The GOP Defines Patriotism As Complacency About Racism

If there has been any benefit to be derived from Donald Trump's racist tweet storm, it is that far right "intellectuals" - something that is increasingly an oxymoron - and the base of the GOP equate white skin and indifference to racial inequality, if not out right racism, with being a "true American" and a patriot.  Given Trump's words and his long history of racism, including racial discrimination in housing in apartment properties his family owned in Norfolk, Virginia, it is near impossible to say the man is not a racist if one indulges in any shred of honesty, yet the right refuses to condemn him. Why?  Because it supports the underlying premise that only whites are true Americans. Everyone else is supposed to be happy to be in America and keep their mouths shut when it comes to enunciating America's many flaws. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the redefining of patriotism and the right to be an American with skin color.  Here are excerpts:

Over the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has tweeted several things that respectable conservatives do not wish to defend. No National Review columnist has seconded Trump’s assertion that U.S.-born congresswomen Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.” And only a few GOP officeholders have implored Ilhan Omar to heed the president’s guidance, and return to the “crime infested” place from which she came.

But beneath these distastefully forward flirtations with white nationalism, many conservative intellectuals see an argument worth redeeming. Trump’s chief complaint with “the squad” of progressive nonwhite congresswomen was that they had been “loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States … how our government is to be run” (apparently, the voters who elected AOC & Co. are not among “the people of the United States,” and opining on government operations is an aberrant behavior for members of Congress).

GOP operatives have been trying to pretend that this was his only point: Far-left Democrats hate our great country. Congressional Republicans got the memo. . . . Trump, meanwhile, shifted his emphasis from whether AOC & Co. are American to whether they deserve to be.

Once sanitized by GOP message-makers, Trump’s stance ceases to be overtly racist. Ilhan Omar’s claim to national belonging is now negated by her anti-American attitude, not her Somali origins. And yet the moment one examines what “anti-American” means, in this context, the true color of Trump’s nationalism becomes plain.

[N]one of the congresswomen in question have said that they “hate America.” They’ve merely expressed dissatisfaction with its present state and challenged popular conceptions about its past — prerogatives of citizenship in a free society that Donald Trump has never denied himself. . . . And Trump has no compunction about goring the sacred cows of conservative nationalism. He has expressed contempt for American prisoners of war, said that George W. Bush did not keep us safe, questioned whether the U.S. government was more “innocent” than Vladimir Putin’s, and declared that America had done “a tremendous disservice to humanity” in the Middle East.

Clearly then, neither Trump nor his defenders believe that dissent is inherently unpatriotic. It is something about the content of the congresswomen’s dissent — and perhaps the congresswomen themselves — that causes conservatives to see their protests as expressions of unforgivable ingratitude.

Of course, that something isn’t difficult to discern. The American right refuses to recognize any distinction between the claim “racial inequality was fundamental to our nation’s founding, and remains a pervasive force in American society today,” and an expression of “hatred” for the United States. This refusal is not peculiar to Trump or his loyalists. Even the president’s most highbrow (and lukewarm) apologists regularly denounce the anti-Americanism of progressives who express dissatisfaction with the state of racial progress in the U.S.

Take Charles C.W. Cooke. On Monday, the National Review’s senior editor penned a column arguing that Ilhan Omar had a moral obligation to “temper her critiques of American politics and culture” because she came to the U.S. as a refugee, and therefore owes this country a debt of gratitude.

But directly engaging with Omar’s dissent would create a problem for the pundit, because not once in the Washington Post column he cites does the congresswoman say “America is a disaster” or “needs complete rethinking.”

Omar clearly expresses disappointment with the United States. But the cause of her disappointment is the discrepancy between her country’s egalitarian ideals and its inequitable realities. Her defining mission, as a politician, is to close that gap and realize the “promise that’s not kept.”

The difference, as Cooke subsequently makes clear, is that Omar’s critique challenges America’s racial innocence, while Trump’s does not.

Beto O’Rourke has no allergy to praising America. But when asked about what he would do to combat racism at a campaign event, he did acknowledge the fact that white supremacy was a de jure reality in the American republic for its first 188 years of existence, and that the legacy of centuries of race-based subjugation has not been fully eradicated in the 55 years since 1964. If Cooke regards the public airing of this sentiment as an invitation to “cultural suicide,” one must ask whose culture he wishes to preserve.

African-Americans have deeper roots in our country than virtually any other U.S. community. The hard labor of black slaves served as a (if not the) primary engine of American prosperity throughout our civilization’s first centuries of existence. Chattel slavery didn’t just fill the coffers of southern planters; “as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers,” historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman write, slavery “proved indispensable to national economic development.”

And yet for the unspeakable sacrifices that their ancestors made in service of our nation’s development, black Americans have never been compensated. Rather, most were systematically excluded from the wealth creation that followed the Second World War. And studies suggest that African-Americans still face de facto discrimination in housing, employment, and the criminal-justice system.

Why would it be more “grateful” of Omar to evince indifference to the maltreatment of a deeply rooted American community whose past subjugation is inextricable from the comforts and opportunities that she presently enjoys? Or, to put the question more pointedly: Why does Cooke — a British-American immigrant who earns his livelihood at a publication that defended southern segregation and apartheid — believe that his relative complacency about racial progress is a mark of gratitude rather than entitlement?

The ostensible answer is that Cooke believes white, conservative Americans are entitled to his (and Omar’s) gratitude, while black liberal ones are not, no matter how long the latter’s “people” have been here. This belief does not appear to be conscious. But absent that premise, his argument becomes unintelligible. . . . 

On the same day that Cooke’s reflection on Omar’s ingratitude went live, the National Review’s editor Rich Lowry published an editorial with nearly identical flaws. . . . Like Cooke, Lowry does not quote the object of his critique because that would make it harder for him to misrepresent her argument.

