Category Archives: Wingnuts Being Wingnuts

What If Santorum Is the Nominee?

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Christ Matthews had a nice gotcha moment on Hardball last night.

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Truly, sometimes Santorum sounds more like a far-right evangelical than a Catholic. See also James Wood, “Senator Santorum’s Planet.” Both Wood and Timothy Egan at the New York Times make the point that Santorum is a theocrat who wants to base public policy on his religious views. Also, too: Becky Garrison, “Rick Santorum’s attacks on Barack Obama are about theology not policy.”

According to an article in Politico, Santorum actually “tests” better against President Obama than the other candidates. This many months from the election I doubt such matchup polls mean much, though.

Sorta kinda related — Charles Pierce notes that something extraordinary happened during the recent debate in Arizona. Santorum actually mentioned President Bush.

He is the man who isn’t there. Until NCLB came up last night, the years 2000-2008 had been successfully written out of the narrative of the 2012 election. For these jamokes, time effectively began in January of 2009. It was Year Zero on the Kenyan Muslim Socialist Calendar. I do not believe that Bush’s political non-personhood is an accident. It is now an article of faith among the Republican base that Bush’s failures stem not from the fact that he was a manifest incompetent, but that he was too liberal a president. Putting through Medicare Part B without paying for it is a greater sin to these people than running two wars off the books was. No Child Left Behind had the endorsement of Teddy Kennedy! (Aieeeeeeee!) If only Bush had tried conservatism, the fairytale goes, then conservatism would have succeeded, as it always does. It never fails. It is only failed. C-Plus Augustus failed conservatism. …

… Since the crimes and bungling of the Bush Administration resulted in a thrashing in the 2006 midterms and, ultimately, in the election of the current president in 2008, this feeling within the Republican base has hardened into an immutable faith. The Republican party has become more extreme, not less. It has become so resistant to compromise that it has become completely resistant even to political logic. (Make no mistake. The party faithful really want this fight over contraception.) I fully expect that, by August at the latest, Willard Romney will be calling the last president of his party a socialist.

I also think the wingnuts can’t help themselves and really will make the election about contraception and other bugaboos rattling around in the wingnut id.

Aliens Among Us

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If you missed the Daily Show yesterday —

E.J. Dionne writes about how wingnuts are making the President out to be alien. Of course, that’s because they can’t come out and say what they are really thinking — “Damn! He’s a n—–!” But they’re also going overboard with the old traditional talking points on Democrats, including the one that they are “soft” on national defense. This is from Richard Adams’s commentary on last night’s GOP debate:

Everyone bar Ron Paul is fixating on Iran and the current president’s fecklessness, which includes such statesmanlike arguments as this from Gingrich: “As long as you are America’s enemy, you’re safe”.

I’m sure Osama bin Laden would agree with Newt that America’s enemies are safe. If he wasn’t so dead, that is.

Anyway — the irony is that the President is, in Dionne’s words, “a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.” If any group of people ought to be voted “most likely to be space aliens” it would be the four clowns still in the presidential race.

Those Sneaky Elitists

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Paul Ryan actually said this:

“We’re seeing this new government activism, paternalistic, arrogant, political philosophy that puts new government-granted rights in the way of our constitutional rights.”

See, the Constitution is not a document of government. It was handed down from God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Unfortunately Moses lost it in a craps game, but centuries later an angel appeared to James Madison and told him he could find it buried under Plymouth Rock.

Here’s the broader context:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Sunday blasted the Obama administration’s moves to mandate religious affiliated groups to provide contraception coverage as “paternalistic” and “arrogant.”

“What we’re getting from the White House on this conscience issue, it’s not an issue about contraception, it’s an issue that reveals a political philosophy the president is showing that basically treats our constitutional rights as if they were revocable privileges from our government, not inalienable rights from our creator.” said Ryan on NBC’s Meet the Press.

You want to talk “paternalistic,” Mr. Ryan?

But in the Wacky World of Wingnuts, providing women with full coverage for contraception is paternalism and trampling on our gawd-given rights, whereas religious dogmas that demand women be barefoot and pregnant are not.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum wants to protect us from elitism by denying coverage for prenatal screening tests.

He lambasted the president’s health care law requiring insurance policies to include free prenatal testing, “because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

“That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country,” Santorum said.

In other words, Frothy wants to be sure prenatal testing is not covered, because some women who discover their babies will be born with major disabilities might choose to abort instead, and he knows better than they do that God doesn’t like that, so he wants to step in and protect women from the elites who think women should be allowed to decide some things for themselves.

Sex and God

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Is it just me, or does it seem the Right is on the edge of a catastrophic meltdown?

They’re starting to remind me of Hal, the Computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the end, as Dave takes Hal apart, his knowledge base degrades back to his first programming. Similarly, as Republicans lose ownership of what had been their strongest issues — national security and business — all the ugly muck at the depths of their ids is rising to the surface. Finally, there is nothing left but the primordial concern gnawing at their bones all these years — sex.

I started to say “sex and God,” but if you think about it, mostly God exists for them as a bulwark against sexual chaos. So it really is just about sex.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in psychiatry to recognize that James Poulos (“What Are Women For?“), for example, is massively bleeped up about sex and frantic to find something to protect him from women and their frightening, alien bodies. And what is the Virginia ultrasound law but a means to keep women in their place through state-sanctioned rape?

And the answer to the question “What are Republicans thinking?” is, what thinking?

Taxing Issues

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The Hill reports that Democrats in Washington may go after the “carried interest” tax loophole that gives preferential tax treatment to private equity executives. Some of them are even planning to push for a “Buffett rule” that anyone making seven figures a year pay at least 30 percent in taxes.

