Because it’s going to be two or three months before the Senate actually holds a vote on the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, I’ve been a little reluctant to respond to every lunatic comment that comes down the pike. I mean, if you want to go after a nearly 55-year old woman for menstruating then you either need a biology lesson or a crash course in political sensitivity…or both.
What’s becoming clear, though, is that a certain element of the Republican Wurlitzer is severely off-key. To a certain degree, there are always fringes on both wings that do little service to the people actually responsible for winning elections. Caught up in their own echo-chamber of self-righteousness, MoveOn.org put an ad in the New York Times accusing our commanding general in Iraq of betraying his country. The pulse of the anti-war movement was gone the next day. MoveOn’s huge mailing list isn’t really fringe at all, but they were marginalized (and essentially censured by Congress) by tin-ear leaders who let their strong sense of right and wrong overpower their political senses. At the same time that catastrophe was unfolding another catastrophe was unfolding among right-wing activist groups who let their hatred of Latinos overpower a cool analysis of demographic reality. In shooting down President Bush’s effort at immigration reform, the right did severe damage to John McCain’s campaign, and to the campaigns of Republicans all over the country. It’s likely to be lasting damage, and their treatment of Sonia Sotomayor indicates that they are content to drive over the same cliff more than once.
With Republican talking heads calling Sotomayor a ‘racist’, a ‘schoolmarm’, a member of the ‘KKK’ without the hoods or the nooses’, stupid, and temperamental, there is no way for either women or latinos to conclude anything else but that the GOP doesn’t like them. And here’s the thing. Normally, political advocates argue their case in a way that they think will ultimately help their party win elections. Sometimes, their desire to win leads them to trim their sails a bit about how they really feel. But these Republicans are letting it all hang out without any regard whatsoever for the essentially suicidal rhetoric they are using.
A lot of liberals are almost gleeful to see them take all the rope and hang themselves with it. Well, I’m not gleeful. I really don’t like having an openly racist party in this county, let alone one that is the only realistic alternative to the Democrats. It’s not healthy and it’s not safe. And I want someone to come along and put this GOP party out of its misery before it comes back to power through the power of inertia.
Libertarians need to get their crap together. Or someone.
Hear, hear!
nalbar
As a Black Woman who has seen these mofos villify and abuse me and my ancestors through the use of the Southern Strategy,
I don’t give a shyt about what this does to the two party system.
They are who we thought they were.
And they can kiss my Black Ass on their way down to marginalization.
Who the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. Looks like the Republican time is about over.
That’s been the case since the day I was born 41 years ago…
we’re almost the same age. You don’t think this racism is more naked than the racism of the 1970’s-2007?
Perhaps more naked in the same sense that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models are more naked today than the models of 20-30 years ago, but there was always plenty of skin to be seen…
Now granted, I don’t exactly live in what you would call a “moderate” Republican area. But I have yet to hear any Republican I know who does not actually believe every despicable and unsubstantiated thing related to Sotomayor being espoused daily by the right wing haters. Not a damned one! I stood at work today in the middle of four people, who I thought to be intelligent human beings, who repeated almost verbatim the crap we hear from Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest of the Wurlitzer Corps on a daily basis.
This is what these people believe. They can’t support their views with facts or real data. But it just doesn’t matter to them. Not a one of my co-workers would admit to having read one damn word about her background or experience. They just simply swallow the Kool-Aid without so much as a hesitation. The people perpetuating this travesty don’t care what is the actual reality. All they care about is the perpetuation of hatred. In their mind, when the dark skinned vermin dare to think they are equals of the white man, the iron fist of violence is the only answer.
No one in the Republican Party is going to be able to stop this. And I’m afraid that all this is leading to is some event of catastrophic significance. Someone finally acting on all the whipped up craziness. Because that is what they want. They want blood in the streets, whether they know it or not. That is what they want. What other rationale could there possibly be? Because only then will their racial and ethnic hatred be the least bit sated.