As a response to Rapinoe’s actual argument, Lowry’s history lesson is a non sequitur. Her complaint is with America’s racial order, not its flag. But like Cooke, Lowry refuses to acknowledge a distinction between the two. On a surface level, both columnists assail the left for equating love of America with indifference to white supremacy; in actual fact, it is Cooke and Lowry who insist on that equation.

Trump has made the color of conservative nationalism more plain to the naked eye. But a tacit faith in white Christian Americans’ superlative claim to national belonging has always been native to the creed.

National Review Slams Trump on Intelligence Leak to Russia

Perhaps Republicans and the conservative news media - save, of, course Fox News and Breitbart - are finally waking up to the incompetent, poisonous and possibly treasonous nature of the Trump/Pence regime.  Indeed, on Facebook I saw one comment that read as follows "Have you noticed lately that "The Hill" sounds like the Daily Kos, Fox sounds like CNN, and the National Review sounds like the New Republic? It's an amazing seismic shift towards reality, and we can thank Orange Julius! Lock him up."  The conservative National Review seems to be joining the media outlets that are belatedly putting the interests of the nation ahead of partisanship and prostituting themselves to Donald Trump's base.  Here are highlights from the National Review's commentary on Trump's disingenuous excuses for leaking top secret information to the Russians:

Let’s begin with this proposition — there is a proper and defensible mechanism for disclosing classified information, even to a geopolitical rival. If the president determines that such disclosure advances the national interests of the United States, and if the president solicits the advice and counsel of the intelligence community and his national-security advisers to minimize the possibility of revealing sources and methods, betraying the trust of allies, or causing any other damage to national security, then it can even be prudent and proper to disclose secret information. In other words, disclosure should be the result of a deliberative process, not a momentary impulse.

Now, let’s contrast this appropriate process with the charges against President Trump and, crucially, with his defense.

The charge is serious. The Washington Post and numerous other media outlets reported that Trump impulsively shared highly classified information with visiting Russian officials — information that “jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.” According the Post, the information “had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government.” The New York Times has identified the partner in question as Israel.

Trump’s disclosure was allegedly dangerous enough to trigger a scramble within the government to “contain the damage” by, among other measures, “placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency.” Officials asked the Post not to publish the full details of the leak. Earlier today, The Resurgent’s Erick Erickson wrote that he knows one of the sources for the media’s stories and that the reality is even worse than the reports:

I am told that what the President did is actually far worse than what is being reported. The President does not seem to realize or appreciate that his bragging can undermine relationships with our allies and with human intelligence sources. He also does not seem to appreciate that his loose lips can get valuable assets in the field killed.

It doesn’t take a 3,000-word explainer to describe how this allegation is alarming. But let’s note this — Hillary Clinton lost the presidency in part because her own mishandling of classified information meant that Russia could have had access to American secrets. According to this report, Trump gave Russia dangerous secrets, impulsively, perhaps as part of an effort to impress his guests.

And what is Trump’s defense? Yesterday one of the most respected members of his administration, national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, issued a terse statement claiming that the Washington Post story, “as reported,” was false. After denying that “sources and methods” were compromised, he said, “I was in the room. It didn’t happen.” The statement was carefully crafted to create the impression of a blanket denial while still giving the administration some wiggle room on the details. Then, this morning, Trump not only refused to deny giving Russia classified information but, in two tweets . . . . undercut the blanket denial.

McMaster is perhaps Trump’s best spokesperson, presenting Trump’s best case, and it’s still unsatisfactory. There is no such thing as “no harm, no foul” in this context. This is not the way we want presidents handling classified information — especially during conversations with a hostile foreign power. While I can imagine a context in which an experienced and knowledgeable president could make a disclosure decision on the fly, the key here is “knowledgeable.”

Disclosing information without knowing the source is a throw of the dice. And remember, this is the administration’s defense. The original allegations are still hanging out there, and the reporters are standing by their stories. Defenses and denials are not the same thing as refutations.

The allegations are too serious to be left to the realm of charges and countercharges. The White House should share available records of the conversation with the relevant congressional oversight committees, and those committees should do their job, examine the evidence, and issue a public report of their findings. The American people should be troubled by what we know. But until we know all the facts, we don’t yet know how troubled we should be.

The Self-Immolation of the Republican Establishment

As prior posts have made clear, I have zero sympathy for so-called establishment Republicans who for years did nothing to oppose the descent of the party into insanity only to belatedly wake up to the Frankenstein monster that they allowed to be created.  Donald Trump is the incarnation of that insanity with Ted Cruz a close second when it comes to being batshit crazy.  A piece in Salon looks at the far too late hand wringing and whining going on among establishment types who bear as much responsibility for the state of the GOP as the extremists and lunatics they allowed into the party.  Here are excerpts:

For the record, it wasn’t Sarah Palin’s rambling endorsement of Donald Trump last week that finally drove editors at National Review to launch the magazine’s “Against Trump” push. The conservative media revolt had been in the works weeks prior to Palin’s now-classic oratory display.

Still, there was something fitting about the Right Wing Noise Machine’s simmering civil war over Trump breaking out into open warfare in the wake of Palin’s embarrassing speech; a comeback that had lots of Republican supporters publicly cringing.

What’s inescapable about the mounting GOP hand wringing is that Trump is a right-wing media creation. He’s flourishing on the fertile playing field of bigotry and resentment that National Review, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a litany of others, have helped seed for many years.

For a movement that has often displayed amazing discipline in terms of targeting its cannon fire on Democrats and liberals, the Right Wing Noise Machine now finds itself stuck in circular firing mode.

On one side, Trump’s denounced as a “vicious demagogue,” a “con man,” a “glib egomaniac,” and “the very epitome of vulgarity.” On the other side, Trump’s army has derided National Review as out of touch, and accused the magazine of cozying up to “open border zealots,” a cardinal sin on the right.

