Will Gays Be Virginia Republicans' 2019 Bogeyman?

For many years the three pillars of the Virginia Republican Party's get out the vote effort has been god - claiming to be the party of true Christians - guns - opposing any form of gun control - and gays - depicting gays as perverts who threaten families and children. With control of the Virginia General Assembly at stake in Virginia's November 2019 elections, early indications are that the Virginia GOP will likely double down on all three as the campaign season heats up.  On guns, the arrogant adjournment of the special session on gun control that Democrats will be depicted as seeking to confiscate guns.  On the issue of gays, recent attacks on Adam Ebbin, Virginia's sole gay state senator, suggests gays - and the likely enactment of LGBT non-discrimination protections by a Democrat controlled General Assembly - may once again be demonized to excite the bigoted GOP base in Virginia.  A piece in The Washingtonian looks at shots made against Ebbin. Here are article highligts:

Shortly before the Fourth of July, a rather remarkable set of quotes appeared in the Washington Post.

Virginia state Senator Adam Ebbin, a speaker intoned at a recent National Rifle Association event in Fredericksburg, is “the only openly gay senator in our Senate” and has an agenda that “means infanticide is coming, all the gun bills.” State Senator Bryce E. Reeves claimed Ebbin supported raising the minimum wage to as much as $25 and that he’d heard Ebbin say Democrats planned to “radically change Virginia” if they won control of the state this fall.

The nasty comments, which came just days before a scheduled special legislative session on gun control, were taken as a sign of how polarized the state had become. But they also thrust Ebbin into the headlines in a way he wasn’t expecting—although he’s long been a champion for LGBTQ rights in Virginia, he didn’t think his colleagues would invoke his identity to turn off voters. Why Ebbin? It doesn’t take a keen political strategist to come up with a theory: In a state increasingly torn between its growing urbanized population around Washington and a beleaguered rural conservative demographic, a gay liberal from the DC suburbs makes a great target. “I was really disappointed to be used as a bogeyman to divide Virginians just because of who I am,” Ebbin says. “My sexual orientation shouldn’t be relevant to gun safety.” 

November’s general election will determine whether Virginia Democrats will take back control of the House and Senate, where Republicans currently hold a razor-thin majority. If that theory is correct, Ebbin’s name may ricochet around a lot more political events in the Virginia’s red areas before this state election cycle is done.

Ebbin was born in Long Island in 1963. His passion for politics began in grade school, where he would walk around his classrooms wearing a “Ford for President” button and worked for a moderate New York Republican running for Congress. While his party affiliation has shifted, his interest in legislation hasn’t waned.

In 1989, his college friends tipped him off about a reasonably priced condo in Alexandria, which was all of the convincing he needed to move to the area. In 1992, he co-founded the Virginia Partisans Gay/Lesbian Democratic Club and spent several years working on the campaigns of two gay elected officials, Arlington County Board’s Jay Fisette and Alexandria City Council’s Paul Smedberg. As a day job, he sold advertising space for Washington City Paper. 

Ebbin says that he felt isolated when he first arrived in Richmond. “In 2004, there was a lot of hostility to LGBT people with anti-gay legislation, whether it was anti-gay adoption, anti-gay straight alliance, anti-gay marriage,” he says. “But I’m proud to say that has changed drastically; we’re in a position where we’re promoting pro-LGBT legislation, and I’ve been really honored to carry legislation for non-discrimination in hiring and housing in Virginia.” 

After eight years in the House of Delegates, Ebbin ran for the Virginia Senate. His platform focused on defending LGBTQ Virginians, investing in public schools, and welcoming immigrants. He faced the first Republican who bothered to contest the district since 1999 and won with 64.7 percent of the vote. He’s run without a Republican opponent ever since and represents south Arlington, parts of Alexandria, and Mount Vernon—an increasingly diverse, growing area that’s an example of the sweeping demographic and political changes in the state.

Reeves sort of apologized to Ebbin: “I certainly meant no disrespect to him or anyone in the LGBTQ community,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Ebbin says the two have been in touch briefly since the comments surfaced. He’s saddened by the rift, but he says it makes fits the tone set by the current occupant of the White House. “As long as the current president is in office, Trump will divide people among Virginia just as he is across the country.” As an important election approaches, Ebbin says, “you never know what tactics Republicans will turn to next.”

