In my decades of polling, I recall only one moment when a party had been driven as far from the center as the Republican Party has been today.
The outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the GOP what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization …
In those years, the Democratic Party became labeled, to its detriment, as the party of “acid, abortion and amnesty.??? With the Democrats’ values far to the left of the silent majority, McGovern lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon in 1972.
While there are no catchy phrases for the Republicans of 2013, their image problems are readily apparent in national polls. The GOP has come to be seen as the more extreme party, the side unwilling to compromise or negotiate seriously to tackle the economic turmoil that challenges the nation …
I see little reason to believe that the staunch conservative bloc will wither away or splinter; it will remain a dominant force in the GOP and on the national stage. At the same time, however, I see no indication that its ideas about policy, governance and social issues will gain new adherents. They are far beyond the mainstream.
If anything, Andrew Kohut is a bit gentle. The GOP became the party of Ted Nugent. WhiteManistan, as a broad description, is a sickening collection, according to Kohut, “demographically and politically distinct from the national electorate … Ninety-two percent are white … They tend to be male, married, Protestant, well off and at least 50 years old.”
Paranoid and the core of the GOP, they cannot retain power but, from a relative minority position, have brought the country to a near standstill, simply through the power of rage — at the president, at Hispanics, at women, at gays, at the poor, etc.
If you are addicted to common sense and logic, South Dakota should bring a smile to your face.
These sensible Americans just passed a law allowing teachers to carry weapons in school as a means to protect their students from terminal psychos hell-bent on committing mass murder …
Truth is, it is the socialist stooges who are responsible for violence. It is their policies that prevent good guys from arming and protecting themselves and creates the big lie of “gun free??? slaughter zones.
It isn’t just anti-gun leftist policies that have enabled thugs to breed and prosper. The violence on America’s streets is the result of a number of other leftist big-government policies that have worked to destroy families and entire communities by discouraging accountability and rewarding dangerous behavior.
That’s the turbo destructo modus operandi of the socialists …
Nugent: The President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama went to the Vietnam Memorial Wall. He did his smoke and mirrors scam. He pretended to show respect and honor, 58,000 American warriors who died fighting communism. And then he hired, appointed and associates with communists.
If you can’t see through the dishonesty and the scamming of this president with that scenario fresh in your mind, then that’s literally like, I guess that would be like, I don’t know, a German in 1938 pretending to respect the Jews and then going home and putting on his brown shirt and forcing his neighbors onto a train to be burned to death.
So we really have a rotten, rotten man in the White House who I am convinced hates America, hates individuality.
In WhiteManistan the President is a Nazi and a Communist, simultaneously. It’s something easy to see but not precisely addressed by Andrew Kohut’s Pew polling.
When Roscoe Bartlett, mainstay of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, had his House career ended in the November election it dealt a heavy blow to the lobbying group. With Newt Gingrich being run off the national stage yet again, two of its most vigorous personalities were cut down.
Although Bartlett never got any legislation passed he did pursue the cause of defending the nation against electromagnetic pulse doom with dogged tenacity.
Franks is a nobody with no pull, someone his own party hardly pays attention to. Which means any movement of electromagnetic pulse defense legislation either quickly dies in committee or is summarily wiped off the bottom of Congressional shoes like a mildly annoying bit of dog excrement.
This week the National Journal ran a piece on the fate of the electromagnetic pulse caucus. It noted the caucus had expanded its membership from 11 to 18.
However, it’s leader, Trent Franks, is such a busted screwdriver he doesn’t even list it under his tabs for committees and caucuses on his home page.
A small but growing cadre of House members is set to relaunch efforts to protect the nation against what they say is a very real threat: the unleashing of an electromagnetic pulse either by a solar storm or a nuclear-armed foe that could cripple much of the nation’s electrical infrastructure.
“I realize there is skepticism, and I understand it’s easy to dismiss this as something coming from people who might go around wearing tinfoil hats,??? said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., one of the leaders of the little-known bipartisan congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Caucus …
The caucus is bipartisan in that it includes two nobodies from the other side of the aisle as tokens, Yvette Clark and Loretta Sanchez.
