Clip by incitebytes: “Republicans Say The Darndest Things (Greatest Modern Hits),” chronicling some of the (many) dumb, stupid things Republicans have said over the last few years (it was really tough narrowing it down to 10 minutes). Clip features: Joe Barton, Sue Lowden, Sharron Angle, Andre Bauer, Louis Gohmert, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, George Allen, Sarah Palin, Steve Doocy, people at Palin rally, Strongsville, Ohio and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Michele Bachmann and George Bush.
By Leo Jennings
Political consultant with Rubenstein Associates
Cardinal Rule: A fundamental rule, upon which other matters hinge. Wiktionary
If you’re engaged in any type of activity that involves the development and implementation of a strategic plan you run into them all the time: Cardinal Rules. Know them, abide by them, and your strategy may well succeed. Ignore or violate them, and your plan will almost certainly crash and burn. In football, for instance, avoiding turnovers is a cardinal rule. In warfare the rules warn against being outflanked by the enemy and outrunning supply lines. Those of us who plan and execute political campaigns live by this one: “Don’t write the other guy’s commercial.”
Apparently GOP Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the architect of a plan that will supposedly reduce the federal budget deficit by six trillion dollars over the next ten years, missed that page in the political strategists’ handbook. And Democrats everywhere, essentially messageless since November of 2008, are rejoicing, because in calling for the privatization of Medicare the Chair of the House Budget Committee didn’t give them fodder for one ad, he handed them enough material to make a couple thousand.
Speculation abounds as to why Mr. Ryan, a savvy politician who played a key role in the Republican takeover of the U.S. House, proposed a policy sure to raise hackles and howls among seniors and those who soon will be. Conservative pundits and commentators explain it by saying he’s courageous and laud the plan as bold and groundbreaking. Liberals question his sanity. (more…)
Five years ago, a 47-year-old Missouri woman began a duplicitous on-line courtship through MySpace with a 13-year-old neighbor who once had been friends with the woman’s daughter.
The adult, Lori Drew, flirted with the 13-year-old, Megan Meier, through the guise of a fictitious, 16-year-old character named Josh Evans. Suddenly, “Josh” broke up with Miss Meier, writing to her, “the world would be a better place without you.” Just hours later, Miss Meier hung herself in her bedroom.
Words have consequences.
Drew wasn’t charged with the child’s death. In fact, a judge reversed her conviction on computer fraud charges, saying the law was intended to deal with hacking, not murder. But for most Americans, there is something deeply disturbing, something morally, if not criminally, wrong with deliberate torment, with predatory viciousness. Drew eluded accountability the same way conservatives are seeking to evade culpability after their irresponsible speech has provoked the delusional to violence.
It’s hard to draw a line directly from Drew’s cruel words to the noose around Miss Meier’s neck. Similarly, it’s difficult to directly link violent political rhetoric like Sarah Palin’s illustration showing gun sight cross hairs on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ Arizona district to the shattering of Giffords’ office door after her vote for health insurance reform last March or Jared L. Loughner’s shooting spree last weekend that left six dead and Giffords and 13 others wounded.
What is clear, however, is that vile and threatening communication that becomes so repetitive that it’s routine has the effect of sanctioning an atmosphere of violence.
Conservatives are yammering that they’re not the only ones who engage in brutal rhetoric. That’s true. But in a contest for production of violent words and images, Republicans would, to use their words, “kill” the Democrats.
The Department of Homeland Security concluded in an April 2009 internal report that right-wing extremism, with a growing potential for violence, was on the rise. That was followed last spring by Capitol security officials reporting a tripling of threats against members of Congress – almost all from opponents of health care reform – in other words, from Republicans, right-wingers or people influenced by GOP TV and radio front men like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, who personally profit from the hostile climate they generate.
They didn’t stop though they had fair warning about the consequences. Consider the case of Byron Williams. He launched a 12-minute shoot out with California Highway Patrol officers last July after they stopped him for erratic driving. A police affidavit filed the following day said Williams intended to “start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at The Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”
The Right has for decades slammed the ACLU, whose sole purpose is to protect constitutional rights, but Glenn Beck had made the Tides Foundation, once an obscure progressive organization, famous by attacking it repeatedly – at least 29 times between January and the July shoot out last year, including two tirades the week before Williams began his assassination mission.
