I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one:
'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.'

And God granted it.
-- Voltaire
This is the second in a series of four diaries -
The Republicans, in their own words (Part 1): bats#!t crazy
The Republicans, in their own words (Part 2): bigotry, hate and violence
The Republicans, in their own words (Part 3): Big Fat Liars (and hypocrites)
The Republicans, in their own words (Part 4): 'Let 'em eat applesauce'
- in which, via the miracles of the video camera and the Internet, we remind ourselves just exactly what horrors await this nation in the unthinkable event that the people quoted here should take charge of the legislative branch of our government this January. In this series we aim, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert,
smear the Republicans with their own words.
Most of the quotes in these diaries are not from random Republicans; rather, they were uttered on the record by Republicans who have been elected to or nominated for office, or who are otherwise opinion leaders among the right wing. And as for those who would question whether the quotes cited here actually represent the true views of the Republican Party as a whole, I would challenge them to perform this simple test:
Ask any elected Republican or Republican nominee to repudiate refudiate any of the words cited here, and see what happens.
Please bear in mind that while well-intentioned and diligently researched, these diaries by no means will comprise exhaustive lists of their respective genres. We still have a week before the elections, and since every time the Republicans open their mouths a new bit of craziness or mendacity or hypocrisy or hatred or ignorance or bigotry or contempt for working Americans comes out, I fully expect that these lists could be added to, and soon. (Also, if the Republican running in your district doesn’t show up here it might be because (a) he/she is relatively sane, or (b) he/she is below the national radar, and there just hasn't been enough media scrutiny of his/her words.)
A bit of good news for those who are (as I am while at work) video-challenged: the "money quote" in each instance is highlighted, transcript-style, so there is no requirement to view the video. In fact, you can put to good use the time you save by not watching the video by sending a donation or GOTV instead!
Before we go any further, let's remind ourselves what we're dealing with here (h/t second gen):
Right, then. Let's begin -
"There is this nagging perception that we are not diverse, and I disagree with that."
-- FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe
MY DOG
I went down this morning to sign up my Dog for welfare.
At first the lady said, "Dogs are not eligible to draw welfare".
So I explained to her that my Dog is black, unemployed, lazy, can't speak
English and has no frigging clue who his Daddy is.
So she looked in her policy book to see what it takes to qualify...
My Dog gets his first check Friday.
Is this is a great country or what?
-- Virginia Beach (Va.) Republican
Committee Chairman
David Bartholomew
i apologize to you and everyone if that is offensive. to me its just humor. i'm not a racist
-- New York Republican gubernatorial candidate
Carl Paladino responding to an acquaintance who
objected to an email Paladino had sent out
"I am not a racist."
-- Republican activist
David McKalip, MD, after circulating this
photo via email:

HAPPY NIGGER DAY!!!
-- Chris Hightower, former campaign manager for
Kentucky Republican senatorial nominee
Rand Paul, on his MySpace page
on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday
“When they don't like your message, they try to deem you as racist, that's really unfortunate."
-- Remember Us We The People President
Kirk Groenig, speaking of his group's float
"The things that have happened in this country - where it really started to go wrong was in the leadup to the Civil War, and it became politicized, and it was all about slavery. Before then we were moving on the right track."
-- Glenn Beck
"To me it’s a sort of feeling that [overlooking slavery is] just a nit. That it is not significant. It’s trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn’t matter for diddly."
-- Mississippi Republican Gov.
Haley Barbour
"Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery."
-- Arizona Republican Rep.
Trent Franks
"[T]here is no equality. You cannot guarantee that any two people will end up the same. And you can't legislate it, and you can't make it happen. You can try, under the guise of fairness and so forth, but some people are self-starters, and some people are born lazy. Some people are born victims. Some people are just born to be slaves."
-- Rush Limbaugh
“What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the War of Northern Aggression."
-- Missouri Republican state Rep.
Bryan Stevenson
"If Obamacare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States — the Great War of Yankee Aggression."
-- Georgia Republican Rep.
Paul Broun
"[T]he alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. . . . the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses . . . Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama . . . America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right."
-- Pat Buchanan
"Diversity . . . leads to hatred, violence and war . . . Tea Party people are called 'racist' because the vast majority wants to stop the massive non-European immigration that will turn America into a crumbling Tower of Babel. Most Tea Partiers believe that we in America have the right to preserve our heritage, language, and culture, just as every nation has that human right."
