Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is on target when he savaged right wing Republicans and their wimpy enablers that stood by as the party was hijacked by loopy extremists that have worked to drag this nation into the gutter.
All across the nation, there are mainstream Republicans lamenting how the party has grown more and more insular, more and more rigid. This year, they have an excellent chance to defeat President Obama, yet the wingers have trashed the party’s reputation by swinging from one embarrassing and unelectable option to the next: Bachmann, Trump, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.
But where have these party leaders been over the past five years, when all the forces that distort the G.O.P. were metastasizing? Where were they during the rise of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck? Where were they when Arizona passed its beyond-the-fringe immigration law? Where were they in the summer of 2011 when the House Republicans rejected even the possibility of budget compromise? They were lying low, hoping the unpleasantness would pass.
The wingers call their Republican opponents RINOs, or Republican In Name Only. But that’s an insult to the rhino, which is a tough, noble beast. If RINOs were like rhinos, they’d stand up to those who seek to destroy them. Actually, what the country needs is some real Rhino Republicans. But the professional Republicans never do that. They’re not rhinos. They’re Opossum Republicans. They tremble for a few seconds then slip into an involuntary coma every time they’re challenged aggressively from the right.
Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength. Under their influence, we’ve had a primary campaign that isn’t really an argument about issues. It’s a series of heresy trials in which each of the candidates accuse the others of tribal impurity. Two kinds of candidates emerge from this process: first, those who are forceful but outside the mainstream; second, those who started out mainstream but look weak and unprincipled because they have spent so much time genuflecting before those who despise them.
Neither is likely to win in the fall. Before the G.O.P. meshugana campaign, independents were leaning toward the G.O.P. But, in the latest Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll, Obama leads Mitt Romney among independents by 49 percent to 27 percent.
The problem is that the GOP has put “too much God” into politics. When you turn every issue into a holy war it makes it impossible to compromise and find reasonable solutions. If one stakes out a position in the name of God, if the position deviates, even slightly, it is portrayed by wing nuts as unprincipled and unGodly. This explains the gridlock in Congress and the feckless or fanatical candidates running for President.
Clearly, the solution is someone like Santorum winning the nomination and getting crushed by a 20-point margin and horribly damaging the GOP’s brand in the process. The wreckage has to be so severe and complete that the Religious Right is expelled from the GOP. Or, the remaining Wall Street Republicans are so sickened by the nuts that they stop enabling them by cutting off their financial support.
Until this major realignment occurs, the GOP — and America– will be hostage to extreme and unsavory elements who will continue weakening the foundation of this country.
The Pat Robertson/Ralph Reed/Tony Perkins/ Rick Santorum/Michele Bachmann crowd have been in power long enough. It is time they are permanently expelled from the GOP and forced to the margins before they further corrupt and undermine this nation.
The Republican Party has always had loopy extremists, but traditionally they were never given a serious shot at wining the Party’s presidential nomination. Cantankerous screwballs like Jesse Helms (R-NC) were kept in their dank, musty cellars and only trotted out to help realistic candidates win in the South, but never to serve as actual contenders.
After more than thirty years of pandering to and then being hijacked by the Religious Right, the core of the GOP has rotted. The only way one can win the nomination is to be crazy or fake it. This has led to a bizarre nominating contest, where the candidates are tripping over themselves to exude ridiculousness and radicalism.
So far, here are the Top Ten greatest wing nut moments of the race:
10)Mitt Romney’s Pander: Mitt Romney is infamous for flip-flopping and pandering. But he may have hit a new low when he told the rabid crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was “severely conservative.” I guess “archconservative” is too namby-pamby for this race.
9)HPV Vaccine: Gov. Rick Perry was pummeled by his opponents for his executive order mandating the HPV vaccine be given to schoolgirls in Texas. Ignoring the science, Rep. Michele Bachmann blasted Perry for giving “government injections” of a “potentially dangerous drug.” She then told a bizarre story about a person she had met on the campaign trail: “I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate. She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.”
