Republicans, Xenophobia, and the 'Real America'

Yesterday, I wrote a post I called "Inside the Republican Brain." In it, I explored the GOP's tendency toward cognitive dissonance. Republicans seem to have an ability (or disability) that allows them to hold two completely contradictory ideas in the same head and believe them both equally.

It's often the case that I come across a story that reminds me of a previous post. Normally, I just post a follow-up to my short-form blog, but occasionally, the subject is too long for that -- it requires a second full-length post. In this case, the point that needs to be made is that the love for logical inconsistency isn't the only problem with modern Republican thinking. There's also xenophobia. This xenophobia often manifests itself as racism or homophobia or sexism, but it's all from the same source -- fear of people who aren't exactly like you. We tend to think of this as hatred, since it usually comes across as irrationally angry, but it's clearly fear.

The story that caught my eye was a John Avlon article at The Daily Beast that involves Facebook, racism, and the Young Republicans -- a branch of the GOP that confusingly includes people as old as 40. It also involves another common Republican mistake -- the belief that Republicans are invisible to everyone else.

On Wednesday, [Audra Shay, vice chairman of the Young Republicans and the leading candidate to be elected its chairman] -- a 38-year-old Army veteran, mother, and event planner from Louisiana who has been endorsed by her governor, Bobby Jindal -- was holding court on her Facebook page, initiating a political conversation by posting that "WalMart just signed a death warrant" by "endorsing Obama's healthcare plan." At 1:52, a friend named listed as Eric S. Piker, but whose personal page says his actual name is Eric Pike, wrote "It's the government making us commies... can't even smoke in my damn car... whats next they going to issue toilet paper once a month... tell us how to wipe our asses..."

Two minutes later, Piker posted again saying "Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist... Muslim is on there side [sic]... need to take this country back from all of these mad coons... and illegals."

Eight minutes after that, at 2:02, Shay weighed in on Piker's comments: "You tell em Eric! lol."

Of course, the proper response to such a comment would be "WTF are you even talking about?" but it's really hard to go wrong with any response short of applause. Shay applauded.





She and Pike got called out for the comment, so she "de-friended" the people who complained. Pike was still listed as a friend, although she did post that the comments were "not okay." She deleted Pike's comments and thought everything was over. It wasn't. When another user commented that the whole thing was overblown, Pike came back and commented, "I agree with dale... this is still America... freedom of speech and thought is still allowed... for now any ways... and the last time i checked I was a good ole southern boy... and if yur ass is black don't let the sun set on it in a southern town..."

Yay for lynching! Black Republicans didn't think much of this and, as we speak, Shay simmers in hot water over the whole incident.

This is just another story to add to the long list of racist incidents on the right. Racist emails and blog posts, bigoted talk radio hosts and pundits, have become old news for the Party of Lincoln. "It seems like some of us Republicans are taking our conservative message, mixing it with personal prejudices and racist views, and calling it patriotism," Lenny McAllister, a black Republican activist, told Avlon. "You can cover cyanide with chocolate, but you still can't call it candy."

Nice sentiments, but you wonder how McAllister feels about gays. Or any of a long list of people that Republicans seem to believe aren't really American.

"I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America," Sarah Palin once said of Barack Obama on the campaign trail. This is the more subtle, the more acceptable form of xenophobia. The question posed by that statement was "Is Barack Obama American enough?" A Kenyan father, a white mom, a period of schooling in Indonesia, a weird name that includes "Hussein." Even the fact that he was raised in Hawaii became a question -- is Hawaii really America?

No one asked that about stand-alone Alaska between Russia and Canada, no one wondered about Panama-born John McCain's "American-ness." Barack Obama's story wasn't a Republican story. And, since we all know that only Republicans are truly American, it wasn't an American story. Where an amendment was once floated to allow Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for president, a man raised in Hawaii was too foreign and exotic to understand what it really meant to be an American. Austria is white-people-land, Hawaii is not and that Indonesia stuff just makes it all worse. In the minds of many Republicans (and here comes the cognitive dissonance again), Austria is more American than an American state.

As I said, it all comes down to a specific kind of fear -- xenophobia. It's not really about racism, that's just a symptom of the larger disorder. It's about being too different. Too foreign is one thing, too foreign and too "unwhite" is another. If you're not Christian enough or not straight enough, you'll find yourself in the same boat.

