Those who are willing to create a monster should be aware that the monster can, and will, turn around and eat them. It's happening to the GOP right now.
Bob Inglis can testify to the truth of that. I feel no sympathy for the Republicans on this issue. None whatsoever. They fought actively for many years to perpetuate the fear and anger on the right, and now they are paying for it, and they have trapped themselves in a box that appears to have no exit.
David Corn, writing for Mother Jones Online, talks about Inglis and his willingness to finally admit to the truth. Too little, too late, but he has paid a price.
August 4, 2010 |
It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn't sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn't ponied up. Inglis' task: Get them back on the team. "They were upset with me," Inglis recalls. "They are all Glenn Beck watchers." About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, "They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis didn't know how to respond.
Here's a clue for you, Mr. Inglis. You should have fought against this long ago. You should have stood up to the lies from the beginning, instead of waiting for this monster to get so large that you no longer had a way to fight it. The Republican Party had an obligation to truth - and they threw it away because it didn't further their agenda.
Corn quotes Inglis:
I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.
Instead, he remarks, his party turned toward demagoguery. Inglis lists the examples: falsely claiming Obama's health care overhaul included "death panels," raising questions about Obama's birthplace, calling the president a socialist, and maintaining that the Community Reinvestment Act was a major factor of the financial meltdown. "CRA," Inglis says, "has been around for decades. How could it suddenly create this problem? You see how that has other things worked into it?" Racism? "Yes," Inglis says.
So after spending years feeding the beast, some Republicans are now feeding it with their own careers. Inglis lost his seat to a primary challenger, Trey Gowdy, because he was not considered "conservative enough".
The division fostered by the Right has been building over the years. They even built themselves a media empire, in order to spread their message and their propaganda far and wide. Fox News, right-wing radio, and so many other outlets were built to push the agenda of the Republican Party. This juggernaut that they have empowered has pushed the party so far to the right that it is falling off a cliff, and taking all of us along with it.
They are paying a price for their malfeasance, however.
As David Frum said:
"Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox."
And Fox, as we know, has no interest in halting the madness, because they benefit financially from what they are quite literally selling to the GOP base.
The Republican Party used to stand for something - fiscal conservatism, small government, moral conservatism - but they have given all of that up in a feverish race to win at all costs.
The Right talks about deficits, jobs, and the economy, but when they were in power, they cared nothing about those issues. Their policies during that time put the lie to their claims of wanting fiscal conservatism and small government.
If you are only a deficit hawk when the other side is in power; if you are only concerned about jobs when the responsibility for creating them is on someone else's shoulders; if you only care about big government when the other side is running that government... then you have no credibility on those issues. None whatsoever.
The Right in this country, at this moment in time, has only one agenda: regain power. Take back what they wrongly consider their birthright, regardless of the consequences. We've already seen that they are willing to let those who are unemployed go without an extension of benefits - something they were happy to vote FOR when Bush was in the White House. You would think that this would hurt them at the polls in November, but I believe they are banking on the forgetfulness of the voter, and the volatility of the 24-hour news cycle.
Voting against everything put forward by the Democrats in Congress has a dual purpose for the GOP.
The first part of this program is to assure that the economy and the jobs situation remain depressed, so that the blame will be affixed to the Democratic Party, as they are now in power and considered the party of record. They believe that voters will be angry enough about the perceived lack of progress to stay home, and allow their party back into power.
The second portion of that agenda goes to the whole "Evil Democrats" meme that they are working so hard to spread.
Their message is this: If it is a Democratic idea, it is a BAD idea, no matter what that idea might be, or how important it is to the country as a whole.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, writing on PoliticusUsa.com, has an excellent article about political nihilism, and the "death of the center". He writes:
Glaringly – one might say painfully – obvious as it is now, this polarization didn’t begin with the election of Barack Obama, or even with George W. Bush’s tainted election in 2000, but can be traced back to the petulant conservative rejection of Bill Clinton’s election after twelve years of Republican rule (the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush). The conservative backlash was vicious and Clinton was the victim.
Compromise, however, for a party with purity standards is heresy. They have not only walled off liberals and progressives and labeled them as the constructed other and as dangerous to America, but they have walled off and labeled themselves as well, as being a group who won’t compromise with those they say want to destroy America.
Now that they’ve painted themselves into a corner with their divisive and nihilistic rhetoric, how do they find a way to take that reach across the aisle, if they ever realize they need to?