I suspect you’re right. You can only sow the seeds of civil war for so long before you reap a bitter harvest. They’ll lose, of course, and likely be outlawed in the aftermath — to the benefit of the world at large which will no longer have American right-wingers feeding fascist regimes abroad — but a lot of innocent people will suffer in the process.
All that said, sooner or later there has to be a final triumph of basic human decency over hatred and fear, or hatred and fear will have a final triumph over basic human decency.
Do you really think they’ll lose? The military is on their side more than ours in regards to most issues.
(Race is ironically, not one of them.)
I think there’s more diversity in the opinions of the bulk of enlisted men than you might expect. Less so in the officer corps, but there’s still a wide gulf between disapproval of the current administration and outright treason.
But yes, I think they’ll lose. Despite the many armed insurrections in American history, Federal troops have never once sided with the insurrectionists. In the last civil war, the bulk of the troops were either fresh recruits (or conscripts) or members of the state armies. One reason we have a standing federal army today is to avoid having a recurrence of the situation where the states have their own armies. And yes, there’s still the National Guard, which is nominally under the command of the governors, but how many Guard units do you really think would disobey direct orders from the President?
The other reason they’re likely to lose is that they actually believe all the crap the NRA spews about small arms being sufficient to resist the government. That actually was (almost) true up until the dawn of the 20th century, but nowadays an army is more than a bunch of guys with guns. Any insurrection will discover this very quickly when they try to face off with a modern armored division with air support.
I hope it won’t go that far. But as they keep ratcheting up the craziness, I’m beginning to think that the best we can expect is for a relatively small insurrection to be put down by the federal military, followed by a concerted law enforcement effort to shut down the remaining militias.
One AC130 can solve most problems by itself if you’re not concerned about collateral damage…
Libertarians need to get their crap together. Or someone.
Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor can form the New Republican Party.
I just want health care and a decently fair system that gives a shit about people and the environment. If the R’s see the light by some miracle, fine. If not they can let the door hit them on their way out. I’m not polite enough to warn them about their arses
It won’t be the Libertarians. After all, they are essentially anarchists. They are not actively hostile to their fellow men like Republicans, but they are basically indifferent to them.
Expecting Libertarians to pull together en masse to form a viable national party is a bit like building a social club for introverts.
Saying that Libertarians are “essentially anarchists” suggests that you’re describing libertarian philosophy and not the worldview of the folks who tend to make up the Libertarian Party or the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party.
Perhaps my view is colored by the Libertarians I know here in Ohio, but the actual political philosophy espoused by self-described Libertarians in my recent experience is a mixture of white male resentment of minorities (e.g. rants against “Affirmative Action” and an insistence that everyone in the US already has a “level playing field” so the government should but out), a knee-jerk defense of gun rights for individuals no matter what, a desire to see drugs legalized, and a willingness to look the other way when a government is wiretapping its citizens and torturing the fuck out of prisoners of war as long as it’s “protecting us from the terrorists”.
Most of the libertarians I know who didn’t sign on to that bit have stopped calling themselves libertarians and have started calling themselves “civil libertarians” and voting for Democrats as the current least worst evil. The rest are just the Republican target demographic without the religious overtones.
Excellent and insightful post, but please, please, please, not the Libertarians, or as I refer to them – Objectivists in Drag.
I seem to have to remind you of this every now and then:
I was born in 1948 and grew up in Atlanta, GA, and the openly racist political party was… the Democrats. They are referred to these days as “Dixiecrats” to disguise their historical political affliation. But the fact remains, they were all actual members of the Democratic Party. George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox… were rabid, unashamed, foaming-at-the-mouth n*gg*r-haters. Richard Russell, Eugene Talmadge, Robert Byrd… were of the more genteel colored-people-should-know-their-place variety but still publicly avowed racists who believed in the supeiority of the white race and its gawd-given right (“…nay, I say, duty, obligation…”) to oppress people of color.
