“The Company You Keep”: Bobby Jindal Wants To Fistfight Your God
“Our God wins!” Who do you think made this statement on Saturday in the hopes of rallying a group of religious fundamentalists? A. The leader of ISIS; B. A Yemeni militant commander; C. A radical Islamic cleric; or D. Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal.
The correct answer is Jindal. He made the “our God wins” statement as the keynote speaker at an event sponsored by the conservative Christian organization, the American Family Association. (AFA.) Now, Jindal’s “our God wins” is a more impressive boast than you might first realize. Jindal, who is now a Christian, was raised a Hindu, a faith that features literally millions of Gods. So for Jindal’s new God to win, he is surely fully aware that it has to beat throngs of Hindu Gods. That would likely entail a massive, NCAA March madness-type bracket system pitting God versus God for years of battles.
In any event, the God Jindal and the AFA members worship has apparently been working out and is ready to kick some deity ass. And the way the crowd cheered Jindal’s notion that “my God can beat up your God” tells you a great deal about the AFA.
Now for those unfamiliar with the AFA, here’s a primer. They are a hate group. It’s really that simple. And that’s not just my opinion, but the view of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which named the AFA a hate group for its vicious anti-gay statements over the years.
As the SPLC’s Mark Potok has noted, in recent years the AFA also added Muslim bashing to its repertoire of hate. Apparently if you ask the leaders of the AFA, “What would Jesus do?” they would respond: demonize gays and Muslims.
The AFA, however, can’t simply be ignored. It’s indisputably a powerful conservative Christian organization. Based in Tupelo, Mississippi, it boasts 500,000-plus members and employs more than 100 people. It also operates its own popular radio network featuring Bryan Fischer, a man who is hateful as he is compelling to listen to on the radio.
Republican candidates for president have long visited Fischer’s show and teamed up with AFA in the hopes of attracting its followers. And not just the likes of Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry, but also more moderate candidates like former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty who went on Fischer’s radio program during his failed 2012 bid for president.
Obviously political candidates can seek the support of any group they want. But as we saw recently with Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La), appearing before hate groups such as the white supremacist group he spoke before in 2002, could, and should, come back to haunt you.
So here’s a sample of the AFA’s views so you can understand what they are all about.
Gays are to blame for The Holocaust: “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.” –May 27, 2010, Fischer’s blog.
God will use ISIS to punish America for gay rights: “God will use the pagan armies of Allah to discipline the United States for our debauchery.” August 22, 2014, Fischer’s radio show.
Freedom of religion is for Christians only: “I have contended for years that the First Amendment, as given by the Founders, provides religious liberty protections for Christianity only. “ August 1, 2014 article by Fischer.
The Charlie Hebdo attack was God’s punishment for the magazine’s blasphemy: “They made a career out of taking the name of God, the God of the Bible, the father of the Lord Jesus” which was in violation of the commandment “you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” January 9, 2015, Fischer radio show.
Bar gays from serving in public office: “I believe being an active homosexual should disqualify you from public office because it’s a form of sexual perversion.” January 8, 2015, Fischer radio show.
Immigrants to the United States must convert to Christianity: Our immigration policy should be, “convert to Christianity, fully assimilate (become an authentic American, not a hyphenated American), and support yourself. If you commit to those things, you are welcome here.” April 9, 2011, Fischer Blog.
And the list goes on and on. Yet Jindal and other Republicans have no problem being the keynote speakers at their event and appearing on the AFA radio program.
Why would a guy like Jindal, an Ivy Leaguer and a seemingly mainstream governor, team up with the likes of AFA? Well, many would say it’s out of political expediency. After all, in the 2012 presidential race, white Evangelical voters accounted for 50 percent of the voters in the early GOP primary contests.
Others would say Jindal is simply desperate. The RCP average of polls shows Jindal in eleventh place out of 12 GOP candidates with only 2.8 percent of support. Jindal is literally running behind the poll’s margin of error.
But then again, maybe we are wrong. Maybe people like Jindal, Perry, Huckabee, and the like align with the AFA because they actually agree with their views. Perhaps they too believe that gays are to blame for the Holocaust, that Muslims and Jews don’t deserve First Amendment rights, and that all immigrants need to convert to Christianity?
Sure, these views sound outlandish, but shouldn’t we assume that the politicians agree with the hateful positions of the groups they team up with unless we hear the candidate publicly denounce each one?