Williams, who was armed during the shootout with a handgun, shotgun, rifle and body armor, said he watched FOX News to see Beck, who blew his mind, and who he viewed as a “schoolteacher.”
Still Beck, expressed no remorse and tried to squirm out of any responsibility for inciting Williams, saying on his show:
“I am the only one that has mentioned the Tides Foundation. . . So that’s what they’re using. This guy couldn’t have found this out on his own; it had to come from me. . .America, if you don’t think that they will use anything, they will. They absolutely will.”
Words do have consequences, Mr. Beck, no matter how many times you cravenly shout denials.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives insisted on reading the U.S. Constitution on the opening day of the new Congressional session. It was, however, nothing but political theatre because conservatives disassociate the rights it grants from the incumbent responsibilities. Right-wing leaders like Beck disavow responsibility altogether.
When it was Arizona Rep. Giffords’s turn to read, the chamber had come upon the First Amendment, which guarantees, among other things, the right to free speech. It even guarantees Republican Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl the right to go on television the day after the shootings and contend that Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Dupnik didn’t have the right to speak about the complicity in the crime of vile, hateful and threatening political speech.
The courts have established the “crowded theater” test to determine when free speech ends and responsibility begins. Americans are responsible to refrain from yelling “fire” in a crowded theater when, in fact, there are no flames. The freedom to yell ends at the point when it endangers others.
Republicans are recklessly yelling. During the fall campaign, Arizona Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle suggested her supporters consider their Second Amendment rights if Sen. Harry Reid were re-elected. Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman said at a Tea Party rally on July 4, “If ballots don’t work, bullets will,” and then was hired by new GOP Congressman Allen West to serve as chief of staff. Tea Party contender Jesse Kelly held a fund raiser in June asking his supporters to “get on target to . . . remove Gabrielle Giffords from office” by shooting a “fully automatic M16” with him.
Republicans bear responsibility for the consequences of this kind of brutal discourse – a political atmosphere charged with violence. Just like Glenn Beck, though, Republicans guard their rights, but shirk the concomitant responsibilities.
***
Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.
Although Arianna Huffington’s recent book Third World America was mostly about economics, my great fear is that her idea that this great country is moving too far in the direction of a third world nation was eerily prescient in more ways than one.
When members of Congress start being assassinated, when the rhetoric about politics and politicians becomes increasingly violent and extreme in nature, and when corrupt oligarchs with way too economic and political power assume they can operate outside the bounds of the law, you have the hallmarks of a Third World country. I have been focusing more and more on the incredible crisis brewing in the financial sector because the corruption there is at the core of so much that is messing up our country’s economy, but the assassination attempt on Gabby Giffords this weekend was a deadly and tragic reminder of how we have the potential to slide more and more toward Third World status in more than just economics. When media figures like Beck and Limbaugh, politicians like Palin, and way too many others so loosely talk about “death panels,” or the President being “friends with terrorists,” or the need to reload, we have a big problem in our democracy: the mentally ill who are close to the edge can easily go over the edge, and the far right borderline violent militia types start seeming like they are mainstream.
I am not an alarmist, a conspiracy theorist, or a pessimist about all this. I don’t think we are on the verge of a Third World dictatorship. This country has seen waves of political violence and terrorism repeatedly in its history, including assassinations, bombings of churches and clinics, and lynchings, and we have survived and overcome. This country has seen waves of economic concentration of wealth and power in the late 1800s and the 1920s before the Great Depression, and we survived that too, making the reforms we needed to make to get stronger. But we are at a very dangerous moment, and not just because of the threat of violence we saw play out this weekend. (more…)
By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist
I’ve just finished up 3 hours of the most difficult radio I’ve ever had to do. The topic, of course, was the horrific shooting in Tucson, which has deeply affected me, as it has many others. As someone who had to flee the Capitol on 9/11, was warned of anthrax contamination in the congressional office I was working in, and has faced various threats of violence during my media career, I was shaken by the scenes in Arizona more so than by any other news imagery in a long time.
The reason the radio show was so difficult this morning was because of the reaction. It was a telling commentary about the larger problems embodied by the weekend’s events.
My points this morning were simple: We know that some conservative media and political leaders often use their platforms to endorse violence as political expression, and both those leaders and all of us in media and politics need to reflect on the inevitable real-world consequences of that reality. Indeed, if we cannot reflect on this after this weekend, when can we?