None of that disguises the fact that Trump is the monster the Noise Machine created by encouraging bigoted and dishonest forces within the conservative movement; by giving credence to the three year Benghazi cover-up charade, the two year IRS witch hunt, by fueling ugly passions about Obama wanting to take away everyone’s guns, and by arguing he’s uninterested in defending America’s national security.

For years, lots of conservative pundits and talkers cashed large, and in some cases very large, paychecks feeding this ugly beast. Now the beast is beyond their control and they’re going to whine all the way to New Hampshire?

The conservative shock and awe of a possible Trump nomination, and the long-term political implications it could unleash, is now real.

But the revolt likely arrives comically late to the game, since a September or October pushback would’ve made more sense. Indeed, the magazine is “telling the Republican Party to pull its ripcord long after we’ve hit the ground,” noted GOP consultant Alex Castellanos.

The Right Wing Noise Machine was revved up to 11 during the Obama years in an effort to destroy his presidency. In the end, the Noise Machine’s lasting contribution, in the form of a Trump nominee, may be assuring that Obama hands the White House over to another Democrat.

The Growing Republican Hysteria

As one who has condemned the Republican Party's embrace of ignorance, religious extremism and increasingly blatant racism for a very long time - I left the formally resigned from the GOP roughly 15 years ago when I could no longer stand the batshitery and nastiness of the "godly Christians" being voted onto the City Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach - I feel as if I was a Cassandra long ignored by one time colleagues who refused to see the poison seeping into the party.  Of late - and very belatedly - I suddenly find myself joined by a chorus of "moderate Republicans" and "conservatives" who are lamenting the insane asylum the GOP has become perhaps best embodied by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  In today's Washington Post Kathleen Parker joins the cavalcade of those warning of the end of the GOP and takes on a tone one more often expects from Maureen Dowd.  Admittedly, Parker has vented vigorously on occasion before.  This time, she targets those who for too long did nothing to stem the metastasizing cancer in the party while gloating over short term election victories.  Here are column highlights:

At first it seemed too weirdly awful to be true, but there she was: Sarah Palin standing next to Donald Trump on Tuesday and endorsing him for president. 

Like previously conjoined twins who had shared a brain before Ben Carson separated them, these two anti-everything, post-lamestream media instigators presented themselves as political doppelgangers, a he/she, yin-yang, sis-boom-bah political marriage of the carnival barker and the bearded lady.

The challenge for those of us in the observation business is to illuminate what’s plainly obvious without offending those who prefer not to see. But there’s no winning once passions are engaged, and hating the messenger is a time-honored tradition. Even though it was, in fact, obvious in 2008 that Palin was out of her league, as I pointed out in a column, her fans wouldn’t hear of it. About 20,000 of them took time out of their busy schedules to send me emails expressing their displeasure. . . . .  The whole episode was instructive in multiple ways, but most important, it foretold a dumbing down of the GOP that eight years later may prove irreversible.

Into a blizzard of irony gallops National Review with a “symposium” of opinions from noted conservative writers saying what must be said: Trump is terrible for conservatism (because he isn’t a conservative) and that populist demagoguery and vulgarity have no place in the party. You don’t say!

The irony, which is so delicious I may skip the chocolate sauce and forgo the cherry, is that this same publication dropped my syndicated column not long after it ran my Palin column. Hoopla and all that. And now suddenly, the editors, one of whom all but telepathically dated Palin, are blind to the former governor’s charms, opposing her choice for president in the strongest terms.

One wonders only what took them so long to say what has been plainly obvious for months.
It must be difficult for some of these writers to go out on a limb like this and recognize in Trump what they were unable to see in Palin in 2008. Trump, to his credit, has managed to clarify matters for them.

Her erstwhile siren call was mostly siren, her formerly hopey-changey, winky-blinky charm turned cranky-wanky and shrill. “You ready for a commander in chief . . . who will let our warriors do their job and go kick ISIS ass?” she shrieked. 

[I]t looks as though Republicans may get what they deserve — a bombastic, bellicose, self-aggrandizing, mean-streaked, golf-cheating, bullying narcissist without plans or policies beyond his own, no doubt fickle, fantasies.   Once Republicans forced the party to take the governor of Alaska seriously as a vice presidential candidate, they opened a populist door that they’ll not easily shut. 

[N]ow we have Trump, who has Palin, who has cemented the anti-intellectual, anti-“elitist” fervor of the Republican base. William F. Buckley’s conservatism seems headed for the door, and National Review deserves plenty of blame. There is, alas, no one left to stand athwart history and yell, stop! 

The question that puzzles me is this: how and why can anyone remotely sane and decent remain a Republican?   And let's be honest on one other thing.  Ted Cruz is as bad or worse than Donald Trump.

National Review Eviscerates Donald Trump's Candidacy

On a less disturbing note - although it demonstrates how insane the Republican Party has become - the National Review (hardly a liberal outlet) is carrying a piece that utterly eviscerates Donald Trump and his narcissistic campaign circus.  Reports now are out that trump paid actors $50 a piece to attend his so-called campaign announcement.  Here are column highlights:

Donald Trump may be the man America needs. Having been through four bankruptcies, the ridiculous buffoon with the worst taste since Caligula is uniquely positioned to lead the most indebted organization in the history of the human race.

The Trump conglomerate is the Argentina of limited-liability companies, having been in bankruptcy as recently as 2009. To be sure, a lot of companies went bankrupt around then. The Trump gang went bankrupt in 2004, too, and in 2001. Before that, Trump was in bankruptcy court back in 1991 when his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City — the nation’s first casino-cum-strip-club, an aesthetic crime against humanity that is tacky by the standards of Atlantic City — turned out to be such a loser that Trump could not make his debt payments.