If Republican candidates want the support of groups like the AFA, both the general public and the AFA’s followers deserve to know which issues they agree upon and which ones they don’t. Isn’t it time that the media started asking those questions?
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, January 27, 2015
“The Plutocrat Politburo”: The Koch Brothers Don’t Care If You Care About Their Plans To Buy 2016 Election
The Koch brothers are done being shy. That’s the conclusion one would have to draw from the fact that they just announced that they hope to spend $889 million on the 2016 election, an unprecedented amount of outside money. It won’t all be theirs — they’re assembling a kind of Plutocrat Politburo, a group of billionaires and zillionaires who will contribute to the cause — but with a combined worth of over $80 billion, they’ll surely be the ones opening their ample wallets the widest and determining the strategy and the agenda.
But unlike some previous reporting on Charles and David’s political efforts, this revelation — which comes from a gathering in beautiful Rancho Mirage of Freedom Partners, the organization through which the Kochs and their allies will distribute all these millions — didn’t require any secret meetings with anonymous sources to unearth. They just told everyone. Here’s the Post’s story on it, here’s the New York Times’ story on it, and here’s Politico’s story on it, all complete with ample details and on-the-record quotes. Reporters may not have been invited into the private meetings at the gathering, but they were allowed to hang around and talk to the participants. And no fewer than four potential GOP presidential candidates (Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz) showed up as well, obviously unconcerned about any charge that they’re kowtowing to the uber-rich.
So the Kochs appear to have concluded that the efforts by Democrats (especially Harry Reid) to turn the Koch name into a symbol of everything that’s wrong in American politics have failed. No longer must they cower in their mansions and take pains to conceal their political spending, fearful of the piercing barbs aimed by liberal politicians and commentators, when all they want is for Americans to fully appreciate the majesty of laissez-faire economics. Free at last, free at last, thank Citizens United, they’re free at last.
If you were expecting journalists to express much consternation at the idea that a group of the super-wealthy are openly announcing their intention to buy the next election, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, the news is being reported more like that of a record-breaking contract for a professional athlete: wonder at the sums involved, but precious little moral outrage. That’s mostly because political reporters tend to believe that election campaigns are already nothing but a parade of deception and manipulation, an enterprise that’s inherently corrupt. So what’s a little more corruption?
There’s no doubt that the behind-the-scenes machinations are fascinating to anyone interested in politics. By putting themselves on par with or even above the parties, the Kochs will make the conflict within the Republican Party even more complex, and potentially vicious, than it already was. Ken Vogel of Politico described the move as “a show of dominance to rival factions on the right, including the Republican National Committee.” What happens when the insurgents are even better funded than what we’ve taken to calling the establishment? It will certainly be interesting to find out.
In any case, the Kochs are probably right that they have little to lose by being public about their plans. Yes, they’ll have to absorb some stern editorials, and maybe even some ads from the DNC criticizing Republican politicians for associating with them. But weighed against what they have to gain by putting nearly a billion dollars into the next presidential campaign — more than the two parties spent, combined, in 2012 — that’s a price so small it’s barely worth worrying about.
In his 2003 novel Jennifer Government, Max Barry imagines a future in which the penetration of capitalism and marketing has become so total that people take the names of their corporate employers as their own last names; characters are called things like John Nike, Nathaniel ExxonMobil, and Calvin McDonalds.
We may not have gotten quite that far yet, but the next Republican president — whether that person is elected in 2016 or after — will have been sponsored, supported, elevated, and outfitted by the Koch brothers and their friends. Should a Republican candidate they don’t like show promise in the primaries, he will surely be crushed by the awesome machine they’re building. The winner may not take their name (Scott Walker-Koch, perhaps?), but he or she will be in their debt to a degree we have not previously contemplated. And the consensus will be that that’s just how things work now.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 27, 2015
“Even If It Worked, I Would Oppose It”: Republicans Too Often Prioritize Partisan And Ideological Goals Over Practical Ones
As hard as it may be to perceive right-wing neurosurgeon Ben Carson as a credible presidential candidate, he received a very warm welcome at Steve King’s “Iowa Freedom Summit” over the weekend, and Carson arguably delivered one of the more polished presentations of the gathering.
But on the substance of Carson’s remarks, one thing jumped out at me.
