Republican Hypocrisy category archive

The gift that keeps on giving.

It’s starting.

Just as predicted. Follow the link.

US-born 70-year-old US citizen of Spanish and Chinese descent ‘already stopped twice’ by law enforcement officers in Arizona and asked to produce his papers.

Tell me he wasn’t stopped because he was brown. If you buy that, I have a nice bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

Act here.

The reason the Founders included a procedure for amending the Constitution is that they believed it could be improved.

The Booman has more.

Afterthought:

Lincoln rotates in his grave. It is truly odd to see the Republican Party taking a stand in favor of the version of the United States Constitution which wrote slavery into the law of the land.

(Jeez oh man, you can’t make this stuff up. Hell, Mad Magazine couldn’t make this stuff up.)

Republican Family Values, the gift that keeps on giving.

Like I said, all the rest is camouflage.

Yes, I am disgusted.

It’s been a bad week and my ability to see humor in lies and hypocrisy wanes.

No More Mister Nice Blog comments on the calls for Mr. Obama to do something about the oil spill gusher. Read the whole thing; it’s delicious. Profane, but delicious:

For the last sixteen months the GOP has been screaming that government is evil, that it is the problem, that we need less regulation in order to be more productive, more profitable, and that rules and oversight aren’t needed because the free market will take care of things.

(snip)

And now the Republicans are demanding that the government “fix the problem”?

Via the Poorman.

Raw Story:

Correspondence between lawyer Kris Kobach and Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce (R-Mesa) suggests that Arizona’s new immigration law, conceived in the nation’s capital, was intended to hit poor Latinos the hardest.

Follow the links and read the posts. Then come back and claim that racial and ethic bigotry is not involved. Then try to sell me that big old bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Remember, I’m a Southern Boy. I know the code.

The BP off shore drilling platform operated by Deepwater Horizons had a history of mistakes, spills, and accidents.

We are not surprised that Halliburton was involved.

Bacon’s Rebellion recounts the myths of off-shore drilling.

Indeed, these could be the myths of privatization of legitimate governmental functions.

Follow the link for a full explication:

• Myth One: High technology will save us.
• Myth Two: For-profit companies always operate for the public good.
• Myth Three: You always know who works for you.
• Myth Four: If a company says it is green, believe it.

Related: In 1999, U.S. report found failure of offshore rigs’ blowout preventers common.

Blowout prevention costs money. Money cuts into profits. Profits > Public Good. Q. E. D.

Rachel Maddow looks at the persons behind Arizona’s “I Know One When I See One” law. Many of them have long histories in the racial and ethnic bigotry and hatred biz.

(Early in the video, the Governor confesses that she does not know what an illegal immigrant looks like. I guess someone is going to sprinkle pixie dust on the Arizona constabulary so they can magically know one when they see one.)

Maddow opens the video by summarizing how Republicans, while caterwauling about immigration for years, have also prevented Congress from taking up the issue, even to the point of turning on George W. Bush when he tried to address it.

Refusing to address a problem festers fosters further demagoguery.

The discussion of the persons behind the bill starts about three minutes in (partial transcript here).

Brendan is boycotting companies based in Arizona. Follow the link for a list of big outfits headquartered there (Warning: He’s upset. Language).

Shaun Mullen (where I found the link to the video) isn’t sure whether a boycott will do any good:

The UFW (United Farm Workers’ California lettuce–ed.) boycott worked, while I have little doubt that a boycott of anything having to do with Arizona will be ineffectual even if big players like Mexico, the state’s largest trading partner, get on board. The neo-Nazis, supremacists and nativists have gotten their way, and there will be no turning back.

But that is not the point, so I will not be flying into Phoenix to see an old friend this summer and making damned sure that I don’t buy anything made in Arizona at the stupormarket.

It comes as no surprise that the movers and shakers behind the law are as vile as they come. Nor that the state government has the chutzpah to ask Washington to help fund the 15,000 officers tasked with hunting down people simply because they have brown skins.

But he’s in, because symbolism matters.

So am I.

(Ahhhh, they want Washington to supply the pixie dust. Frankly, I think that producing pixie dust would be a horrible overreach of federal power under the terms of good witch/bad witch clause of the United States Constitution.)

Addendum:

Anonymous Liberal, who is a lawyer, analyzes the pixie dust.

Dick Polman considers statements by Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush questioning Arizona’s “See Your Papers, Mach Snell” law:

The tea-party people who scream that health care reform is a threat to their personal freedom have been conspicuously silent about the new Arizona law that poses a threat to personal freedom. Gee, I wonder why. Perhaps it’s because the virtually all-white tea-party people can’t seem to muster outrage about governmental overreach that potentially imperils the freedom of brown people. Apparently not all government “tyranny” is created equal.

Imagine that the teabaggers were black.

After I wrote this, but before it autoposted, Terrance DC published a long musing on just this topic.

Via JK at Balloon Juice.

Tony Norman, writing at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, discusses Arizona’s xenophobia. A nugget:

Right-wingers complain about creeping fascism all the time, yet there has been no bigger example of a drift toward tyranny and the police state than this stupid, race-coded legislation. We should all be outraged.

By the way, injustice rarely stops at well-defined borders of race or class once it gets rolling. One day, someone is going to ask us all for our respective papers. Consider this a down payment.

Clarence Page draws on his experiences to anticipate life in Arizona:

I had a taste of what that was like in the 1970s as a black American reporter during South Africa’s apartheid regime. The white-minority government’s “influx control” policy required all black South Africans to carry a photo-ID “passbook” in urban areas to prevent a deluge of black Africans from flooding in to areas where the jobs were. Sound familiar?