--David Duke
"We're on to this gangster government."
-- Minnesota Republican Rep.
Michele Bachmann
"We need segregated buses . . . This is Obama’s America."
-- Rush Limbaugh
Rachel Maddow: Do you think that a private business has a right to say that 'We don't serve black people?'
Rand Paul: [two minutes of evading the question]
-- Kentucky Republican senatorial nominee
Rand Paul
"One wonders how a child’s sexual imprinting mechanism is affected by forcible racial integration and near continual exposure to media stimuli promoting interracial contact. The most serious implication of human sexual imprinting for our genetic future is that it would establish the destructiveness of school integration, especially in the middle and high-school years . . . It also compounds the culpability of media moguls who deliberately popularize miscegenation in films directed toward adolescents and pre-adolescents. In the midst of this onslaught against our youth, parents need to be reminded that they have a natural obligation, as essential as providing food and shelter, to instill in their children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage . . .
"The organized anti-Western media of today seem to scour the gutters of the ghetto for the most vile filth imaginable and then serve it up to our children as 'their culture.'"
-- New York Republican congressional nominee
Jim Russell
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."
-- South Carolina Republican Lt. Gov.
Andre Bauer, speaking about
people receiving government assistance
"How often can you go see a bunch of white guys play basketball?"
-- National Republican Congressional Committee chair
Pete Sessions
"I was a minority for 16 years."
-- Oregon Republican
gubernatorial nominee
Chris Dudley
"As your governor, you're going to be seeing a lot of me on the front page, saying 'Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell."'
-- Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Paul LePage
h/t Spud1
"[Barack Obama] has no place in any station of government, and we need to realize that he's an enemy of humanity."
-- Arizona Republican Rep.
Trent Franks
"[Authorities will be able to spot undocumented aliens by] what kind of shoes people wear, what kind of accident [sic] they have, um, the, the type of grooming they might have, there're, there're all kinds of indicators there and sometimes it's just a sixth sense and they can't put their finger on it."
-- Iowa Republican Rep.
Steve King
"They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there's different type of attire, there's different type of ...right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes. But mostly by behavior it's mostly behavior . . . "
-- California Republican Rep.
Brian Bilbray, on how to spot an
illegal alien
"If we are to become 30 per cent Hispanic we will no longer be America. That would be a bad thing."
-- Patriot Pastor and
National Tea Party Convention keynote speaker
Rev. Rick Scarborough
"[As my solution for illegal immigration, w]e can follow what happened back in the '40s or '50s. I was just a little girl in Miami, and they filled camps for [sic] the people that [sic] snuck into the country, because they were illegal. They put them in the camps and they shipped them back. We can do that." [audience applauds]
-- Republican Marg Baker,
running for Fla. state assembly
"We could put land mines along the border."
-- New Mexico Republican congressional nominee
Tom Mullins
-- Louisiana Republican Sen.
David Vitter
“I think that you're misinterpreting those commercials. I'm not sure that those are Latinos in that commercial. What it is, is a fence and there are people coming across that fence.”
-- Nevada Republican senatorial candidate
Sharron Angle
"I don’t know that all of you are Latino. Some of you look a little more Asian to me. I don’t know that . . . I’ve been called the first Asian legislator in our Nevada State Assembly."
-- Nevada Republican senatorial candidate
Sharron Angle
"[West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller] just brought to Charleston yesterday Dr. Cho - or Dr. Chow - or Dr. Chow Mein, I don't know what his name is."
-- West Virginia Republican senatorial nominee
John Raese, speaking of Nobel Prize-winning physicist and
Dept. of Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu
"There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies . . . "
-- South Carolina Republican county chairmen
Edwin O. Merwin Jr. and James S. Ulmer Jr.
The deep, dark, dirty secret of Islam: It is a religion that promotes pedophilia . . .
I have a very good friend here in Dallas who is a Muslim.
-- Dallas pastor
Rev. Robert Jeffress
“[T]here is a Muslim problem in the world and if 'The View' ladies will not acknowledge that, that’s their problem . . . [T]here isn’t any theology involved in this at all from my perspective . . . But I’m not going to say, oh, it’s only a few [Muslims], it’s only a tiny bit. It’s not, Juan. It’s whole nations - Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan - whole nations . . . But I’ll tell you what — if there was going to be a backlash against Muslims, it would’ve happened after 9/11. It didn’t happen in this country . . . It did not happen here.”
