A fun sidelight is the brethren's excitement that Nikki Haley might name black conservative Tim Scott to replace DeMint. Matthew Vadum at FrontPageMag makes the case:
Unlike President Obama, Scott has an inspiring life story that happens to be true. Unlike Obama he was not a “red diaper baby” surrounded by Marxists from his first breath. Scott was actually born poor and unlike the president embraced the American Dream, running a business and achieving upward mobility before entering politics.In the quest for power, racism can be tabled but slander and bullshit never sleep. At least Vadum doesn't mind he's black; check out the commenters at American Renaissance -- they get really mad at Republicans when they're not supplying them with white candidates.
UPDATE. My favorite part of the whole thing is the Reasonoids telling us what a libertarian DeMint secretly is, but they have been outdone by Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner, who headlines, I swear to God, "Jim DeMint was the libertarian hero of the Senate."
For libertarians, Christian conservative pro-lifer Jim DeMint was the best thing to come through the Senate in decades. DeMint, quitting early to run the conservative Heritage Foundation, embodied an underappreciated fact of life in Washington: The politicians who most consistently defend economic liberty are the cultural conservatives.Other prime quotes: "the big-government side in today's abortion battles is the 'pro-choicers'"; "DeMint opposes gay marriage, but again, the U.S. Senate hasn't had much to say on the issue"; and "Traditional morality and limited government aren't enemies. They're friends." Your chucklehead buddy who thinks he's kind of a libertarian because he wants to free the weed and misses the Drew Carey Show is going to be disappointed to hear that it was really all about tax breaks for the wealthy.
So, being with Pajamas Media is more influential than being a real journalist; going Galt is better than running a business; and now, heading a right-wing think tank is more powerful than being a senator. Shit, we might just win this thing by default...
ReplyDeleteUnlike Obama he was not a “red diaper baby” surrounded by Marxists from his first breath.
ReplyDeleteYeah! If Obama was a real American baby, he would have, um...chosen different parents? Seriously, WTF is Vadum trying to say here?
A million-dollar salary vs having to stand at his desk reading The Fountainhead out loud to stop a cabinet appointment -- it was a no-brainer.
ReplyDeleteRoy, you really weren't kidding about those commenters.
ReplyDeleteI mourn the South's being inhabited by other races than Caucasians. I just put in his place a young white minister who preached a sermon I heard against the south re: slavery. He was a missionary's son in Colombia, SA. I told him he should preach against his country's violence and drug culture and leave the South alone. He was offended that I defended the South.
Holy shit! Is American Renaissance the hot rally to go to if your sheets are still at the laundry?
So very much this. When The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant is one of the books advertised on your sidebar, you encourage those kinds of comments. (What, The Clansman wasn't available?)
ReplyDeleteI mourn the South's being inhabited by other races than Caucasians.
I think you need to discuss this with your predecessors in 1619 Jamestown, Virginia.
Them, or the Powhatans, Choctaws, Seminoles, Creeks, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Catawbas, and Tuscarora [damn Yankee injuns!].
ReplyDeleteIn re DeMint: he could be just trying to help his brother. In the South Carolina Lowcountry his name is everywhere, but nobody's buying.
ReplyDeleteI mourn the South's being inhabited by other races than Caucasians.
ReplyDeleteHm. A bit out of step with the slavery nostalgia, non?
Jennifer Rubin only mentioned Edmund Burke and Russel Kirk because she was trying to freestyle about conservative heroes, but stopped when she kept rhyming with "jerk".
ReplyDeleteMaybe she's just pining for Chechens.
ReplyDelete"I mourn the South's being inhabited by other races than Caucasians."
ReplyDeleteOh, so did the original inhabitants. They even left a Trail of Tears.
sigyn
He's saying that Obama was raised to be an un-American big-C Commie (where his Republican banker grandma fits into that meme, Vadum won't say), and by implication, that Tim Scott therefore is a true-blue American free-market patriot (and not the fiscal and cultural leaping screamer that he appears to be to sane people). So, Vadum is saying: "Dat boy was done brought up right. He agrees with us white people!"
ReplyDeleteBut, they protest, they're not racists. They're "race realists."
ReplyDeleteThey're now just first cousins to Klansmen.
A black Republican appointee will make liberals "heads explode"? More like make them crowd around in slack-jawed amazement.
ReplyDeleteLiberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress were made, as
ReplyDeleteSauron made the Orcs, in mockery of Heritage, AEI, et al.
Because conservatives invented think tanks, like they invented all good things. Reminds me of the Twilight fan who expressed outrage at The Wolfman for stealing the werewolf idea from Stephanie Meyer.
