How the GOP weathered the Fourth

When it rains on the Republicans’ Fourth of July parade, it’s a monsoon!

I doubt seriously that the stars will ever again align against the GOP in the precise configuration they’ve achieved since the Supreme Court ruled that the individual health care mandate in the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. The deluge of dashed hopes, mixed messages, and wrong turns that has flooded the vast conservative echo chamber has expanded the right wing’s Independence Day celebration into a “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week,” to borrow a phrase from author Judith Viorst (and a meme from the Internet).

Never mind that “the mandate” was an idea that Republicans originally proposed but which they detest now against all reason and with vehement intensity. (President Obama is equally intent on furthering his inevitable goal of “bipartisan compromise,” which never gets him anywhere with these people.) Once Obama looks favorably upon such brainstorms of the right-wing think tanks and thereby gives them cooties, conservatives metamorphose into their own doctrines’ most fervent critics.

How many things went wrong for the Republicans in the short span of a week? I counted a dirty dozen:

1) The Supremes ruled against them, and “heads exploded,” as Dick Cheney once said, all over Washington.

2) Fox and CNN (trying to outfox Fox) both got the story horribly wrong at first, because whoever skimmed that ruling was either in too big a hurry for a scoop to read past the first paragraph or too “simple” to fathom what the ruling meant. They saw “individual mandate unconstitutional” and ran with it. (Even worse, Obama was tuned in to both channels and, at first, believed what he was hearing!)

3)The entire wingnut populace spent days massively freaking out, denouncing the treachery of Chief Justice John Roberts (who is supposed to be “an impartial guardian of the law,” not a right-wing tool), and proclaiming that “Obamacare” included “the biggest tax increase in the history of the world.” Roberts’ new critics invaded his Wikipedia biography and symbolically “repealed” him by “replacing” the title “Chief Justice” with “Chief Traitor.”

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage all tried to outdo each other’s bombast. “Our freedom of choice just met its death panel,” Limbaugh raged about SCOTUS. Beck hawked T-shirts depicting Roberts as a coward. Savage suggested that Roberts’ epilepsy meds had caused “cognitive disassociation (sic)” that affected his judgment. And Troy Newman of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue compared the day the decision was announced to 9/11 and, appallingly, referenced Nazi Germany as well, warning that “we are all moving down the road toward complete annihilation.”

4) Some nut-job even proposed one of Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle’s “Second Amendment remedies.” In Michigan, former state GOP spokesman Matt Davis asked in a mass email whether “armed rebellion” might now be justified. An anonymous commenter responded to an online article about it: “I will not submit I will not buy something I don’t want I will not pay the fine (sic). And I will not be arrested peacefully. Your move Feds (double sic: punctuation needed desperately).”

5) Mitch McConnell appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” expecting his usual softball interview. Chris Wallace, however, grilled him relentlessly about the Republicans’ plan to “replace” Obamacare once they’ve repealed it. After Wallace asked him three times how the GOP planned to cover some 30 million uninsured Americans, McConnell finally blurted out in exasperation, “That’s not the issue!” Then, realizing what he was admitting, he clarified that the Republicans didn’t have a replacement plan for Obamacare’s most important provision.

6) After Republicans were proven wrong on how big the tax increase would be (the Great God Reagan passed a higher one), Romney’s campaign stooge, Eric Fehrnstrom the Etch a Sketch guy, made it clear that Romney didn’t consider the fine that “free riders” would have to pay for ignoring the mandate a “tax” but rather an “unconstitutional penalty.” If Romney were to call it a tax, it would mean that he had also “raised taxes” when Massachusetts passed Romneycare. Much wingnuttery ensued, including a snide tweet from Rupert Murdoch saying Mitt should “hire some real pros” for his campaign team.

On the “penalty” side of the debate were conservative think-tank analysts, The Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the four dissenting justices – all of whom warned that accepting as a tax what was written into law as a penalty would give big-government advocates “unlimited power to impose new purchase mandates.” The government could “legally tax our every breath,” Sen. Rand Paul warned.

7) Individual GOP lawmakers have a personal stake in one facet of the law they so fervently want to repeal: the provision that allows their own adult children to remain on their health insurance policies. Tea Party blowhard Joe Walsh (who also recently tried to “swiftboat” his Democratic opponent, a former Black Hawk pilot and double amputee, for “politicizing” her military service) explained that, while his 24-year-old son is covered by his mother’s plan, the freshman congressman doesn’t really support keeping the provision. “I don’t know where I am on that, and that’s a lousy thing to say,” he observed. “That doesn’t matter to me, though, irregardless (sic) of that.” (It’s “lousy” indeed, given that Walsh’s ex-wife has sued him for more than $100,000 in child support arrears that she claims he owes.)