-- Bill O'Reilly
"[The media are] now are buying into the 'genteel' Islam."
-- Bill O'Reilly
"[President Obama should] stop talking like a Muslim and begin to talk like an American."
-- Walid Shoebat, at the
Restoring America rally
"Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America ... Because of this subversive ideology, Muslims cannot claim religious freedom protections under the First Amendment."
"[W]hen you have Muslims who are applying for permanent residency, for permanent legal residency, or applying for citizenship, my recommendation is that instead of granting them citizenship, we help them return to their homeland, to their native country, we help repatriate them to their country of origin where they can have the freedom to be Muslims without having to chafe against our religious liberty and our freedom of speech and first-class citizenship status for wives and for women.
"This has got to be awkward for them, it's got to be painful for them, it's got to be uncomfortable for them to see so many people enjoying the fruit of Christianity, its liberty and its freedom, its respect for the individual, its respect for the freedom of individuals to think and make decisions for themselves, its got to chew them up because it is so the polar opposite of what Islam is all about."
-- Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis
for government and public policy,
American Family Institute, sponsor of the
Values Voter Summit
"I’m totally against [the building of an Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero]. If I had my way, it would pretty much be over my dead body. That religion is against everything America stands for. If we have to let them build it, make them build it nine stories underground, so we can walk above it as citizens and Christians . . . This religion’s plan is to destroy our way of life."
-- Florida Republican congressional candidate
Ron McNeil
"I think they should be allowed to build [an Islamic center in Manhattan], followed by the hijacking of an Iranian plane right into that building and blow it to smithereens."
-- Denver rightwing talk-show host
Mike Rosen
"We must stop pandering to the pornographers and the perverts, who seek to target our children and destroy their lives . . . I don't want [children] to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or successful option. It isn't."
"I'm not a homophobic."
-- New York Republican gubernatorial candidate
Carl Paladino
"[Passage of the Matthew Shepard hate crimes bill would mean that] if you’re oriented toward animals, bestiality, then, you know, that’s not something that can be used, held against you or any bias be held against you for that. 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."
-- Texas Republican Rep.
Louie Gohmert
"[Rep. Boehner] supports existing federal protections based on immutable characteristics."
-- Ohio Republican House minority leader
John Boehner's aide, explaining Boehner's opposition to
hate-crimes law protections based on sexual orientation, and his
support for protections based on religion
"I hope all the queers are thrilled to see him. I am sure there will be a couple legislative fruitloops there in the audience."
-- North Carolina Republican state Rep.
Larry Brown, referring to a state House colleague
who was honored by a gay-rights group
"[Allowing gays to serve openly in the military will lead to] alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art."
-- Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss
All faggots must die.
-- aide to Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss
"Bunch of lazy idiots. Many of them don't want to really work. Non-profits siphon contributions, as their salaries and so forth, and think of themselves as good people, charitable people. I mean, these people are rapists, in terms of finance and economy."
-- Rush Limbaugh
"What can be done, when you learn that your house has already been invaded?
"Well, the tried and true remedy is tenting.
"Experts come in, actually envelope the whole dwelling in a giant tent – and send a very powerful fumigant, lethal to the varmints and unwelcome creatures, into every nook and cranny of the house. Done thoroughly, every last destructive insect or rodent is sent to varmint hell – and in a day or two, the grand house is habitable again.
"I believe – figuratively, but in a very real way – we need to tent the White House!"
-- Pat Boone
"How many of you watched the movie, Lonesome Dove? . . . What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd? He got hu-ung! Well, that's I wanna do with [Democratic Senator] Patty Murray [smiles; audience cheers and laughs]."
-- Dianne Capps,
Tea Party speaker
"She [Democratic Sen. Patty Murray] ought to be shot. Murray and [Democratic Sen. Maria] Cantwell ought to be shot."
-- Businesswoman supporter of Republican Dino Rossi,
at business roundtable hosted by Rossi
"That's not really what you meant."
-- Republican Dino Rossi to his supporter,
pointing out that a reporter was present
"I didn't mean that."
