Republican Hypocrisy category archive

Clarence Page exposes the duplicity. A nugget:

Doublespeak? What else describes the reasoning of activists who oppose a proposed “ground zero mosque” — that, by the way, would neither be a mosque nor at ground zero — in the name of “protecting our religious freedoms?”

Thought police? If you want to have a future in today’s Republican circles, thou shalt not scoff in public at the power of talk-show star Rush Limbaugh or the next day thou shalt find thyself apologetically groveling at his mighty throne.

Newspeak? Don’t even think of referring to tea party supporters as “teabaggers,” even when they’ve got tea bags dangling from their hats.

But, amusing as such examples might be, the rise of right-wing PC takes on an aroma of real danger in a current case of what I call Wisconsin Doublethink: The use of state versions of the Freedom of Information Act to suppress information that the right doesn’t like.

In the Chicago Tribune, Megan Crepeau describes the Republican bait-and-switch:

For example, the 2010 Republican “Pledge to America,” the standard with which all Republican candidates marketed themselves, is conspicuously absent of the big two hot-button social issues: gay rights and abortion. Apart from two vague references to “life,” nothing in their agenda indicated the current onslaught on women’s health. Never mind that direct federal intervention in women’s lives — and raising taxes along the way — goes directly against the kind of limited government principles that got them elected. This was a sneak attack, and a hypocritical one at that.

Read the whole thing.

Bob Cesca sums it up:

Trying to unscramble their (Republican–ed.) logic is a wild goose chase.

The president could observe that the sky is blue, and the Republicans would reply, “Nuh-uh! Commie!” Then, if the president responds by conceding, “Well, they’re partly right, the sky can be several colors depending on the time of day,” they’d reply, “No no no!!! The sky is only blue! Why does Obama hate America?!” There’s nothing there. It’s just the opposite.

In my ex-local rag, Dick Polman looks that the Republican Party’s, and particular the loathsome Congressman King’s (R-The Dark Side) hearings this week.

He exposes the fraud behind the hearings, then zeroes in on their inherent hypocrisy:

. . . consider the case of Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and the ’96 Atlantic Olympics, and later killed a cop while on the lam from the FBI. Rudolph was affiliated with an extremist Christian group, and he famously quoted the Bible to justify his clinic bombings – yet the Republicans never called for hearings to examine whether white Christian churches were breeding domestic terrorists.

The hypocrisy is most obvious when we examine Congressman King’s past loyalties to the IRA. On a number of occasions after the IRA bombed British facilities and killed innocent people, our counterterrorism chairman seemed fine with that.

(snip)

And while King carves out an exception for the IRA, the GOP stays true to its own DNA. These hearings predictably stigmatize an entire minority community, paint its members as The Other, and further stoke anti-Muslim hostility among those who think that mosques are hotbeds for terrorism and that any “radical” thought is a coded call to action.

_________________________

*Yes, I know that Muslims come in all colors. But I have a dollar to a doughnut that, if no Muslims were not-white, wingnuts would not be so committed to demonizing them as a group.

Addendum, Later that Evening:

See The Richmonder.

In Wingnut World, there is no such thing as “the public good” if there’s a quick buck to be made.

Forget the “public trough.”

They’re planning to make make off with the whole water system and fence it to their cronies, who like most fences, will pay only a pittance for the goods:

A peek into Governor Walker’s so-called “budget repair bill” reveals a shop of horrors that is just the opposite of actually repairing the budget. Among the items listed in the bill until Wednesday night were selloffs of state power generation facilities – in no-bid contracts notoriously prone to insider dealing. The 37 facilities he wants to sell off that produce heating and cooling at low cost to the state’s universities and prisons. Walker’s budget repair bill would have unloaded them at a low price, presumably to campaign contributors such as Koch Industries – and then stick the bill for producing this power at higher rates to Wisconsin taxpayers in perpetuity. (And this is all being sold as a “taxpayer relief” plan!) Invariably, this will make its way into new legislation once attention is diverted from the current controversy.

