Serious Question

12 Comments

1. 

   Tien Le on March 30, 2018 at 1:28 pm

   Classic What-About-ism. They think it will undermine the liberal talking points. Also co-opting, as in every time they feel like victims they compare themselves to Rosa Parks or Dr. King. It’s all about diluting messages from those who disagree with them.

2. 

   nalbar on March 30, 2018 at 1:36 pm

   The republicans are shit flingers, everyone of them, from the guy that lives down the street from you, all the way through the ones that are in State assemblies, and all the way up to Trump. Throwing shit is what they live for.

   They are like the gorilla in the zoos of the 50’s and 60’s, living it’s life out in a barren, concrete floored cage, that starts hooting and hollering until he draws the suckers in real close, then whips out the shit he has been saving and throws it at the crowd*.

   But the gorilla had an excuse, he was in prison, without any hope. He had been captured in tropical Africa and put in a cage. Republicans have no such excuse, they have created their own cage inside their empty head, where they nurse their grievances until it rots them deep inside.

   After that, all they have left is shit flinging.

   *I actually saw this happen at the San Diego Zoo in the early 60’s. But my father warned us, and kept us out of range. Not because he cared if we got covered in shit, but because he did not want to smell it in the car all the way back to LA.

   .

   • 

     AngryTeacher on March 30, 2018 at 5:58 pm

     You’re spot on about the primates flinging excrement.  I’ll have to find the reference, but I remember reading about a chimpanzee during WW2 who was particularly fond of tossing his calling cards at the nice white uniforms of sailors.  

     You’re also essentially correct about the “shit flinging” that takes place withing the Republican Party.  As someone who grew up around Republicans, considered himself one for a time, and still breaks bread with many, the transformation has been remarkable.  Lots of relatively bright people recognized initially that this was a shallow, self-serving electoral tactic.  However, over time, they came to believe the lies that were repeated ad nauseam.  Many others “nursed their grievances” with regular hits of talk radio and Fox News.  Slowly, but steadily, this divorces them from reality.

     Objectively, the Democrats have done a better job of finding candidates who ground themselves in reality.  Furthermore, many Democrats are unwilling to create falsehoods out of whole cloth in order to be elected.  

     For this reason, I usually vote for Democrats, despite my disagreements with Democratic orthodoxy on many issues.

     However, a word of caution.  In time, populism and groupthink can infect any political organization.  Democrats should take care, lest they fall victim to the same disease which is destroying their foe.  

   • 

     Racer X on March 31, 2018 at 1:32 am

     “But the gorilla had an excuse, he was in prison, without any hope.”

     They too are in prison, a prison of their small frightened minds.  Often wrong but never in doubt, they live their lives voting against their own interests.  Despite record inequality and climate change they keep enabling their tormentors, oblivious to the downward spiral they themselves are fueling (and taking us with them). Their moral hypocrisy betrays the facade they use to justify their hate.  They are incapable of putting together a cogent argument to justify their bigotry so they must rely on lying and cheating.

     They claim to be Christians and patriots – they are anything but…

     “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” – Truth.

     They won’t change.  They won’t listen to logic or reason or science.  

     If I didn’t despise them so much, I might pity them.  I probably should because I don’t think they are curable.  They cannot escape their prison because they don’t know they are in one… At least the gorilla knows…

3. 

   seabe on March 30, 2018 at 1:52 pm

   Interesting timing:

   A Huge Caravan Of Central Americans Is Headed For The US, And No One In Mexico Is Stopping Them

   Organized by a group of volunteers called Pueblos Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders, the caravan is intended to help migrants safely reach the United States, bypassing not only authorities who would seek to deport them, but gangs and cartels who are known to assault vulnerable migrants.

   Organizers like Rodrigo Abeja hope that the sheer size of the crowd will give immigration authorities and criminals pause before trying to stop them.

   “If we all protect each other we’ll get through this together,” Abeja yelled through a loudspeaker on the morning they left Tapachula, on Mexico’s border with Guatemala, for the nearly monthlong trek.

   When they get to the US, they hope American authorities will grant them asylum or, for some, be absent when they attempt to cross the border illegally. More likely is that it will set up an enormous challenge to the Trump administration’s immigration policies and its ability to deal with an organized group of migrants numbering in the hundreds.

