Posts Tagged ‘The Stupid Party’

Why Wingnut Wit? ‘Because Stupid’

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

Alaska's lone congressman, Don Young, was forced to apologize for referring to Latino farm workers as 'wetbacks' during a recent interview. Photo by Dennis Zaki/AlaskaReport.com.

By Emily Theroux

“Stupid is as stupid does,” said Forrest Gump’s mother, who almost had it right. “Stupid is as stupid says” might be a more accurate watchword for the recent surge in wingnut imbecility.

Governor Bobby Jindal’s “Stupid Party” has been on a tear during the past few months, ever since losing the 2012 election caused widespread existential angst among the Freeperati. What should have been a time for sober introspection has devolved into a blabfest of ideological inanity, as Republicans try to one-up each other in some cosmic open-mic Battle of the Booboisie.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus

You want stupid? I’ll give you stupid — “biologically stupid,” as RNC Chairman Reince Preibus* put it during an interview with Radio Iowa. “Listen, I don’t think our platform is the issue,” opined “R-r-r-r-r-r-reince” (as Rachel Maddow calls him, with an obligatory tongue roll). “I think a lot of times it’s some of these biologically stupid things that people say, you know, that I believe caused a lot of the problems.”

Yes, Freeper fans and foes, teabaggers like Todd “RapePublican” Akin say the dumbest things, to paraphrase the late Art Linkletter — and lose elections for it. I’m sure you have a few G(ullible) O(btuse) P(arty) favorites of your own.

Just humor me, and I’ll see your “asinine” and raise you two “moronics.” (“Mindlesses”? “Myopics”? “Whacko birds?” Never mind, as Emily Litella used to say. Andiamo!)

 

Texas Teddy’s ‘Cruzin’ for a bruisin’ ‘ by parroting the guv

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas

“Senator Ted Cruz isn’t going to let all the stupid in Texas belong to Gov. Rick Perry,” wrote Joan McCarter of Daily Kos, on the occasion of what she called “Dumb Pronouncements from Texas About Medicaid Day.” Good ol’ boy “N*****head Rick” got the ball rolling with the following April Fool’s Day bluster about expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act:

“Texas will not be held hostage to the Obama administration’s attempt to force us into this fool’s errand.”

And how, exactly, will three years’ worth of free Medicaid funding hurt the state’s 2,036,000 uninsured adults — at 33 percent of the population, the highest rate of uninsured residents in the nation?

Allow Cruz the Crusader to explain:

“Our friends who are saying they want health care do not realize that expanding Medicaid will worsen health care options for the most vulnerable among us in Texas. … If you want state funds to provide for our prisons and law enforcement to incarcerate violent criminals and keep them off the streets, you should be glad we’re not signing up for this Medicaid expansion … because the pressure is going to crowd out just about every other priority in the budget.”

Oh, really, Senator Newbie? You forgot to mention that the very Medicaid expansion your team turned down would have significantly increased total spending in your state’s economy, as well as real gross product, personal income, and retail sales — and saved 2,938 lives in the bargain.

 

Gohmert leaps from guns to gay marriage to bestiality

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert

Let’s hear it again for Texas, where Rep. Louie Gohmert had the huevos to compare limiting the number of rounds in a gun magazine to expanding the definition of marriage to include LGBT couples. “(W)hy would you draw the line at 10 (bullets — or one spouse)? And the problem is once you draw that limit, it’s kind of like marriage when you say, (if) it’s not a man and a woman any more, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?”

As the congressman noted when rejecting a hate crimes bill in 2009:

“If you’re oriented toward animals — bestiality — that’s not something that can be held against you … Which means you’d have to strike any laws against bestiality. If you’re oriented toward corpses, toward children — you know, there are all kinds of perversions — pedophiles or necrophiliacs or what most would say is perverse sexual orientations.”

Do tell. Sounds like a 14th-inning stretch, if you don’t mind mixing your bestiality metaphors with a little baseball.

 

Why not ‘marry gay’ to scam government benefits?

Sue Everhart (Photo by Marietta Daily Journal)

“You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow,” said Georgia GOP Chairwoman Sue Everhart.

“Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”

Incredible! Why pretend you’re gay to “get all the benefits” of marriage? You can already score the same perks by getting hitched to someone of the opposite sex — you know, the time-honored “one man, one woman” route.

 

Religious rightie: ‘The gay’ behind N. Korean belligerence

Radio talker Rick Wiles

Right-wing radio haranguer Rick Wiles went all “Kim Jong-un” on marriage equality last week on his Trunews talk show.

“You know, at precisely the same time the Supreme Court is hearing these arguments on same-sex marriage, in Asia a crazy man in possession of nuclear weapons is openly saying: I have ordered our military to position our rockets on U.S. targets in Hawaii, Japan, Guam and the mainland of the United States. Could our slide into immorality be what is unleashing this madman over here in Asia to punish us? You got this happening over here and you got this happening over here: Could the two be connected?

PFAW’s RightwingWatch.org has been all over this story, as well as the one about Wiles making his case to the fundies that the actor playing Satan on the History Channel’s The Bible series is a dead ringer for President Obama. “God guided the hand of the makeup artist and blinded the eyes of everybody on the movie set while it was being recorded” so no one would notice the resemblance — which just goes to show you, Wiles concludes, that “the man in the White House is a devil from hell.”

A month ago, Wiles sounded the tocsin to fellow Obamaphobes: “Let me remind the gay rights fanatics, North Korea plans to send a nuclear warhead our way. There’s a terrible price to pay for outright rebellion against the holy God of Israel, and your sins are going to get us all killed.”

As my friend Jim would say, “I’m sick and effin’ tired of being blamed for wars and natural disasters.”

 

And out of his mouth comes a-bubblin’ crude — Texas tea’

Texas Rep. Steve Stockman

They sure do make ’em witless in the Lone Star state! From freshman congressman Steve Stockman‘s Twitter feed gushed the following “Texas crude”:

“The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out.”

Later, Stockman topped off a string of snarky oil-themed tweets with this trenchant observation:

“Energy-rich oil propelled civilization into the 21st century. But liberals want to turn back the clock to inefficient Bronze Age wind power.”

These witticisms don’t seem so slick when you consider last weekend’s pipeline leak in suburban Mayflower, Arkansas. If enough of that “black gold” wells up out of the ground, from enough hidden pipelines, under enough subdivisions whose residents were never informed the pipelines were there, Stockman’s “civilization” is going to wind up blasted back to the Stone Age.

* * *

See more “fun Freeper facts” below:

 

* Reince Priebus, according to fallen Fox News pundit Dick Morris, will be featured in a new “outreach” ad targeting Latino voters. Priebus is expected to thank “those Latin Americans who’ve come to the United States to help us build our country, to help harvest our food, to help make our economy work (italics mine).” Forget “biological stupidity” — how about “ethnic stereotype stupidity”?

 

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Cheat ‘Em

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show coins a new Fox sobriquet: Ferret News Channel.

By Emily Theroux

The Stupid Party’s been trying to act foxy lately over the urgency of ideological “reform.”

But Jon Stewart of The Daily Show has ferreted out the Republicans’ actual intentions. The GOP’s search for a “new, improved” menu of voter comestibles is really an effort to repackage the party’s time-honored “s–t sandwich.”

Unable to win presidential elections fair and square in the face of encroaching demographic turbulence, Republicans have resorted to what Stewart termed a type of “Orwellian sleight of tongue” — a.k.a. cheating. (Oops! I meant “winning through process innovation.”) The GOP, Stewart contends, needs “a perpetual messaging refinement and distribution resource — preferably one cloaked in the trappings of journalistic authority, but without any of its ethical constraints.” In other words, a “rebranded” Roger Ailes 24/7 propaganda vehicle: “Ferret News“!

Karl Rove, 'the Architect'

Playing word games in an attempt to hoodwink low-info voters, as Fox does, is really just a variation on Republican “dirty tricks.” Originated by Richard Nixon and Chuck Colson, this reprehensible strategy dates back in recent political history to the advent of Karl Rove on the national stage at the dawn of the new millennium. We may have dodged Y2K, but enduring the mercurial machinations of Y2Karl has continued unabated for four election cycles, with mercifully declining levels of success.