Donald Trump, being Donald Trump, announced his candidacy at Trump Plaza, making a weird grand entrance via escalator — going down, of course, the symbolism of which is lost on that witless ape. But who could witness that scene — the self-made man who started with nothing but a modest portfolio of 27,000 New York City properties acquired by his millionaire slumlord father, barely out of his latest bankruptcy and possibly headed for another one as the casino/jiggle-joint bearing his name sinks into the filthy mire of the one U.S. city that makes Las Vegas look respectable, a reality-television grotesque with his plastic-surgery-disaster wife, grunting like a baboon about our country’s “brand” and his own vast wealth — and not see the peerless sign of our times?

On the substance, Trump is — how to put it gently? Oh, why bother! — an ass. Not just an ass, but an ass of exceptionally intense asininity.

Trump’s is a fill-in-the-blanks agenda: He claims to have a plan for defeating ISIS, but he cannot say what it is for reasons of operational security for the mission that exists only in his mind. He assures us the plan is “foolproof,” but whoever coined that word had never met a fool like Donald Trump. Immigration? Build a wall and force the Mexicans to pay for it.

We’ve been to this corner of Crazytown before. If we’re going to have a billionaire dope running for the presidency, I prefer Ross Perot and his cracked tales of Vietnamese hit squads dispatched to take him out while Lee Atwater plotted to crash his daughter’s wedding with phonied-up lesbian sex pictures.

The problem with messiah complexes is that there’s no way to know whether you are going to rise on the third day unless somebody crucifies you. Trump has announced, and I say we get started on that.

If the above hasn't made you laugh enough, check out Cher's twitter comments on "The Donald" here.

National Review - Living in an Alternate Reality

I do not want to beat a dead horse, but the far right's reaction to the veto of Arizona SB 1062 continues to reveal the detachment of bot the Christofascists and far right pundits from objective reality.  Some are claiming that SB 1062 was not targeting LGBT Arizonans despite the commentary from the Center for Arizona Policy - the original backer of the law - which make it clear that a license to discriminate against gays was the goal.  Others like George Will are describing gays as "sore winners" - even though Arizona has no statewide non-discrimination laws based on sexual orientation (less than a  half dozen cities have such protections via city ordinance).  And then there is National Review which describes SB 1062 as a "live and let live law."  Are these folks serious or do they have their heads so far up their asses that they are delusional from lack of oxygen?  Here are highlights from a main editorial followed by highlights from a slap down Rich Lowry received on This Week.  First the editorial:

In response to a number of lawsuits in which such providers of wedding-related services as bakers and photographers have been threatened with conscription into participating in same-sex ceremonies to which they object on religious grounds, Arizona’s state legislature has adopted a law under which businesses that decline to provide such services will enjoy protection.

It is perhaps unfortunate that it has come to this, but organized homosexuality, a phenomenon that is more about progressive pieties than gay rights per se, remains on the permanent offensive in the culture wars. Live-and-let-live is a creed that the gay lobby specifically rejects: The owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado was threatened with a year in jail for declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. New Mexico photographer Elaine Huguenin was similarly threatened for declining to photograph a same-sex wedding. 

And the so-called liberals answer: “To hell with your consciences.”

In T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, the nature of totalitarianism is captured in the motto “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” Gay marriage has made the sprint from forbidden to compulsory in record time; the day before yesterday, a homosexual marriage was a legal impossibility — and today it is a crime to sit one out.

Gay Americans, like many members of minority groups, are poorly served by their self-styled leadership. Like feminists and union bosses, the leaders of the nation’s gay organizations suffer from oppression envy, likening their situation to that of black Americans — as though having to find a gay-friendly wedding planner (pro tip: try swinging a dead cat) were the moral equivalent of having spent centuries in slavery and systematic oppression under Jim Crow.

As one who was forced from my job for being gay, ended up in bankruptcy as a result , and had many sleepless nights worried about how I would support my children, these comments are beyond infuriating.  Time and time again these "godly Christians" knowingly and deliberately harm others  citing "sincerely held religious belief" as the magic wand that makes all the harm OK.  The truth is that they are horrible, selfish, self-centered people who prefer to embrace ignorance rather than think for themselves or deal with uncertainty.  I suggest that the editorial board of National Review get their heads out of their asses and get out an see what religious based bigotry does to others on a daily basis.  

Thankfully, when Rich Lowry of National review appeared on This Week, he basically had himself "ripped a new one" and deservedly so.  Bigotry is bigotry, plain and simple.  Here are highlights via Towleroad:

Responded Jones to Lowry's points:  You can't -- look, if you want to be a bigot on your own time, that's fine. But if you want to extend that to your LLC, to your business that you own and hold out for public, you can't point to god to excuse your bigotry.

 

Republicans Adrift From Reality

A column in the Washington Post looks at an issue that I have looked at often - the current Republican Party's disconnect from objective reality and inability to accept that the country is changing and the the party base is losing its long enjoyed white Christian privilege.   The column also references a lengthy piece in New York Magazine that is worth a read as it describes a National Review post election cruise.  The column also looks at the bubble of racism and ignorance that so much of the party base now embraces.  It's a sad commentary on what was once a respectable political party.  Here are some column excerpts:

On Nov. 11, a mere five days after the presidential election, the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam pushed off from Fort Lauderdale for a Caribbean jaunt. Aboard were nearly 600 emotionally tattered Republicans, most of whom had been expecting a Republican victory of Rovian proportions — surely they had all read Karl’s prediction in the Wall Street Journal — and now were about to cruise 750 miles to nowhere, just like the party they so adored.

The difference between this cruise and others like it was the (paying) presence of Joe Hagan, a writer for New York magazine. To his considerable credit, Hagan abstained from shooting these particular fish in their barrel and instead portrayed them as dismayed and somewhat disoriented refugees from an America that used to be. Not only had they been unprepared for Mitt Romney’s loss, but it was dawning on them that their tribe — mostly affluent, elder whites — had lost the election as well as the demographic battle that had preceded it.