More infamous members are crackpot Steve King, recently in the news as one of the people Karl Rove has targeted as a nuisance politician who won’t be able to win a Senatorial run in Iowa because “he is the poster boy for over the top, racially tinged rhetoric in his attacks on President Barack Obama,” notes the Grio.
“Not only has King compared the president to Saddam Hussein, and called the president ‘very, very urban,’ on the House floor, he has also said, ‘The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race on the side that favors the black person,’ ??? it continues.
Like Franks, Steve King is a birther.
Also on the caucus is Paul Broun, another raging GOP sociopath (there are many), in the news for great quote like:
“I was the first Member of Congress to call [Obama] a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies like government control of health care and redistribution of wealth.
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.”
One of the many liabilities of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby is that, robot-like, it still refers to the “Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From Electromagnetic Pulse Attack.??? Originally written in 2004 and revised in 2008, it’s now nine years old, five if you’re feeling generous.
The Commission principal was William Graham, an old Reagan adviser and peddler of the “Star Wars” missile defense program.
It’s a twin problem, not only because of now creaking antiquity, but because of the solid impression, one the caucus and Franks cannot escape, that it’s just part of the missile defense lobby.
Prior to Roscoe Bartlett’s defeat in November, the EMP Crazy lobby generally tried to get at least one opinion or mainstream article on electromagnetic pulse doom ending civilization into the news feed at least once a week.
Since the election all the mojo is gone.
The majority of pieces on electromagnetic pulse doom are now all published by WND.com, the right wing conspiracy website most famous as the parking stall of Ted Nugent’s weekly column cursing the president, and peddling Jerome Corsi, yet another crackpot who promotes “a staggering number of outlandish conspiracies about the president, including that Obama has a fake birth certificate and stolen Social Security number; that Obama is both secretly gay and secretly Muslim; and that Obama and his family have lied about the true identity of his father, who may be either communist writer Frank Marshall Davis or ‘some Indonesian.'”
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has always been horribly tainted by its weird and extreme membership. But the departure of Roscoe Bartlett really hurt because he occasionally came off as a reasonable and kindly old man.
Another veteran member of the Cult has been Frank Gaffney. But in the last three years Gaffney has spent much more time convincing Tea Party legislators in red states that shariah law is coming to the United States.
Trent Franks had tried to keep the ball rolling on electromagnetic pulse doom defense.
But as notes the Journal:
Franks said he had been led to believe last session that his bill would be brought to the House floor for a vote. But he said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., let it die in committee. He said he has been unable to get an explanation from Upton.
They just can’t get no respect. Not even from their own, anymore.
When the Republican Party moves on something it can never contain it’s burning desire to attack everything it hates, across the board.
I’ll leave the coup which turned Michigan into a right-to-work state to others.
Close on the heels of it is another bill, GOP authored, to curb the menace no one can see but the far right.
From the Detroit Free Press:
A Muslim rights group has urged Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to veto legislation designed to block use of Islamic law in the state should it reach his desk.
A House bill to bar use of “foreign laws that would impair constitutional rights??? was on Tuesday’s House agenda. Rep. Dave Agema, R-Grandville, sponsored the bill, which doesn’t specifically mention the Islamic legal code called sharia. However, the bill’s supporters have said they are concerned about the use of sharia spreading …
Pure and simple, it’s a bigot’s bill, another part of the Republican Party’s obsession with getting after people they hate.
And, nationwide, it has been common in red states since the election of Barack Obama, pushed by persistent lobbying by Islam-o-phobe groups in Washington, often associated with Frank Gaffney.
“The question now is whether Michigan Republicans can find time to deal with a nonexistent Shariah takeover when they’re so hard at work crushing unions and curtailing women’s rights,” comments a piece at Mother Jones.
It would be almost funny. But when you’re laughing the Republican Party, even though a minority, always manages to ram through toxic
legislation at the local level.
[Bob Costas], blamed the murder-suicide on easy access to guns. He lives in a strange fairyland of ignorance and denial …
What Mr. Costas didn’t say and possibly doesn’t know is that 2 million Americans use guns each year to defend themselves from punks and thugs. Access to guns saves an incalculable number of lives each year.