The budget bill also plans to tear down the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS). This is not New Jersey, where a succession of corrupt governments have underfunded (read: stolen) the state pension system in order to shift resources to pay for budget shortfalls in general revenues caused by tax breaks for the rich. The WRS is one of the nation’s most stable, well-funded and best-managed pension systems. Although Wisconsin is not a big state, the WRS has amassed $75bn in reserves, and pays out handsome pensions to its public retirees, without needing new public subsidy. The Walker bill has language providing for tearing down this system, raiding its assets to pay for further tax cuts for the rich (especially property owners), and then throwing Wall Street a meaty bone as public employees would be shifted to 401k plans handled by money managers on commission.

In a separate proposal, Governor Walker would start privatising the University of Wisconsin’s two flagship doctorate-granting campuses. Ironically, the land grant universities – of which Wisconsin has long been among the best – were created by protectionist 19th-century Republicans as an alternative approach to British free-market doctrine, which dominated the prestigious and largely anglophile Ivy League universities. These universities, like their German counterparts, taught a new economic policy of state management and public enterprise that formed the basis for subsequent US and German development. Walker would kill off this tradition, and return intellectual production to the highest bidder.

Bob Cesca explains.

Addendum, Slightly Later:

Field certainly has a way with words.

Last week, I wondered how long it would before Wisconsin Republicans abandoned all pretense of democracy and staged a coup.

Answer: Five days.

I haven’t yet been able to watch this all the way through.

Today’s Republican Party cares not for governance nor for the polity. It cares only for the power to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Video via Balloon Juice.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Via Some Guy with a Website.

From the Center for American Progress via Balloon Juice.

Someone finally caught a voter fraudster.

Guess what. A Republican office-holder:

Secretary of State Charlie White, the top election official in Indianapolis, is facing seven felony counts, including voter fraud, perjury and theft, all connected to what a prosecutor said was an attempt to hold on to his seat on the town council even though he was living outside of his designated district.

Via TPM.

When I was growing up, history books and commentators would refer to the United States as “a nation of immigrants.”

They left out the word “white.” Appears that not-white means not-welcome, at least to some folks.

Harold Myerson:

What the census shows is that America’s racial minorities, aggregated together, are on track to become its majority. The Republican Party’s response to this epochal demographic change has been to do everything in its power to keep America (particularly its electorate) as white as can be. Republicans have obstructed minorities from voting; required Latinos to present papers if the police ask for them; opposed the Dream Act, which would have conferred citizenship on young immigrants who served in our armed forces or went to college; and called for denying the constitutional right to citizenship to American-born children of undocumented immigrants.

If the Republicans have a long-term strategic plan, it seems to derive from King Canute, who commanded the tide to stop.

In related news, “whites-only” scholarships.

Writing at the Denver Post, David Sirota tries to figure out why multi-million dollar bankster bonus babies are okay, while $50k teachers are too much. A nugget:

In this view, $500,000 isn’t nearly enough taxpayer cash to retain government-funded bankers, but $48,000 (the average teacher salary in Wisconsin) is too much to pay educators. In this view, the government is “there to serve the banks,” as the new chairman of Congress” Financial Services Committee said, but police and firefighters are expected to serve the population, even as those police officers and firefighters are berated for receiving middle-class wages.

Via TPM.

Via the Richmonder.

Shorter Connie O’Brien (Republican member of Kansas House):

I know she’s illegal because of how she looks.

Longer version:

[O’Brien] spoke during the meeting of her son’s difficulty paying for classes in 2010 at Kansas City (Kan.) Community College and a feeling of despair at waiting in line at the college with a female student who appeared to them to have been born outside the United States.

“My son, who’s a Kansas resident, born here, raised here, didn’t qualify for any financial aid,” according to a recording of her statement to the committee. “Yet this girl was going to get financial aid.”

“My son was kinda upset about it because he works and pays for his own schooling and his books and everything and he didn’t think that was fair. We didn’t ask the girl what nationality she was, we didn’t think that was proper. But we could tell by looking at her that she was not originally from this country,” she says on the recording.

