Republican Hypocrisy category archive

Leonard Boasberg, writing at the Philadelphia Inquirer, wonders why, if teabaggers so revere the Constitution, they are so eager to amend it. A nugget:

The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives played to its tea-party base by opening the proceedings with a reading of the Constitution – well, most of it anyway, skipping some embarrassing parts, like that business about “three-fifths of all other persons.” But now let us turn our attention to how the tea-party folks would amend the document they regard with such reverence.

The so-called “repeal amendment,” if approved – which, fortunately, seems unlikely – would allow the repeal of any act of Congress or federal regulation by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states. Legislators in 12 states have come out in favor of this nutty idea, as have Virginia’s attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, and the new majority leader in the House, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia.

(snip)

Instead of reading the Constitution aloud, the Republican members of Congress might do better to read the Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to explain and defend the Constitution to the then-disunited states. In Federalist No. 34, Hamilton countered those who objected to the idea that the laws of the United States would be the supreme law of the land.

“But what inference can be drawn from this, or what would they amount to, if they were not to be supreme?” he asked, and answered: “It is evident they would amount to nothing.”

Like phony preachers who wave the Bible while stuffing their pockets from the offertory, they like only the parts they like and so there!

Barry Saunders of the Raleigh News and Observer comments at McClatchy.

Via Will Bunch.

Shaun Mullen reads the fine print. A nugget:

The big engines of the Republican Party’s mid-term Bamboozlement Express were a promise to cut $100 billion from the federal budget this year and repeal health-care reform. The promises were, of course, as empty as the party’s Pledge for American and both deader than door nails even before newly minted Speaker John Boehner gavelled the House into session.

Boehner knew that the $100 billion promise would be impossible to come close to keeping given the fine print attached to the pledge by party bigs even as they coddled the Tea Party acolytes among them. The fine print included Social Security, Medicare and defense and homeland security spending being off limits. In other words, the bulk of the budget.

If the budget-reduction promise was good political theater, the health-care reform offensive is worthy of a group Grammy. This is because . . . um, reality will once again rear its pug-ugly head.

Read the rest at the link.

Via BartBlog.

The Booman suggests that Republicans stop making stuff up. A nugget:

All I’m saying here is that we really shouldn’t have to tolerate a party going around talking about cutting the budget by 10, 20, 50 times what is realistically possible. They aren’t even serious about the numbers. They’re just saying whatever bullshit they think people want to hear, or that will win them some attention.

We could make this easier by just changing the rules. We propose something and then they lie about what we proposed and refuse to support it. That is the basic structure of our government right now, and everything else is just extraneous window dressing and noise.

In other proposals, pigs, wings.

Skippy demonstrates.

A compilation of hate-full-ness.

If this were an episode of Criminal Minds, these would be portrayed as the ravings of–oh, never mind. The words speak for their speakers.

Via TPM, where you can find the attributions for the quotations that Congressman Dingell was kind enough not to attribute to those who said them.

The rightwing is quite happy to sow the wind with its rhetoric of violence, hate, and paranoia. But as for reaping the whirlwind?

Not so much.

Facing South* looks at history for indications whether vile and violence-laden rhetoric can lead to political violence. Here’s the excerpt; read the entire post for context and supporting arguments:

As of last year, the FBI was still investigating over 100 unsolved murders that happened during the Southern civil rights struggle. That doesn’t include the dozens of killings that have been successfully prosecuted, including the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis in 1968, whose life will be memorialized this coming weekend.

Many civil rights activists, scholars and reporters maintain there was a direct line between this blood-stained chapter in U.S. history and the violent rhetoric of politicians like George Wallace, the Alabama governor and presidential hopeful..

Indeed, a veteran of the civil rights years, Congressman James Clyburn, speaks from personal experience (follow the link to hear the full exchange):

When I see and hear things today that are reminiscent of that period of time, I am very, very concerned about it, because I know what it led to back then, and I know what it can lead to again.

Again, the issue is not Sarah Palin’s bellicose graphics (though it appears that she may reap that particular whirlwind), it is the right’s paranoid tactic of painting other patriotic Americans as the enemy, as unpatriotic and traitorous; it is their fantasizing about and making light of murder and death; it is their demonizing those who have different opinions; it is their glorifying bloodshed; all of which are as common among the loudest voices of the right as it is rare** on the left.

Joanna Weiss addresses this well in the Boston Globe:

But if people are going to take this opportunity to soul-search, they might as well talk about the real problem with today’s political discourse: not the language of violence, but the language of insurrection. The notion, perpetrated by certain talk-show hosts, that we’re teetering on the edge of a coup. That our president wasn’t born in America. That an incremental change in the way health care is delivered — the wisdom of which is open to legitimate debate — is a plot to deprive Americans of their freedom.

“To prepare soldiers to go to war, you’ve got to dehumanize the enemy, because that’s the only way to kill people,’’ notes Leonard Steinhorn, a communications professor at American University. “What we’re in the process of is either dehumanizing or de-Americanizing one’s opponents.’’

Rhetoric that cheapens life becomes a rationalization for behavior that cheapens life, even for the irrational.

_________________

*I mentioned the Facing South link in a comment yesterday. I was planning to post about it, but had to let the treatment simmer in my brain pan.

**I said, “rare,” not absent; I don’t want to hear any “I saw something nasty on a car with an Obama bumper sticker” whining.

Some Guy with a Website:

Click To Enlarge

A map, via Hanlon.

In response to the shootings in Tucson, persons (including me, not that anyone other than my three or four regular reader will notice) have called out the rightwing’s habit of demonizing and dehumanizing those with whom they disagree.

The right has responded with the classic which we all remember from our teen-aged years,

But everybody does it.