Lessee, it was Tom Paine who said, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
ReplyDeleteFor forty years, the GOP has been cultivating the crazies in their midst because they needed the membership. Recall Nixon's glee at the "hard hat riots" where the "silent majority" whomped on the hippies because they dared challenge a war in which they and their friends were getting killed for the most specious of reasons. I remember when James Robison was screaming for bugfuck evangelicals to "get out of the churches and into the streets, into the ballot booths," in order to defeat "godless communism" and "change the world." (That bit of theocratic legerdemain, incidentally, eventually gave us George W. Bush.) Now, there's an impassioned defense of the craziest of true believers, the Teabaggers, whose sense of their own purity of purpose is wandering deep into the territory of the maniacally grandiose. And yet, they're just another bunch of crazy racist fuckers the GOP dragged into the tent moments after the 2008 election and told, "here's yer lapel button and yer yard sign." Little did they know that the host had just offered itself up to the parasite, once again.
At every instance of the GOP encouraging this sort of extremism, it has--in the long run--turned out badly for them and the country, in part because these are effectively the goofiest of the splinters and splitters representing fifteen or twenty percent of the right wing, and maybe ten percent of voters, who have incrementally and serially--with the help of crackpot billionaires' money--pushed the party not just to the fiscal cliff, but over the sanity brink.
The only thing that has kept the GOP in the game is the decision by the Dems after Ronnie Raygun's reelection to become more like the GOP (one of the reasons why we now have the very strange reality of a black President praising Ronnie Raygun and dissing FDR, and offering to weaken core Democratic programs in exchange for a mostly symbolic increase in taxes on the wealthy while continuing to pursue some of the most ambitiously authoritarian projects of the prior GOP administration).
Time, and not reason, may bring the GOP back from the asylum, in a few decades. Maybe the bigger question is whether or not the Dems recognize their inclinations to superficial appearances and imitation.
More power to Tim Scott, the Virgin Ben Shapiro of politics (oops, make that the Britney Spears of politics), who can't be any worse than DeMint, and who might actually one day consider, in his legislative capacity, that someone working 16 hours a day, as his mother did, shouldn't be living in poverty. But since when is opening an insurance agency an act of entrepreneurial heroism? Forget the magic by which this becomes a greater moral good than his mother's eighty-hour weeks; how, exactly, is it any different than punching a clock? What payroll did he meet? Paid the window washer every month?
ReplyDeleteIt seems Republican history repeats itself three times: first as a talking point, then as a fetish item, and finally as something to charge RINOs with doing ten years afterwards.
Yes, but he still has to stand at his desk and read the Fountainhead out loud to his donors. Then they all crawl into the tent and shine flashlights under their faces and go galt.
ReplyDeleteAlso, aren't they "racialists"-the "alist" at the end seems to make the race part ok.
ReplyDeleteaimai
Doesn't this also go back to the smear by some pundette that all interracial babies by white women and black men were part of a commie plot to create a manchurian demographic--not only a red diaper baby but a sleeper baby!
ReplyDeleteSo you are saying this is Xeno's paradox of voters? That you get a good base out of your splinters and splitters but every time you halve your control over the sane voters?
ReplyDeleteThe very first comment over at the VV points out, sniffily, that in point of fact the Orcs were constructed by Morgoth, not Sauron. I do love the internet in the morning.
ReplyDeleteWhy is that every time conservatives put an African-American into some position of prominence, they start crowing about how this proves for all time that they're not racists? They appoint Michael Steele to run the RNC, and see! That proves they're not racists despite all the racist stuff they say and do. Alan West gets elected on a wave of insanity and see! That proves they're not racists despite all those emails about Obama with a bone through his nose!
ReplyDeleteIf I had my DSM-IV handy, I'm sure I could find this sort of behavior diagnosed with a spiffy name for it. For the moment, though, I'll just call it "Conservatism" out of convenience.
Deelicious:
ReplyDeleteQuestion Diversity • 4 days ago
The Stupid Party is so predictable.
When I found out that DeMint was resigning from the Senate to run the H-1B visa-loving Heritage Foundation, I thought to myself, "Gov. Nimrata Randhawa might do something stupid like put that Tim Scott in his place just to have one black in the Senate."
Not only is that actually probably going to happen, much to my dismay, that's what Jim DeMint wants! I expected better of him.
J.C. Watts is now reassessing his impact.
ReplyDeleteEd Burke is thoroughly bemused.
Or, optimistically, we could say, first as tragedy, then as farce, and finally, as punishment.
ReplyDeleteWhat you're saying just goes to show that there is no "They" there. That's the problem with such broad generalizations, there never is, and it just pisses off those who get unfairly tarred.