The Republican party developed a habit of exclusion a long time ago and it's killing them. By turning everything into an "us against them" issue, even to the point of politicizing religion, they're destroying themselves. In 1980, Ronald Reagan took 55% of the white vote and won easily. In 2000, Bush got 55% of the white vote and had to steal Florida to win. In 2008, John McCain won 57% of white men and 53% of white women and lost bad. Every election cycle, it's the Republicans who are becoming less and less "American enough," because every election cycle those "real Americans" they represent are a smaller and smaller slice of the American population.

Unless they're able to make a fundamental change in the way they think, not only will Republicans continue to find these racist scandals popping up monthly, but they'll find themselves a minority, growing progressively smaller every day.

-Wisco


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Inside the Republican Brain

A couple of weeks ago, President Obama made an argument I wish more people would make. At a press conference, he was asked if a public option for health insurance would "drive private insurers out of business."

"Why would it drive private insurers out of business?" he answered. "If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality healthcare, if they tell us that they're offering a good deal, then why is it that the government -- which they say can't run anything -- suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical."

It's not only insurance companies who say this, it's Republicans. As always. cognitive dissonance rules supreme on the right. There's no way that government can possibly do something better than the private sector -- that is, until the only argument against a government program is that government will do it better than the private sector. Then all bets are off, a core argument of conservative philosophy is abandoned, and we're supposed to believe that everything we were previously told of the supremacy of the private was wrong.

It amazes me that the small minority who still consider themselves Republican can manage this logical origami. When Sarah Palin resigned, she said, "Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: 'Sit down and shut up,' but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out" And we weren't supposed to notice that she was quitting. If you're a Republican, two entirely contradictory concepts are able to exist in the same skull.





We saw the same thing throughout the Bush administration, where we were told that we had to fight wars to "keep Americans safe." Over four thousand service members died in the Iraq war alone -- did we borrow some other country's military for that? If not, we lost more Americans in Iraq than we did on 9/11. And the Iraq war was supposedly started to protect us from another 9/11. Doesn't seem like the best math in retrospect, does it? That's probably why military funerals and the returning coffins were practically a state secret -- it's hard to argue that you're keeping Americans safe when they're returning from a war in boxes.

These mental gymnastics are nothing new. Ronald Reagan demonstrated this cognitive dissonance when he admitted to a scandal without admitting to a scandal. "A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages," he said. "My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not." If you can wrap your head around that and get it to make any damned sense at all, you probably vote Republican.

Given history, I think we can easily write off Republican arguments as BS. The arguments don't even have to have any logical consistency within themselves. So expecting there to be any continuity between separate arguments would be foolish. First, we have to privatize everything government does, because the private sector is superior to government in every way. Then, we've got to keep government out of an industry, because government would put all of these superior private companies out of business. Pick a belief and stick with it, because believing everything is pretty much the same thing as believing nothing.

But that's not the case here. Republicans believe what's convenient to believe -- or, at least, they make the most convenient arguments. What they really believe is that the interests of corporations are more important than the interests of the consumers. The problem is that voters are consumers, so you have to put things in a way that isn't 100% honest. You have to get people to vote for screwing themselves.

This corporatism is a bipartisan belief, infecting both parties, but the GOP has the more severe case. If you doubt that, show me a pro-labor Republican or two. Show me the Republican who believes that government's role is to police and regulate industry.

So the public option is a bad thing because government is just too good at competing in the insurance industry. At the same time, government can't do anything right. Government insurance would be the worst thing ever, because you'll find a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, instead of an insurance company bureaucrat. An insurance company bureaucrat is better than a government one. Don't ask why, because there is no answer to that question. It's like sending Americans to die in a war. That keeps Americans safe. It doesn't make any sense, it's just an argument that enough people will fail to think about. And when you fail to think something all the way through, when you stop thinking once you've reached the conclusion you're most comfortable with, then you've attained that state of Zen that is Republicanism.

And once that argument is shown to be false, you're supposed to forget anyone ever made it. If a bill with a public option reaches the president's desk, you'll be expected to forget that anyone predicted with absolute certainty that it would destroy our health care system. When it works out great and private insurers drop prices to compete with the public system, we're supposed to forget that this was never going to happen in a million years.

