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Subject: NYT: GOP-Fascists looking for a personality to go with the
Cult.
Date: Nov 1, 2009 5:15 AM
Maybe we should help them.
They want something between Hitler, Cheney, and
Bush seems to be what they're after. Nationalism,
scaremongering, macho, mavericky, Teddy Roosevelty,
John Wayney... with an evangelical twist.
What's that pervo-Mormo-FreeMason's name?
(The Mormon plastic-man. What's his name?)
They can't get Arney, now, because they
blew that op with the Birthing episode.
Maybe we should have a national contest.
Is there a place where we could either write-in
in or draw-in or photoshop-in their next icon
in a contest? GOP is brainless, so we'll have
to help them think up their New Macho Idiot.
http://www.actionlyme.org
============================http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/opinion/01rich.html?pagewanted=print
November 1, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York
By FRANK RICH
BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign
was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as
secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat
has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P.
civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the
Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on
giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.
The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as
the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama
presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as
it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural
Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting
could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of
combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt
Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But
such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement —
whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or
not.
The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right
has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its
own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders,
Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual
responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican
Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the
short term, at least, their wish could come true.
The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local
Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede
Scozzafava, as their party’s nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is
in safe Republican territory that hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress
in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York
standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to
the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has
occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-
sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right’s
Jacobins, that’s cause to send her to the guillotine.
Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her
for a third-party candidate they deem a “true” conservative, an
accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared
endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John
Boehner and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt’s
presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him
appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as
“global warming czar.” She’s quite the wit.
The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele
Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-
bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the
big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page.
Such is Palin’s clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim
Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly
fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion.
They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas,
Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state
legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge,
insinuating that Hoffman’s Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl
Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside
groups.
Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman
doesn’t even live in the district. When he appeared before the
editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he “showed
no grasp” of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman
complained that he should have received the questions in advance —
blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an
editorial on the morning of his visit.
Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical
right — as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus. In
fact he’s on the finance committee of a hospital that happily helped
itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the federal
government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York’s
23rd would be a Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is
the pork-dependent military base, Fort Drum.
The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the
G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign,
further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the
Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own.
But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with
this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary
challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s
bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey
Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the
incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a
teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.
The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the
Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less
interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be
found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of
the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities,
maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the
excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent
to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed
that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own
ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.
The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they
constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it
is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove
out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State
put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing
to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania,
speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any
dissenters in their own camp.
These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic
they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from
an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about
being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course,
was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion.
Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation,
profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket
buyers, not drive them away.
This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent
column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the
dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when
lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once
their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are
right.”
They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national
political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The
right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign,
that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a
“microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or
Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century
profile.
That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost
every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior
citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s
also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration,
whatever Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC
News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as
Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for
independents).
No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two
big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to
disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob
McD., is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career
has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even
birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues,
disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel
Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris
Christie, McD.’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign
video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring
campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had
endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine.
Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah
and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the
White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because
it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and
independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s
histrionics for the first time, the president’s numbers will benefit
as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the
barflies in “Star Wars.”
There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry
about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness,
not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this
president down.
This column has been updated from the version that appears in print to
reflect the fact that Ms. Scozzafava suspended her campaign on
Saturday morning.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci |
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