LGBT Virginians best brace themselves for yet another round of attacks from Virginia Republicans. 

Republican Legislators Larger Bathroom Threat than Transgender Individuals

One of the scare tactics used by Republican legislators in Georgia and North Carolina (as well as here in Virginia) to push for passage of anti-gay and anti-transgender laws is to depict transgender women as a threat in restrooms - seemingly, no thought was given to the consequences of forcing transgender men to use women's rooms.  The irony, however, is that there are ZERO cases of transgender individuals engaging in misconduct in restrooms.  The same cannot be said for Republican legislators themselves.  A piece in Gay Star News looks at this reality that it is Republicans legislators who are the most serious threat in restrooms.  Here are highlights (check out the link to a list of Republicans involved in sexual misconduct):

[S]tatistics show no trans person arrested for sexual misconduct in a public bathroom, BUT surprise, surprise (or not?), three Republicans lawmakers had been arrested for doing very naughty things in there. Who are they?

Well the guys at Newnownext didn’t have to dig too far into recent history to find these bathroom-seeking politicians:

Back in 1981, Mississippi congressman Jon Hinson was arrested for engaging in oral sex with a male staffer in the House of Representatives bathroom.

In 2007, Idaho Republican Larry Craig was arrested in the restroom of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer.

Also in 2007, Florida state Representative Bob Allen was arrested after he agreed to give an undercover police officer $20 for oral sex in the men’s room of a public park.

Evidently, some U.S. legislators have a whole lot of homework to do before they can make better decisions with regards to what rights should be given to the people, and what rights should be controlled.

Well, since we are on the topic of hypocrisy, here’s an extensive list of the biggest sex offenders coming from the U.S. Republican Party.

Oh, and one more person to add to the list: Alabama Governor Robert Bentley.

The National Republican Party Is Behind the Push for Anti-LGBT Laws

The RNC likes to act as if the anti-LGBT measures being filed in state legislatures is the result of local desires and initiatives rather than part of a national campaign akin to what was done in 2004 with anti-gay marriage constitutional amendments aimed at turning out the Christofascist vote.  Now, as Pink News is reporting, behind the anti-gay and anti-trans efforts across America is a RNC resolution pushing Republicans at the state level to once again use anti-LGBT animus to stir up the hideous Christofascist base of the party in the run up to the 2016 federal elections.  It's no coincidence that hate group leader (and KKK lover) Tony Perkins has again been appointed to the GOP Platform Committee.  Here  story highlights:

A resolution passed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) has shown the party is coordinating trans discrimination on a national level.

It was passed and approved by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus where he condemned President Obama and his “government overreach”.

“The Republican National Committee calls on the Department of Education to rescind its interpretation of Title IX that wrongly includes facility use issues by transgender students,” the resolution reads.

“The Republican National Committee encourages state legislatures to enact laws that protect student privacy and limit the use of restrooms, locker rooms and similar facilities to members of the sex to whom the facility is designated.”

A number of states have already taken up the party’s call including Virginia, Indiana and Tennessee, but some critics have said this top down approach by the GOP goes against its overarching ethos of small government.

Elsewhere in the country, a number of bills sit before state legislatures aimed at discriminating trans people.

In Indiana, Senator Jim Tomes wants to make it illegal for people to use a bathroom that isn’t for their biological gender.

Local trans advocates say it’s a scare tactic, but the Senator has said “it’s just men use men’s restrooms and dressing rooms and women use the women’s restrooms and dressing rooms”.

In Tennessee, a lawmaker is trying to prevent schools from building gender neutral bathrooms and in Florida, a Miami-based Republican is saying the state should follow North Carolina’s lead.

The Great Republican Revolt

A lengthy piece in The Atlantic looks at the war raging within the Republican Party.  Part of the warfare stems from the shortsighted  welcoming of the Christofascists into the GOP.  But another major cause of the battle for the party's soul is the fact that the so-called GOP establishment has based its policies on benefiting Wall Street and the wealthy to the detriment of working class Americans.  Yes, appeals to racism, religious extremism, and anti-immigrant hatred for a long time have duped the GOP base to vote against its own financial and economic best interests. Now, those tools of distracting the base may be losing their power.  The result is that the GOP establishment's preferred candidates - Jeb Bush being the starkest example - are failing even as the Trump insurgency goes on undiminished.  The article ends with options confronting the GOP elite.  Here are article excerpts:

The angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how white male became an accusation rather than a description.