8) Mother Jones magazine updated a story about Mitt and the Fabulous Bain Boys investing $75 million in Stericycle, a medical waste firm that disposed of aborted fetuses. This time, Mitt couldn’t weasel out of it by claiming he no longer worked there when the Stericycle deal went down. According to writer David Corn, an SEC document revealed that Mitt had held sole “voting and dispositive power” over Bain’s Stericycle shares when the investment was made. One pro-life blogger, along with Dan Primack of CNN Money, challenged Corn’s conclusion. Primack acknowledged that Bain asked Mitt to continue signing Stericycle fund documents after he “left” in February 1999 to salvage the Olympics in Utah. (Mitt had taken an earlier leave in 1994 to run for the Senate.) “Romney said he will stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions,” The Boston Herald stated at the time. A July 1999 press release said Romney was “currently on a part-time leave of absence” and quoted him speaking for Bain Capital.

9) In a surprise move, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed three voter suppression bills. Needless to say, Republicans weren’t too happy about this unprecedented defection from their nationwide plot to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters.

10) Jonathan Krohn, the erstwhile wunderkind of CPAC’s 2009 conference as a precocious 13-year-old, has now emerged at 17 to denounce conservatism – and his own naivete. Movement bigwigs who once revered him are now calling him vile names and sniffing that they secretly thought all along that he was annoying, condescending, and mindless.

11) On the Fourth, Mittens caved to intense pressure from his puppeteers by revising his views on the “penalty vs. tax” issue yet again, now calling it “a tax” but offering no elaboration. Then a Wall Street Journal op-ed blasted Mitt and his bumbling campaign strategy for “slowly squandering an historic opportunity” by vacillating and obfuscating on issues like health care reform. Flip-Flopper-in-Chief, anyone?

12) And for the grand finale, the right’s wackiest characters genuinely “brought the crazy” during America’s 236th birthday week. El Rushbo dropped another misogynistic bombshell when he replied to a caller opining on the youth vote: “When women got the right to vote is when it all went downhill. Because that’s when votes started being cast with emotion and maternal instinct that government ought to reflect.” (Worry not, dittoheads: Beck’s got his back. The Blaze, Beck’s website, insisted that Rush was merely baiting liberal critics with an old saw written by Ann Coulter – who probably really believes it.) Meanwhile Florida’s favorite Mad Hatter, Rep. Allen “Wild, Wild” West, said at a campaign rally: “I have a great idea. I believe, for personal security, every American should have to go out and buy a Glock 9mm” – an obvious applause line, gun humor for the ideologically challenged. “And if you don’t do it, we’ll tax you,” he added, after his curtain call. (Col. West is not amused by the federal income tax.) “Now I wonder how the liberals will feel about that one.”

I have to hand it to him: That’s one hell of an “individual mandate.” The problem is that it’s about as thoughtless a possible provocation to trigger-happy whack jobs as Dubya jeering, “Bring ‘em on!” at the citizens of a nation we had just occupied in a preemptive war. Or Sarah Palin exhorting the Tea Party faithful, “Don’t retreat, RELOAD!” and using a U.S. map festooned with figurative gun sights to target the districts of congressional Democrats who had voted for the Affordable Care Act – like Arizona’s Gabby Giffords, later shot and gravely injured by a deranged gunman who killed six other people during the same attack.

I’m not implying that the shooter had ever seen Palin’s provocative map; we have no way of knowing what set off his crazed shooting spree. But all we need in this polarized country is more wildly irresponsible NRA rhetoric – or everybody and his grandma packing heat.

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This blog entry was first published as an opinion column in The Zest of Orange (Hudson Valley Views with a Twist), described by its editors as "an informative, scrappy, argumentative, contrarian, and thoroughly entertaining site sure to delight some readers and infuriate others."