ReplyDeleteDunno, exactly. But, it seems there is a bandwagon effect on the GOP every time they embrace the crazies, as if each new insanity is the shiny object of their desires. With that comes the delusion that this latest crop of minority extremists represents the new majority. An insular inside-the-Beltway press (probably furthered by media consolidation over the years) doesn't help dissuade them from that view, either. George W. Bush was the culmination of their fascination with the evangelicals and the culture wars, and they were so obsessed with winning (and winning forever) that they couldn't see that the combination of a moron like Bush, a carpetbagger like Rove and an amoral imperialist like Cheney was disastrous, both for their electoral future and for the necessity of governance.
ReplyDelete....aaaand my ears just started leaking blood.
ReplyDeleteI love the fact that "embracing the American dream" means choosing only the life and career path that conservatives endorse. Isn't the American dream having the freedom to choose one's own path?
ReplyDeleteAnd since when is working to help empower other people, as President Obama chose to do, un-American?
Let's not even go there about "inspiring life story that happens to be true."
I glad I'm never going to have to wash those sleeping bags.
ReplyDeleteBut the pay is better.
ReplyDeleteWelp. Now that the Republicans are maybe thinking about nominating a black Senator, our plot to paint them as hateful deadenders is pretty much fucked, unless they do do something equally batshit like going on anti-communist rants so antiquated the dudes who remade Red Dawn are embarrassed.
ReplyDeleteyou'll never make it here at the gulch, son!
ReplyDeleteI mourn the South's being inhabited by other races than Caucasians
ReplyDeleteYikes! In addition to the racism here, there's an amazing disconnect to reality. In what fevered imagination was the South EVER inhabited only by Caucasians? Like it or not the culture of the American South is fundamentally based on the presence of African people - its food, its music, its language. Even in the most sentimentalized stereotypical fantasy, it's an African-influenced culture. Imagining a Caucasian-only South would be like imagining a Minnesota without Norweigians.
It's the start-into-the-abyss effect in real life. Each time the GOP has grabbed the short-term gains and promised everybody they'd solve the problems later. Racists in the sixties and seventies, protestant prigs in the eighties, antigovernment wackaloons in the nineties, and finally the remnants of the John Birch Society. In this pattern they've neatly paralleled oh, for example, Enron.
ReplyDeleteOf course the people who write the memos are going to insist that light in the distance is the end of the tunnel, and not the 11:10 from Reading. What other option do they have?
Oh let's, that was the best bit! It was so helpful of him to provide evidence for the assertion that Obama's life story is a lie by lying about Obama's life story.
ReplyDeleteTim Scott is pretty much the definition of a hateful dead-ender; he's so virulently anti-union that he went after striking workers' food stamp eligibility, and wanted to impeach Obama over the 2011 debt ceiling crisis.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's a big tent. Unfortunately for them, it's not so much that they have members outside the tent pissing in, they have members inside the tent pissing in.
ReplyDeleteAsk 'em where city names like Tuscaloosa came from. Ask 'em where the Cherokee originally lived.
ReplyDeleteThe answers would be entertaining.
I don't think they've fully thought this one through.
ReplyDeleteAs much as a black Republican appointee might cheer rightbloggers and nutjobs from other states, appointing a black man to DeMint's seat is unlikely to win friends and influence neighbors in South Carolina's overwhelmingly white male racist Republican base.
Well, it's a small tent but otherwise as you describe. Not everyone is racist though as is demonstrated by plenty of real world examples from Condi Rice to Alan West, and the existence of the congressman from South Carolina, I'm guessing. It's counterproductive to label them all as racist.
ReplyDeleteOf course that comment thread at American Renaissance demonstrates that quite a few of them definitely are racist. But one commenter said something to the effect that liberals have no understanding of white poverty in the red states and I find that to be generally true. The long article in Sunday's WaPo about the poor white girl in western Pennsylvania was somewhat emblematic.
Giving it some thought, I'd posit that the disconnect has something to do with the differences between the inner city poverty we see in the blue states and the more rural poverty elsewhere. The inner city poor typically believe they have plenty of opportunity, even if it's totally unrealistic. They see success all around them all the time. The more rural poor see nothing but a bunch of self-riteous assholes who call themselves role models but are anything but. Way too many genuinely believe there is no hope and act accordingly. The lucky few move to blue cities.
It's unfortunate that our liberal-ish national politicians so totally ignore so many of those people. Howard Dean had it right with the 50 state strategy. Obama should make regular appearances throughout the red states. Unfortunately though, most of the losers are correct in that there is no realistic hope for them. It's pretty much the military or the drugs and the alcohol. Not to rule out the one followed by the other.