8)The Choice: On ABC’s The View, Herman Cain was asked if he thought being gay was a choice. “Well, you show me the science that it’s not and I’ll be persuaded,” Cain replied. “Right now it’s my opinion against the opinions of others who feel differently. That’s just a difference of opinions.”
7) Booing a Soldier: The crowd at a Republican debate booed Stephen Hill, an openly gay Army Captain serving in Iraq. None of the allegedly patriotic candidates onstage defended the soldier or upbraided the audience for their disrespectful behavior.
6) Brokeback Perry: Rick Perry’s “war on religion” ad turned into a major farce that became a parody magnet. In the ad, Perry whines that gays could serve openly in the military, while children could not openly celebrate Christmas. It backfired when it was noted that Perry wore a coat that looked identical to one worn by one of the gay characters in the movie Brokeback Mountain. The video scored the most “dislikes” ever for a YouTube video.
5) Racist Rock: Who can forget Gov. Rick Perry’s racist rock. According to the Washington Post: “In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance. ‘Niggerhead,’” it read.
4) Let them die: At one debate Dr. Ron Paul seemed to suggest that a person without health insurance should be left for dead. “What he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself. My advice to him would have a major medical policy, but not before…That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks,” Paul said, as the audience cheered.
3) Fiscal Lunacy: In an early debate the moderator said: “I’m going to ask a question to everyone here on the stage. Say you had a deal, a real spending cuts deal, 10-to-1, as Byron said, spending cuts to tax increases…. Who on this stage would walk away from that deal? Can you raise your hand if you feel so strongly about not raising taxes, you’d walk away on the 10-to-1 deal?” All eight candidates raised their hands, showing an alarming level of economic extremism.
2) Bachmann Investigation: Rep. Michele Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, denied that his clinic practiced “ex-gay” therapy. But a Truth Wins Out undercover investigation revealed that he was not telling the truth. This helped stall Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s momentum and made it difficult for the campaign to portray her as mainstream.
1) Santorum Campaign: It is impossible to pick one incident from Rick Santorum, so we will pick the entire campaign. From his words on women combat troops, to his ties to Opus Dei, to his recent comments on JFK’s speech making him want to “throw up,” to his calling Obama a snob for wanting a college education available for Americans, to his stance on birth control, to his comments about Satan. It is not news when Santorum is extreme – only when he sounds reasonable.
That silver lining you thought you glimpsed? It was a just a toxic bit of mercury seeping out of the cave where these GOP contenders live. While the race continues to be entertaining, the mood will turn quite dour and serious if any of these characters are actually elected president.
There’s an interesting piece in the Times today that compares who is actually voting in the Republican primary with the voting population at large. It goes a long way toward explaining why this campaign has, in the year 2012, gotten to a place where we’re actually talking about whether contraception is okay, and why, in a nation where clear majorities support full marriage equality, the Republican primary contenders are competing with each other see who can hate gays the most. Read it all, but here’s a bit:
There is no other way to put this without resorting to demographic bluntness: the small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian and unrepresentative of the nation at large.
None of that is a surprise. But when you look at the numbers, it’s stunning how little this Republican primary electorate resembles the rest of the United States. They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012.
Given the level of media attention, we know an election of great significance is happening on the Republican side. But it’s occurring in a different place, guided by talk-radio extremists and religious zealots, with only a vague resemblance to the states where it has taken place. From this small world have emerged a host of nutty, retrograde positions, unpopular with the vast American majority.