Racism rears its ugly head in age of Obama

It’s not my imagination, and it’s neither stereotyping nor paranoia. I even have a fistful of academic studies by credible sociologists to back up my theory about race relations in the 21st century: The election of our first African-American president has reawakened the ugly specter of a kind of flagrant racial prejudice that, once it was subdued by “political correctness,” lay dormant for decades in the body politic. That’s why it feels like we’re suddenly being assaulted by bigotry in the age of Obama; the racket it makes is so deafening, after years of relative multicultural harmony.

Now Robert Draper, the author of a new book about House Republican machinations after Barack Obama took office, has supplied anecdotal evidence that supports the sociologists’ conclusions. What Draper said also bolsters my sickening suspicion that the virulent opposition to Obama among a certain swath of the electorate — a vibe that’s so palpable, you practically trip over it every time you go online — is rooted in something far more pernicious than the customary Republican aversion to Democratic policies. (Even though World Net Daily did call Bill Clinton “much more than a ‘stealth’ communist president, but a secret ‘master of the Illuminati’,” this Obama-focused slime is far more abhorrent).

During an interview with Al Sharpton, Draper was asked what he thought motivated “the intense, unparalleled resentment” of Obama from the right. “I think there is a dimension, an extra depth of contempt for this president that is really off the charts,” Draper replied. “I interviewed a lot of Tea Party freshmen, spent a lot of time with them, and I didn’t detect any kind of racial animus in any of them. However, they were ushered in by a Tea Party movement that does have a certain racial component to the depth of contempt that they feel for this president.”

Draper’s book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, has exposed a secret cabal of 15 Republican “strategic thinkers” who met on the very night of Obama’s 2009 inauguration and plotted how they were going to bring him down. Neither John Boehner, who would become Speaker of the House two years later, nor Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, was invited to attend. Boehner, however, apparently failed to notice that the cheers on the day he became speaker were for the 87 Tea Party freshmen whose midterm victories had won him his oversized gavel. McConnell crowed triumphantly that his top political priority for the next two years would be “to deny Barack Obama a second term.”

‘A village in Kenya is missing its idiot! Deport Obama!’
Why, I’ve often wondered, was the gloating so extreme after the 2010 midterm elections? Obviously, the Tea Party hysteria that erupted during the summer of 2009, after Obama introduced his historic health care bill, had gotten the ball rolling. Republican politicians were riling up the fractious crowds with irresponsible drivel about “death panels” and imaginary government bureaucrats “coming between you and your doctor.”

But amid the cacophony of town hall jeers and phony “Astroturf” protests organized by corporate lobbyists, something more sinister was afoot than simply opposing what the vociferous base called “the government takeover” of health care. There was a wild, insolent edge to the proceedings, the kind of raucous mob mentality that you might have observed at a public hanging during the Middle Ages.

Demonstrators at Tea Party rallies carried a wide variety of signs and banners. Many displayed patriotic or anti-tax slogans, but others bore overtly racist messages — some of them crude (and often misspelled) racial epithets and taunts (“A village in Kenya is missing its idiot! Deport Obama!”; “We don’t want socialism, you arrogant Kenyan!”; “This sign is the brownest thing on this entire block”), or vile caricatures of the president in whiteface with a Hitler moustache, or decked out like an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose.

The Tea Party movement has never been a single entity and, since its inception, its demographics have remained elusive. A 2010 USA Today/Gallup poll showed that “Tea Partiers” were fairly close to the overall national average in terms of age, education, employment status, and race (6 percent of “non-Hispanic blacks” said they were supporters of the Tea Party, as opposed to 11 percent in the general population). Conservatives interpreted it as incontrovertible proof that they were not, as they claimed the mainstream media portrayed them, overwhelmingly old, Caucasian, male, right-wing, and seething with “white resentment” of minorities.

The poll proved misleading, however, since it surveyed people by asking them whether they considered themselves “supporters” or “opponents” of the movement, not whether they were active members who attended rallies and protests — often described by observers as resembling “a sea of white faces.”

Did overt racism go underground after the civil rights era?
An intriguing study by Michael Tesler of Brown University postulates that “old-fashioned racism” — the overt kind that characterized the Jim Crow era — largely went underground in the decades following the civil rights era. As segregation became a fading memory, racist epithets were no longer acceptable in public. In the 1970s, cultural pressure to be “politically correct” drove race-baiters even further into the shadows. Politicians began resorting to “code words” — “states’ rights,” “entitlement society,” “big government,” “welfare reform” — to communicate their subliminal racial messages to voters.

