“Freedom’s Just Another Word For Guns”: Honor Lincoln And MLK By Getting Yourself An AR-15
Let’s say you’re a local Republican party organization in a Democratic state, and you want to think creatively about how to get media attention. You could put up a “Kiss a Capitalist” booth at the county fair, or hire a local graffiti artist to spray-paint portraits of Ronald Reagan on the homes of poor people in order to inspire them to take a firm hold of those bootstraps and pull. Or, in honor of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, two liberals who got assassinated with guns, you could raffle off an AR-15. That’s what the Multnomah county GOP is doing, and you have to give them credit: people are noticing! Here’s part of their press release:
Multnomah County Republicans recognize the incredible time of year we are in. In successive months to start the year, we celebrate the legacy of two great Republicans who demonstrated leadership and courage that all of us still lean on today: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. In celebrating these two men, and the denial of the rights they fought so hard against, the Multnomah County Republican Party announces that we have started our third raffle for an AR-15 rifle (or handgun of the winner’s choice).
For the record, Martin Luther King was not a Republican, and Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party was the liberal party of its day; just ask yourself what side the average Tea Party Republican of today would have been on had they been alive in 1864. And let’s try to unpack that last sentence: “In celebrating these two men, and the denial of the rights they fought so hard against…” So wait, are you celebrating the denial of rights? And which rights did they fight against? I’m confused.
Grammatical puzzlers aside, this is some high-grade, industrial-strength trolling. For some people, freedom’s just another word for … guns. That’s really all it’s a word for. Freedom is guns, and guns is freedom, and if a historical figure sought to correct injustice, then obviously he would have been opposed to the worst injustice of all, which is when you have three AR-15s and you want to get a fourth one, but you have to get a background check to get it instead of just buying it out of some dude’s trunk at three in the morning in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly like James Madison intended.
And here’s the best part of that article about the raffle: “The winner will be given a background check before receiving the weapon.” Wouldn’t want any nuts getting their hands on it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 15, 2014
“Tea Party Consulting Scam”: The Real Conservatives Funded By The Senate Conservatives Fund
It’s worth reading Politico’s Manu Raju and Maggie Haberman’s recent story on the Senate Conservative Fund, an independent political group that used to specialize in backing “insurgent” primary candidates over “establishment” ones, and that now devotes the bulk of its spending against actual incumbent Republican elected officials — including, most notably, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The SCF’s leader, Matt Hoskins, has a “core team of five staffers” and no board of directors to answer to. The organization reports that it raised more than $9 million in 2013. It spent some of that money on campaigning for its chosen candidates. It has spent some of that money on … other things.
But without a board of directors, Hoskins and his team can choose to spend with little accountability.
Such expenditures include purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of conservative commentator Mark Levin’s books to hand out to donors as a freebie for their contributions. His group also paid $143,360 over three years to a luxury design firm to renovate office space in Washington townhouses, according to campaign-finance filings.Between May 2010 and October 2013, Hoskins and his company, Bold Colors, have been paid, in total, $463,750, with an additional $72,000 from the SCF’s super PAC, records show.
To sum up: The SCF has paid more than a half-million dollars to the consulting firm run by the head of the SCF. But the detail that caused a minor conservative media shit storm was the detail about the SCF buying up Mark Levin’s book in bulk. A spokesperson for the RNC — the “establishment” — tweeted about it, which led to a bunch of true conservatives complaining about the dastardly accusation that Levin is somehow on the take, just because this group sent a bunch of money this way and he sends a bunch of donors their way. Levin said that the RNC spokesperson, who sent one tweet calling attention to the Politico story, “will not silence me with his sleazy inside-the-beltway tactics.”
And then Erick Erickson stepped up to defend Levin and the SCF, with a completely insane post comparing the symbiotic relationship between the SCF and Levin to the fact that a National Republican Senatorial Committee staffer had child pornography on his computer. I mean, yes, one is a “guilt-by-association” argument with no coherent financial motive while the other is a clear-cut conflict-of-interest deal, but still, they both happened. Erick Erickson: master of analogies. Erickson writes: “It is just as ridiculous to accuse Mark Levin and the Senate Conservatives Fund of a quid pro quo relationship when they happen to be allies in a fight and also happen to be friends.”