I just put in his place a young white minister who preached a sermon I heard against the south re: slavery. He was a missionary's son in Colombia, SA. I told him he should preach against his country's violence and drug culture and leave the South alone. He was offended that I defended the South.
ReplyDeleteLol. None of this actually happened.
it's a bit like watching mtv in 1993 isn't it, when wishes were like flannel? simpson bowles! hearings on benghazi! paul ryan really does care about the poor! demint leaves the senate for heritage! nicki haley picks an african-american replacement! victory is nigh! IT CAN ALL BE GRUNGE!
ReplyDeleteMark Davis at TownHall about Tim Scott: a pro-life, pro-business voice unafraid to warn that our hasty exits from Iraq and Afghanistan are a gift to al Qaeda.
ReplyDeleteHasty? 11 years, with at least 13+ planned for Afghanistan? That hasty? Geez, Scott would have loved the Vietnam war. From a similar distance of course.
It makes them the A-list racists.
ReplyDeleteIf they come up with a baby that sleeps reliably, I might want in on that.
ReplyDeleteWho's "they"? Physician, heal thy self...
ReplyDeleteBut, srsly, there's no worse abuse than calling a bigot "racist". As a crackery lookin' person here in Dixie, I cause 'em pain just by not agreeing with their racist world views, so, eff 'em. Calling them racists right to their doughy faces, or here on a blog, is appropriate. Fun too!
A, little Timmy Carney, aged 6. Every time he hits the "publish" button, God kills a kitten. Every time I read him, I lose a few million brain cells.
ReplyDeleteDeMint, from the Reason interview: "I don’t think the government should impose my morals or anyone else’s on someone else, but at the same time I don’t want the government purging morals and religious values from our society."
ReplyDeleteWell, he's getting a good start on the libertarian stoner-freshman rhetoric.
I love the fact that "embracing the American dream" means choosing only the life and career path that conservatives endorse.
ReplyDeleteAre you saying that everyone can't be a businessman?
Are you saying we can't just all organize selling stuff to each other?
Are you saying some people actually have to make the things that are sold?
What are you, some kind of red diaper baby?
The Hundred Years' Skirmish was more to his liking.
ReplyDeleteUh: the Washington Post is not synonymous with "liberals"--not even close. Things that surprise journalists and/or editors of major newspapers are not actually at all surprising to "liberals." Northern, white, poverty stricken or not. There's a shit ton of poverty in rural White Maine, for instance, and in every rural area where the prime economy is built on extraction.
ReplyDeleteaimai
Hasty only by the warmonger's standards. This jihad against the jihadists is supposed to last many lifetimes, or until the enemy grants the superiority of Christian Americans and surrenders en masse to Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney, and begs Franklin Graham to baptize them. And they give our multinationals all the oil they want at knocked-down prices.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, we can't go after China and Russia until we've dispatched the Muslims, can we? Or, so the thinking goes in such circles....
the big-government side in today's abortion battles is the 'pro-choicers'
ReplyDeleteI am so fascinated to hear the logic by which this is true. The government that wants to make your medical and family decisions for you is the small government? The one that wants to let you decide is the tyrannical nanny state? But I'm so afraid if I go read the source, I'll suffer dain bramage.
Okay, I caved and read it, and silly me for expecting logic. The idea is just dropped in there as... well I was was going to say assertion, but it's really more of a nonsequiter. Sigh. Maybe it makes sense if you're fluent in crazy.
ReplyDeleteTrue story: I used to work in a coffee shop and we had a regular with schizophrenia who periodically left flyers for us. Her writing style was similar to this Carney's: just a page crammed with nonsequiters, but you could tell by the passion and fear in their tone that the author genuinely felt she was stringing them together in a way that amounted to "building a case" and warning us of mortal danger.
I am starting to really see edroso is on to something when he says our political opponents are insane.
Prediction: Obamacare something something sandra fluke something something religious liberty plus planned parenthood is getting rich off medicare abortions (hyde amendment? what hyde amendment?), and anyway, all those restrictions on abortion are happening at the state level (except when they aren't) and that's totally different because Thomas Jefferson.
ReplyDeleteIf the Stupid Party is so predictable, but you vote for them every time, what does that make you?
ReplyDeleteAlso: This obsession with foreign names is so weird. Just one more element of the wingnut psychosis. I know your real name YOU MAY HAVE FOOLED OTHERS BUT NOT I HAHA NOT SO POWERFUL NOW ARE YOU
The Brookings institution was founded around 1916. AEI was when?
ReplyDeleteI thought to myself, "Gov. Nimrata Randhawa might do something stupid
ReplyDeletelike put that Tim Scott in his place just to have one black in the
Senate."