The Republicans haven't just painted themselves into a corner - they have surrounded their platform with a red-hot moat of vile, hateful rhetoric, with no bridge back to sanity. The problem here is that this rhetoric is eating away at their platform, and only the craziest few are left. The moderates were long ago cast off into the moat, to sink or swim as best they could. And it's worse than that - Inglis was not considered "conservative enough" and yet he had a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. How far right do you have to be to win, now? It's a scary thought.
The anger against the left was initially just a strategy cooked up by the GOP to gain power, but it is now the mainstay of their agenda. The fumes from that red-hot rhetoric have infected their own minds.
The insanity of the Right is spiraling out of control, and as they have removed the moderates from their party, there appears to be nobody on their side who is willing or able to rein it in. And even those few who might have the will to pull back from the madness can no longer control the beast.
This demonization of the Left started as simple partisan politics, to be sure, but it has ramped up over the years to insane levels.
And here is where I take slight issue with Hrafnkell Haraldsson, the writer of this piece - the vilification of the Left did not start in the last twenty years. It has been a long slow rise over the last several decades, but I think we can trace a large portion of it back to the Nixon era, to Donald Segretti and Lee Atwater, Nixon's "Dirty Tricksters". I wonder how many people in this country realize that Karl Rove was their protege? How many Americans know that many of the same people who worked in Nixon's administration also worked in George W. Bush's? It is a long list - a very long list.
If you look at the way Jimmy Carter was treated, and at the Iran hostage crisis, you see the same dirty tricks used against him, and again - by the same basic group of people. It wasn't as overt in those days, but it was there. It's just that over the years, every time a Democrat made it into the White House, the rhetoric was ramped up just a bit higher each time... Carter, then Clinton, then Obama. And now, here we are, at a fever pitch.
Is it really that bad? Am I being hyperbolic? You tell me. During the Bush administration, a right-winger told me that I wasn't worth the dynamite it would take to blow me up. Why? Because I committed the sin of disagreeing with him, and I was a Democrat. For him, that was more than enough reason. I've been told that Democrats are worse than terrorists. Was that hyperbole on their part? Possibly, but when we see people using violent language, and someone shooting another human being because of their opposing political beliefs... that's where hyperbole reaches reality, and is no longer in the realm of sanity or political discourse.
The GOP learned long ago that fear is a great tool to keep people in thrall, to keep them in check. They use fear, religion, and "patriotism" as cudgels to keep people in line. If you disagree with them, you are either going to be attacked by terrorists, sent to hell, or branded as traitorous for your dissent. And fear is an excellent weapon, because it grabs us at a visceral level, one that bypasses the reasoning mind. As former Vice-President Al Gore said:
Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse, and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote 'Men feared witches, and burnt women.'
How do you combat something so visceral that reason cannot gain a foothold? Fear is connected directly to our survival instincts, and Fox News knows this. If you keep someone in a low-level state of terror, they are more likely to keep watching, hoping for some sort of resolution to that state of anxiety. What they are told is that the "others" have caused that fear, and of course the only solution is to keep watching Fox, and keep voting for those who will slay the fearsome dragons - even if those dragons are merely their fellow human beings who are different from them in some small way - even if that difference is artificial or inflated.
How bad is it? So bad that a church carnival has set up an "Alien Attack" game - with the target being President Obama.
From lehighvalleylive.com:
"I just can’t believe how far things have come that now on church property you can shoot the president and get a prize if you hit him in the head or heart," said Chapman, a Medford, Mass., resident who last lived in Roseto the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. She was in town for a family reunion.
Even though the game shows a black man dressed in a suit, holding a scroll labeled "health bill" and wearing a belt buckle that features the presidential seal, Goodtime Amusements President Irvin L. Good Jr. said the image does not portray President Obama.
And Mr. Good lies, of course - blatantly, and openly. But that is how the Right operates now. Lies are no longer considered "wrong", as long as they further the agenda.
One of the biggest changes is in how the Right reacts when it is caught doing something that would be considered hypocritical, or when it is caught lying. Richard Nixon ended up resigning after the Watergate scandal - something I can't picture happening anymore. We have now been brought to a time where only Democrats are expected to take the heat for a political scandal in their ranks. Republicans simply ignore what was done, or deflect the criticism, and move on. Bill Clinton was hounded for his sexual misconduct, and yet Newt Gingrich, one of those who was the most vicious in attacking Clinton was himself involved in an affair at the time. David Vitter was caught in a scandal, but is still in office, whereas Elliot Spitzer had to resign. There is an egregious double standard in effect.