You can measure their pessimism in polls that ask about their expectations for their lives—and for those of their children. On both counts, whites without a college degree express the bleakest view. You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age.

White Middle Americans express heavy mistrust of every institution in American society: not only government, but corporations, unions, even the political party they typically vote for—the Republican Party of Romney, Ryan, and McConnell, which they despise as a sad crew of weaklings and sellouts. They are pissed off. And when Donald Trump came along, they were the people who told the pollsters, “That’s my guy.”

They often don’t think in ideological terms at all. But they do strongly feel that life in this country used to be better for people like them—and they want that older country back. . . . . they lean Republican because they fear the Democrats want to take from them and redistribute to Americans who are newer, poorer, and in their view less deserving—to “spread the wealth around,” in candidate Barack Obama’s words to “Joe the Plumber” back in 2008. Yet they have come to fear more and more strongly that their party does not have their best interests at heart.

A majority of Republicans worry that corporations and the wealthy exert too much power. Their party leaders work to ensure that these same groups can exert even more. Mainstream Republicans were quite at ease with tax increases on households earning more than $250,000 in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the subsequent stimulus. Their congressional representatives had the opposite priorities. 

Their rebellion against the power of organized money has upended American politics in ways that may reverberate for a long time. To understand what may come next, we must first review the recent past.

Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle. In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.

Meanwhile, the dividing line that used to be the most crucial of them all—class—has increasingly become a division within the parties, not between them. Since 1984, nearly every Democratic presidential-primary race has ended as a contest between a “wine track” candidate who appealed to professionals  . . . . and a “beer track” candidate who mobilized the remains of the old industrial working class . . . . . The Republicans have their equivalent in the battles between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” candidates. Until this decade, however, both parties—and especially the historically more cohesive Republicans—managed to keep sufficient class peace to preserve party unity.

Not anymore, at least not for the Republicans.   The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999. The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not.

It was these pessimistic Republicans who powered the Tea Party movement of 2009 and 2010. They were not, as a rule, libertarians looking for an ultraminimal government. The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”

Yet even as the Republican Main Street protested Obamacare, it rejected the hardening ideological orthodoxy of Republican donors and elected officials. A substantial minority of Republicans—almost 30 percent—said they would welcome “heavy” taxes on the wealthy, according to Gallup.

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.

The rank and file did not like it. But they could not stop it. The base kept elevating “not Romneys” into first place, and each rapidly failed or fizzled; Romney, supported by a cumulative total of $139 million in primary funds by March 2012, trundled on.

Romney ultimately lost the presidential election, of course, to the surprise and dismay of a party elite confident of victory until the very end. One might have expected this shock to force a rethink. The Republicans had now lost four out of the past six presidential elections. . . . . And yet, within hours of Romney’s defeat, Republican donors, talkers, and officials converged on the maximally self-exculpating explanation. The problem had not been the plan to phase out Medicare for people younger than 55. Or the lack of ideas about how to raise wages. Or the commitment to ending health-insurance coverage for millions of working-age Americans. Or the anthems to wealth creation and entrepreneurship in a country increasingly skeptical of both.

Instead of holding on to their base and adding Hispanics, Republicans alienated their base in return for no gains at all. By mid-2015, a majority of self-identified Republicans disapproved of their party’s congressional leadership—an intensity of disapproval never seen by the Republican majority of the 1990s nor by Democrats during their time in the majority after the 2006 midterm elections.

In fact, disapproval had flared into an outright revolt of the Republican base in the summer of 2014.  

[W]ithin five weeks of his formal declaration of candidacy on June 15, Bush’s campaign had been brutally rejected by the GOP rank and file.   From Jupiter Island, Florida, to Greenwich, Connecticut; from Dallas’s Highland Park to Sea Island, Georgia; from Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to California’s Newport Beach, the baffled question resounded: What went wrong?

The mutiny of the 2016 election cycle has been different. . . . . What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom.

Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.

Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.

What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans. 

The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.