"Make no mistake about it, the president is for this strongly," Sen. Chuck Schumer said yesterday on Face the Nation. "There will be a public option in the final bill." A health care reform bill is going to leave a key senate committee with a public option included. 72% of Americans back a public health care plan and would be willing to pay more in taxes to get it.

Meanwhile, the private health insurance industry is dumping $1.4 million a day lobbying against it. In the end, the question here is who will win out -- the corporations or you. Republicans would argue that both would win if the public option were written out of a final bill, but it's hard to see how anything could change without one.

And I suppose that's the point. If we get the same damned thing as always, if the status quo is maintained, you'll be told that this is a win for you. Everything you were so unhappy with before will be what you'll be expected to be grateful for now.

It doesn't have to make sense, it's Republicanism. Just turn your brain off, forget logic and consistency, and be happy.

-Wisco


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Obama's Like Hitler - Except the Nazis Hate Him

John McCain perfected it in the 2008 campaign. You throw together a completely outrageous ad, run it in one market one time -- or post it on the web and never broadcast it -- and watch the media run with it. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did the same in '06 against John Kerry, but not to the extent that McCain did. The idea is that you create a "controversial" ad, then the media covers the controversy. Along the way, they play the ad again and again and again -- nationwide and for free. Eventually, the media finally wised up and stopped covering this controversy porn, but that hasn't stopped people from trying the tactic.

Specifically, an ad from the right wing group Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which is the creation of the PR firm Russo Marsh & Rogers, to air someplace on July 7 -- or so they say. In this new ad, we're informed that Barack Obama is exactly like Hitler.

Examiner:

The anti-Obama group, Our Country Deserves Better PAC, has announced that it will launch an advertising campaign featuring a video claiming that Obama is using tactics common to Hitler’s Germany. An audio teaser video... has been released as a fundraising tool to buy time to air the ad.

The ad lists a series of actions including the report ordered by the Bush administration on right wing extremists released by the Department of Homeland Security after Bush left office. They quote an unnamed Congressman saying, "They proposed a civilian security force and an American congressman warned it was exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany."

An unnamed "American congressman" -- always a credible source of historical analysis. By the way, there is no "civilian security force," that's a popular wingnut lie. Our "American congressman" is probably Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, who -- unfortunately for OCDB PAC -- later recanted.





But the important thing is to remember that Barack Obama is just like Hitler. Which makes this report, from the Anti-Defamation League, a little hard to square:

The Tea Party phenomenon, which began with anti-tax rallies staged across the country on April 15, 2009, will continue as activists in almost every state are planning similar events on July 4. Notably, white supremacists are again planning to participate. As they have done with other political and social issues, for example, promoting the Ron Paul campaign and using the immigration debate, white supremacists and anti-Semites are planning to exploit Tea Parties to disseminate their hateful views and recruit a larger following.

Stormfront, the most popular white supremacist Internet forum, is home to discussion between extremists eager to influence the events. In addition to circulating a list of local organizers and promoting planned rallies, Stormfront members are trying to find ways to involve themselves in the events. In posts to the forum, many voice their intent to attend the Tea parties for the purpose of cultivating an "organized grassroots White mass movement."

"A big crowd of irate White folks protesting the government seems like the perfect time and place for us [White Nationalists] to promote our cause, at least to my way of thinking," says one neo-nazi.

Because Barack Obama is exactly like Hitler. You go ahead and wallow in the irony of that for a minute. "It ought to give conservatives pause when their only usefulness in politics is serving as a recruiting opportunity for white supremacists," writes AMERICAblog's John Aravosis. Yeah, it should, but it won't.

Isn't it odd that you don't get these guys at lefty protests? Especially when you consider that the head of the Democratic Party is Hitler's ideological (if darker-skinned) twin? These guys never showed up at anti-war rallies and tried to get all the peaceniks onboard with this whole "white unity" idea. But, then again, the Iraq war was about killing Arabs for them, so white supremacists were big fans.

But doesn't it say something when the neo-nazis see all their opportunities as coming from the right? Doesn't it say something that white supremacists look at these "tea party protests" and see a sea of angry white people?