A young masked man, bent on a mission of destruction and death, entered an Oregon mall and opened fire, turning the holiday shopping season into a chaotic horror that could have been much worse, police officials said Wednesday …
The man entered the Clackamas Town Center, a popular suburban mall several miles from downtown Portland, on Tuesday afternoon. He was wearing a hockey-style mask and a protective vest and began firing with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, stolen from someone the suspect knew, police said. There were also several magazines of ammunition.
If only more people would carry AR-15s when doing Christmas shopping, perhaps this could have been avoided and the punk shot dead.
Some people are mentally unfit. Ted Nugent is such a person.
The black and bleak humor in this is that it presents Nugent with having to write about another nuts shooting only two days after he ranted about all the idiot liberals who try to destroy American freedom after each massacre.
UPDATE
And now it’s orders of magnitude worse. Why would anyone want to be in any club or organization this man speaks for is beyond understanding.
The Republican Party was wiped out in California in the election. It has no political power to do anything in the state legislature, thus opening the way to the first significant change here in well over a decade.
But there are still red areas where the right white man sits, boiling in a stew of fears over the president, the imminent loss of freedom, the overthrow of the republic, non-white people and the homosexuals, too.
And the ferment has resulted in major gun sales for the Christmas season.
From the Orange County Register:
Californians are buying more guns than ever …
“I think it’s a direct outgrowth of the strategies employed in the recent election,” said John Eastman, a professor and former dean of the Chapman University School of Law who in 2010 sought Republican nomination for state Attorney General.
Eastman pointed to the discord brought by groups like Occupy Wall Street, which in some cases clashed with police. The breakdown in public order inspired more people to think about self-defense, he said …
“The National Rifle Association has done a wonderful job of demonizing President Obama,” said [one observer to the newspaper].
In fact, Blek said, Obama’s gun policies have either been nonexistent or a step backward in the eyes of safety advocates …
“A lot of people are just recently learning about what the Constitution says and the rights that we have and starting to exercise them now,” a [gun shop owner] told the newspaper.
“There is a big scare that guns are going to begin to get scarce,” [said another firearms store owner].
The newspaper added the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System had run almost one million background checks “related to guns in California” this year.
Want to give a God Save WhiteManistan T-shirt to the closet bigot in the family or office? Think of the merry conversation it could make at the holiday table!
If so, say so in comment. Perhaps I’ll put the image on-line at one of the insta-T-shirt printers!
I saw the professor deliver a March 2010 speech to California Tea Party activists in Buena Park during his failed attempt to win the Republican Party nomination for attorney general. Calling himself a constitutional scholar, he declared that if the state allowed gay marriages, citizens had a duty to “rise up and abolish” the government. Eastman also proudly noted his philosophical attitude could be summed up by the declaration Justice Thomas has on an office plaque: “I ain’t evolving.”
The mainstreaming of Ted Nugent as a pundit and personality demonstrates a deep flaw in American character — the real enjoyment and approval of those who are defined by their malice toward others.
Ted Nugent is now much of the GOP electorate. He is one of the most recognizable faces of the Psychopath Vote. And it’s why the party is essentially dead except in gerrymandered WhiteManistan.
There is no question that wishing ill on others is just about all that motivates Nugent. It’s his money-maker. One only has to read a year of his columns at the Washington Times and tabulate the various curses and slurs he brings down on others weekly.
Today is no exception. At the heart of his column is the assertion that the poor, those receiving benefits as part of the in-tatters social safety net, should have their right to vote rescinded. While it may seem shocking and reflexively nasty it’s not an uncommon sentiment in 2012 USA.
On election night Nugent publicly choked on his own bile. And he quickly adopted the odious bigot’s theory of everyone else in the the Republican Party’s top rung — the only reason Barack Obama won was because he gave stuff to lots of people, like the Obamaphone. And those people are all leeches, bringing the country down.
The three sacred entitlement cows in the room that no politician wants to poke are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A blinding statement of the obvious is that we are never going to get our financial house in order until these sacred entitlement cows are not only poked, but slaughtered …
In addition to slaughtering the three sacred entitlement cows that consume a vast majority of the federal budget (and I use the term budget generously), let’s truly spread the pain around and raise taxes on everyone, including the nearly 50 percent of Americans who pay zero federal income taxes. Those Americans need to have some skin in the game, too. I recommend at least a 5 percent federal income tax bracket for them.