  • In 2004, Dubya won reelection despite pro-John Kerry exit polls in Ohio, where allegations later surfaced of “blatant partisanship of election officials” and possible electronic ballot tampering. Two Democratic reports on the Ohio vote later suggested that many Kerry votes were suppressed by long lines, too few voting machines, and numerous instances of election officials improperly forcing Democratic voters to cast provisional ballots that were later discarded.
  • In 2008, Rove served as an informal adviser to John McCain. Any stratagems he may have recommended failed to stem the Democratic tide of “hope and change” that swamped McCain and Sarah Palin, as Barack Obama won swing states by margins too wide to contest or tamper with.
  • In 2012, the GOP hollered “Voter fraud!” and followed up the general panic that ensued among Fox News viewers by passing voter suppression laws in battleground states. But not even minority voter intimidation, interminable lines at polling places, billions in Citizens United super-PAC moolah, or Karl Rove’s election-night histrionics on Fox’s air could pull out a Mitt Romney win.

Abject failure in the last election hasn’t stopped Rove from reinventing himself this year, however. Rove has drawn the ire of the Tea Party after launching a new initiative by his American Crossroads super PAC, the Conservative Victory Project, designed to get moderate GOP candidates nominated in 2014 primaries instead of extremists, who often go down in flames during general-election contests.

Like a battered pop-up target in a particularly brutal game of Whac-a-Mole, the trusted consigliere whom Dubya nicknamed “Boy Genius” has sent out political green shoots in midwinter 2013. Knowing Turdblossom, the emerging “bloom” is likely to crop up as a stinkweed.

 

All ‘happy talk’, no policy proposals

The Republican Party establishment doesn’t appear to be following the new blueprint drafted by “the Architect” — not, at least, with any construction contracts. Most remain in the “bargaining” stage of dealing with defeat, if not the “denial” phase. Talk is cheaper and less painful than action, and anyway, wordsmithing has been the GOP’s ticket to ride since 2000, and many are reluctant to disembark from the happy-talk train.

'Maybe this strategy is starting to have diminishing returns. Maybe Republicans have hit peak Luntz' — Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Feb. 5, 2013

When Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal admonished his fellow Republicans to “stop being the stupid party,” he advised the GOP to start “(talking) like adults.” This tactic, however, is nothing new. Glossology guru Frank Luntz, whom Stewart dubbed the “Republican Batman,” has long corrected what he terms “language errors,” converting them into persuasive obfuscations then uttered simultaneously by Republican “communicators” on Luntz’s cue.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 5, 2013. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor put Luntz’s “new” linguistic framing into effect earlier this week, when his speechwriters went so far as to purloin the “fair shot at success” speech delivered in December 2011 by his arch-enemy, Barack Obama (as Al Sharpton demonstrated on his MSNBC show, Politics Nation). Cantor’s purpose was to lull the ignorant sheeple into swallowing his party’s “softer focus” on “creating conditions for health, happiness, and prosperity”  — you know, stuff like education, health care, immigration reform, and the American Dream. His focus was soft, all right: gauzy words, but no policy prescriptions.

After all, as participants in The National Review’s recent summit on “reforming” the Republican Party concluded, the GOP need only ameliorate its delivery, not change its platform. While Karl Rove breaks ranks with the Tea Party in a desperate bid to defy demographics and reinstate the “permanent Republican majority” he has long envisioned, the (Hoping You’re) Gullible Old Party reduces its existential impasse to mere semantics.

“Rebranding,” not reform, is the GOP’s new raincheck for electoral success. Republicans haven’t quite “completed the sentence,” as Cantor offered on Morning Joe, but the clauses that form it are beginning to coalesce. Just ask Faux pundits InSannity, O’Really, or Steve Duncey — talking points have always been the most effective form of GOP cheating.

Ferret News may have dumped Palin and kicked Dick Morris to the curb, but crusty cliches don’t vanish overnight. How much do you want to bet that Fox keeps guarding the GOP henhouse?