The Republican Party used to pretend to a moral high ground, but have lost any real claim to it.
The only "high ground" they can claim now is forcing Democrats to adhere to the strict standards they themselves gave up long ago.
This is, I think, the root of the matter. The Republican Party has come to a place where they no longer care about truth. They do not care about hypocrisy, or integrity, or any of those issues. Those are now expendable. What matters is winning, and that is ALL that matters.
Anything they do is now legal, moral, and truthful if it helps them regain power. A lie is not a lie if it scores them political points. You can call them on the lie, and they will simply deflect and move on, counting on the short attention span of voters to get past the problem.
The most diehard of their base have also embraced this idea, because they have been sold a bill of goods - that the Democrats want only to hurt them. So they ignore the lies, and the base hypocrisy, because it's all part of the "cause". It's all part of "getting their country back" from the evil "others". And it is only a small step from interpreting the Bible to their own standards, to interpreting the Constitution and any other document according to their own desires.
I truly believe that the so-called leaders of the GOP have decided that anything that gets them back into power is true, correct, and good, because it rids them of the scourge that is the Democratic Party. Any who would argue are removed from the party, and thus the GOP is purified even more, into a lovely little demi-glace of sheer wingnuttery.
So the GOP takes turns terrifying their base, and then lulling them to sleep with vague and false promises, all designed to get them to vote against their own best interests. They work to keep the nation divided - Right against Left, White against Black, Americans against Immigrants... all so that they can keep the real divide from being bridged - that of rich vs. poor. The GOP base is told that someday they might join the ranks of the top three percent, so that they will fight for the rights of the richest few, even while they are being robbed at work, at the store, and at the gas station. They have been sold a bill of goods, and we all end up paying for it.
There are some on the Right who tire of the madness, but if you think that they are in the majority, take a good hard look at Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Andrew Breitbart, James O'Keefe and so many others... and tell me that there is any sanity there.
As an anonymous Tea Party consultant said in a Playboy article:
Conservatives had been trying to take down ACORN for three decades. Where they failed, BigGovernment.com and my friends succeeded. In one magnificent explosion, a loose group of troublemakers, libertarians and Republicans took its first scalp. Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chair of ACORN’s Maryland chapter, told The New York Times in March, "That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work."
When Breitbart gestured to the print reporters at a Tea Party event in Nashville and said, "It’s not your business model that sucks; it’s you that sucks," he whipped Tea Party members into a frenzy unlike anything I’d ever seen. Breitbart is one of them, except smarter, better connected and angrier; compared with him, Palin is Las Vegas dinner theater. That’s why he is loved by Tea Partyers in a way Palin can never hope to be loved.
Before Election Day there will be more stings. If you are part of a large organization with a vested interest in the Obama administration’s success, be afraid.
They have shown us very clearly and openly what they intend to do. Nothing less than the destruction of the left, and of the Obama administration will satisfy them, and if we all have to suffer because of it, that's just collateral damage in their eyes.
Darrell Issa has stated openly that if the GOP regains power, they will do nothing but submit subpoenas, and attack the Obama administration. Michele Bachmann and John Boehner are on board:
House Tea Party Caucus leader Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) agree: If Republicans win back control the House in November, they'll embark on an agenda of issuing subpoenas, repealing legislation, and holding hearings to investigate the Obama administration.
The danger is clear, and we cannot afford to ignore it.
Our only solution, in my opinion, is as Keith Olbermann said: "An uprising of the reasonable..." We have to vote. We have to work to get our friends, our families, and our neighbors to vote. And we have to work to inform people, to help them see the good that is being done, even as the Right lies about it, and opposes it. We have to expose the hypocrisy of the Right, in order to open those eyes that are still willing to see.
If we do that; if we are willing to work hard, and keep working, then we may have a chance. It may be our only hope of restoring sanity to this country.
The GOP may not be able to control the beast they created, but we might be able to do it. Our only real power in this country is the power of the ballot box, and we desperately need to use it this November. The only way to rid ourselves of the monster is to marginalize it until it dies out on its own, sees reason, or is minimized to a pile of dust in the corner of our country.
It's up to us.