Let’s also stop the insanity by suspending the right to vote of any American who is on welfare. Once they get off welfare and are self-sustaining, they get their right to vote restored. No American on welfare should have the right to vote for tax increases on those Americans who are working and paying taxes to support them.
Ted Nugent is a raging public bigot, full time. It’s his career. He appears regularly on television and lousy cable tv specials made especially for him.
In a civil society Nugent would have no place. But that’s not us. His presence is a symptom of underlying sepsis in the soul, the yen to see others, always the weaker, publicly hurt or destroyed.
Mitt Romney was all right with Ted Nugent, even seeking his approval. So if there is good news in any of this, it is that Nugent is so public and so very obviously a good example of the Republican Party.
Repeal Obamacare. Lower income tax rates and simplify the tax code. Cut Medicaid by a third and make it a state-controlled block-grant program. Overhaul Medicare by giving beneficiaries money to buy competing public and private health plans. Reduce non-entitlement spending to its lowest level since World War II.
Repeatedly labeled a flim-flam man by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. Rejected in the recent election. Making it almost impossible to satirize the United States in 2012.
Specifically, Santorum, joined by Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), urged the Senate to reject the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities – a treaty negotiated during George W. Bush’s administration and ratified by 126 nations, including China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Syria.
The former presidential candidate pronounced “grave concerns” about the treaty, which forbids discrimination against people who have AIDS, are blind, use wheelchairs, and the like. “This is a direct assault on us,” he declared.
Lee, too, has “grave concerns” about the threat to U.S. sovereignty. “I will do everything I can to block its ratification …
To the demented Republican Party, the UN is always a looming menace to the country.
And I’ve never been able to figure out how anyone gloms onto the idea that an agency as demonstrably powerless as the UN could take the guns, or anything, off the nation that has the most powerful military in world history. It’s impossible to even approach trying to understand minds that believe such things. It’s a real chasm of mental, social and cultural division.
Nevertheless, here we are.
“He’ll be loyal to our land/There is hope for our nation, again … ,” they sang, months ago.
Neal Caren, a sociology academic at the University of North Carolina, has posted a cool plot of “The New Secessionists” by state, with “darker colors showing higher levels of secession support.” It is here.
It looks like the secession petition movement has peaked …
We also looked at the distribution of petition signers by gender. While petition signers did not list their gender, we attempted to match first names with Social Security data on the relative frequency of names by sex. In first week, of the 302,502 respondents with gendered names, 63% had male names and 38% had female names. This 26 point gender gap is twice the size of the gender gap for voters in the 2012 Presidential election. For more recently signers, the gender gap has risen to 40 points, with male signers accounting for more than 70% of signatures since 11/20.
A newspaper in Riverside County, CA, has published some statistics taken from the UNC plot for my state’s secessionistas. The numbers are insignificant:
The 607 petitioners the students plotted in Riverside County make it one of the cooler spots on the national heat map the students produced, given the county’s 2 million-plus population.
Compare that to the 268 signers from Campbell County, Wyoming (population: 563,626) or the 125 from Blanco County, Texas (population: 10,497). It’s worth noting that even in that central Texas hot spot, only about 1 percent of the population signed on to a secession petition.
Back in California, Imperial County’s 174,528 residents were even cooler to the idea of secession than Riverside County’s. Only 13 signers could be plotted there.
I have a pretty clear idea as to the kind of people who are seriously (and some are reportedly quite serious) looking to secede from our country …
I’ve endured such people ever since I was old enough to vote, which was back in the great Ronald Reagan tidal wave of 1980. Because I wasn’t a conservative or a Republican, I felt the sting of ridicule from individuals — ranging from local souls to national pundits — who saw no value in anything to the left of their views and who apparently believed you were either with them or against America. They damned “liberals??? so often and so effectively that the term can no longer be used by the crowd that now calls themselves “progressives.??? This animus has intensified in recent years, as if these people are on a crusade to purge our holy land of an un-American leftist, socialist pestilence …
The line has been drawn, and they’ve helped draw it. They will still rant about the course of our republic and those who differ from their views. But after this dubious stunt, they’re no longer qualified to complain.
Schuylkill County, PA, has 217 secessionistas. I couldn’t determine the number for Los Angeles County.