Even if we didn’t live in a world where explicit endorsements-for-pay were common among conservative radio personalities, it wouldn’t be “ridiculous” to assume that buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of a host’s book would lead to the host saying nice things about you. But the problem for Erickson’s argument is that we actually do live in a world where conservative groups pay talk radio hosts obscene amounts of money to boost their groups. And one of the hosts who does this is Mark Levin. It is a thing he does. He endorses groups for money.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, with the help of various talk radio people, made itself the most prominent group fighting against the GOP establishment on behalf of the Tea Party. That led to them raising lots and lots of money. That money goes to people running the SCF, in the form of salaries and consulting fees, and it goes to the people promoting the SCF, in the form of direct payments and mass book purchases. None of this is illegal (as far as I know, anyway). Is it immoral? Is it unethical? Not many people are interested in answering that question. Nearly every prominent national conservative is in on the graft, and the marks are people who write checks to fund the advancement of conservative ideas or the election of conservative politicians. All of this is exceedingly well-documented. And it doesn’t matter.
The thing about this grand bamboozling is that the marks want to be bamboozled. When you tell them that Glenn Beck is paid to have certain opinions, they truly do not care. Sending people money to fight for a cause you strongly believe in feels good. The apocalyptic pitches may be obviously manipulative to anyone outside the target demographic, but they obviously work. And for years, the scheme actually worked in the larger sense, of enriching people and advancing the conservative agenda. With the financial (if not political) success of the SCF’s nihilistic approach to strategy, conservatives invested in the actual policy agenda are starting to worry.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 14, 2014
“Political Arsonist Condemns Partisan Fires”: When Mitch McConnell Looks At The Dysfunctional Senate, He Sees His Own Handiwork
Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) delivered a lengthy, beautifully written soliloquy on the once-great institution in which he serves. “What have we become?” McConnell asked. “I’m absolutely certain of one thing: the Senate can be better than it is,” he added. “We’ve gotten too comfortable with doing everything we do here through the prism of the next election, instead of the prism of duty. And everyone suffers as a result.”
The long-time Republican is apparently quite invested in his concerns over the demise of the Senate, publishing a piece in Politico on the subject.
When you look at the vote tallies for some of the more far-reaching legislation over the past century, for example, the Senate was broadly in agreement.
Medicare and Medicaid were both approved with the support of about half the members of the minority. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with the votes of 30 out of 32 members of the Republican minority. Only six senators voted against the Social Security Act. Only eight voted against the Americans With Disabilities Act.
This is, oddly enough, practically identical to the kind of lament one might hear from a progressive Senate Democrat. Before the radicalization of Republican politics, bipartisan cooperation on major policies was common, and when centrist GOP lawmakers still existed, popular and even progressive legislation was approved with large majorities.
So why is McConnell echoing Democratic concerns? Because he’s convinced of his own misguided righteousness.
When Democrats couldn’t convince Republicans that [the Affordable Care Act] was worth supporting as written, they plowed ahead on their own and passed it on a party-line vote.
That’s why the chaos this law has visited on our country is not just tragic, it was entirely predictable. Chaos will always be the result if you approach legislation without regard for the views of the other side.
It’s at this point when knowledgeable readers, too well informed to fall for such a clumsy con, realized that McConnell is playing the public for fools. What we have is a political arsonist condemning partisan fires after he lit the match.
As Ed Kilgore, Greg Sargent, and others noted in response to McConnell’s breathtaking, almost nauseating, complaints about the Senate, the Minority Leader’s whining is not only hypocritical, it’s making a mockery of the very idea of self-awareness.
Medicare and Medicaid were approved with bipartisan support, but as GOP extremism becomes the new norm, McConnell and his party are eagerly trying to undermine both. The Voting Rights Act has enjoyed near-unanimous support, but it was Republican justices on the Supreme Court that gutted the law, and it’s Republican lawmakers who are now reluctant to repair it.
Social Security is a venerated American institution, which Republicans actively hope to replace with a privatization scheme. The Republican right to celebrate the Americans With Disabilities Act officially ended in December 2012.
Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to think all of these landmark legislative accomplishments – Medicare, Medicaid, VRA, Social Security, and the ADA – would not only face a Republican filibuster if brought to the floor for the first time today, they’d all fail in the GOP-led House.
“When you look at the vote tallies for some of the more far-reaching legislation over the past century, for example, the Senate was broadly in agreement”? That’s true. Then the Republican Party became radicalized and it stopped being true.
As for the Affordable Care Act, Democrats desperately tried to find Republican support for a policy built around Republican-friendly policies. No matter how much Dems pleaded with GOP officials to work in good faith towards a compromise, the more Republicans refused.
And it was McConnell who was candid enough to explain in 2010 how and why this happened.
“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought – correctly, I think – that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
Right. McConnell figured that if Republicans worked in good faith on a bipartisan health care bill, the public would assume it was a worthwhile idea. So McConnell insisted that his party oppose every effort at compromise, and slap away every outstretched hand, so that the GOP could condemn “Obamacare,” regardless of the merits.