Fear Won the GOP Presidential Debate

Overall, there seems to be any consensus as to who won the Republican Presidential debate last night.  Yes, Jebbie Bush got in a few licks against The Donald and reminded the audience that the Geneva Conventions still exist (not that his idiot brother and Dick Cheney let that bother them), but seemingly there is little movement to be seen in polling numbers.  But, as a piece in Politico, there was indeed one winner: fear or perhaps more accurately, fear mongering.  And the overall solution the GOP clown card offered is belligerence, calls for "troops on the ground," and, of course, killing Muslims.  In the process, the would be commanders in chief showed most were not ready for prime time.  Ted Cruz may hay released classified information, Chris Christie talked about talking face to face with the king of Jordan who has been dead for 16 years, and as noted in a prior post, Ben Carson advocated for killing women and children in the fight against ISIS.  Sadly, the mainstream media is doing its best to whip up fear and anxiety and, thus are aiding the GOP.  Here are highlights from the Politico piece:

[I]t’s accurate to say that the debate was all about terrorism—how to fight it, how to keep Americans safe from it, and how much Americans should be freaking out about it. CNN’s panelists asked no questions about jobs, wages, the impending Fed rate hike, health care, energy, infrastructure, the federal budget, the federal deficit, the Supreme Court, financial reform, abortion, race, or any other domestic issue unrelated to homeland security. “Americans are more afraid today than they’ve been at any time since 9/11,” Wolf Blitzer declared, and the main theme of the debate—from the candidates, but arguably from the network as well—was that they ought to be even more afraid.

Immigration was a prominent topic, but mostly in the context of keeping jihadist refugees out of the U.S. Energy came up, but only in the context of reducing U.S. dependence on oil from terror-supporting nations. Guns came up, but only in the context of Obama’s proposal to deny guns to Americans on the terror watch list. The economy barely came up, although Kasich did say strengthening the economy would help defeat ISIS. Rand Paul brought up the federal debt in his closing statement, calling it the greatest threat to U.S. security.

Polls after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks have found that terrorism has become the most pressing issue for the public. It’s a complex issue, worthy of debate, and last night’s focus on terror produced several interesting disagreements among the Republicans—over regime change and foreign entanglements, over domestic surveillance, over Syrian refugees and border security. But CNN’s implicit assumption was that non-terror issues are no longer as important for 2016. “You all have different strategies for keeping America safe and that will be the focus of our debate tonight,” Blitzer said at the outset.

There was little acknowledgment during the conversation that Americans have anything to fear from anything other than terrorists, or that the terrorist threat could be anything but dire. In fact, since 9/11, more Americans have been killed by lightning strikes than by terror attacks—and way more Americans have been killed by car accidents or preventable diseases. But that doesn’t mean Americans feel safe, especially when cable news is wall-to-wall terror coverage. There’s a fine line between covering anxiety and creating it.

Rand Paul also suggested last night that Americans shouldn’t overreact, that “we defeat terrorists by showing them we don’t fear them.” But that was a minority view on the Republican stage, as the candidates generally agreed that our military is in shambles, our president is weak, and ISIS is an existential threat. There was no sense that the U.S. spends more on its military than the next seven countries combined, and little mention of the thousands of bombs the U.S. and its allies are already dropping on ISIS.

Nobody really explained how all that belligerence would defuse a threat that can manifest itself in homegrown Americans, like the health inspector who killed his colleagues in San Bernardino. And there wasn’t much discussion of the potential for military action abroad to create unintended consequences. But near the end of the debate, Trump complained that more than a decade of U.S. intervention in the Middle East has achieved nothing, while costing trillions of dollars that could have been spent upgrading U.S. roads, bridges and airports.

It was a profound attack on the interventionist Republican foreign policy of the 21^st century; Carly Fiorina immediately pointed out, correctly, that Trump’s rhetoric echoed the Democrats. And needless to say, it was the only time anyone mentioned infrastructure.

In truth, other than waging endless war and ignoring huge domestic problems, the GOP clowns offered no real solutions - which is par for the course.

Will the GOP Ever Stop Peddling Hate?