“Minorities came out like crazy,” Kevin Hassett, a former Romney economic adviser, told them. “White people didn’t get to the polls. There are far more African-Americans voting than they expected.” Imagine!  Who “they” might be is not exactly clear. But what is clear is that to the cruising Republicans, there is something weirdly topsy-turvy about minorities gaining the political clout once held in perpetual trust for the majority.

A menacing sense of foreboding permeates Hagan’s article. The passengers both fear and hate Barack Obama. To them, he is the nightmare president — allegedly alien in outlook, morality and economic approach. An economic cataclysm is imminent, and the nation has wandered into an icky swamp of immorality. “I’m afraid,” a passenger told Hagan. “Write that. We’re scared to death.”

I chortle not. I was once a National Review subscriber, although never a conservative. In its infancy and for years afterward, the magazine was bursting with ideas. The writing was often fresh and engaging

Now, though, it is conservatism that is both intellectually exhausted and nearly indefensible. It is the movement of the ideologically ossified, of gun zealots and homophobes, of the immigrant-phobic and the adamantly selfish. It insists that government must be small (an impossibility!), education must be local (a stupidity) and that debt, no matter what the reason, is immoral and reckless. The movement has lost its reliable monster. Godless communists have been replaced by the church ladies of Planned Parenthood.

[T]he emphasis was on yesterday. These passengers were people who had — and maybe still have — a sense of possession about America. It was once theirs. It once looked like them and acted like them and thought like them. No more. In more ways than one, they were out to sea.

I will confess that like the column's author, I too once subscribed to the National Review.  Not any more.  And the decline of that publication is reflective of what has happened to the Republican Party and its base who are now best defined by their racism bigotry, greed and selfishness.

 

Romney's Bain Problem Continues to Metastasize

I suspect some readers may think I am beating a dead horse, but Mitt Romney's Bain problem continues to metastasize.  Now a growing number of conservative pundits are almost screaming at Romney to release his tax returns - 12 years worth in some cases.  Even National Review is now stating that Romney must either release the tax returns now or later after further self-inflicted damage has been inflicted.  Ultimately, the question becomes that of what is Romney hiding?   If there is nothing damaging in the tax returns, then why the continued refusal.  I've always believed that those who act as if they are hiding something usually ARE hiding something.  Thus, the speculation continues to grow.  Were there years when Romney paid no taxes?  Or were there years when obscene levels of income yielded taxes at a lower rate than that paid by many working class families.  Here are highlights from a National Review editorial entitled "Release the Returns":

Romney argues that whatever he releases will not be enough to satisfy the Obama campaign and its factota in the media, who are, once again, proving their bias and double standards. Romney is right, but he should release the returns anyway. Let them go fish.

If there is scandal to be had of that, it can be had from the information that already is available. But there is no scandal in that: Romney is a wealthy man — and he has complicated personal finances, something that is typical of wealthy men. In fact, Romney’s personal finances are a very good case study in what’s wrong with the American tax system and regulatory climate.

The Romney campaign says he has released as many returns as candidate John Kerry did in 2004, and cites Teresa Heinz Kerry’s refusal to release any of her tax returns. Neither is an apt comparison. John Kerry actually released returns from 1999 through 2003, and also released tax returns during his Senate runs. As for Teresa Heinz, Romney isn’t the wealthy spouse of a candidate, but the candidate himself.

Romney protests that he is not legally obliged to release any tax returns. Of course not. He is no longer in the realm of the private sector, though, where he can comply with the letter of the law with the Securities and Exchange Commission and leave it at that. Perceptions matter.

Romney may feel impatience with requirements that the political culture imposes on a presidential candidate that he feels are pointless (and inconvenient). But he’s a politician running for the highest office in the land, and his current posture is probably unsustainable. In all likelihood, he won’t be able to maintain a position that looks secretive and is a departure from campaign conventions. The only question is whether he releases more returns now, or later — after playing more defense on the issue and sustaining more hits. There will surely be a press feeding frenzy over new returns, but better to weather it in the middle of July.

It is to President Obama’s advantage to fight the election out over tactics and minutiae. By drawing out the argument over the returns, Romney is playing into the president’s hands. He should release them, respond to any attacks they bring, and move on.

Andrew Sullivan notes as follows:

This [the National Review statement] is such obvious advice that the real question becomes: what on earth could be so damaging that Romney would risk this agonizing twist in the wind? Did he pay no taxes at all in 2009? Or in some other year? Meanwhile, TP has listed 15 prominent Republicans calling for the release of the returns - including Ron Paul, George Will, Haley Barbour, Brit Hume and Michael Steele. This crack in the ranks means that some kind of release is all but inevitable - the Palin strategy is not going to work here. 

The trouble is: it cannot be populist to hide most of your tax returns when you are running for president. Even Hannity is going to have a hard time justifying that one. Sure you can rail against the MSM. But in this case, the MSM includes Bill Kristol, Haley Barbour and National Review.

Are the GOP and the Right Wing Media Beginning to Regret Their Racism?

I have maintained for a long time that just barely under the surface of the Christianist organizations, the Tea Party crowd, and Right Wing news outlets such as Fox News lurks a very strong streak of racism.  Not to mention, homophobia as well.  But with the changing demographics of the USA and the rapid shift occurring the acceptance of gay Americans, the deliberate pandering by the GOP and its media allies to the nastiest elements in American society may be poised to bite them in the ass big time.  That, of course, would strike me as Divine justice.   An article in The Nation looks at conservative efforts to pretend that the GOP and Fox News, et al, are not the equivalent of modern day segregationists.  Here are some highlights:

Conservatives must be feeling regretful. After nearly fifty years of using appeals to white racial resentment to take over the South, win presidential elections and control of Congress, conservatives are realizing this might come back to bite them in the ass. As the right wing has become xenophobic and anti-Latino, conservatives have watched young Latinos and young Asian Americans join young African-Americans in being overwhelmingly Democratic. The greater diversity of this younger generation has in turn meant that Democrats, especially Barack Obama, have won handily among young voters in recent elections. All of a sudden, conservatives see being the party of angry white males as a potential liability, and they want to change their image. 