In other words, even if Dems approached McConnell with a health care plan McConnell liked, he’d still reject it. To do otherwise would be to help Democrats, while denying the Minority Leader a chance to complain later.
Indeed, it’s this attitude that has served as a template for Republican obstructionism for five years. When McConnell looks at the dysfunctional Senate, what he sees is the result of his own handiwork – the ashes of the fire he started, then complained constantly as emergency crews struggled to put it out.
For the Minority Leader to ask, “What have we become?” is a good question. Perhaps McConnell can answer it after a long look in the mirror.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, January 14, 2014
“The Trouble With Christie”: It’s More Than Ordinary Narcissism
I was there in Tampa in August, 2012, for Governor Chris Christie’s keynote address at the Republican National Convention, and from the first line I knew this guy was trouble: “Well! This stage and this moment are very improbable for me.” For twenty-four overwrought minutes, Christie spoke, proudly, glowingly, about the subject that really gets him fired up, which is himself—how he always faces the hard truths; how he wants to be respected more than loved; how, of his two parents, he’s much more like his tough, brutally honest Sicilian mother (“I am her son!”) than like his good-hearted, lovable Irish father. It was later observed that the Governor almost forgot to mention the Party’s Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, whose nomination Christie was in Tampa to kick off; less widely remarked was that he also practically disowned his sole surviving parent, who was in the audience listening, and presumably didn’t mind.
The trouble with Christie has to do with more than ordinary narcissism, which, after all, is practically an entry requirement for a political career. When Barack Obama used to tell crowds during the 2008 campaign, “This is not about me. It’s about you,” I always interpreted the words to mean that it actually was about him. But Obama, whose ego is so securely under control that his self-sufficiency has become a point of criticism among Washington pundits, would never devote more than a paragraph to his own personality (as opposed to his biography)—which was the subject not just of Christie’s convention keynote speech but of his entire political career. What struck me in Tampa even more than his self-infatuated lyrics was the score they were set to—the particular combination of bluster, self-pity, sentimentality, and inextinguishable hostility wrapped in appeals to higher things. (After declaring that Democrats “believe the American people are content to live the lie with them,” Christie waved the flag of bipartisanship, saying, “We lose when we play along with their game of scaring and dividing.”) Those are dangerously combustible elements in a political personality. Americans older than fifty are all too familiar with them.
The engineered traffic nightmare in Fort Lee, New Jersey, is, of course, being called Bridgegate. The suffix has been used, overused, and misused for almost every political scandal since a “third-rate burglary” at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters on the night of June 16, 1972. In the case of Bridgegate, there are several key limiting factors. It’s a state scandal, not a national one. A potential Presidency might be at stake, but not an actual one. No evidence ties the Governor directly to the havoc visited on one of New Jersey’s five hundred and sixty-six municipalities—not yet, anyway. On the scale of Teapot Dome and Iran-Contra and even Monica, the four-day closing of two approach lanes to the George Washington Bridge is very minor league.
So why do I keep having flashbacks to 1972? Some of the parallels are weirdly exact. Whether or not he ordered the Watergate bugging, Richard Nixon ran a campaign of dirty tricks for two reasons: he wanted to run up the score going into his second term, and he was a supremely mean-spirited man. Nixon’s reëlection campaign reached out to as many Democrats as possible (not just elected officials but rank-and-file blue-collar workers and Catholics). Nixon ran not as the Republican Party’s leader but, in the words of his bumper sticker, as just “President Nixon.” His landslide win over George McGovern translated into no Republican advantage in congressional races—the Democrats more than held their own. The Washington Post’s David Broder later called it “an extraordinarily selfish victory.”
Christie’s 2013 reëlection tracks closely with this story: an all-out effort to court Democrats in order to maximize his personal power, and a landslide victory in November, with all the benefit going to the Governor, not to his fellow-Republicans in the state legislature. On Christmas, the Times published a piece about Christie’s long record of bullying and retribution. In it, the Fort Lee traffic jam was mentioned as just one of many cases (and, I have to admit, not the one that stayed with me) of vengefulness so petty that it inescapably called to mind the American President who incarnated that quality, and was brought down by it.
In the e-mails that went public last week when the scandal broke, the tone of Christie’s aides and appointees displays the thuggery and overweening arrogance that were characteristic of Nixon’s men when the President was at the height of his popularity—utter contempt for opponents, not the slightest anxiety about getting caught. In both cases, whether or not the boss sanctioned these actions, the tone came from the top. It’s the way officials talk when they feel they have nothing to fear, when there’s a kind of competition to sound toughest, because that’s what the boss wants and rewards. Once all hell broke loose, Christie insisted, in a compelling and self-indulgent press conference that, like his keynote speech, was all about himself, that he was the scandal’s biggest victim. “I am not a bully,” he said, in an echo of one of Nixon’s most famous remarks.