If one has followed the GOP for over the last 15 to 20 years, one discernible trend  of the GOP is its need to peddle hatred against others to satisfy its increasingly foul party base.  Hatred of blacks, hatred of gays, hatred of immigrants and now, hatred of Muslims.  There always has to be some demographic that is held up as "other" that is claimed to be posing a threat to America and the white Christian theocracy that the Christofascist portion of the base wants to force on the entire nation.  The GOP is now best described by who and what it is against, yet offers few actual positive alternatives of how to move the nation forward.  A column in Salon looks at the way in which peddling hatred has become the GOP norm.  Here are excerpts:

It was bound to happen, what with calls for special Muslim IDs, mosque closures, and unfounded claims that Arabs were dancing in New Jersey streets following 9/11. On Monday afternoon, the GOP’s bombastic front-runner, Donald Trump, decided that the only thing more rigid than his peroxide mane would be the central plank of his campaign’s 2016 platform: Islamophobia.

Yet as worrying as his proclamation is (let there be no question that he awakened the ghost of Mussolini), it’s a fool’s errand to believe that this latest bout of xenophobic rhetoric is only about Trump.  It’s not.  Rather, it speaks volumes about the Republican Party, its primary voters, and the message that sizable swaths of that group crave.

Take my home state of North Carolina, for example. A survey conducted by the Public Polling Institute in late September found that 40 percent of Republican voters believe that the practice of Islam should be illegal. Seventy-two percent of the GOP in that state believe, like Trump’s closest rival, Ben Carson, that a Muslim should never be allowed to serve as president; the same percentage also agree with Trump’s claim that Obama is waging a war against Christianity.

Alarmingly, 67 percent of his voters support national database of Muslims; 62 percent believe his unfounded claim that thousands of New Jersey Arabs cheered 9/11; and 51 percent want to see mosques in this country shut down.In Iowa, where Trump now trails Ted Cruz, the numbers aren’t much better. The same public opinion poll found that 30 percent of Republican voters want to criminalize Islam. 

76 percent of the GOP nationwide thinks that Islam is un-American, and 54 percent of Republican voters across the country believe that Obama is a Muslim (remember the Trump “birther” kerfuffle?).  Suddenly, the reasons for Trump’s paroxysms of prejudice sharpen into fuller relief.

The biggest obstacle facing American Muslims isn’t the opportunism of election season rhetoric, however nasty it may be. Instead, it’s the pockets of sustained prejudice across the country that give the Trumps of the world reason to pipe off such nonsense in the first place.

That cesspool of toxic worldviews is the illness. It’s demagogues like Donald Trump who fish from it, that are the symptoms. Drying up anti-Muslim prejudice within the GOP — a task that is undoubtedly difficult — is the only way to ensure that future presidential candidates or politicians in that party don’t pander to the crazies who line their ranks and use Muslims as political pawns to gain advantage.

In the end, the result is a world where religious minorities aren’t targeted with rhetoric and rage, and one where polarizing trolls like Trump don’t have a shot at occupying the highest office in the land.

Sadly, I do not see the GOP changing for the better - at least not until the Christofascists are driven from the party.  And, frankly, I don't know how that metastasizing cancer in the GOP can be easily  eradicated. 

Rubio’s Empty Rhetoric on Terrorism

Although perhaps not as utterly despicable in his choice of language as Donald Trump or Ben "Rabid Dogs" Carson, Marco Rubio has jumped fully aboard the Republican fear mongering wagon.  And like his GOP brethren, other than making inflammatory statements and threatening to make Americans even less free and subject to even more domestic surveillance, he has nothing to offer  except fear and bigotry.  Indeed, ISIS is likely grabbing sound bites from Rubio, et al, to make a new round of propaganda films to further ramp up claims that the West is against Islam itself.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Rubio's shameless self-prostitution.  Here are excerpts:

At first glance, Marco Rubio’s first television ad as a presidential candidate seems unassailable. He says the world is facing a “civilizational struggle between the values of freedom and liberty, and radical Islamic terror.”

“What happened in Paris could happen here,” Mr. Rubio says, looking slightly less bewildered than usual. The Florida senator goes on to say: “These aren’t disgruntled or disempowered people. These are radical terrorists who want to kill us.”  So far, so good.

Then he said that “they” want to kill us “because we let women drive, because we let girls go to school.”