A recent CBS News/New York Times poll says 55 percent of Americans think the rich are not paying their fair share of taxes, and 52 percent think capital gains and investment income ought to be taxed at the same rate as wages. This is fruit ripe for plucking, one might say.

For years, the dominant argument on tax reform involved lowering marginal rates and closing loopholes. But the “loopholes” most likely to be targeted, Dems realized, are credits and deductions that benefit the middle class. (Oddly, after decades of alleged loophole cutting, GM still didn’t pay taxes last year. Funny how that works.)

The Bush tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year, so you know this is going to become a big campaign issue. For too long Republicans have gotten away with demagoguing the tax issue. But now recent events and public opinion favor Democrats. They’re coming to bat with the bases loaded, so to speak.

From the far reaches of the Crazy Land Fringe, Grover Norquist says that if the Bush tax cuts expire, President Obama could be impeached.

NORQUIST We’re focused on the fact that there is this Damocles sword hanging over people’s head. What you don’t know is who will be in charge when all of this will happen. I think when we get through this election cycle, we’ll have a Republican majority, [though] not necessarily a strong majority in the Senate, and a majority in the House. The majority in the House will continue to be a Reagan majority, a conservative majority. Boehner never has to talk his delegation going further to the right.

If the Republicans have the House, Senate, and the presidency, I’m told that they could do an early budget vote—a reconciliation vote where you extend the Bush tax cuts out for a decade or five years. You take all of those issues off the table, and then say, “What do you want to do for tax reform?”

Then, the question is: “OK, what do we do about repatriation and all of the interesting stuff?” And, if you have a Republican president to go with a Republican House and Senate, then they pass the [Paul] Ryan plan [on Medicare].

NJ What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?

NORQUIST Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

Overlooking the technicality that the House impeaches, not the Senate — the time has come to round up all of Grover Norquist’s whackjob ideas and drown them in a bathtub. He wants to make 2012 about tax cuts? Bring it on.

Poor Baby

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Rand Paul is whining that the TSA at the Nashville airport were mean to him. They “barked” at him! I assume he was referring to human personnel and not sniffer dogs. Imagine that a Person in Authority would so much as raise his voice at a law-abiding citizen! Obviously, that never happens to anyone but people known to be conservative politicians.

Yes, it was a “major ordeal”! I hope he recovers. Ron Father of Rand is saying the police state is out of control! And of course all the rightie bloggers are in full-bore everybody-picks-on-us and Obama-is-a-dictator mode.

I’m sure they were just as outraged when Sen. Edward Kennedy was stopped and questioned by airport security five times in March 2004. Oh, wait …

No, Both Sides Don’t Do This

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Genuinely disgusting.

Update: Blue Arkansas —

Personally I would hope that leaders on the right-Steve Womack, the Arkansas Republican Party, etc.-would step up and condemn this as strongly as possible. I would also hope that Steve Womack’s father, owner of a local radio station, would stop giving out the names, phone numbers, and addresses of members of the Aden team or anyone else for that matter on his radio program when ranting about Aden. The elder Womack has done that several times and Aden’s former press secretary got a death threat in the mail soon after her name was mentioned on the program. Clearly there is someone out there that doesn’t need anymore of that kind of information, much less inspiration to act on their hatred. I also hope that the Aden campaign will do whatever they can to up the security at some of their events, for the time being at least. Aden has said he’s going to put out a press release on the matter soon, and we’ll be following this and any developments related to it closely.

The radio station is KURM, I believe.

Un-Freakin’-Believable

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Charles Murray of Bell Curve fame explains that if there is increasing inequality in the U.S., it’s the lower classes’ fault. Why? Because they aren’t getting married enough.

When Americans used to brag about “the American way of life”—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

I thought the American dream ca. 1960 was owning one’s own home and seeing the U.S.A. in our Chevrolet.

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

He then goes on to explain how two hypothetical neighborhoods of white people fall along the cultural divide based on rates of marriage, out-of-wedlock births, church attendance, crime, etc., and argues that these “lifestyle” changes lead a lack of “industriousness” and thereby to income inequality.

I think just about any social psychologist would argue that the real data show that economic instability is the cause of social instability, not the other way around. In other words, people aren’t poor — financially insecure — because they don’t get married; they don’t get married because they are poor. A man who doubts his ability to support a family is less likely to pursue marriage, for example.

Daniel Larison at the American Conservative points out that Murray’s arguments have no internal logic, never mind any connection to the real world.

I suppose the degree of racism one sees in Murray’s essay depends on how you read it. He says he is comparing populations of white people to argue that race isn’t a factor. Well, he could have just said, “race isn’t a factor.” He could have made his hypothetical population plaid, I suppose. But really, IMO what he’s saying here is that lower-class whites are getting to be just as lazy and shiftless as the Colored Folk.

In other class warfare news. William Tucker of the American Spectator dismisses “environmentalism” as an indulgent affectation of the leisure class. “Only in the highest echelons do we hear people say, ‘We don’t need to build any pipelines. We’ve already got enough energy. We can all sit around awaiting the day we live off wind and sunshine,'” he says. Real Americans, of course, want to drill, baby, drill.

I don’t know anybody who says that, of course; what some of us say is that we ought to be working our butts off developing alternate and sustainable energy sources instead of ripping our planet apart squeezing the last drop of fossil fuel out of it. This is less about the “leisure class” versus the “working class” than it is about “vested interests” versus “people who would like to believe there will be a habitable planet for our grandchildren to live on.”