You can see this concern in Mitt Romney’s recent campaign events touting his substantively thin but rhetorically compassionate education reform agenda. As the Washington Post reported on Romney’s visit to a school in West Philadelphia on Thursday, his first campaign event in a majority black neighborhood: “Mitt Romney’s campaign team has been quietly laying plans . . . . o reassure independent swing voters that Romney can be inclusive and tolerant in his thinking and approach.” Romney’s campaign insists they are sincere, but they never made any such outreach during the primaries, . . . . 

The conservative media are happy to help burnish both white racial anxieties and the official story line that Republicans are the friends of minorities by trying to tell an oddly inverted story of race relations in America. According to National Review’s current cover story by Kevin Williamson, it is the Republican Party which has consistently supported civil rights and Democrats who have opposed it.  Meanwhile, conservative blogs, talk radio and Fox News hype random stories of anti-white violence, creating the false impression that whites are more often the victims of hate crimes by blacks than the reverse. 

The National Review argument has been thoroughly debunked in many outlets.  .  .  .  .  Critics of Williamson’s piece were generous enough not to mention that National Review’s tendencies towards racism and opposition to civil rights continue today.  National Review recently let go of longtime contributor John Derbyshire for penning a shockingly bigoted rant in another publication, . . . . NR also had to drop another contributor, Robert Weissberg, shortly thereafter for having, in Lowry’s words, “delivered a noxious talk about the future of white nationalism.” Meanwhile NR defends voting laws that would disenfranchise minorities through onerous requirements such as presenting government-issued photo identification. And it argues that the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary. 

There is a corollary to this logic holding that it is blacks that oppress whites, rather than the reverse. This is, of course, a regular feature in arguments against affirmative action.  

Conservative media have been especially eager to smear Trayon Martin, the young black victim of a shooting for which the perpetrator was initially not arrested. They are also getting on the wrong side of modern civil rights struggles, by opposing gay rights and fanning the flames of Islamophobia.

National Review Fires Derbyshire

I wrote yesterday about the outrageous column that John Derbyshire wrote which appeared on the website Taki’s Magazine. One reader (who I greatly respect) sought to defend Derbyshire saying that his "rant was actually a facetious and satirical April 6th response to the outrageous article by Toure' in Time Magazine's April 2nd issue which hit the news stands in the last week of March." Apparently, the people at National Review saw things differently and Derbyshire has been given his walking papers by National Review. This from Rich Lowry:

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

As Queerty notes, blacks were not the only targets of Derbyshire's less than loving approach to his fellow man. Gays likewise were in his view "a net negative for society." Sadly, Derbyshire's views on blacks and gays - and likely Hispanics don't rate well with him either - are all too typical of today's American conservatives. The irony that I've noted many times is that some of those who most embrace these foul views are the ranks of Christianists who now make up much of the GOP base. Here's more from Queerty:

[H]e considered himself a homophobe, “though a mild and tolerant one.”

This means that I do not like homosexuality, and I think it is a net negative for society. As a conservative, inclined to give the benefit of the doubt (when there is doubt) to long-established practices, I cannot help note that there has never been a human society, at any level of civilization, that has approved egalitarian (that is, adult-adult) homosexuality.

Male-male buggery has been proscribed in every society that ever existed. I am inclined to think that there are good reasons for these universal prohibitions. To say the least of it, male homosexuality is very unhealthy–much more so than, for example, cigarette smoking.

Homosexuality both male and female is also antisocial, in a profound sense. I do not believe that any stable society can be founded on any basis other than heterosexual marriage. Under modern conditions, I think you would have to add “monogamous,” too.

On the positive side, Derbyshire says he does not support the criminalization of homosexuality. Beyond that, he certainly is no friend to LGBT rights. Queerty notes:

And what does giving a “normal life” a try entail exactly? Banging a few babes before giving in to dick? Getting married to a man and popping out a few kids before accepting you’ll always be a dyke? It’s nice that you cop to your homophobia, Mr. Derbyshire, but we’re gonna need a little more information if we’re gonna ratchet back our civil rights to your liking.

A National Review Writer's Racist Screed

UPDATED: While some argue that Derbyshire's post was done in jest, perhaps it wasn't. This from Rich Lowry at National Review:

Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb’s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here.

I have often felt that today's Republican Party is increasingly racist and that often one sees GOP candidates using coded messages to win the votes of racists. Some of Newt Gingrich's batshitery is a prime example. Now, in a wildly racist screed, John Derbyshire (pictured at left) of the National Review has thrown this often denied racism out in the bright light of day. It's beyond shocking, but I suspect his views are held by many in the GOP base who hold contempt - or worse - for all but those who are white, heterosexual conservative Christians. Think Progress looks at this wildly racist rant. Here are highlights:

Popular conservative columnist and National Review writer John Derbyshire topped all of his previous racistscreeds (and sexist rants) today by posting a long breakdown of all of the important lessons he has taught his children about race — and he’s outdone his own racism with this one.

Derbyshire wrote the column in the third person, as a list of lessons to his kids about race. . . . he cuts to the heart of his lessons for his children:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

We need to thank Derbyshire for being honest enough to openly state what so many of his conservative cohorts are thinking.