While it’s true that radical Islam rejects women’s rights, Mr. Rubio’s analysis is just as shallow as the argument that European nations’ colonialism or more recent acts of American stupidity, committed primarily by President George W. Bush, excuse acts of sociopathic mass murder.

But what’s really wrong with Mr. Rubio’s commercial, and his candidacy, is that he offers not the slightest idea of what he would do as president to combat terrorism — other than to further undermine Americans’ civil liberties under the guise of counter-terrorism and to turn away legitimate refugees because they happen to be Middle Eastern Muslims.

Mr. Rubio talks about the assault on “Western values” by Muslim terrorist groups, but he supports proposals to freeze the entry of some 10,000 U.N.-designated refugees from the Middle East, based on a series of lies he and other Republicans like to tell about President Obama’s refugee policy.

“What needs to happen here is you can’t let people in unless they complete a background check.”

Sounds good, except that the refugees in question have completed background checks and will have to complete many more before they set foot on American soil.

[R]efugees must go through a long process to enter this country. “If there’s any doubt at all, they’re not allowed in,” he said. “It takes 18 months, 24 months, while these people sit in wretched refugee camps in Turkey, in Jordan, in Lebanon and if there’s any doubt, they’re not allowed in. Marco Rubio doesn’t know what the process is. There is a process, and it’s worked.”

Mr. Rubio also seems confused about the right way to discuss things like terrorism and national security in a presidential campaign. On Fox News on Sunday, Chris Wallace rather hilariously asked Mr. Rubio if he thought his “foreign policy credentials” (which are nonexistent) were giving him a “boost with voters” after the terror attacks in Paris and other places.

“I obviously am not happy about the events,” he said, to everyone’s great relief, “but I think it’s a positive development that it suddenly has forced Americans to confront more carefully the issue of national security.”

Mr. Rubio said: “I hope that we focus on that more, not just for political advantage, but because the world has become a very dangerous place.”

Maybe Mr. Rubio can start with himself. Instead of just seeking political advantage after the horrors in Sinai, Lebanon, Paris, Mali and elsewhere, perhaps he could come up with something useful to tell voters about why they should entrust him with the job of president.

Republicans Are Panicked, Stupid And Cruel

The caption of this post was too good to pass up - especially since it is true in its description of far too many of today's Republicans.  Sadly, the party base embraces ignorance - - actually, celebrates it - gushes bigotry, and is motivated b fear: fear of gays, fear of blacks, fear of Hispanics, fear of Muslims and fear of modernity itself.  Enter the GOP clown car of GOP presidential candidates and the result is almost guaranteed to be a train wreck.   A piece in Politicususa.com looks at the the fruits of the failed policies of the GOP and the bigotry and hysteria of the GOP base which has only intensified since November 13, 2015.  Here are highlights:

It is really difficult to discern what kind of character flaw is driving a fair number of Americans to abject fright and dependency on being in a near-perpetual state of panic; most recently over a single incident in Europe that is repeated around the world at the same frequency as mass shootings in America, almost weekly.

At first blush one assumes that social conservatives are pathologically addicted to fear, but it is so much more than that because a primary component of irrational fear is ignorance. The Republican base are also inherently stupid and it is a fact not lost on their leaders who are again taking advantage of that indisputable fact to manipulate them like a herd of terrified sheep.

[I]f the right were not so stupid, they would realize that the Republican fear mongering over Syrian refugees is precisely how George W. Bush convinced Americans to support invading two Middle East nations who did not attack America. They also supported giving up their privacy, opening the door to al Qaeda in Iraq, and creating the object of the Republicans’ fright du jour; the Islamic State (IS, ISIS, ISIL).

In his Friday column, Paul Krugman noted that since Barack Obama was sworn in as President, Republicans and conservatives have done nothing but “warn about imminent catastrophe.” Of course none of the fiscal crises, hyperinflation and economic collapse due to health insurance, gun confiscations, or imposition of Sharia Law have happened as predicted. And yet, the same Republican panic-mongers have their stupid base terrified of allowing refugees who are not “proven Christians” into the country.

All of this Republican-created panic and fear is going on in America while Parisians who were actually attacked are staying calm and going out to cafes to show that they are not intimidated like terrified Americans. President François Hollande even reaffirmed that, because France is a humanitarian nation, they will continue taking in Syrian refugees and increased the number.