During the meeting, Rep. Sean Gatewood, D-Topeka, asked O’Brien to clarify her remark.

“Can you expand on how you could tell that they were illegal?” Gatewood asked.

“Well, she wasn’t black,” O’Brien said. “She wasn’t Asian. And she had the olive complexion.”

Representative O’Brien denies any racist content in her words, characterizing it as an “innocent remark.”

But, you see, that’s the thing about racism. By and large, most racists don’t consider themselves as racists; they think they are normal and that everyone else is wrong.

It’s just part of how they were taught to view the world, to them as natural and innocent as an April shower.

Via Tapped, where Julianne Hing provides excellent commentary.

Michael Tomasky explains in the Guardian that it’s all about the monied. A nugget (emphasis added):

When Tea Party candidates were elected in a raft of seats across the United States in the midterm elections last November, we wondered what the fallout would be. Now we’re finding out.

At the state level, most notably in Wisconsin but in other states too, conservative governors are using the financial crisis – created by Wall Street bankers and the deregulation-mad politicians who serve them – to give the bankers even more power, in effect, by trying to crush the strongest countervailing force against them in our political system – unions.

Lucy Johns, a letter writer in The Nation (vol. 292, no. 9, Februay 21, 2011, p. two, letters available online only to subscribers), discusses, a bit cynically perhaps, the movement of jobs and markets overseas as interpreted by the plutocracy. An excerpt:

Whatever motive impelled Henry Ford to pay a living wage or others of his status to tolerate government subsidies of middle-class life (the GI Bill, mortgage deduction, college tuition aid, union protection), it’s gone now. We’ve all thought such subsidy is what America was about. Not. It was about maintaining demand . . . Don’t need that demand anymore. The policies that enabled its growth are nothing but a diversion of profit to the undeserving.

John Jon Stewart, in the video embedded at this Talking Points Memo item (check out the comments), said that there was nothing in common between the Wisconsins gathered in Madison and the Egyptians who gathered in Cairo.

He has a point, certainly as regards the severity of grievances.

Nevertheless . . .

According to pro-labor protesters in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker (R) may be taking a page from former Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarak and cutting off internet access to key protest organizers within the state Capitol building.

If you are in the Capitol attempting to access the internet from a free wifi connection labeled “guest,” you cannot access the site defendwisconsin.org. The site has been used to provide updates on what is happening, where you can volunteer, and where supplies and goods are needed to support protesters. Administrators of the website were notified on Monday that the page is being blocked. Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate says that the site was put on a blacklist typically used to filter out pornography sites so that protestors inside the Capitol could not access this key site.

Via The Richmonder.

The Rude One extracts some learnings. A sample:

3. Remember: if the majority Democratic Congress and the Democratic president are protested by the Tea Party, that’s just patriots expressing the will of the people against a tyrannical government. However, if the majority Republican assembly in Wisconsin is protested by tens of thousands of workers, that’s the slippery slope to anarchy.

4. Remember: if Republicans in the Senate abuse the rules that run their house by filbustering or putting individual holds on nearly every single bill or nomination from the House or the White House, refusing to even allow them to be considered, even if it affects the actual functioning of the nation, that’s just brave men and women standing in the way of Democrats enslaving the American people. But if Democrats in Wisconsin deny the Assembly a quorum by leaving the state, that’s just arrogant politicians refusing to do their jobs.

____________________

*Hip buzzword of the day for getting consultancy gigs.

Click through to see the image at its original size.

Via Down with Tyranny. who comments

So it really shouldn’t come as such a surprise that the war on women’s rights has emerged from the right-wing muck. For some on the Far Right it’s the answer to prayers long muttered under cover of ideological darkness, for a return to the “happy” days of biblical patriarchy, where uppity people who don’t know their place are forcibly shown their place. For others on the Far Right, notably the economic royalists led by the Koch brothers and their zillionaire cohorts, it’s a useful strategy for reinforcing the loyalty of those militant warriors for their authoritarian agenda. Just how far this holy alliance can succeed under cover of the economic meltdown remains to be seen.