On the Affordable Care Act – which Carson has on several occasions compared to slavery – the famous former surgeon said he opposed any government intrusion in health care. “Even if it worked, I would oppose it,” Carson said of Obamacare. “It doesn’t.”
“I don’t believe in taking the most important thing a person has, which is their health and their health care, and putting it in the hands of the government,” he later added….
For a brief argument in a speech, there’s quite a bit to this. We know, for example, that Carson’s mistaken when he says the Affordable Care Act isn’t working; the evidence to the contrary is simply overwhelming. We also know that when it comes to his preferred model, Carson used to believe largely the opposite of what he’s arguing now.
What’s more, when Carson argues that government shouldn’t have a hand in matters related to health care, it would seem to suggest the Republican candidate is against the VA health care system for active-duty and retired military personnel, Medicare, and Medicaid. That’s not too surprising – a guy who draws a parallel between modern American life and Nazis isn’t going to be a moderate – but it’s a pretty extreme position for even today’s GOP.
But the true gem is, in reference to the ACA, “Even if it worked, I would oppose it.”
Regular readers know that I’ve referenced the Republicans’ “post-policy” problem on several occasions, and Carson’s eight-word line seems to summarize the larger issue nicely. While Democrats focus heavily on policy outcomes and the efficacy of policy proposals – as one might expect from a governing party – Republicans too often prioritize partisan and ideological goals over practical ones.
Whether or not tax cuts work, for example, isn’t especially important. Whether the evidence supports climate change doesn’t matter, either. Pick the issue – national security, education, immigration, et al – and for much of today’s GOP, empiricism and efficacy just isn’t that important. What matters instead is an ideological drive to shrink government, regardless of policy outcomes.
I rather doubt Carson intended his comments to be so revealing, but the fact that he’d oppose a Democratic health care reform package built on a Republican model, regardless of whether or not it works, says a great deal.
What’s the basis for a serious policy debate when one side of the argument doesn’t care if policies are effective or not?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 26, 2015
“On And On It Goes”: How The GOP Became A Party Of Ideological Extremism
As America’s two major political parties have evolved in the direction of philosophical purity over the past half century — with the Democrats emerging as the home of ideological progressivism and the Republicans as the font of ideological conservatism — it has become common for each to accuse the other of extremism.
Republicans call the Democrats strident socialists eager to bring about the End of Freedom in America, while Democrats accuse the Republicans of waging a War on Women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and just about anyone else who isn’t a Wealthy White Man. The vacuous centrism of inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom then reinforces the pox-on-both-your-houses narrative, treating both sides as equally to blame for every failure to reach consensus and Get Things Done.
The reality is far less fair and balanced.
Over the past six years, Barack Obama has shown himself quite willing to compromise with Republicans, while Republicans have demonstrated over and over again that they have no interest in cutting deals with the president. (Number of Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote for President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill? Zero. Number of House Republicans to vote for the Affordable Care Act? Zero. And so on.)
Whether this is because of the GOP’s principled opposition to Obama’s policies, or its Machiavellian conviction that the president is hurt more than the opposition party by inaction in Washington, or (more likely) some combination of the two, the end result is the same: The Democrats prove themselves to be a pragmatic, centrist party, while the Republicans consistently demonstrate no-holds-barred ideological stridency.
We saw further examples this past weekend, at the Iowa Freedom Summit, where a long list of GOP presidential hopefuls spoke to adoring crowds in Des Moines.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz advocated an ideological litmus test: “Every candidate’s going to come in front of you and say, ‘I’m the most conservative guy to ever live.’” But “talk is cheap,” he insisted. “Show me where you stood up and fought.”
Now imagine a liberal presidential candidate taunting fellow Democrats, daring them to demonstrate their progressivism and willingness to stand up and fight for it.
Unlikely.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, meanwhile, plans to build a national campaign “on his record of defying teachers’ unions.”
Now imagine a Democrat building a national campaign on a record of defying police unions.
It wouldn’t happen.
Then there was rabble-rousing neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who promised that he would dismantle ObamaCare “even if it worked.”
Now imagine a Democrat showing an equal disdain for pragmatism by promising to prop up a government program “even if it doesn’t work.”
I don’t think so.
On and on it goes, with the GOP’s would-be presidential candidates competing to stake out the ideologically purest, most unambiguously right-wing position. An analogous scramble to the left just doesn’t happen among the Democrats — or at least it hasn’t happened since the time of the Reagan administration.