I realize that I'm coming close to practicing guilt-by-association here. Tea party wingnuts aren't nazis -- at least, not all of them -- they're just gullible morons who think that deficit spending began the day Obama took office. The point is the argument that Barack Obama is just like Hitler suffers from the fact that nazis hate him as much as the wingnuts do. If you want to determine who is the most Adolf-like out there, you really ought to follow the nazis and see where they go. The fact that they're heading off to their local tea party kind of punches a big hole in that "Obama=Hitler" argument.

-Wisco


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If You Publicly Wish for a Terrorist Attack, Your Wish May Come True

The country has moved away from it's core values. There's a commie in the White House who loves terrorists (and may not even be a citizen) and our first response to riots in the streets in Tehran wasn't naked belligerence. Democrats control both chambers of congress and are set on socializing the health care system, handing out your tax dollars to the undeserving, and enshrining abortion and homosexuality as respected institutions. Only one man can save us. Only one person has the wherewithal to drag America back to its true path. Only one individual can wake America up from this socialist nightmare.

And that man is Osama Bin Laden.

On Tuesday, Glenn Beck had the former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, on as a guest and that was his assessment of our chances. We can only be saved from the loonie leftists by Bin Laden. We need a spectacular terrorist attack and the bigger the death toll, the better.

BECK: Do you really, honestly believe that we have come to a place to where those very senior people in the highest offices of the land, Congress and the White House, really will not do the right thing in the end, that they won't see the error of their ways?

SCHEUER: No, sir, they will not. Not -- the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grassroots, bottom-up pressure, because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. Only -- it's an absurd situation. Again, only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.

Help us Obi-Wan, you're our only hope.

Somewhere along the line, Obama got it into his fool head that torture is bad. He decided that operating a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay was illegal. He decided to talk to Muslims in weird foreign countries, rather than threaten them with destruction. He decided that the US isn't a world all its own, disconnected from that other world where all the terrorists live. He must be stopped. And only Bin Laden can stop him.





While I realize that expecting a segment on Glenn Beck's TV Circus to be sane is expecting too much, you'd think that the former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit might tone it down a bit. Just because Beck offers programming aimed straight at crazy people, it's wrong to assume that only crazy people watch it. It's still national TV and, if you say something completely insane, everyone's going to know about it. FOX News is not a secret clubhouse.

But the truth is that, historically speaking, America has much more to fear from domestic terrorists than it does from foreign terrorists. The Southern Poverty Law Center has come out with a pretty comprehensive list of what they call "plots, conspiracies and racist rampages since Oklahoma City" and it's pretty big -- 75 incidents since April 19, 1995. All from right wing extremists. More than five a year, on average.

These aren't just drunken racists burning crosses in people's yards or gangs of thugs beating up gays. According to SPLC, this is "a detailed listing of major terrorist plots and racist rampages that have emerged from the American radical right in the years since Oklahoma City. These have included plans to bomb government buildings, banks, refineries, utilities, clinics, synagogues, mosques, memorials and bridges; to assassinate police officers, judges, politicians, civil rights figures and others; to rob banks, armored cars and other criminals; and to amass illegal machine guns, missiles, explosives and biological and chemical weapons. Each of these plots aimed to make changes in America through the use of political violence. Most contemplated the deaths of large numbers of people — in one case, as many as 30,000, or 10 times the number murdered on Sept. 11, 2001." It's very selective. This isn't an overly broad definition of terrorism, these incidents are inarguably terrorism.

Given this history of right wing nuts resorting so often to terrorism, is it really wise for a show aimed at right wing nuts to tell it's audience that only terrorism can save us? Frank Schaffer, a former evangelical leader who says he "quit the evangelical movement in disgust," sees this sort of thing as all too common and unbelievably dangerous.

There's a biblical story about the stoning to death of St. Stephen, where the yet-to-be-converted-apostle Paul didn't throw the deadly stones himself but stood holding the coats of the people doing the killing. Similarly, the right-wing leadership, are "holding the coats" of present and future violent actors. These coat-holders sow the seeds of hate with their words, then pretend horror when those words are taken seriously.

"Who has been beating the anti-immigrant drum?" Schaffer asks. "Who has been calling abortion doctors 'murderers?' Who has been saying that Obama will take away our guns? Who is ratcheting up the anti-Obama hysteria?"

And now we can ask, "Who is saying that terrorism would be good for America?"

