Republican Hypocrisy category archive

A. No.

Addendum, the Next Morning:

Will Bunch:

As for Ensign, despite his blatant hypocrisy, I’m not a big fan of jumping over every GOP guy who cheated on his wife; when it comes to morality, there’s no reason to think that either party has the edge, although for some reason it does seem like more Republicans have found themselves in embarassing spots lately. (Although I’m less worried about what Ensign was up to than where someone like Democrat Jack Murtha has been putting his hands — in the cookie jar).

If Jack Murtha has his hands in the cookie jar (as appears more than possible), that’s not a good thing and ultimately harms more persons than Ensign flying his ensign in foreign waters.

But Murtha hasn’t been running around sanctimoniously pontificating about other persons’ hands in other cookie jars.

As George Washington Plunkitt famously said, “There’s honest graft and there’s dishonest graft.”

It’s not the affair.

It’s the hypocrisy.

The cut-throat self-righteous sanctimonious hypocrisy which is the dishonest graft of the Republican Party.

The Booman. Read the whole thing.

Addendum:

They did it again.

Addendum-de-dum-dum:

Dum-dum is right.

They just can’t help betraying their maggoty racist innards, now, can they?

Warning: O’Reilly language.

Read more »

Words matter. Helen Philpott cuts to the quick:

It’s just not that big of a leap to see a connection between the television news calling someone a Baby Killing Nazi over and over again and some religious fanatic deciding to finally pull the trigger. I get that it is not quite the same as the pie making my ass fat, but I don’t work for Jenny Craig. Bill O’Reilly, however, works for Fox News. The emphasis, of course, is on that last word – News. He should know better. He is paid to know better. He should be fired for not knowing better.

Read the whole thing.

Afterthought: Of course, Fox News won’t fire Bill O’Reilly for not knowing better. They need him to attract and propogate the Know Nothings.

H/T Karen for the link.

Oliver Willis sums it up:

For some time now, as John Lewis noted, the right has done a good job of whipping up hatred and animosity in order to profit from it politically. The problem is, the hate is now consuming the right and spilling blood into the streets. And the right has no intention of pushing back on it. In fact, they’re accelerating it.

In Wingnut Fantasyland, up is down, green is blue, ignorance is knowledge, right is left.

Media Matters asks:

In 2005, many Republican Senators went so far as to claim the filibuster of judicial nominees was unconstitutional. Now four years later, President Obama’s has appointed Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Will Senate Republicans remain consistent in their position or commit one of the most blatant acts of hypocrisy in the 220-year history of the United States Senate?

It’s multiple choice, folks. Consistent, hypocritical, or consistently hypocritical.

Link via Delaware Liberal.

Martha Goldberg writes at the Guardian:

This April, a leaked report from the Department of Homeland Security warned about a possible outbreak of right-wing violence. “Paralleling the current national climate, right-wing extremists during the 1990s exploited a variety of social issues and political themes to increase group visibility and recruit new members,” the report said, mentioning opposition to gun control, free trade, abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as racial antagonism.

(snip)

Conservatives howled in protest, complaining that the government was demonising their ideology. But the DHS was on to something. Experts who study the far right saw the rhetoric in various extremist movements ratcheting up. Brian Levin, director of the centre for the study of hate and extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, is a former cop who often consults with law enforcement. For the far right, he said, Obama’s election signaled that “the country has now become the cesspool that they’ve been warning about. When people feel so disenfranchised, or an event has taken place that for an extremist is considered so pivotal, it makes sense that we look at what these extremists are saying, because someone is listening.”

Addendum:

Dick Polman:

I’ll certainly stipulate that most anti-abortion activists are peaceful; however, they rarely denounced the harsh rhetoric that was routinely directed at the murder victim. Tiller was regularly maligned by mainstream anti-abortion groups as an “executioner,” somebody who “routinely killed the babies of women.” And the message was dutifully amplified by O’Reilly, who used his Fox megaphone to warn that anybody refusing to “stop” Tiller would have “blood on their hands.” (This climate, of course, has been nurtured for years. Tiller is the fourth slain doctor. He was shot in both arms in 1994 by a woman who vocally praised the slaying of a Florida doctor five months earlier. That Florida doctor had been targeted by anti-abortion militants who had put his face and home number on a poster, emblazoned with the word “Wanted.”)