This is why my first political affliation was joining the Young Republicans, the party of Lincoln-who-freed-the-slaves. This complete political role reversal is one of the Major Amazements in my life’s observations.
Johnson was an optimist…
It happened again, yesterday, in the San Francisco Chronicle comments section on the latest Sotomayor flap.
A reactionary commenter wrote with confidence that the Nazis were socialists. I wrote a couple weeks back that a relative of mine was saying that FDR was first elected as a result of Father Coughlin’s support and that Coughlin was a “socialist/progressive.”
This is the danger of the likes of Jonah Goldberg(whose parents have devoted much of their lives’ work promoting the disinformation and propaganda for the Right and the permanent government). They are stealing our history.
There are people walking around who see history ass-backwards. They have watched the Glenn Becks and the Sean Hannitys of the world, have listened to Rushbo, read Jonah Goldberg, and they are now totally unable to learn from history. The propagandists of the New Order have fed these people back their petty hates and fears and have packaged them in the grandest of lies. You may secretly hate Sotomayer because she’s a woman and she’s an Hispanic but it’s okay to hate her because SHE’S a racist and a sexist. You see, it’s okay and you can hate in her what you can’t admit in yourself. Fascism is no longer fascism. Anti-fascism is fascism.
My favorite saying is attributed to Napoleon: “History is a series of agreed upon lies.” Now something close to a quarter of the country agree on lies. They are absolutely clueless about fascism and embrace fascism because they think it’s anti-fascist.
This is remarkable. Ignorance is strength.
is hiding the truth” Joss Whedon — not entirely surprising that it echos an ancient General’s observation…
Why not a progressive populist party to the left of the dems?
You have been encouraging this trend by gloating over the fact that Obama has been pandering to the moderate republicans.
Let the dems become the conservative party so us progressives can vote for a party that reflects us. I regret voting for Obama. I knew he was a moderate, but he is really like a 1970s republican. He just doesn’t reflect my views anything. Not the economy, his foriegn policy the constitution or the environment.
it doesn’t work like that. Successful parties don’t splinter. They grow too ideological until a sector of the country starts defecting back to the other side. Unsuccessful parties and coalitions splinter to find new ones that can succeed.
Well then the Democrats should start reflecting my views then, instead of the views of moderate republicans who according to you, should go back to the republican party and control their racists.
I don’t care about the party. I care about policies. Obama is wrong about torture, wrong about he environment, wrong about single payer. Wrong on the no strings bailout.
Obama’s not wrong about single payer – he doesn’t have 60 votes in the Senate to get single payer done, so he’s pushing the best plan that he can get through the Senate. Congress is a co-equal branch of our government so we can’t put all of the blame – or credit – on Obama.
He never proposed it in the first place so it has nothing to do with pragmatism. It just part of his weird third way trickle down philosophy. Subsidize the insurance companies no strings attached, pretend your helping the uninsured.
That sentence has a logical fallacy. The reason he didn’t propose it in the first place was pragmatic. He was a sitting U.S. Senator and he knew very well what could and could not pass through Max Baucus’s committee.
You say that as if Rahm hasn’t been clearing the primary fields dems like Max Baucus.
The party doesn’t represent me anymore.
Progress comes in small portions, just like freedoms disappear in small slices.
If someone gets up in a Senate hearing and gets out information on single-payer, why it’s superior to what’s current and what’s proposed, then when the Senate settles for the crap that they will settle for, and when people smell the odor, then the next health reform, which won’t take long, will be closer to single-payer.
Small slices.
The problem is, when it comes to something like the environment we have run out of time. It’s massive change in the next 5 years, or civilization collapses.
What happened over time in Europe, or other areas that have more than 2 parites?
Seems the big voices on the internet (popular reading sites) for Libertarianism are reason.com and lewrockwell.com.
Reason seems secular/athiest, not concerned with topics that show up on Rockwell. Rockwell’s got big thinkers who post, including Ron Paul, where Reason seemed to never even mention Paul.
Is there a third or further outlets for Libertarian thought?