch from the Department of Unintended Benefits, via TPM:
California Tea Party groups are calling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s boycott and raising him a … boycott.
The mayor raised the ire of California Tea Partiers this week when, in response to Arizona’s passage of a controversial immigration law, he announced a boycott of the state, barring San Francisco city employees from entering Arizona and threatening to cut off economic ties. Local Tea Partiers who support the Arizona legislation answered his actions with a boycott of their own — on the city of San Francisco.
“We are just tired of our representatives not representing our wishes,” said Bridget Melson, president of the group Pleasanton/NorCal TEA Party, which called for the boycott on Wednesday. . . .
The group has encouraged its members not to patronize local businesses. . . . “Spend your money anywhere else…vacation elsewhere, dine elsewhere — if you protest here, bring your own food, coffee and water,” Melson writes in the boycott’s official call to arms.
As it happens, I live in the Bay Area. I know San Francisco quite well, and have been to Pleasanton more than a few times. Suffice it to say that Pleasanton is, um, not San Francisco — it’s more than 45 minutes’ driving time away across a bridge and through hills and valleys (not counting traffic), and in cultural terms the distance is probably measured in light years.
So I think I can say with some confidence that a threat by a Pleasanton-based group to stop spending their money in San Francisco most likely isn’t causing The City’s businesses to tremble with fear. Especially given the propensity by members of this particular movement to be less than flush with cash and not exactly swift to embrace the diversity for which S.F. is famous.
In fact, for folks like me, the news that a bunch of intolerant, obstreperous suburbanites are doing their best to steer clear of San Francisco makes it seem that much more appealing as a place to spend my liberal, big-government-loving money. Heck, if you ask me, whoever’s in charge of tourism for San Francisco should make an ad to make sure everybody knows about the boycott.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
Reactionary losers looking for a fight
Armed protesters on the National Mall? On the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing?
Last summer I had remarked on how the complete repudiation of the GOP at the polls would spark a repeat of the wrong-wing wackiness and terror of the late ’90s. I was really expecting more militia activity, abortion clinic terror and media hate talk, all of which has been delivered.
But this so-called Open Carry protest has a whole different quality. The no-dick big-mouth gun nuts now strut into public, family settings like National Parks and Starbucks, brazenly displaying their ability to target and kill us with a squeeze of the trigger.
Now they are marching on the Capitol, brandishing weapons? Are these guys transforming into the Sinn Féin to the militia group’s IRA?
Seriously, it’s just a matter of time now before some wacko unloads on an elected leader or government official – or car bombs another Federal building. Make no mistake, this is terror of the early Nazi brownshirt variety, and the target is you, me and the rule of law.
Tea Bagger political discourse
CNN’s Bob Schieffer doesn’t believe the Tea Baggers are Yahoos. Here is how Swift described the Yahoos:
“…the Yahoos were known to hate one another more than they did any different species of animals; and the reason usually assigned was the odiousness of their own shapes, which all could see in the rest, but not in themselves.”
“…“For if,” said he, “you throw among five Yahoos as much food as would be sufficient for fifty, they will, instead of eating peaceably, fall together by the ears, each single one impatient to have all to itself”…if a cow died of age or accident, before a Houyhnhnm could secure it for his own Yahoos those in the neighborhood would come in herds to seize it, and then would ensue such a battle as I had described, with terrible wounds made by their claws on both sides, although they seldom were able to kill one another, for want of such convenient instruments of death as we had invented. At other times the like battles have been fought between the Yahoos of several neighborhoods without any visible cause: those of one district watching all opportunities to surprise the next, before they are prepared. But if they find their project hath miscarried, they return home, and, for want of enemies, engage in what I call a civil war among themselves.”
“That in some fields of his country there are certain shining stones of several colors, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond; and when part of these stones is fixed in the earth, as it sometimes happeneth, they will dig with their claws for whole days to get them out, then carry them away, and hide them by heaps in their kennels; but still looking round with great caution, for fear their comrades should find out their treasure…in the fields where the shining stones abound the fiercest and most frequent battles are fought, occasioned by perpetual inroads of the neighboring Yahoos…when two Yahoos discovered such a stone in a field and were contending which of them should be the proprietor, a third would take the advantage and carry it away from them both”
“…the Yahoos appear to be the most unteachable of all animals; their capacities never reaching higher than to draw or carry burthens. Yet I am of opinion this defect ariseth chiefly from a perverse, restive disposition. For they are cunning, malicious, treacherous, and revengeful. They are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and, by consequence, insolent, abject, and cruel.”
Hmm, I suspect that Bob has ever read Gulliver’s Travels.
April Fools’ Day can be a very dangerous holiday in some organizations.
For example, given the well-documented perversity of the Washington Post‘s op-ed pages under Fred Hiatt, it’s probably no surprise that second-tier staffers blow off steam by grumbling and making sarcastic jokes in informal lunch-room conversations.
So, it happens that yesterday, a bunch of them were sitting around on a break at a table with that morning’s Wall Street Journal — lying open to Karl Rove’s opinion piece offering unsubtle GOP-friendly suggestions to the “tea party” movement (including not forming a third party). The talk turned to how soon it would take Hiatt to ask the staff to gin up a me-too column from one of the WaPo’s ever-growing stable of former Bush administration mouthpieces.
Then, realizing it was April Fools’ Day, one of them said, “You know what would be funny? If we wrote up our own piece and put it under the name of Dan Quayle.”
“Who’s Dan Quayle?” asked one of the younger staffers.
“The 1980s prototype for Sarah Palin,” another answered. “Young, supposedly irresistible good looks, and dumber than the day is long.”
“Seriously? How dumb was he?” asked the younger staffer.
“Bill Kristol was considered his ‘brain’.”
A long pause. “Holy crap! I guess you’re right.”
“Exactly! So wouldn’t it perfect to have a column with advice for the teabaggers from Dan Quayle — the patron saint and godfather they never knew they had?”
Unfortunately, just then Fred Hiatt walked in for a cup of coffee, overhearing the suggestion. And he thought they were serious.
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
Some tea bagger dumbass and his accomplice beg for a beat-down and get it. I don’t condone the violence, but I watched this a few times through and I believe the first ‘hit’ goes to the tea bagger.
I mused a few times during the darkest days of the Shrubya Reign of Error that the wrong-wingers really want us to devolve into a place like Brazil where people are armed, the rule of law is tenuous, the streets are dangerous and where political passions run high.
In fact, this kinda reminds me of growing up in Puerto Rico. Around elections, little vans and micro-busses would cruise around the streets with megaphones blaring the party and candidate messages. One day I remember two rival vans turn onto the same street – and young toughs piled out, started screaming and then quickly bashing each other.
The danger of doing that here in the U.S. is that the wrong-wingers are well armed and apparently consider the use of firearms ‘politics by other means.’
Still, it’s nice to see a reactionary punk get beat down.