He goes on to discuss how low turn-out is for this Republican primary. The nation has simply moved beyond these extreme wingnut positions, but to my eyes, it seems like the wingnuts are having some sort of last “hurrah.” Republicans hate their candidates, but the fringe that’s deciding this primary wouldn’t like any candidate who actually could appeal to a majority of Americans. At the end of the piece, the writer sums it up by saying that the voters in the Republican primary are truly “a nation unto itself,” and that’s the long and short of it. The rest of us, of course, support contraception and human rights and at least some semblance of an attachment to reality. Meanwhile, the very loud Republican primary continues with wingnuts yelling at each other about how Obama is a communist and women should hold an aspirin between their knees to prevent childbirth.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama withstood a barrage of criticism by the Catholic Bishops the past few weeks over this issue — and the New York Times reports today that his popularity rating has reached the critical 50-percent mark.
The rise in his polling numbers primarily reflects the economy. However, it also shows the impotence of the Catholic bishops and how their campaign against women has backfired terribly. If Rick Santorum gets the nomination, look for a major backlash from women against the GOP and the biggest gender gap in the modern history of presidential politics.
Combine these factors with Republican Big Government overreaches on issues that affect women — such as Virginia’s draconian and intrusive ultrasound abortion bill that just passed.
The GOP’s attack on women, the intransigent extremism of the Catholic bishops, and Santorum’s Bronze Age mentality — may spell a landslide for the ever-more-popular President Obama.
A Brooklyn Rabbi, Yehuda Levin, wrote that gay men should consider chemical castration “as you do with cancer” to stop their same-sex feelings. Levin made his comments in a Letter to the Editor in response to a groundbreaking op-ed written in the Jewish Press by Chaim Levin. (No relation). The op-ed was important because it was the first time that this conservative publication published a column written from the perspective of an openly gay former Orthodox Jew.
“As you do with cancer, you never stop trying to find a better treatment to cure yourself,” wrote Rabbi Yehuda Levin in his Jewish Press letter. “If all therapies fail, as a last resort you use chemicals to stop the urge to act in a forbidden manner. (This resolution is ordered by European courts for offenders and it works.) Unpleasant, surely; but better than committing adultery, homosexuality or incest.”
Rabbi Levin’s medieval mindset is an embarrassment to Judaism and he should be deeply ashamed of himself. Levin’s anti-gay comments were cruel and insensitive to Jews everywhere who have felt the sting of intolerance and discrimination.
Rabbi Levin, who leads Congregation Mevakshei Hashem in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, is no stranger to anti-gay controversies. Last year he made news by claiming that the new marriage equality law in New York helped cause the earthquake that shook the East Coast. The rabbi opposed a gay pride parade in Jerusalem in 2010 calling it a “sodomy celebration” and “nothing less than the spiritual rape of the Holy Land.”
However, Levin is most remembered for helping GOP gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino write anti-gay remarks that badly backfired. After Paladino retreated and apologized to the LGBT community, Levin dropped his support complaining that the politician, “folded like a cheap camera.”
Clearly, Rabbi Yehuda Levin is the Jewish version of Fred Phelps, the hateful Kansas preacher best known for protesting LGBT events with “God Hates Fags” signs. The fact that so many anti-gay organizations team up with him proves that they will scrape the bottom of the barrel to show that their ‘Christian Nation’ agenda has diverse support.
Indeed, Levin is a member of the advisory committee of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation. Last month, the rabbi joined some of America’s most radical extremists to protest the Southern Poverty Law Center for labeling a few anti-gay organizations “hate groups.”
The Rabbi was angered after he read an historic op-ed in the Jewish Press by Chaim Levin, who detailed being abused at the hands of a therapist referred by the “ex-gay” organization Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH). The co-founder of JONAH, Arthur Abba Goldberg, is a convicted felon who concealed his lurid past until it was uncovered in a joint Truth Wins Out and South Florida Gay News investigation. Chaim originally spoke out about the harm caused by reparative therapy in a video produced by Truth Wins Out.
The reaction to Chaim’s Jewish Press op-ed by anti-gay activists was ferocious. According to the newspaper: “Following the publication of this op-ed, a number of Jewish Press advertisers were approached and threatened. They were told to stop advertising with the Jewish Press.”