   The number of people who showed up to travel with the caravan caught organizers by surprise, and has overwhelmed the various towns they’ve stopped in to spend the night. Pueblos Sin Fronteras counted about 1,200 people on the first day.

   About 80% of them are from Honduras. Many said they are fleeing poverty, but also political unrest and violence that followed the swearing in of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández after a highly contested election last year. The group often breaks into chants of “out with JOH.” They also chant “we aren’t immigrants, we’re international workers” and “the people united will never be defeated.”

4. 

   JimPharo on March 30, 2018 at 2:23 pm

   They use it because they think it helps them look less racist.  And I suspect this works better than we think it does…

5. 

   oaguabonita on March 30, 2018 at 2:49 pm

    . . . annoying”, since that’s the default, Ockham’s Razor explanation for vast oceans of the indefensible shit they spew.

6. 

   n1cholas on March 30, 2018 at 7:31 pm

   Racists will always seek out, promote, and spotlight tokens in an attempt to prove to others that they aren’t what they are.

7. 

   Ponzi Finance on March 30, 2018 at 9:46 pm

   Because the Republicans are a white grievance party, anything that normalizes the separation of “whites” and “everyone else” will be embraced as a viable tactic.

   You already noted earlier this week that Republicans have given up on democracy and that Jonathan Turley is offering free legal advice to Michael Flynn and lying to the public while doing so. Rightwingers also spent a lot of time this week defending Williamson by saying that the hanging of women was a joke. Whenever MLK Day rolls around, GOP folks will point out the “judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin” line and ignore everything else about the man!

   It’s Cleek’s Law all the way down.
        

8. 

   LosGatosCA on March 31, 2018 at 9:04 am

   What motivates a Republican to do anything?

   1. Money
   2. Hate
   3. Cleek’s law

   In this case, they are using Cleek’s law to support their hate of immigrants while annoying liberals.

   `See, even the Latino union organizer was supportive of our program for addressing this issue. Checkmate, libtards!’

9. 

   yastreblyansky on March 31, 2018 at 9:26 am

   Every conservative is at heart that guy who was good at debate in high school and trying to relive the glory. That line about Chavez is so dumb, but so classic high school:

   • it’s facile and glib and much more difficult to answer than it is to assert
   • it deflects the argument from its subject to the subject of whether your opponent agrees with Cesar Chavez or not, which your opponent probably isn’t prepared to discuss,
   • it’s an instant strawman: your opponent is now “in favor of illegal immigration”, a ridiculous oversimplification from which the opponent now will be forced to defend herself, also more difficult and complex and distracting
   • it shows, as others have noticed, that you’re “not racist” because you call on this brown-skinned saint of progressivism as an authority

   Incidentally, Chavez strongly favored amnesty for undocumented immigrants, at least from 1974 through Reagan’s amnesty bill, which he supported. What’s commonly adduced as evidence that he was “against illegal immigrants”, the “wet line” outposts UFW used to run on the Mexican border to stop people from crossing illegally, were to stop strikebreakers. Chavez’s bottom line was that all farm workers should be adequately paid and able to join unions: he didn’t object to the “illegality” of the undocumented, but to the way they were exploited by employers. Per historian Steven Bender,

   as UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta explained to me in 2007, “The whole thing is we wanted people not to break the strike, period. We’re not against people who are undocumented. We just don’t want them to break our strike.” Chávez recognized the hypocrisy of INS immigration officials, who would look the other way to protect farmers when they employed undocumented workers as labor strikebreakers, but would deport the workers once the crops were picked or if they joined the UFW strike. Chávez alleged the Nixon administration and the growers conspired to limit immigration enforcement in the fields, so long as the migrants were useful to the growers, in the ongoing cycle of the invitation and exile of Mexican workers seen by too many US employers as implements rather than as humans.

   Chávez recognized the precarity of the undocumented worker as exactly suiting the needs of employers hoping to suppress unionization in their workforce. An undocumented worker, actively recruited as a strikebreaker, would be unlikely to defect to the union side or complain about workplace injustices, and if the worker did, the employer could count on immigration officials to oust the worker at its urging. Chávez and the UFW accordingly championed amnesty for undocumented workers, as well as easing restrictive immigration limits and hurdles for those future entrants seeking status as lawful permanent residents or ultimately as US citizens.

   • 

     oaguabonita on March 31, 2018 at 12:38 pm

      . . . element of this “conservative” “argument”, then.

     Who coulda predicted?