Republican Hypocrisy category archive

Like the wolf at the bar trying to pick up the girl next to him, Mitt the Flip says whatever he thinks will work right now.

In the Chicago Trib, Steve Chapman surveys Mitt’s recent history of incantations and recantations and sums them up:

This incident is not just an isolated flub. It’s a reminder of Romney’s chief flaws as a candidate. One is his habit of eagerly changing any position whenever he can gain by it. Another is his tendency to deny having done so.

Follow the link for to see the evidence.

Mitt the Flip: There’s no there there.

I remember my Daddy talking about paying his poll tax. He had already passed his literacy test. He was white. That guaranteed a passing score.

President Clinton calls out the voter fraud fraud: The revival of Jim Crow voting restrictions.

Video via the Brad Blog.

Afterthought:

Why do Republicans fear voters?

Following Mitt the Flip is like watching a tennis match in a cartoon: Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Only it’s the same player on both sides of the net:

The Rude One sums it up quite succinctly in discussing the situation in Minnesota:

Remember: it’s not that Democrats are necessarily bad negotiators. It’s just that they are damned with having a conscience. So while Republicans generally don’t give a [expletive deleted] what destruction happens, Democrats do. It ain’t the position of strength.

Follow the link to undelete the expletive.

Poor Me is a game people play.

If the embed doesn’t work, listen here.

Why has the Republican Party suddenly gotten concerned with the rule of law when, for decades, they haven’t given a damn?

Shaun Mullen explains. An excerpt:

The Republican Party has long been the party of war, and one has to go all the way back to Herbert Hoover, a committed pacifist, to find a Republican president who was not a hawk. Dwight Eisenhower gets a slide both because he inherited the Korean conflict and probably understood the horrors of war better than any president since George Washington.

So it is no surprise that war fits comfortably with the contemporary Republican embrace of American exceptionalism, neocon saber rattling trumping diplomacy, and rewarding rapacious defense contractors for their profit-making death machines and lavish campaign contributions.

So recent statements from House Majority Leader John Boehner, among other Republican bigs, questioning President Obama’s embrace of the NATO-led mission against Moammar Quadaffi in Libya, as well as more muted criticism of the war in Afghanistan might appear to be a break with the party’s bloody past.

It is not, of course, and is merely yet another manifestation of criticizing everything that Obama says and does.

Republicans cooked up the “voter fraud” thing because they fear voters.

They fear voters because they know that their policies are inimical to the general well-being.

Cynthia Tucker explains:

In America’s tiny towns, isolated hamlets and rural enclaves, lots of poor folks manage to get by without an automobile or the driver’’s license that goes along with it. They pay their utility bills in cash at local outposts. They ride to church and to the doctor’s office and to the grocery store with neighbors or nephews.

(snip)

It’s no accident, then, that Republican governors and lawmakers in more than a dozen states are following the lead of Georgia — an early adapter of modern methods of voter suppression — by setting in place strict voting requirements that insist on a driver’s license (or some other state-sponsored form of photo identification). They want to make it inconvenient — preferably impossible — for some of those faithful Democratic voters to cast their ballots, giving the GOP an edge in close elections.

They’re going after young folk, too — especially college students. While Reagan-era college kids tended to be faithful Republicans, the current generation heavily favored Obama in 2008. That has led some Republicans to look skeptically at the 26th Amendment.

I can’t add anything to this.

But Republicans think you can’t handle the truth.

Warning: Anatomically correct but most proper language.

Read more »

Via Bob Cesca.

Via Bob Cesca.

Faith-based Republicans:

Via The Richmonder.

Chauncey DeVega diagrams the wingnut misdirection play, faking populism up the middle, then running around the right end to racism.

The video is about a month old, so some of current events are no longer current, but the under currents of which Mr. DeVega speaks are still under.

Will Bunch considers New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s pimped out ride:

We live in a strange world where it’s cool to coddle billionaires and bully public school teachers, but a short hop on a state helicopter is an outrage. Personally, I’d say make billionaires pay their fair share — and then Christie can ride the helicopter to whereever he wants.

Of course, the glee with which some lefties have greeted Christie’s chopper, trying to make a lot out of not much of anything, is understandable.

It is a reaction to the institutionalized duplicity of contemporary Republicanism and to the wingnut ability to make a lot out of nothing at all.

Michael Serconish is a conservative columnist and radio host who I find an interesting read.

Though I usually disagree with him, I often find his reasoning to be sensible and understandable (unlike Charles Krauthammer and Cal Thomas, who exemplify the “say whatever sounds good today regardless of what I said yesterday” school of argument).

He does not toe the Fox News line and dares to take positions that more orthodox conservatives would not be willing to state in public. He thinks; he does not parrot.

He often thinks wrong, of course, but he thinks (I once said to Atrios that Smerconish’s writings have “a certain ‘everyman’ feel, sort of like Fred Flintstone with a typewriter”).

Now comes Smerconish arguing that politicians’ personal lives are under too much scrutiny, citing Mitch Daniels and Arnold Swarzennegger as examples. A nugget:

The irony is that boorish personal behavior among the political elite may be fueled by the same personality traits that voters consistently seek out in elected officials.

Frank Farley, professor of psychology at Temple University and a former president of the American Psychological Association, believes that many of the factors that make for a successful politician – most significant, a predisposition toward risk-raking – also lead those individuals to behave badly in their personal lives.

Farley says these individuals have a “type T personality” – the T stands for thrill. They’re drawn to unpredictable, high-profile, challenging jobs, making politics the perfect career. According to Farley, the very qualities that persuade voters that type T’s are best-suited for that business – independent streak, strong will, magnetic personality – can also drive personal misbehavior.

He goes on to argue that, unless there is evidence of public misconduct, perhaps it would be best not to overemphasize “personal misbehavior” in assessing qualifications for public office.

Left unspoken in the the phrase “personal misbehavior” is one word, as this column specifically seems to apply to “personal mating misbehavior.”

Also missing was this: it was conservative, specifically, “family values” Republicans–you know, the ones commonly found in airport restrooms and on Craig’s List and in bed with persons other than their spouses–who made personal behavior fair game.

In doing so, they made themselves fair game.

What goes ’round and all that.

The Oldsmobile, like Mitt the Flip’s old policy positions, has disappeared.

Cynthia Tucker reports on the current flip, automotive division. A nugget:

So Romney has once again had to distance himself from —well, from himself. On automobile industry bailouts, though, Romney’s contortions have been more convoluted and difficult than on health care reform because they required a triple-flip, a move that had to be hard on the joints of a middle-aged man. (Those moves should have been hard on his integrity, too, but he seems to have surrendered that for the duration of the campaign.)

Full play-by-play at the link.

Republicans bridled when Congressman Alan Grayson said that the Republican Health Care Plan was

Don’t get sick. If you do get sick, die quickly.

Well, now the same folks who campaigned with bogus claims that President Obama’s health care plan would destroy Medicare continue their crusade to (you guessed it) destroy Medicare. From TPM (details at the link):

The GOP continued its bloody walk into the Medicare buzzsaw Wednesday, when 40 out of 47 Senate Republicans voted in support of the House GOP budget, and its plan to phase out and privatize the popular entitlement program.

The test vote failed by a vote of 57-40. But the roll call illustrates that Medicare privatization — along with deep cuts to Medicaid and other social services — remains the consensus position of the GOP despite the growing political backlash against them.

Just as a memory refresher, here’s an encore of Congressman Grayson:

Republicans: They got theirs. To hell with everybody else.