Instead of backing down, the Jewish Press wrote a brave editorial defending Levin’s op-ed and boldly claimed that, “The Jewish Press won’t be silenced.” In support of the publication, TWO started an online Change.org petition that generated more than 3,000 letters from people who thanked the Jewish Press for their bravery and fairness.
Levin is not the only Jewish anti-gay extremist making news. Australia’s Rabbi Shimon Cowen published a report that claimed an effective way to counter anti-Semitic bullying is to funnel public money away from anti-homophobia bullying campaigns.
It all started with fireworks and a massive fundamentalist prayer rally in Houston’s Reliant Stadium — but by the time Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race today, he didn’t stand a prayer. Perry talked a lot about Jesus and the second coming, but who knew that he would turn out to be the second coming of Fred Thompson?
When Perry entered the race the pundits hyperventilated and immediately declared him the frontrunner. Then misfortune struck the campaign: Rick Perry spoke.
When people actually saw the man behind the myth they were so disappointment that they returned to Mitt Romney’s fold, then embraced a pizza guy who knew so little about foreign relations that he had nothing to say about Libya and was unsure if China had nuclear weapons. Once Cain’s campaign was hit with allegations of serial sexual harassment, the “family values” electorate flexed their moral muscle by lining up behind a serial adulterer in Newt Gingrich.
Once Gingrich petered out (he could still come back to life like a horror movie villain) the fickle GOP voters tricked with Rick Santorum, the admitted last man standing alone at the dance. When the voters woke up with a hangover, they turned over in bed, looked at who they were sleeping with and realized why Santorum had been jilted and standing by himself on the dance floor.
During the long, grueling campaign of clowns, the voters never returned to Rick Perry — even as he invoked Jesus more often that Pat Robertson. While the Texas governor looked great on paper, he was revealed to be a paper tiger. Now he joins Michele Bachmann as a Christian conservative candidate who bit the dust.
“Increasingly LGBT people are empowered, not ashamed,” he said. “They’re attacking us, and we’re confronting them. We’re holding them accountable and calling them on their lies and their ‘pious baloney,’ to borrow Newt Gingrich’s phrase. America is waking up to the fact that we’re not bogeymen, and we’re not coming to do any harm, and that we’re your daughters and sons and neighbors, sometimes your parents, your co-workers, friends, colleagues. The Republican party, in this desperate [nod] to its dying evangelical base, is just ramping up the homophobia, and they’re doing themselves real long-term damage.
“What’s interesting is that, you look at who’s been doing the most hate speech: Bachmann? She’s out. Herman Cain? He’s out. Perry? He’s all but out. Santorum? He’s running fourth, he’s trailing even in conservative South Carolina,” Savage continued.
“It’s not winning them the election anymore. It’s not 1992; Pat Buchanan can’t get up and give a ‘gay rights never, family values forever’ speech at the Republican National Convention anymore. Times have changed.”
This is why, though, if we step back from the GOP primaries and look at the state of the whole movement, the Religious Right is becoming more extreme in their rhetoric against LGBT people. They are desperately trying to hold on to the last few clingers, as they’re well aware that the younger generations just aren’t replacing the older generations when it comes to anti-gay bigotry. They won’t admit it, but they know they’ve lost the overall war. In the piece above, we find Dan wondering whether the GOP will ever look the same again, once they truly realize that the bigot thing doesn’t play with the general population anymore. I wonder the same thing, because it’s really not like the current Republican party believes IN anything.
Reporting from Iowa, Chris Johnson of The Washington Blade uncovers the thoughts of young, gay Iowa caucus attendees, who they support in the GOP, and why.
The common themes:
“the candidate’s business background”
“limited government”
“what really made this country, and what made us who we are”
“core values of the U.S. Constitution”
Given eight years of Bush-Cheney, and given some current GOP presidential candidates’ support for global corporations that use government to tax and manipulate the American people — progressives may chortle at young Republicans’ blind assumption that the GOP favors limited government and the Bill of Rights.