Explosion of Hate Mocks Christian Values

Since the Iowa Supreme Court ruling a week ago which was soon followed by the legislative triumphs for gay marriage in Vermont and Washington, D.C., the explosion of hate from Christianists and the dehumanizing and untruthful things that they are disseminating about LGBT individuals in my view are a travesty and make a mockery of Christ's message. After all, Christ said that the two great Commandments were to love God and to love thy neighbor as they self. Moreover, the Gospels repeatedly show Christ as condemning the self-righteous and sanctimonious who smugly judged and condemned others in contravention to the command to love thy neighbor. The Christianists claim to believe the Bible is inerrant and must be followed verbatim as "the word of God." Why then do they pick and choose what they want to follow as if the Bible were an al carte menu?

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Let's be candid, from the National Organization for Marriage and it's bogus ad with paid actors pretending to be real ordinary citizens to commentaries in National Review and statements by Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention what we have seen is unbridled hatred for other humans merely because we do not subscribe to a particular set of religious beliefs. The statements are truly hate filled and - in my view - will provide another basis for more citizens to look at the Christian message and walk away shaking their heads in disgust. Andrew Sullivan has it right when he says that these folks hold gay lives in contempt. Here are some highlights of the "love" being disseminated by professed Christians. I begin with the National Review comment:

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Few social goods will come from recognizing same-sex couples as married. Some practical benefits may accrue to the couples, but most of them could easily be realized without changing marriage laws. Same-sex couples will also receive the symbolic affirmation of being treated by the state as equivalent to a traditional married couple — but this spurious equality is a cost of the new laws, not a benefit. One still sometimes hears people make the allegedly “conservative” case for same-sex marriage that it will reduce promiscuity and encourage commitment among homosexuals. This prospect seems improbable, and in any case these do not strike us as important governmental goals.

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Then we have Richard Land at the SBC who is rapidly becoming as extreme a homophobe as Peter LaBarbera and Fred Phelps making Southern Baptists as a whole appear to be a most unloving crowd. Land's official title is "president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention's official entity assigned to address social, moral, and ethical concerns, with particular attention to their impact on American families and their faith." Here are Land's incendiary statements:

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Once again, it was the judiciary branch of state government rending the nation’s moral fabric, bent on rewriting our country’s social construct. With no residency requirements, the [Iowa] court’s opinion means at the end of April when the order goes into effect, same-sex couples will be free to travel from other states to exchange “vows” in the Iowa Heartland.

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This ruling turns Iowa into a destination for same-sex “marriages.” No doubt there are weekend travel packages already being planned. Iowa will soon be the Las Vegas of same-sex “marriage” for America. And you know those folks won’t be resettling in the Hawkeye State, but will be heading back home–perhaps to your state.

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The Iowa Supreme Court couldn’t have ruled that an amendment to the constitution is “unconstitutional.” If they had done that, then a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” would be imperiled. If the California Supreme Court does this in the case they are currently considering, then we’d have to say that our entire system of government is coming to a tragic end.

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Another comes from the Baptist Press where Eric Schumacher pastor of Northbrook Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, maintains that gay marriage is more catastrophic than a 500 year flood and will"eternal damage" that cannot be repaired and which will "erode" civilization. Here are some highlights:

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On April 3, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a state law limiting marriage to one man and one woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution. Licenses will be issued to homosexual couples April 27. It is not hyperbole to say that this ruling has the potential to be the worst disaster to strike the state of Iowa.

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Flood waters destroy houses, ruin offices buildings and displace families. Yet, recovery happens. Houses are rebuilt. Businesses relocate. Families eventually find housing. Legalized "homosexual marriage," on the other hand, does far more pervasive and irrecoverable damage. Civilization itself is eroded as marriage, the central building block of culture and society, is redefined. Soon, our sons and daughters are confused about what it means to be male and female, as "homosexual marriage" gains both legal status and visibility in neighborhoods and the classroom.

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Flood waters erode the soil. "Gay marriage" erodes the soul. A flood impacts for a decade. "Same-sex marriage" destroys generations. A flood draws a community together. "Homosexual marriage" tears the family apart. Communities recover from floods. The promotion of un-natural unions has an eternal consequence.

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As I have said in prior posts over the nearly two years I have been actively blogging, messages like these are akin to how the Nazi regime dehumanized and denigrated Jews in the run up to the Holocaust. How many people will hear these messages and feel totally justified in violence against LGBT citizens. It is bigotry and religious based discrimination of the worst order.

Buckley Leaves National Review

I just recently did a post on the announcement by Christopher Buckley (pictured a left), the son of National Review founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., that he intended to vote for a Democrat for the first time in his life by voting for Barack Obama. Not only is Christopher Buckley the son of the founder of National Review, a conservative new magazine bastion, but he was himself a contributing columnist to the magazine. But not any more. Buckley announced today that he has resigned from National Review. Here are highlights from CNN's coverage of his announcement:

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(CNN) — Christopher Buckley, the son of conservative icon William F. Buckley, said Tuesday he's resigned from the conservative National Review days after endorsing Barack Obama's White House bid, among the most powerful symbols yet of the conservative discontent expressed this election cycle.

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In an online column, Buckley said he had decided to offer his resignation from the magazine his father founded after hundreds of readers and some National Review colleagues expressed outrage he was backing the Illinois senator. "While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for," Buckley wrote.

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"Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case," he also wrote.

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Buckley expressed disappointment the magazine, and conservatives in general, were not more open to dissenting opinions that his own father once championed. My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman," he said, adding later, "My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much."

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Buckley is only the latest among several prominent conservative to express dissatisfaction with McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin. David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and George Will, all high-profile conservative thinkers, have each openly criticized the ticket over the last month.

National Review Column: DADT Needs to Go - UPDATED

UPDATE: Per live blogging by HRC, apparently, Elaine Donnelly made an ass of herself at the Congressional hearings on DADT (why am I not surprised?) and prompted a lot out outright laughter at her crazy statements. At one point, Arkansas Congressman Vic Snyder (D) admonished Donnelly for her outrageous claim that gay and lesbian servicemembers increase the risk for other soldiers contacting HIV and told her that, ironically, by her logic, she should only want to let lesbians into the military. Loud laughter all around. The woman truly needs to be in an institution under mental health care.