Stopped clock something something. Because I think that Tim Scott's race would be a factor, given the GOP's desire to trot out the occasional African-American to bolster their hollow disavowals of racism. Point out that Tim Scott is a reactionary assboil whose worldview effectively declares his own mother a worthless parasitic loser, and they'll even get to call you racist. It's a trifecta for people who can't count to three, many of whom are Republican members of Congress.
Look, wingnuts are in favor of SMALL GOVERNMENT. They are also in favor of restricting abortion rights. Therefore, it only stands to reason that restricting abortion rights must equal SMALL GOVERNMENT. It all makes sense when you think about in those terms, as long as you don't think about it too hard.
ReplyDelete"I don’t think the government should impose my morals or anyone else’s on someone else, ..."
ReplyDeleteJoin us next week, when Jim DeMint informs us that the Pope is Protestant, and that bears shit only in the desert.
Permitting abortions encroaches on the morality of social conservatives, and encroaching is something BIG GOVERNMENT does. And if abortions are legal, that's something that has to be regulated, which means more big government. Whereas black-market abortions are a free market far from the controlling hand of bureaucrats.
ReplyDeleteIn other news, I am so much better than Jim DeMint at this, and deserve to be paid accordingly.
Herman Cain's pizza once made one of my body parts want to explode, but it wasn't my head.
ReplyDeleteAnd when was the last time you pulled off one of Satan's masks, Mr. Smartypants Liberal?
ReplyDeleteIt is a beautiful thing when the balm of shared insanity and hatred of subhuman poor people can heal the hurts of racism. Frothing black nutjobs have been, too long, shut out of the Republican Party and it's a real shame. Tim Scott will be remembered in the future by black men and women who lovingly embrace the politics of sociopathy as a shining beacon who forged ahead. Whenever a rich black person wants to put their boot in the face of someone less fortunate, I hope they'll remember to take just a little bit of time to thank Tim Scott.
ReplyDeleteMy father, who is otherwise a decent and doctrinaire liberal, has some sort of knee-jerk vestigial racism that cause him to pull that shit anytime Bobby Jindal comes up. But he's at least sane and self-aware enough to know this is behavior he should be embarrassed by.
ReplyDeleteI have to point out that the repugs didn't "embrace" the nutty tbaggers, they (with Kock help) created them, funded them, told them what to think and say and do. It got a little out of their control, but the TParty was their monster. God knows what horror they'll come up with next.
ReplyDeleteYou forgot to mention that he's an investment advisor too, an accomplishment that trumps Obama's Harvard education and law degree, at least - and when you factor in the summer he worked at Pizza Hut I think we can all agree that he has clearly distinguished himself in his personal endeavours far beyond what the president could ever hope to achieve.
ReplyDelete.....and even if it did, it shows him to be kinda stupid. The minister is a missionary's son in Colombia, South America. In other words, he's an expat, an American, not a Columbian. "His" country (along with, ironically, its "violence and drug culture") is the USA, not Colombia.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, how do the flaws in Colombia (which do actually exist), cancel out or render nugatory the flaws of the Southern USA? Is it really a defense of the South, and its history of slavery and racism, to say, "Hey, Colombia has problems too?" Particularly when those problems are not only not unique to the country in question, not only are problems in the USA itself, but are problems in the very Southern USA being "defended."
Or, how the Cherokee "New Echota" became abandoned, near Calhoun (don't you love the irony?) Georgia (hint: military force was involved)
ReplyDeleteThe inner city poor typically believe they have plenty of opportunity,
ReplyDeleteeven if it's totally unrealistic. They see success all around them all
the time.
what?
That was Lisa Schiffren at NRO. Dear God, she doesn't get out much.
ReplyDeleteFrothing black nutjobs have been, too long, shut out of the Republican Party and it's a real shame.
ReplyDeleteHey now, Allen West hasn't even locked up his office yet!
There are many successful people in big cities. It's where they tend to congregate.
ReplyDeleteI don't read many newspapers. I spend a lot of time among the inner city poor.
The WaPo article I refer to isn't overtly political. It describes a reality I'm familiar with.
ReplyDeleteEveryone wonders "what's wrong with Kansas?" I think that's the wrong question, particularly if one is in favor of progressive politics. The better question is "what's wrong with progressive communication/voter outreach?" Cause as has been duly noted, those rural-ish white guys most brutalized by conservative policies are the Republican's core consistency. It feels good to gloat that the problem is them, but if progressives are ever to turn this thing around, they'll need to learn to understand and empathize with the victims and realize that the problem is with their own poor communication strategies.
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