As your mother pointed out when you tried that, “No, everybody is not doing it” and “Even if they were, that doesn’t make it right.” (I’ll leave out the part about, “If everybody was driving cars off a cliff, . . . .”)

Stephen Budiansky considers the “have cake, eat it too” elements of the rightwing’s rationalizations. A nugget:

For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime to declining test scores to teen pregnancy to rude children to declining patriotism to probably athlete’s foot . . . upon Dr. Spock, Hollywood liberals, the abolition of prayer in school, Bill Clinton, the “liberal 1960s,” the teaching of evolution — in other words, upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%. Something is driving the tripling of death threats against congressmen (and the concomitant rise in threats against Federal judges and other villains of the right, from Forest Service rangers to climate scientists) and it isn’t the sunspot cycle.

Dick Polman considers:

Could these shootings have happened “anywhere,” as the apologists insist? In theory, yeah. But they didn’t occur anywhere. They happened in a swing district, in a turbulent, gun-loving state, to a moderate Democrat who as we speak is resting in a medically-induced coma. Given the kind of place that Giffords represents, and her party affiliation, this incident has its own cruel logic. As Giffords herself said on TV last March, referring to the rhetoric and violence, “When people do that, you’ve got to realize there are consequences.”

So, no, this is not a shock. Rather, it’s the inevitable side effect of our toxic stew, runneth over. Sooner or later, some whacko out there was going to drink too much.

Budiansky link via Andrew Sullivan.

(I know that this has been amply echoed in the echo chamber, but I really just cannot resist.)

The hollowness of the Republican declaration of loyalty of the Constitution of the United States of America is exceeded only by their ignorance of its provisions.

In a follow-up to the embarrassing non-swearing-in of Reps. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and Mike Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., on Wednesday, the House this morning approved a resolution nullifying their votes on six roll call votes, cast when, it turns out, they were still “representative-elect.

Sessions and Fitzpatrick sent letters to every member late Friday apologizing for the episode, saying they were deeply committed to “maintaining the integrity of the People’s House.”

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon. What an ignoranamus.”

Afterthought:

Hanlon’s comments seem appropriate. A nugget:

Do conservatives have a Constitution fetish? Yes, they do. In that they worship the image of the Constitution as a religious idol, not that they actually follow it any more strongly than progressives.

Dick Polman, writing elsewhere, provides context. A nugget:

The (health care–ed.) repeal vote is sheer simplicity. It’s political theater for the tea-party crowd, a gimmick by which the Republicans hope to bank some good will in the short run, knowing full well that the base will be disappointed down the road. Already, we’re getting word that a key GOP campaign promise – to cut $100 billion from this year’s budget – is as DOA as health reform repeal. The rumored reduction tab is now down to around $30 billion or less. For instance, Republican leaders were thinking about slashing federal road money – whereupon their good friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told them, oh no, you can’t do that.

Dick Polman considers Joe Miller’s Teabagger Have Cake, Eat It Too political stance:

As Sarah Palin’s autumn stalking horse, Miller insisted that federal jobless benefits were unconstitutional. Then it turned out that his own wife had received such benefits.

Miller insisted that federal health care entitlements, including Medicaid, were unconstitutional. Then it turned out that he and his family had received Medicaid.

Miller denounced federal spending on agriculture. Then it turned out that, back in the ’90s, he had received federal agriculture subsidies for a farm he owned.

Miller assailed Denali KidCare, a health program heavily subsidized by the feds, and he rebuked Murkowski for having supported it. Then it turned out that his own kids had received Denali KidCare.

So you see the problem. The bottom line is, Joe Miller didn’t lose his Senate race because some Alaskans misspelled Murkowski’s name. He blew his Senate race because the voters assessed the chasm that separated his tea-party talk from his personal actions, and found him fraudulent. Insulting the voters even in defeat, by trying to disenfranchise them in federal court, will only cement his reputation.

Afterthought:

Face it, wingnut candidates will say whatever they find convenient at the time, regardless of what they said and did yesterday or might say and do tomorrow.

In that way, they are electioneering equivalent of Charles Krauthammer.

Shorter Haley Barbour:

Overt bigotry, discrimination, and oppression based on race wasn’t so bad.

Addendum:

Leopard, spots.

Via Delaware Liberal.

From the StevenD:

Tax cuts for a few thousand Billionaires and Multi-Millionaires that will increase the deficit by 80 Billion dollars in 2011 alone? “Yes, or else,” say the Republicans. Spending a comparatively measly $1 Billion health care reform that will help millions of non-miilionaires, people desperately in need of better health benefits? Absolutely not! say the Republicans.

And helping 9/11 responders who risked their lives and suffered the consequences, and improving food safety for all Americans? “Too costly,” say the Republicans Tell me again, who exactly is waging class warfare here?

Fox, the news network with its right thumb always on the balance. From Media Matters:

This latest revelation comes after Media Matters uncovered an email sent by Sammon to Fox journalists at the peak of the health care reform debate, ordering them to avoid using the term “public option” and instead use variations of “government option.” That email echoed advice from a prominent Republican pollster on how to help turn public opinion against health care reform.

Sources familiar with the situation in Fox’s Washington bureau have expressed concern about Sammon using his position to “slant” Fox’s supposedly neutral news coverage to the right.

Sammon’s orders for Fox journalists to cast doubt on climate science came amid the network’s relentless promotion of the fabricated “Climategate” scandal, which revolved around misrepresentations of emails sent to and from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.

At the time of Sammon’s directive, it was clear the “scandal” did not undermine the scientific basis for global warming and that the emails were being grossly distorted by conservative media and politicians. Scientists, independent fact-checkers, and several investigations have since confirmed that the CRU emails do not undermine the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet.

Via Atrios.

Fortunately, they don’t fail Jon Stewart.

Via Bob Cesca.