Actually, the fatal bullet fired Sunday by suspect Scott Roeder has pierced the heart of the anti-abortion credo. The underlying premise of the movement is that the alleged immorality of abortion is more important than its legality. The movement perceives abortion to be a sin against God (as they interpret sin, as they interpret God), and the rights of those who disagree with them are immaterial. In other words, they didn’t care that Tiller was operating within the law, because their concept of the law is more spiritual (as only they define it).

Sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander.

Bob Herbert considers the wingnut reaction to the Sotomayor nomination:

Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!

Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery. I don’t remember hearing their voices or the voices of their intellectual heroes when the Republican Party, as part of its Southern strategy, aggressively courted the bigots who fled the Democratic Party because the Democrats had become insufficiently hostile to blacks.

Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”

Frank Schaeffer discusses those who would claim that words of hate do not lead to deeds of hate.

Via Air America.

Words can be powerful things.

No one gets up in the morning and says, “Oh, gee, I think I’m going to do something hypocritical today.”

The hypocrite does not–cannot–see his hypocrisy.

He merely lives it, in a pedestrian, banal, and unself-conscious way.

There will be many empty words of regret from those, like this one among many, who helped suborn the nutcase in Kansas City (and other nutcases) to murder, while wrapping themselves in the self-righteous mantle of their hate-full-ness.

Sane people will point out that the words of hate that the anti-abortion forces (“baby-killers,” “murderers,” “Nazis”) routinely use as part of their campaign have helped push the nutcases over the line to murder.

Wasted words.

Rationality does not work with those who have none. And those who profit from hate care not the effects of their words.

. . . is rightwing terrorism.

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.

The open, naked descent of the Republican Party into their netherworld of hatred and bigotry over the nomination of Sonia Sotomajor to the Supreme Court has been a truly amazing thing to watch.

In less than a week, they have revealed their maggoty racist innards so as to surprise even me, whose low opinion of Republicanism is rivaled by no one’s.

And, Jeez oh man! I grew up under Jim Crow.

[JIM CROW MODE ON]

Frankly, she looks white to me. I guess we wuz too busy hatin’ on black folks to worry us’ns with American citizens descended from other American citizens from the American territory of Puerto Rico.

[JIM CROW MODE OFF]

It is to throw up.

The Booman:

With Republican talking heads calling Sotomayor a ‘racist’, a ‘schoolmarm’, a member of the ‘KKK’ without the hoods or the nooses’, stupid, and temperamental, there is no way for either women or latinos to conclude anything else but that the GOP doesn’t like them. And here’s the thing. Normally, political advocates argue their case in a way that they think will ultimately help their party win elections. Sometimes, their desire to win leads them to trim their sails a bit about how they really feel. But these Republicans are letting it all hang out without any regard whatsoever for the essentially suicidal rhetoric they are using.

. . . I really don’t like having an openly racist party in this county, let alone one that is the only realistic alternative to the Democrats. It’s not healthy and it’s not safe. And I want someone to come along and put this GOP party out of its misery before it comes back to power through the power of inertia.

Video via Delaware Liberal.

It’s only activism when wingnuts disagree with the outcome:

Via the Great Orange Satan.

The odious Southern strategy lives on.

Appealing to bigotry:

It’s second nature to them now,
like breathing out and breathing in.

Indeed, a lot of folks don’t seem to realize that Puerto Rico is part of the United States.

Josh Marshall:

As I said this morning, it’s painfully revealing how conservatives simply cannot helping going hard on the race front with Sotomayor or, as David Kurtz just put it, can’t help imagining that everyone else is as racist as many of them are.

Video link via Atrios.

From Phawker via Brendan.

WWJD?

Why, torture, of course!

(Aside: Honestly, these people are nuts.)

The Booman defines the term.