-- Businesswoman supporter of Republican Dino Rossi,
to the reporter present
"Now that you've passed your health-care bill, let the violence begin . . . I hope somebody kills you, and I hope somebody kills [the president] . . . You are signing my death warrant, so I want to sign yours . . . There's a target on your back now . . . It only takes one piece of lead. Kill the (expletive) senator! . . . I hope somebody puts a (expletive) bullet between your (expletive) eyes . . . I do believe that every one of you (expletive) socialist democratic progressive (expletives) need to be taken out."
-- Charles Alan Wilson,
in voicemails to Democratic Sen. Patty Murray;
"Wilson's attorney noted her client was concerned
federal insurance reform would cut into
the government benefits he was receiving"
According to a Florida Highway patrol crash report filed September 6, 2002, a truck working for Liberty Mailing services was delivering campaign flyers to US Post Office when the accident happened.
On board the truck were thousands of flyers put out by [Republican David] Rivera's political opponent at the time.
The fliers included a last minute attack on Rivera's character.
Before the truck could make it to the US Post Office, according to the FHP report, a car driven by David Mauricio Rivera struck it forcing the truck to the shoulder of the Palmetto Expressway right in the middle of evening traffic at 5:50pm, ten minutes before the truck's deadline to get to the post office which was 6:00pm Eastern.
-- report on Florida Republican "Young Gun"
congressional candidate David Rivera
"[M]ake the fellow scared to come out of his house. That’s the only way that you’re going to win."
-- Florida Republican congressional nominee
Allen West
"Aside from the fact a gentleman doesn't hit women, explain to me why the M[edia ]M[atters ]F[or ]A[merica] boys don't get curbstomped fortnightly?"
-- Rick Wilson, owner of Republican marketing firm
Intrepid Media, after Media Matters debunked
an anti-Harry Reid ad he produced
"You send another goon to my daughter's house and I'll take you out, buddy!"
-- New York Republican gubernatorial candidate
Carl Paladino, to a reporter
"We hunt liberal, tree-hugging Democrats, although it does seem like a waste of good ammunition."
-- Mississippi Republican Rep.
Gregg Harper
"[Democratic Rep. Steve Driehaus] may be a dead man. He can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati."
-- Republican house Minority Leader
John Boehner
"A jury could very well conclude that this [case of rape] is a case of buyer's remorse."
-- Colorado Republican senatorial candidate
Ken Buck, on why he refused to prosecute a case
of admitted date rape

"If East Germany can do it [build a wall], we can do it!"
-- Alaska Republican senatorial nominee
Joe Miller
“The other [Democratic] party wants to take your guns, and we think that everybody's got a right, given the Constitution, the Second Amendment, to bear arms. And that’s what we’re enjoying tonight . . . Because, as everybody knows, all across America, people are buying guns, and there’s a reason for that. We all know what that reason is . . As long as we have the Second Amendment, then that is what keeps our government dealing with us. That’s what gives us the right to freedom of speech, that’s what gives us the right – freedom to assemble – because our government knows, the bottom line is, that we are armed citizenry."
-- Southeast Republican Club of Broward County (Fla.) Pres.
Ed Napolitano, at a club event wherein
then-congressional candidate Robert Lowry
shot at a target silhouette bearing the initials of
Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schulz
"If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."
-- Nevada Republican senatorial nominee
Sharron Angle
BECK: Last week, I head you say that — you were on with Dennis Miller. ... You two were talking about an insurrection coming.
O’REILLY: Tax revolt.
BECK: He used the word insurrection. And not in a comedic way.
O’REILLY: Yeah, tax revolt. I think people, when they figure out how badly they’re going to get hurt in the next few years, there’s going to be a tea party on taxes and its gonna get nasty. Nancy Pelosi’s going to be bobbing up and down in the Boston Harbor.
-- Bill O'Reilly, interviewed by
Glenn Beck
"So, Speaker Pelosi, I just wanted to -- you gonna drink your wine? . . . There you -- I want you to drink it now. Drink it. Drink it. Drink it . . . By the way, I put poison in your -- no, I -- I look forward to all the policy discussions that we're supposed to have -- you know, on health care, energy reform, and the economy . . . "
-- Glenn Beck, fantasizing on his show about
poisoning Nancy Pelosi