When Obama was elected, according to Tesler, openly racist speech and behavior — which had not been correlated in sociological studies to white Americans’ partisan preferences in decades, began to return with a vengeance. Tesler demonstrated that such behavior was a much stronger predictor of opposition to Obama than to ideologically similar white Democrats. Republicans may have hated President Bill Clinton in 1993, but nowhere near as much as they hated President Obama — and openly expressed it — in 2009.

Optimists actually believed, in the early days after Obama’s election, that America had finally emerged from its long, dark history of racial strife and blossomed into a new era of “post-racial” politics. Too many echoes of the remote past have surfaced since 2009 to substantiate that hope. Republican politicians openly disrespect President Obama in public and abuse the filibuster with an unprecedented frequency to stall Democratic bills in the Senate. Republican lawmakers churn out a relentless stream of socially conservative bills, in a wave of nostalgia for the halcyon days when women and minorities “knew their place” and didn’t dare question white male authority.

The renewed obsession of many aggrieved conservatives with racial resentment — and their increasingly vocal expression of it, from town halls to Twitter to the House floor — are poisoning our national discourse. If you don’t believe that, just look up "Tea Party racism" on YouTube, or ask a few conservatives what they think about affirmative action, “voter fraud,” or “reverse racism.” If they say we don’t need the Voting Rights Act any longer (at a time when right-wing Republicans all over the country are passing voter suppression laws), if they say affirmative action is racial discrimination against white people and that Obama is a “socialist” (an ad hominem attack made for decades against black leaders), then you’ve got your answer. Code is a useful “tell” about people’s gut antipathies.

‘I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake; I can’t have illegals.’
I doubt that Mitt Romney, who doesn’t really appear to believe in anything, could muster the necessary vitriol to be more than a careless, knee-jerk bigot himself — especially after watching the debate that caught him out in this thoughtless remark about firing the undocumented immigrants he “discovered” were working on his property: “I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake; I can’t have illegals.”

I have no way of knowing what’s in Mitt’s heart, although he probably couldn’t tell you, either, unless he could manage to locate it. But I’m not the first person to observe that his campaign advisers seem to have caught on to the tactics of the kind of good-ole-boy, “dog-whistle” politics that would do Lee Atwater proud. I don’t think Mitt would be above resorting to whatever strategy his advisers suggest will win him the White House — including the snarky campaign slogan, “Obama Isn’t Working,” which calls to mind the offensive racial stereotype of the “lazy black man.” I can only judge his words, using my trusty “embedded” racist-code detector, to interpret for the masses the language of oligarchs.

Consider the following coded excerpt from Romney’s victory speech in Manchester, N.H.: “There was a time, not long ago” (translation: three short years), “when each of us could walk a little taller and stand a little straighter” (when a white man was in the Oval Office, God was in His Heaven, and all was right with the world), “because we had a gift that no one else in the world shared” ("we" descendants of Europeans, who have held the reins of empire and colonized the world): “We were Americans” (not Kenyans, Indonesians, Mexicans, or other "foreigners" who don't look like Mayflower Pilgrims, Confederate generals, Archie Bunker, or "Beaver" Cleaver).

“Those days are coming back,” Mitt insists, although I'm not sure why he's implying that the good old days of "American exceptionalism" ever departed - and I'd bet you $10,000, if I had rich parents to borrow it from, that you haven’t heard squat since Dubya left office about any "big-government conspiracy" to round up natural-born Americans and convict them of treason so Obama can revoke their citizenship (unless you've been listening to Glenn Beck lately).

“That’s our destiny,” Mitt concludes his camouflaged riff. (Final translation: “We” are going to take our country back from "them.") And who do the propagandists mean by "them"? The feared and hated "other" that Obama represents to them. Black people, whom Lincoln told slave owners they had to set free. Red people, written out of Eurocentric American history after centuries of denial that they were here before us. And brown people, straining at our southern border, who will one day outnumber those who reject them, unless "majority whites" herd them all into private-sector prisons or drive them into the Gulf of Mexico.

Then behold! The ruling class will live happily ever after in a white-bread, corporate-owned, feudal America, complete with dirt-poor Anglo peasants, a land of "opportunity" that’s never going to lose the permanent Republican majority that Karl Rove always promised.

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This blog post was first published as an opinion column by The Zest of Orange (Hudson Valley Views with a Twist), described by its editors as "an informative, scrappy, argumentative, contrarian, and thoroughly entertaining site sure to delight some readers and infuriate others."