(Pic courtesy of DonkeyHotey, via Flikr)
There are a lot of people that would not walk across the street to piss on Grover Norquist if his ass was on fire and his hair was catching. That said there is a new crew who has their sites on the Americans for Tax Reform president and possibly the most powerful man not in elected office in the nation.
You have to give these folks credit, it is not often that anyone get labeled as “Pro-Perversion” but that is exactly what Joseph Farah, Editor of WorldNetDaily (should always be pronounced whirled nuts daily) did in an OpEd today.
It is a pretty incoherent screed against Norquist (about what you would expect from the Ed of WhirledNutDaily) it seems that Farah’s problem is not just that Norquist supported the debt ceiling compromise (you know instead of sending the planetary economy into full on melt down and certainly having everyone and their brother seriously downgrade out debt) but rather that he is not a pure enough conservative to be given any power in the conservative movement
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While that might be somewhat reasonable (if such a word can be applied to anything the Winguts at Whirled Nut say) Farah then jumps right in the big old pool of crazy and ties his Islamaphobia and bigotry against gays into the whole hate soup he’s cooking up.
From the post:
He's shockingly pro-Islamist and has used his well-developed connections in Washington to spread the tentacles of stealthy jihad through the corridors of power, including the White House.
He's is unashamedly pro-perversion, given his position on the advisory board of GOProud.
And he is a phony economic conservative who helped mislead tea-party Republicans in control of the House of Representatives this year giving Obama all the money he needed to keep destroying the free-enterprise system through the end of his term.
Let’s take these one at time, shall we?
Shockingly pro-Islamist – this is the first one and obviously Farah thinks it is the most important. This guy is nuttier than squirrel crap. He is the one that has been pushing this idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is infiltrating the country. Anyone that is not willing to jump on a chair and scream at the idea of Muslims living and worshiping in this country is immediately branded a sympathizer.
It is just your grandfathers McCarthyism dressed up Middle Eastern clothes, everything old is new again.
Then there is the pro-perversion bit. This is the raw quill 100 proof bigotry of the far right at work. Norquist is on the gay GOP group (talk about some conflicted people!) and invited them to CPAC this last year.
Because Norquist won’t disavow gay citizens, because he is willing to find allies where ever he can, the screamers on the Far Right want to give him the boot.
Then there the charge that he is a phony economic conservative because he understands economics enough to understand what a default by the United States on its debt would mean and helped explain it to the malefic Jetrho’s of the Tea Party and got them to take their fingers off of the trigger of the economic gun pointed at all our foreheads.
I know, there is nothing too shocking about an attempted purge of someone insufficiently bat-shit insane for the Republican Party, but it is interesting how many arrows old Grover is dodging these days.
40 Republican Representatives have broken with him in the House and few in the Senate. Hell Speaker Boehner called him “some random guy” recently. All this seems to indicate that the days of being able to hold the Republicans in abject fear is ending for Mr. Norquist.
If the forces that have sway in the Republican Party (namely the Teahadists and their backers) decide that it is time oust Norquist it will be signal the end of the Regan Revolution. Norquist swept into power about that time and has not changed his tune at all in the whole time he has been slowly but surely making it nearly impossible for the government to perform the services and build the infrastructure a modern nation needs.
During these last 30 years there the Republicans moved to Crazy Town and they are noticing that Grover did not move with them. The war on expertise has been won in the Party of Lincoln so anyone who is not ready to rub blue mud on their bellies because the shamans of the Tea Party say so, is inherently unacceptable, no matter what their contributions in the past.
In a way, if Norquist really is pushed out and marginalized, he is a victim of his own success Part of the whole shtick from ATR is that they will publicize any person who has signed their pledge and then votes for tax increases of any kind.
It forced a discipline on the Republican Party that has made them nearly reflexive in following their leadership. Now that same kind of group think is beginning to turn against him, and there is probably nothing that he can do about it.
Those who live by inflexible ideology, will probably die by it, and deservedly so. But Norquist won’t be killed; it will just be his political career that will die. And after three decades of putting the screws to some of the most powerful people in the nation, I tend to think that there will be very few tears at the funeral.
The floor is yours!