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them. Warren G. Harding surrounded himself with corrupt pols and businessmen, then checked out, leading to the most sensational case of bribery in American history. Ronald Reagan combined zealotry and fantasy, and Oliver North acted them out. Bill Clinton was libidinous and truth-parsing but also cautious, while George W. Bush was an incurious crusader who believed himself chosen by God and drove almost the entire national-security establishment into lawlessness without thinking twice. Christie, more than any of these, is reminiscent of the President whose petty hatefulness destroyed him—which is why, as NBC’s newscaster said when signing off on an early report on that long-ago burglary, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.
By: George Packer, The New Yorker, January 14, 2014
“One Trick Pony”: Ted Cruz Cements His Position As The GOP’s Master Troll
On the Internet, a troll purposely inflames anyone he can to attract attention to himself, in hopes of wasting everyone’s time and energy. In the Republican Party, a troll does the same thing and he becomes a hero of the far right and a frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced on Monday that he had hired Paul Teller as his deputy chief of staff.
Teller — a favorite of outside conservative groups like Club for Growth — was swiftly fired from his position as executive director of the far-right Republican Study Committee in December after leaking conversations between House members.
Cruz’s new hire immediately won praise from Red State’s Erick Erickson, a leader in the movement to push the Republican Party further to the right by demanding continued standoffs in Congress and supporting primary challenges to incumbents, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) joined McConnell in speaking out against outside conservative groups in December, after several opposed the budget deal Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) negotiated with Senator Patty Murray (D-WA). By hiring Teller, Cruz cements his allegiance with the groups who championed his effort to shut down the government over Obamacare, which he was able to pull off with the help of the House GOP’s so-called “suicide caucus,” many of whom are members of the Republican Study Committee.
Cruz’s willingness to spurn his party’s leaders represents just one trick in his impressive arsenal of trolling tactics.
The Harvard-educated lawyer, who argued in front of the Supreme Court nine times, recently published a 10,000-word article in the Harvard Law Review that speaks to one of the darkest fantasies of the Tea Party movement: How the United Nations is coming to take our golf courses.
The Daily Beast‘s Ben Jacobs points out that Cruz is artfully speaking to the fear of a world government, a fringe idea that’s surprisingly widespread among the Republican base. If he spoke about his concerns about the UN on network television, he would be deemed “wacky” or “wackier.” So instead, he’s presenting them in one of the most prestigious law journals in the world.
The senator’s immense intellect gives him the ability to frame his extremism in acceptable venues. And it also enables him to make convenient arguments against the president that serve his agenda but crumble under scrutiny.
In an attempt to brand Obama as “imperial,” Cruz attacked the president for ignoring federal law in effectively allowing Colorado and Washington state to legalize marijuana.
This critique raised the hackles of Jacob Sullum at Reason.com, who points out that the federal government has virtually never prosecuted personal marijuana use. The Department of Justice has retained the right to crack down at any time, something the senator decided not to point out. But for now, the DOJ has decided to use its “limited investigative and prosecutorial resources to address the most significant threats in the most effective, consistent, and rational way” — as it always has.
But since Cruz lumped his concerns about marijuana legalization in with a screed against Obamacare, he knows that few in the audience he’s trying to reach will parse out what he’s saying.
The shutdown that the senator championed has led to new lows in popularity for the Republican Party.
However, a big chunk of the GOP’s unfavorable rating comes from the party’s base.
In a recent YouGov/Economist tracking poll, 37 percent of Republicans viewed the members of their own party unfavorably, compared to 10 percent of Democrats. Many Republicans believe the party actually gave up too soon in the government shutdown standoff. They want constant, unwavering opposition and charges of lawlessness against the president.
Essentially, they want the party to be made up entirely of Ted Cruzes.
We’ve been telling you about the remarkable descent of Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) from Republican savior to Tea Party troll.
But Rubio’s problem is that compared to Cruz, he’ll always be a squish. He’s dabbled in bipartisanship and proposed “amnesty” for “illegals.” Even if the junior senator from Florida ultimately votes against his own bill, he’ll still be the kind of Republican Ted Cruz lives to crush, even if the senators agree on almost every conceivable issue.
This isn’t because Rubio is not intent on being disruptive or contentious or a “walking press release announcing a no vote.” It’s because he’ll always be in the shadow of a true master of the form.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, January 14, 2014
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