Posted on 03/23/2015 6:44:43 AM PDT by Kaled
Already, we have the greatest video of the 2016 presidential election cycle. Rick Santorum -- And have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is? -- was down in the home office of American Sedition for one of those mock "summits" designed to lift the wallets of terrified caucasian separatists. A lady got up in the audience, opened her mouth to speak, and huge bats flew out.
Why is the Congress rolling over and letting this Communist dictator destroy my country? Y'all know what he is and I know what he is. I want him out of the White House; he's not a citizen; he could have been removed a long time ago... Ted [Cruz?] told me I've got to wait for the next election. I don't think the country will be around for the next election. Obama tried to blow up a nuke in Charleston a few months ago! And the three admirals, and generals. He has totally destroyed our military. He's fired all the generals and all the admirals that said they wouldn't fire on the American people.(And, yes, there is a tale told on the InfoWars right that the president's plot to destroy Charleston with a "false flag" nuclear detonation was foiled a while back.)
And what does Rick Santorum, a leader of his party, have to say to this crazy person? Does he suggest she seek help? Does he summon the police, an ambulance, a fire hose spraying liquid Thorazine? No, he says this:
"I'm not a sitting member of the Senate, so I'm not taking blame for any of that stuff."A real profile in courage, this guy.
This is the party that modern conservatism has built, brick by brick, one indulged lunatic at a time, over the past 60 years. I leave the details to Rick Perlstein, but there is no question that this was a conscious choice made over time by one of the only two political parties that we have allowed ourselves. It began with the decision to side with the remnants of American apartheid. It continued with the decision to ally itself with the most virulently retrograde elements of American Protestantism. It was energized by the tragic historical truth that this stuff is an effective means of gaining political power. The thinking became more and more magical. The rhetoric became more and more unhinged. The willingness of the Republican party to tolerate an almost limitless amount of sheer public lunacy has led us to this moment, where the only answer Santorum dares give to a woman who believes the president intended to nuke an American city was to say that he wasn't in Washington at the time.
There is no Republican middle any more. Pundits go searching for it and never return. Their bleached bones are found two years later in a ditch surrounding an Iowa cornfield, or their entrails are discovered hanging from a pine tree in northern New Hampshire as a warning to anyone else who dares undertake the quest. Just over the past few days, we have seen two alleged Republican "moderates" take positions that, a decade ago, would have marked them as fringe nuisances.
There is Senator Mark Kirk from Illinois, who finds himself entangled in the brilliant Republican gambit of using a bill designed to halt human trafficking as a Trojan horse for some truly oppressive anti-choice legislation. Called on this obvious chicanery, on which he himself has called bullshit, this is what allegedly moderate Republican Senator Mark Kirk said:
"[Senate Democrats] are making the same mistake that Democrats made in the 1850s when they defended slavery," he said. "We should all be neo-abolitionists here, to make sure that there is no right in America to enslave others using the Internet."The distance between Kirk's historical analogy and what that lady in South Carolina believes the president is conspiring to do is not vast at all.
Then, there's Jeb (!) Bush, the choice of what is alleged to be the Republican "establishment," winner of the "money primary," calling for the outright abolition of the federally mandated minimum wage.
"We need to leave it to the private sector. I think state minimum wages are fine. The federal government shouldn't be doing this. This is one of those poll-driven deals. It polls well, I'm sure – I haven't looked at the polling, but I'm sure on the surface without any conversation, without any digging into it people say, 'Yea, everybody's wages should be up.' And in the case of Wal-Mart they have raised wages because of supply and demand and that's good. But the federal government doing this will make it harder and harder for the first rung of the ladder to be reached, particularly for young people, particularly for people that have less education."Spoken like a man identified on his birth certificate with an account number instead of a name. As it happens, I'm reading The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark's terrific book about the run-up to World War I. We marvel today at the utter blind stupidity with which the European powers stumbled into a cataclysm. Centuries from now, historians, probably working on houseboats floating above what used to be Delaware, are going to look back at this period in our history and wonder how we tolerated a political party gone so completely mad, much less how we continued to empower it, election after election. They are going to marvel at how all the institutions designed to check the spread of the madness refused to look at it and call it what it is. These people are going to think American democracy was some sort of weird contagion that overcame the country, like ergot infecting the nation's wheatfields. They're going to believe we all just went crazy and ate ourselves.
Addendum: A fire hose spraying liquid Thorazine should probably be on standby at all such events.
Neither party will remove the focktard. Commie and Commie lite.
Charles Pierce is a fine journalist. Although he could improve his style by moving his ad hominem attack from the second sentence to the first. Do progressives actually read and believe this garbage?
Well, yes, the Democrats probably wouldn’t kick out a nutcase who said the Republicans were trying to nuke an American city, either, I suppose.
Whenever an election cycle rolls around, the GOPe tells us that we have to reach out to the middle. The problem that I have with that is that the passion is at the base or far right. Move too far to the middle and the support from the base lags. Moderate independents do not get fired up about elections enough to read up on and/or even study the issues, the candidates or their positions.
It would be an interesting study to map the voter intensity vs the left right spectrum. My suspicion is that the further you get from the middle, the greater the passion. The further from the extremes, the less likely the extremes of either party are going to support your candidate. Ultimately this will result in fewer votes from the base.
Take all of that information and turn that into a correlation for voters. Like the Laffer curve, there is some point where there is optimum voter turn out. Perhaps this would be a good thesis for either a Mathematics or Polysci major.
What does the estimable Charles Pierce have to say about Van “Bush plotted and carried out the 9/11 attacks” Jones? And that is just for starters in a very long list of out and out far left crazy talk from Democratic Party leaders ranging from Dick Durban to Nancy Pelosi.
As I noted, the Dems have their share of crazy people opening their mouths and having huge bats fly out.
Query: Was it Van Jones or one of the other loons who came up with this “the President tried to nuke Charleston” conspiracy theory? That’s a new one on me....
No Democrat middle either. That party took a hard-left turn years ago and kept right on marching.
Looks like Charlie’s still enjoying the LSD flashbacks.
Reagan was opposed to libertarianism nooby.
Your use of that single sentence from the 1975 interview of candidate Reagan by the libertarian magazine Reason, gives an impression that amounts to a lie.
Are you opposed to conservatism, libertarians are.
"As government expands, liberty contracts."
--Ronald Reagan
STEEERIKE TWO!
"Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem."
--Ronald Reagan
STEEERIKE THREE!! Yer out!
I favored Santorum; then I had pause when he “endorsed” Trayvon Martin without knowing any of the facts.
No nooby troll, Reagan spouting his conservative beliefs is simply conservatism, he disagreed with libertarianism.
That is why you can look at his vast political history, speeches and writings, and not come up with Reagan as a libertarian.
It also accounts for why you guys had your best election ever, AGAINST Reagan in 1980.
Some people are passionately moderate.
Yes. But what did good old Charles Pierce have to say about all that crazy talk from the Democrats?
Based on your performance on another thread, I believe you post it because you BACK it.
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