According to right-wing social conservatives, all they require to be courageous and intimidating is god and guns, and although they have those in abundance, a tough guy like Erickson is too much of a coward to venture out to the local multiplex. All the while, Parisians are back to their routines and Republicans are terrified of refugees; unless “they can prove beyond a doubt that they are Christians.”

Krugman is not alone in his assessment of Republicans and their conservative punditry. President Obama rightly mocked Republicans for claiming they intimidate world leaders and yet are “scared of widows and orphans.”
Mr. Krugman makes a very valid point in noting that panic is the only thing Republicans have and that the presidential nomination will go to “whoever can most effectively channel that panic.” Krugman comprehends, like Republicans and their conservative pundits, that their social conservative base is driven by fear, stupidity and cruelty; especially toward Muslim people whether they are Syrian refugees or American citizens.

There is a major election coming up and with nothing to run on Republicans are reverting to what they know works best; frightening Americans who are too cognitively challenged to know they are being manipulated yet again. It is not a testament to Republicans’ expertise at reading the people, just a revelation that a fair portion of the population is stupid enough to fall for the exact same fear tactics. If they were not imbecilic morons they might be embarrassed but they are not; that in itself is embarrassing.

Donald Trump, Fear Mongering and the GOP

I often note that those who fail to know history are doomed to repeat it.  If one looks at today's Republican Party and especially the party's candidates for the presidential nomination, it feels almost like Germany in the early 1930's when the Nazis used fear and claims of conspiracies to convince Germans to give away their civil rights.  Hitler had his Jews and communists to blame for the nation's ills.  Now we see Donald Trump using Hispanics and Muslims - others in the party use gays and "liberals" - to fear monger all with the goal of gaining power.  And frighteningly, most American's do not seem to see what is happening.  A piece in Salon looks at the disturbing parallels.  Here are highlights:

“Paris attack should end criticism of ‘militarization’ of police. NYPD getting ready.” So said the neocon historian Max Boot on Twitter over the weekend, with a link to a New York Times report on the formation of a “standing counterterrorism force” within the NYPD. “After the next attack, the pundits will say ‘This should end your criticism of the government,'” quipped Salon’s Ben Norton.

We’ve been down this road plenty of times before. By now, it’s easy to predict how human beings will react to unexpected attacks like the ones in Paris. Of all human emotions, fear may be the most contagious, and the terrorists know this well. . . . . Of course, fear is a invaluable emotion that prevents human beings from acting recklessly or just plain stupid, but it can quickly become irrational and dangerous — and in many cases, it is a gift to authoritarian politicians.

The infamous Reichstag fire of 1933, which Adolf Hitler called a “sign from God,” is a prime example of how useful fear can be for aspiring dictators. . . . . The day after the fire, Hitler was granted the Reichstag Fire Decree by the German President, Paul von Hindenburg, which suspended many civil liberties and provided Hitler with greater emergency powers as Chancellor. Thousands of communists were arrested, and in the Reichstag elections during the following month, the Nazis gained enough of a majority to pass the “Enabling Act,” which gave Hitler a de facto dictatorship, providing him with the power to enact all laws without parliament. With the scapegoating of Jews, communists, and other minorities, the Nazis managed to further their power, and provide enemies to the people in times of economic desperation.

Today, Republicans and neocons like to invoke the Nazis when discussing Islamic extremism, yet, as the past week has illustrated, these same politicians are the ones who most resemble their fascist forefathers. In July, I wrote about the worrisome parallels between Trump’s rhetoric and that of fascism, and what it says about the modern Republican party. The likeness has become even more disturbing after the terrorist attacks in Paris. Trump has always had the strong man attitude of a fascist. 

The racism and nativism of the Trump campaign (and his competition) is even more disquieting. His anti-Mexican rhetoric has been a cornerstone of his campaign, and now, after the Paris attacks and with the Syrian refugee crisis, anti-Muslim rhetoric has taken hold.

Just as the Nazi’s used the Reichstag fire to their advantage, creating fear of a communist conspiracy (which was nonexistent), Republicans have used the atrocities in Paris as a campaign tool, crafting various conspiracy theories about sleeper cell refugees and anti-West Muslims looking to implement Sharia law in Cleveland, Ohio. Ultimately, this is what fascism was (is) all about: manufacturing and spreading fear. Fear of some foreign ideology invading and destroying a countries traditions, or as Umberto Eco (who grew up in fascist Italy) calls it in is essay, “Ur-Fascism,” the “fear of difference.” There also tends to be a fear (or obsession) of some kind of conspiratorial plot against them.