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Yes, it is a bit of a shock, but the National Review Online is carrying a column by one of its contributing editors slamming Don't Ask, Don't Tell ("DADT" and adamantly concluding that the policy needs to go. The piece also has some interesting statistics as to just how much the military has had to lower its standards to meet recruiting goals. Meanwhile, competent, educated, patriotic, law abiding gays have been forced out of the military. Common sense makes it clear that the policy was idiocy when adopted and has only become more stupid. It needs to go NOW. Elaine Donnelly (and closet cases like Robert Knight) will simply have to find a new group to victimize in order to have an orgasm or otherwise make herself (himself) feel better about her/his hate-filled, nasty self. Here are some highlights:

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As a House Armed Services subcommittee surely will discuss this afternoon, Pentagon officials evidently trust military inductees with felony rap sheets more than they do law-abiding gay GIs. Having relaxed academic, age, and weight restrictions to achieve recruitment goals, the Defense Department has granted “moral waivers” to criminal convicts. Simultaneously, it uses the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy to jettison gays in uniform, usually for merely disclosing their sexuality. This policy deserves a dishonorable discharge.

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Between 2006 and 2007, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee recently revealed, convicted felons accepted by the Marine Corps rose 68 percent, from 208 to 350. Equivalent Army admissions rocketed 105 percent, from 249 to 511. Between 2003 and 2006, U.C. Santa Barbara’s Michael D. Palm Center calculates, “106,768 individuals with serious criminal histories were admitted” to the armed forces.

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Last year, the Army . . . admitted five rape/sexual-assault convicts, two felony child molesters, two manslaughter convicts, and two felons condemned for “terrorist threats including bomb threats.”

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Conversely, expelled military personnel include Arabic linguists and intelligence specialists who help crush America’s foes in the War on Terror. “Don’t Ask” has ousted at least 58 soldiers who speak Arabic, 50 Korean, 42 Russian, 20 Chinese, nine Farsi, and eight Serbo-Croatian — all trained at the prestigious Defense Language Institute. Al-Qaeda intercepts need translation, and Uncle Sam may need people who can walk around Tehran with open ears. Yet these dedicated gay citizens now are ex-GIs.

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A December 18, 2006 Zogby poll of 545 GIs who served in Iraq and Afghanistan found that 73 percent considered themselves comfortable among gays. Also, 23 percent said they knew gay people in their units, while 45 percent believed they did. So, 68 percent of GIs confirmed or imagined that they worked with gay colleagues, with no evident clamor for their ejection. If there is a gay-fueled crisis in unit morale and cohesion, it appears to have gone undetected.

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Today’s hearing of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel will consider what to do about this policy. Here is a simple idea. “Don’t Ask” should yield to equality: Sexual orientation should be irrelevant while inappropriate sexual conduct — gay, straight, or otherwise — should be punished. Our enemies are Islamofascists who murder Americans, not gay patriots who unravel terrorist plots and introduce jihadists to Allah.

The Grim Truth: Republicans face a calamitous political situation

This is an interesting article in National Review (http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=YmYzNzBlNTkxZjAzYjgxOGQ2Y2I5YjExN2U5ZjQ5MzQ) that looks at the less than bright outlook for the GOP. It is telling that a conservative publication like National Review has such a pessimistic article. On the other hand, it has never been a wingnut Christianist publication either. I hope that the GOP continues to do what it has been doing and gets slammed in November, 2008. I think it is the only thing that will cause the party to refocus away form its current trends. I just hope the Democrats don't screw up and snatch defeat from what should be a strong victory. Here are some highlights:

But for all the understandable natural resistance to pessimism, it has its uses. Fear can be nature’s way to get us to realize that we’re in danger and to take appropriate action. Consider Iraq. If more supporters of the war had been willing to admit that the war was going badly in 2005–6, we might have undertaken the surge and switched our strategy earlier.

The plain truth is that the party faces a cataclysm, a rout that would give Democrats control of the White House and enhanced majorities in the House and the Senate. That defeat would, in turn, guarantee the confirmation of a couple of young, liberal Supreme Court nominees, putting the goal of moving the Court in a more constitutionalist direction out of reach for another generation. It would probably also mean a national health-insurance program that would irrevocably expand government involvement in the economy and American life, and itself make voters less likely to turn toward conservatism in the future.

This outcome is avoidable only if Republicans understand the sources of their unpopularity. Conservatives tend to blame their travails on Republican politicians’ missteps and especially on their inability to communicate. But the public’s unhappiness with Republicans goes much deeper than any such explanation. A mishandled war, coupled with intellectual exhaustion on the domestic front, has soured the public on them. It is not just the politicians but conservative voters themselves who are out of touch with the public, stuck in the glory days of the 1980s and not thinking nearly enough about how to make their principles relevant to the concerns of today. Unforeseen events could yet change the political environment radically. As it stands, Republicans are sleepwalking into catastrophe.

The political calendar and map are also conspiring against Republicans. In the Senate, Republicans have to defend 21 seats and Democrats only 12. They face tough races to retain seats in Minnesota, Maine, Oregon, New Hampshire, Virginia, Colorado, and New Mexico, while vulnerable Democratic seats are hard to find.

Democrats will be able to fight on this favorable terrain with more resources than Republicans. The RNC has done well against the DNC, outraising it $63 million to $40.5 million, with a cash-on-hand advantage of $16.5 million to $3.3 million. Otherwise, Democrats are winning the money race going away. Democratic presidential candidates have raised a stunning $200 million, 70 percent more than the Republican candidates. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee 2 to 1. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had $22.1 million on hand as of August, the National Republican Congressional Committee only $1.6 million (it started the year $16 million in debt).