The question is why.
The answer has nothing to do with the machinations of party leaders or anything else that originates in Washington. On the contrary, the stance of each party reflects above all else the ideological makeup of its most loyal voters. And the fact is that in the United States, right-wing Republicans outnumber left-wing Democrats by a significant margin.
As the Pew Research Center showed last summer in an important report on political polarization, 22 percent of the general public identify as conservative (either socially or economically), while just 15 percent think of themselves as liberal.
Those are the relative sizes of each party’s ideological base.
The gap increases to 27 percent conservative and 17 percent liberal when highlighting registered voters. And it increases even further — to 36 percent conservative and 21 percent liberal — among the most “politically engaged” Americans.
Electorally speaking, Republicans are being pulled to the right by public opinion much more powerfully than Democrats are being pulled to the left.
This is one significant reason why the RealClearPolitics cumulative average of polls currently shows just 16 percent of Democrats supporting left-wing candidates (Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders), while nearly double that percentage of Republicans (30 percent) favor right-wing options (Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, or Rick Perry).
It’s also one important reason why Hillary Clinton — a candidate only a right-wing Republican could consider a radical lefty — currently enjoys 61 percent support among Democrats, while the more moderate Republicans (Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio) receive a comparatively lukewarm combined total of 43 percent. (I’ve left Rand Paul, with 6.8 percent, out of both camps because his positions defy tidy ideological categorization.)
The GOP is a party increasingly being steered by its most stridently ideological voters. Which is one reason (among many others) why I won’t be voting for a Republican anytime soon.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 27, 2015
“Just Changing The Optics”: The Republican Abortion Bill Shows They Still Believe Many Women Lie About Rape
In a move being credited to the wisdom of Republican women lawmakers, the House will not be voting on a sweeping 20 week abortion ban that only allowed for rape and incest exceptions if the victims reported their assaults to police. (Because Republicans know just how much women love to lie about rape and incest to get those sweet, sweet abortions!)
But before we pat all those kind, considered Republican women on the back for their reasoned withdrawal of support for a bill that would’ve made women file police reports 20 weeks after being assaulted in order to have the option of not being forced to have their rapist’s baby, let’s not forget that all of this is just political posturing. The bill – or even another, less extreme 20 week abortion ban – was unlikely to ever pass the Senate, and President Obama made clear that he would veto it if it did.
So backing off on yet another terrible anti-abortion bill – they tried this in 2011 with the “forcible rape” provisions in the Hyde Amendment renewal – is not a sign that Republicans will be more moderate with their future restrictions on reproductive rights, or that Republican women will be able to temper the radical anti-choice agenda of their party.
It’s great, sure, that Representatives Renee Ellmers and Jackie Walorski took their names off the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, and that Ellmers also reportedly lobbied her female colleagues against the legislation. But I don’t believe this was some change of her anti-choice heart: more likely, she simply realized that the bill’s extreme requirements for rape and incest exceptions to the blanket ban wouldn’t exactly go over well with American women.
During a time when sexual assault and the difficulty of reporting it is a central part of the national conversation, forcing women and girls to go to the police before they can access abortion makes Republicans seem even more out of touch with the issues women face than usual. According to RAINN, 68% of sexual assaults aren’t reported to police, and numbers are even harder to come by for incest – where so often the victims are young girls.
Still, Republicans will now get to introduce and support anti-woman legislation, but they’ll have the advantage of appearing less radical than they are because they supposedly have a few “reasonable” women in the party keeping them in check on women’s issues. And any 20-week abortion ban is a bad thing for women, even without “forcible rape” or “reported rape” provisions.
Trotting out a few female Republicans and changing some words in a bill doesn’t change the reality of how the party feels about – or legislates – abortion; it just changes the optics. Republicans still want to deny people access to sex education, they still want to deny women access to contraception, they still want to prevent us from getting abortions and they still want to eliminate the Roe v Wade decision that protects our rights – and they want to do all of this despite the irreparable harm that it will cause American women.
The Republican women who forced House leadership to withdraw this one bill aren’t “reasonable” – they’re just smart enough to know that they need to shroud just how radically anti-woman their party really is. Good luck with that.
By: Jessica Valenti, The Guardian, January 22, 2015
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