Fear is a very powerful weapon indeed. Sometimes, it is enough for the majority of citizens to willingly give up civil liberties, or to stop criticizing the militarization of the police, or to become bigoted against those who look different to them. It was certainly strong enough fourteen years ago, when the Patriot Act was signed into law one month after the attacks of 9/11. And the Islamic State is counting on it to be strong enough this time around as well. They are especially counting on European and American nationalists and sympathizers to make the lives of Muslim immigrants and citizens miserable enough (perhaps by making them register in a database?) to make them sympathize with anti-West Islamic fanatics. 

Both Islamic and Western fascists want a clash of civilizations, and they play into each others hands. ISIS creates mass panic and provide politicians like Donald Trump the perfect political tool of fear, while Trump and his GOP cohorts create a toxic anti-Muslim atmosphere that ends up creating more recruits for ISIS, or as President Obama said, “I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric coming out of here in the course of this debate.”

Just a month ago, it would have been hard to imagine the GOP primary becoming even more toxic, but ISIS helped make it happen. Even worse, Trump has made a comeback in the polls, and is now around ten points ahead of his next competition.

After the Reichstag fire, Hitler made the following remark about the communists: “These sub-humans do not understand how the people stand at our side. In their mouse-holes, out of which they now want to come, of course they hear nothing of the cheering of the masses.” Let us hope the people, the masses, are smart enough to reject the fear and intolerance that the GOP has made its prime selling point.

GOP Fear Mongerers and America's Poor Track Record on Immigrants

One other thing that John Kasich said in the context of whether or not Syrian refugees should be allowed into America was to the effect that "the American public usually gets it right."  Kasich made the statement to justify turning away Syrian refugees.  In point of fact, America has gotten it seriously wrong on immigration many times over the course of the nation's history - especially if the immigrants were of different faiths and darker skin color.  The image above shows how wrong public opinion was in the 1930's in the context of taking in Jewish refugees.  This piece looks at America's less than stellar track record.  Here are some excerpts:

It’s a comforting thought to look at the refugees fleeing ISIS — the same ones to whom Republicans want to deny entry into the United States — and say that we’re better than this, that Americans as a whole will rise up and refuse to be so cold, so heartless. But those of us who are eager to help people in need are truly in the minority, historically speaking.

As World War II approached, Fortune Magazine published the results of a 1938 poll that should serve as a grim reminder that Americans can and will latch on to bigotry in any sense. Today, we pretend that America has always accepted Jewish people. Unfortunately, the poll reveals that the majority — 67 percent — openly rejected taking in Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, and other countries oppressed by the Nazis “with conditions as they are.” Only 23 percent of Americans, most of whom opposed raising immigration quotas, said that accepting Jewish refugees was a good idea.

2016 Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie’s opinion that we should not even accept Muslim “5-year-old orphans” is one that should stay buried in our shameful past — but a January 1939 poll heartbreakingly reveals that Americans even opposed taking care of Jewish children.

In September, the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor reminded us that the bigotry espoused by the Right and the hatred they level at Muslim refugees is exactly like the anti-Semitism of the 1930’s:

No matter the alarming rhetoric of [Adolf] Hitler’s fascist state — and the growing acts of violence against Jews and others — popular sentiment in Western Europe and the United States was largely indifferent to the plight of German Jews.

“Of all the groups in the 20th century,” write the authors of the 1999 book, “Refugees in the Age of Genocide,” “refugees from Nazism are now widely and popularly perceived as ‘genuine’, but at the time German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews were treated with ambivalence and outright hostility as well as sympathy.”

“Part of that hostility was fueled, as some of the European grievances are now, by stereotypes of the refugees as harbingers of a dangerous ideology, in this instance communism and anarchist violence,” Tharoor notes.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Every day, Republicans remind us  — incorrectly — that Muslims are of the devil, that their ways and beliefs are somehow dangerous to the good, pristine America they know and love…and that has not existed since Jim Crow ended.