This should be a point of consensus among the left and right. Regardless of what crazy theories motivated the Tucson shooter, and regardless of how insane he obviously is, we know our culture is now regularly infused with the radical notion that says political motives – whatever they are – can be legitimately expressed with violence. We know this because the examples are everywhere – and because Rep. Gabrielle Giffords explicitly warned of the “consequences.” And we should know that when you mix inevitably crazy people with notions that violence is acceptable politics, you are bound to get violence. This isn’t esoteric sociological theory – it’s basic common sense. (more…)
By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley
Sarah Palin watched from the audience as daughter Bristol danced on ABC. Twenty-three million other Americans joined her from their homes. The next day, the former vice-presidential candidate started a 13-state book tour for her new book, America By Heart, which has a first printing of 1 million. Her reality show on TLC, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” is in its third week. Last week she was the cover story in the New York Times magazine.
It’s all part of The Palin Strategy for becoming president in 2012 — or 2016 or 2020.
Republican leaders don’t believe it. “If she wanted the Republican nomination she’d be working on the inside,” one influential Republican told me a few days ago. “She’d be building relationships with Republican Senators and representatives, governors, and state party officials. She’d be smoothing the feathers she ruffled by backing Tea Party candidates. She’d be huddled with GOP kingmakers.” When I suggested she has a different strategy, the influential Republican smiled knowingly. “That’s how it’s done — how McCain, Bush, and everyone has done it. That’s the only way to do it. But all she really wants is celebrity.”
The Republican establishment doesn’t get it. Celebrity is part of The Palin Strategy — as is avoiding the insider game. She doesn’t want to do what Huckabee, Pawlenty, Gingrich, or Romney have to do. She has an outside game. (more…)
The electorate is bitter and angry. It’s no wonder. Foreclosures rise while Wall Street bankers, whose recklessness caused this grave recession, grab million dollar bonuses. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5 percent, but corporations continue to ship jobs overseas.
This is not the hope America voted for in the fall of 2008. Now another election is upon us. On Tuesday, voters can choose candidates capitalizing on bitterness, or they can return to hope and provide time for change to play out. Voters can stay the course with the President whose basic philosophy is a Biblical one – that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Or Americans can empower Republicans who believe it’s every man for himself, who espouse the view that a man’s success is his own, and, equally, each man is solely responsible for all of his setbacks.
This midterm election is about how those disparate Republican and Democratic values will play out in legislation. Do Americans want to live in a Republican country that blames individuals for their unemployment in an economy creating only one position for every five jobless workers? Or do Americans want a country that lives by the Democratic philosophy that government must aid, not blame, the unemployed, that it must give a hand up, not a slap in the face, to the suffering?
Hard as it is during troubled times, as difficult as it may feel after some legislative efforts have fallen short of important idealistic goals, let’s build a country of hope, one in which we help our fellow Americans.
That virtuous aim, of course, is the subject of ridicule. Here’s Sarah Palin mocking optimistic Americans at a Tea Bagger event in February, “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”
But come out to vote for hope Tuesday anyway; stand up to the malevolent bullies.
What the bullies want is a country where workers are on their own: for health insurance, for income security in their old age, for surviving another Wall Street collapse. For everything.
Unemployment insurance is a good example. Over the past year, the GOP has scorned the jobless, calling them lazy freeloaders. Republicans repeatedly voted against extending unemployment benefits. From the GOP point of view, Wall Street’s crash didn’t cause the economic collapse and high unemployment. No, according to Republicans, each unemployed worker is responsible for his situation, and it’s not the role of government to intervene to help. That philosophy is behind Republican South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s comment that the unemployed, like stray animals, should not be fed: “You are facilitating the problem if you give an animal or person ample food supply.”
Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to aid the unemployed.
Wall Street reform is another example of Republican “on your own” philosophy. Before the stock market crash of 1929, the unregulated American financial system whipped the economy in wild boom and bust cycles. The frequent crashes and runs on banks were called panics. In Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress imposed rules on Wall Street and the banking industry. For the next sixty years the economy largely avoided panics. Then Congress lifted the regulations, and the crash of 2008 wrecked the economy. Former President Bush responded by proposing and orchestrating the Wall Street bailout. But his party vigorously opposed re-regulation to avoid another economic disaster. The GOP voted against the legislation restoring protections for the economy, investors and consumers. Republicans believe government has no business policing the free market or interceding for investors and consumers because individuals are solely to blame for everything that happens to them.
Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to protect hardworking Americans against financial fraud and the machinations of powerful, multi-national financial firms.
Health insurance reform provides one of the clearest examples of Republican “on your own” philosophy. The GOP proposed that “reform” consist of granting individuals small tax breaks, about a quarter the cost of health insurance, while revoking breaks given companies that provide health coverage to workers. This, Republicans said, would “free” companies from providing insurance and “free” individuals to choose their own plans. It would have liberated individuals to negotiate coverage and claims payment with giant, sophisticated, lawyer-laden insurance corporations. If an individual got a bad deal, one that enabled the insurer to drop coverage when he got sick, deny coverage to his sick child or raise rates continuously, well, then, that would be the fault of the individual purchaser. Republicans have promised that if empowered, they will repeal the Democrats’ Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to support the health insurance reform law that uses the power of government regulation to shield policy holders from insurer abuses, that lowers costs and that enables nearly all Americans to obtain insurance.
Retirees should be “on their own” as well, Republicans believe. Some in the GOP even contend Social Security is unconstitutional. Others want to cut it or privatize it. What privatizing means is getting the government out of the business of collecting Social Security taxes to ensure that all workers receive benefits after retiring. Instead, Republicans want workers to be on their own to invest for their retirement. If there’s another market “panic” – which could happen if Republicans repeal Wall Street reform – and workers lose their “privatized” retirement savings in the crash, the GOP’s response would be that individuals must take responsibility – their loss is their fault.
Come out Tuesday and vote to keep America’s promise to provide basic income security to all elderly citizens. Vote to be your brothers’ and sisters’ keeper and for them to be yours. Vote for hope.
***
Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.
Posted
October 20, 2010 at 3:29 pm,
in
From the News
Michael Winship
By Michael Winship
Senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS
One of the most memorable moments in television coverage of American politics came during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Out on the streets, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations were attacked viciously by law enforcement officials in what later was described in an official report as “a police riot.”
Inside the convention hall, tightly controlled by the political machine of the city’s notorious Mayor Richard J. Daley, CBS correspondent Dan Rather was attempting to interview a delegate from Georgia who was being removed from the floor by men in suits without ID badges. One of them slugged Rather in the stomach, knocking him to the ground. As the reporter struggled to get his breath back, from the anchor booth, Walter Cronkite exclaimed, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan!”
It was an uncharacteristic outburst from America’s Most Respected Newsman, indicative of just how terrible the violence was both inside and out and how shocking it was for a journalist to be so blatantly attacked while on the air by operatives acting on behalf of politicians.
As appalling as that 1968 assault was, thuggery is nothing new in politics; it transcends time, ideology and party. But what’s even more disturbing in 2010 is how much of the public, especially many of those who count themselves among the conservative adherents of the Tea Party, is willing to ignore bullying behavior — and even applaud it — as long as the candidate in question hews to their point of view.
Here in New York State, of course, we have Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who combines the boyish charm of J. Edgar Hoover with the sunny quirkiness of Pol Pot. So extreme are Paladino’s views, so volatile his temper, that even Rupert Murdoch’s right wing New York Post has endorsed Democrat Andrew Cuomo, which is a bit like the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano dissing the Pope and singing the praises of Lutherans. (more…)
Posted
September 12, 2010 at 3:00 pm,
in
From the News
Edwin D. Hill
Edwin D. Hill
International President, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
In an attempt to rally rank-and-file union members behind the Republican Party in advance of November’s midterm elections, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin recently took to the Internet to appeal to union members to oppose President Obama and congressional Democrats.
To my hardworking, patriotic brothers and sisters in the labor movement: you don’t have to put up with the scare tactics and the big government agenda of the union bosses. There is a different home for you: the commonsense conservative movement.
Now former sister Palin is more than welcome to try to sell the GOP’s agenda to our membership — we count Democrats, Republicans and independents among our ranks. But let me offer her a piece of sales advice.
If there is something our members hate — and we’ve done polling on this — it is overheated rhetoric and knee-jerk partisanship. They value their vote and want to know where candidates stand on the issues that matter the most to them, their families and communities — not just to folks like me in Washington. This year it’s all about jobs, jobs, jobs. (more…)