Get ready for more of this. On July 4, the right is planning more of their "Tea Party protests" -- a series of astroturf events disguised as grassroots outrage. They serve no real purpose other than to keep those few people who still identify as Republicans mobilized -- the last ones changed nothing and public opinion is still on the side of Obama and the Democrats. Call it busy-work for the nutjobs. I'd imagine it's a successful fundraising tool as well.

But those last tea parties were also a showcase for racist slogans, historical revisionism, anti-government sentiments, and seething anger. Underneath it all was fear; fear that the US is becoming a less Christian nation, a less Republican nation, and a less white nation. People carried signs comparing Barack Obama to Hitler or Stalin -- and believed what was on those signs with all their little wingnut hearts. It's pounded into their talk-radio-disinformed brains on a daily basis; America is being destroyed, destroyed, destroyed, destroyed.

And they have to do something about it.

Michael Scheuer may believe that a major terrorist strike may be the only thing that can save America from itself, but he's wrong in saying that only Bin Laden can do it. History proves that the wingnuts are more than capable of doing it for him.

-Wisco


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The Bad Neighbors

Suppose you just moved into a neighborhood. You decide to throw a party and you invite your neighbors from next door. They get drunk, pee in your potted plants, chase your dog away, call you names, and hit on your wife. Here's the question; are you going to invite them back?

I'm willing to bet your answer is no. Those people are freakin' nuts and the last time you tried to get together with them, it turned out to be a big disaster. You're not sure what that smell is, but you doubt you're ever getting it out of your couch. This is the position Barack Obama finds himself in with Republicans. His big "post-partisan" neighborhood get-together didn't work out the way he thought it would -- mostly because some of the people in the neighborhood are dicks.

Yet, in a Washington Post piece about how Obama's going to have to reconcile the diversity within his own party, Greg Sargent found this nugget:

...GOP leaders complain that the phone calls and White House invitations have slacked off -- perhaps because Obama's early efforts to woo Republicans yielded few votes.

"I think that in the beginning they seemed a lot more willing to go in and engage with us," said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor.

"I asked Cantor spokesperson Joe Pounder if this was the real view of House GOP leaders," Sargent reports. "He argued that while Obama engaged at the outset -- watching the Super Bowl with GOPs, for instance -- there were now multiple cases where Republicans had been snubbed."

Imagine that.





It's no surprise that Obama has ideological diversity to deal with within his own party. In a two-party system, both parties are -- by necessity -- coalition parties. They represent the interests of many different constituencies. With the Republican party shrinking, the Democratic party necessarily grows and those constituencies previously represented by the GOP find themselves in the Democratic coalition now. The fact that Republicans are currently driving out the ideologically impure doesn't help their coalition any -- in fact, if they succeed the way most seem to want to, they won't be a coalition anymore. The Republican party will be one wingnut constituency standing alone. The party of Lincoln would be kicking out the labor-friendly Lincoln these days and, as much as they idolize their idealized version of him, Reagan would be too far to the left for them. Teddy Roosevelt was unceremoniously disowned by the party years ago and the name Eisenhower is never spoken.

While this has consequences for Obama and the Democrats, it also has consequences for the Republicans. As the Democratic party grows, the Republican party becomes more and more homogeneous. President Obama's post-partisan dreams fell apart when confronted with the remnants of the GOP -- they aren't interested in bipartisanship, they're interested in ideological purity. If Obama thought he could find compromise, he found an uncompromising party waiting for him.

Of course, the idea that the GOP would begin to complain about this is laughable. It is, after all, their own damned fault. They spending every waking minute calling Obama a socialist, accusing him of siding with terrorists, and floating seriously insane conspiracy theories. When Michele Bachmann says she won't cooperate with the census because she's worried that people are going to be rounded up and put into camps, you've kind of got a situation where compromise is impossible. Either they're convinced Obama is the devil or they want you to be convinced of it. Either way, they slap his hand away every time he reaches across the aisle. To be surprised that he's stopped reaching is either incredibly stupid or typically dishonest.

So Obama's bipartisanship will have to be of a sort of historical kind; he's going to have to build bridges between the more liberal Democrats and Democrats who would've been Republicans in previous years. His bipartisanship is going to have to be in reconciling the different de facto parties within his own coalition. If Republicans are finding themselves shut out of those meetings, it's because they've locked themselves out and thrown the key in the Potomac.

-Wisco


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