But whose fault is that?
I know of few if any prominent progressives who celebrate “entrepreneurship, “limited government,” or “American values.” Instead, most folks are talking about some “99 percent” mathematical mumbo-jumbo. What next — square roots? Exponents? (I say that as someone who favors a restoration of Clinton-era taxes upon the upper class.)
I also know of few progressives who celebrate the ability of public-school children to pray as they and their parents wish, without interference from pushy rival churches or cults. Instead, we are quoted siding with religious “minorities” against “Christian students” who are inaccurately portrayed as champions of religious freedom (albeit only for like-minded Christians).
We are not celebrating the freedom to learn and protecting historic truths, so much as we are “opposing bullies” (allowing the GOP to redefine bully) and “changing curricula” (allowing the GOP to pretend it’s not changing curricula and revising history to erase all minorities).
Progressives also are not explicitly celebrating individual responsibility, entrepreneurship and initiative. We are not communicating the protection of our own families’ wealth and achievement from redistribution by either ruling party to its donors.
Many of us may assume these values have been self-evident in our actions — but they haven’t. People ranging from Mitt Romney to Tim Tebow to Fox News exploit our failure to communicate with the language and customs of middle America. So long as they are the primary source of talk about these values, we allow them to own the conversation.
Until we rethink and translate our language of economics and values, the progressive message will continue to be framed by others. Progressives and young moderate midwestern Republicans might as well be distant tribes speaking different languages, both ripe for mistranslation and political exploitation. Under present conditions, the young Republicans who will likely lead large swaths of America in 10 to 15 years will continue to tune out progressives’ sometimes-dated foreign language of (socialist?) equality, (LGBTQIA?) alphabet soup, (Gloria Steinem?) sexism, (transvestite?) gender norms, and so forth. Certainly, public understanding of sex and gender must be advanced — but in plain English, not Ivy League lingo that is so easily twisted by yellow journalists.
So long as we dismiss or ridicule flyover country instead of speaking their language, we dismiss our audience — and deny ourselves access to many of our future leaders.
Oh, Mittens! You’ve gone and rustled up the ire of the wackiest fringe rabbis in the land! Why, they have given you a new title, that of “dangerous homosexualist!” Oh, dear:
The statement today comes from the Rabbinical Alliance of America, which describes itself as an organization of 850 Orthodox Jewish rabbis in the U.S. and Canada, who serve some 500,000 religious Jews.
[...]
The statement attributed to Rabbi Yehuda Levin said that Hannukah marks the defeat of the Syrian Greek efforts “to impose their pagan culture on the Jewish people.” That included, he said, the increased emphasis on homosexual behavior.
“While our organization does not make any endorsements of political candidates, in view of the disastrous national decline in morality, we are compelled to condemn Mitt Romney’s support and promotion of the immoral homosexual lifestyle and agenda,” his statement said. “While we sympathize with those challenged by homosexual urges, or a desire for minors or adultery, they all remain prohibited activities that debase the practitioners and demoralize society. Gov. Romney over a long political career has earned the title: ‘Dangerous Homosexualist’ – one who constantly advances the militant anti-religious, anti-society, immoral homosexual agenda to the detriment of family people.”
Oh, Yehuda, for him to “constantly” be advancing anything, he’d have to be capable of having a single opinion on an issue for more than five minutes.
I am happy, though, to have a new thing to call him: Mittens The Dangerous Homosexualist. It’s like a whole new Mormon superhero!
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is on target when he savaged right wing Republicans and their wimpy enablers that stood by as the party was hijacked by loopy extremists that have worked to drag this nation into the gutter.
It all started with fireworks and a massive fundamentalist prayer rally in Houston’s 
Given eight years of Bush-Cheney, and given some current GOP presidential candidates’ support for global corporations that use government to tax and manipulate the American people — progressives may chortle at young Republicans’ blind assumption that the GOP favors limited government and the Bill of Rights.