My American passport came in handy on a Johannesburg street when an Afrikaner police officer said “Wys my jou paspoort.” (Show me your passport.) I was strolling-while-black. He didn’t need any more reasonable suspicion than that.

My views haven’t changed.

This is an evil law that reveals the worst aspects of the American character: bigotry, prejudice, xenophobia, hatred, and racism, just to mention a few.

This is a must watch:

John Stewart via TPM.

Republicans formally declare their allegiance to their corporate masters.

Move along now. Nothing new to see here . . . .

This is strong stuff and not for the faint of heart.

Follow the link to see how deeply hypocritical and bereft of values the Party of Family Values truly is.

Link below the fold.

Read more »

Jamelle points out that it’s not a deficit when Republicans do it, at least not insofar as the press is concerned:

Rhetoric notwithstanding, there is little in the last thirty years of political history to suggest that Republicans are actually concerned with deficits. From Reagan onwards, the GOP has been the party of deficits; cutting taxes and raising spending with little regards to the nation’s long-term fiscal health. Insofar that “fiscal conservatism” means anything, it has little to do with deficit reduction and everything to do with turning the federal government into a generous benefactor for the wealthy and privileged.

As for the second point, our current deficits are not the product of entitlement spending. This isn’t a hard fact to grasp, but it seems to elude most of the professional commentariat (or at least those that can’t be bothered to use Google).

Dick Polman analyzes the Republican Wall Street spin cycle:

In his ’07 book, entitled Words That Work, Luntz warns Republicans that Wall Street “is seen as global and cold, with sterile glass structures and office cubicles filled with numbers crunchers concerned more with profits than people.” The problem, of course, is that Republicans have traditionally been close to Wall Street, vacuuming up more of its donations than the other party. (According to a massive ’08 study by the nonpartisan wallstreetwatch.org, the GOP collected 55 percent of the financial sector’s political donations in the 10 years between 1998 and 2008.) But (Frank–ed.) Luntz had a solution: Republicans, in their messaging, should take care to identify themselves with Main Street. In Luntz’s words, “Wall Street is about profit. Main Street is about people…Wall Street is about buyouts and takeovers. Main Street is about family.”

Which brings us to the current efforts on Capitol Hill – led by Democrats, with a few participating Republicans – to crack down on Wall Street abuses. Earlier this year, when Republican leaders realized that they would have to serve their Wall Street friends by opposing reform, without somehow appearing to side with Wall Street against the little guy, Luntz went to work on the thorny problem. He came up with a solution. He suggested some talking points that made it sound as if the Republicans, by opposing reform, were actually sticking up for the little guy – and that the Democrats, by pushing reform, were sticking up for Wall Street and screwing the little guy.

John Cole dissects Republican opposition to banking reform so I don’t have to.

The Republican Party: Now and ever the Party of Privilege.

Facing South analyzes several polls of teabaggers. It’s conclusions are no surprise. Put bluntly, it’s all about the Scary Black Man:

. . . it’s also their racial attitudes. While racist antics among tea party protesters have made this an article of faith for many on the left already, the racial character of the tea party got some scholarly backing from a multi-state survey released this week by Christopher Parker at the University of Washington.

(snip)

But this body of evidence suggests a few things: While the tea party may be able to make some media noise and influence a few Republican primaries in the short-term, the movement’s narrow and shrinking core base puts it on the wrong side of our country’s demographic trajectory.

What’s more, the tea party movement clearly draws strength from whites who fear and resent their loss of social position (both real and imagined). That’s given rise to a politics of racial resentment which will not only further drive them away from African-Americans, Hispanics/Latinos and other people of color, but also whites (especially younger and urban) who don’t share such racial hostilities.

Billmon has more at the Great Orange Satan (Via John Cole). So does Jamelle.

Underlying it all is the idea that, by devaluing others, we somehow increase our own value (Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell showed that to be at the heart of prejudice, bigotry, and nativism when they studied the radical right in the 1950s–they called it “status anxiety.” See also Eric Berne.) As long as you have someone to look down on, it seems, you must be doing okay.

Over the years, the list of those looked down on has included variously Catholics, Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, and Poles, among other, but has always included blacks.

Nevertheless, by devaluing others, we do not increase our own value.

We devalue everyone, including ourselves.

Read more »

Back when I was a young ‘un, growing up in the Jim Crow South, some of the school administrators went to attend some kind of convention in New Orleans. One of them was a close friend of my father (in fact, the first baseball glove I had was contributed by this man).

Remember that this was in the most intense period of the Civil Rights struggle, shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed and after this.

After they came back, my father’s friend told my father that the trip was okay, but, when they got to Mississippi, the atmosphere was so tense that they felt they had to put on fake Southern accents.

And these were white guys with Southern accents from a segregated state, from the state that came up with the idea of Massive Resistance.

They were afraid to be mistaken for Yankees, despite their Virginia accents.

They were also, quite frankly, amazed at what a different world Mississippi was from Virginia.

I did not, at that time, know that Mississippi still had not ratified the 13th amendment to the Constitution, the amendment that abolished slavery.

Mississippi still hasn’t given up.

Afterthought:

I mentioned earlier that one of my ancestors was a General in the CSA. He is also represented in the John Brown Wax Museum at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, in the act of signing John Brown’s death certificate.

My younger son, who was with us on that trip, was ashamed.

Do I disown him (my ancestor, that is; I’m still thinking about my son)? Heavens no. He is part of my history and he was a man of his time.

But that does not require me to honor his cause.

Anyone who cannot figure out why the Confederate Flag, Confederate symbols, Confederate History Month, and the whole Confederate ball of wax are deeply offensive to many persons is either too stupid for words or a racist ideologue.

There really is no middle ground.