When House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., lost his seat in the Republican primary last summer, Rep. Peter Roskam, R- Ill., was next in line to move into the House leadership, joining House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California.
This cartoon by David Horsey is from 2009 but is just as true today.
To any objective observer, the national Republican Party appears to be bent on suicide — a colony of angry white male lemmings headed straight for the cliff. Every decision the party’s leadership makes, every strategy they pursue, seems to be motivated by a singular, urgent need to stoke their voters’ basest fears and inner rage.
But while the GOP base may take glee with the party’s wars on women, African-Americans, Latinos, students, the poor, immigrants, seniors and science, normal Americans, including the independent swingsters who decide elections, are increasingly unnerved by it. Driven by their base, the national GOP is ignoring the swingsters’ concerns and doubling down on efforts to appeal exclusively to teavangelical Fox watchers and Dittoheads.
As Keith Humphreys at The Reality-Based Community noted this week, this is a familiar scenario for Californian Democrats and independents, who have watched with muted astonishment over the post 20 years as the nation’s largest state Republican Party obstinately pursued a similar doubling-down on its angry white base — a strategy that has left the state party fiscally and ideologically bankrupt and shriveled to its lowest voter registration in over a century:
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Here is the statement Sen. Kinnaird released, via the Daily Tar Heel, the newspaper published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is in her district:
1. Reinstating Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws 53 years after the historic Woolworth sit-ins in Greensboro
2. Under the guise of motorcycle safety, passing a big-government Republican takeover of North Carolina women’s uteruses, which Gov. McCrory signed into law despite a campaign promise not to restrict women’s reproductive rights
3. Cutting funding for programs that feed the hungry and house and clothe the unemployed — which is a paradox because these Republicans claim to be Christians and this directly countermands Jesus’ requirement that Christians must help the poor and needy
4. Attempting to unilaterally nullify the U.S. Constitution and create a North Carolina state religion
5. Killing a proposal for background checks for gun buyers while passing a bill to make it legal to carry concealed weapons on college campuses, state property, greenways, bike trails, at sporting events and in businesses that serve alcohol
A bill filed recently in the N.C. legislature, where Republicans hold veto-proof majorities (which are irrelevant because the governor is also a Republican), would impose a poll tax on the parents of college students who register to vote in the town where they go to college, which the Supreme Court has ruled is their right:
A new poll from Gallup found that more Alabamians think of themselves as “conservative” than residents of any other state. This puts the state in the running for first in hypocrisy, since it is also the tenth biggest recipient of federal spending among the states, versus its tax receipts. (The District of Columbia was the top recipient, but it is not a state.)
Yes, this tea party/neo-Confederate hotbed is also the 10th largest “taker” state. Here’s an overview of the socialist largess that jack-booted bureaucrats from the federal government shove down Alabama’s throat:
Do neo-Confederates who advocate secession of the South from the United States (again) “love” America? Logic suggests that they do not. Back in April, Rick Perry famously suggested that the secession of Texas was at least a possibility:
REPORTER: Some have associated you with the idea of secession or sovereignty for your state…
PERRY: Oh, I think there’s a lot of different scenarios. Texas is a unique place. When we came in the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that. You know, my hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that? So. But Texas is a very unique place and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.
(Perry is, of course, lying. Texas was not given an option to opt out when it was annexed into the union in 1845.)
But now we have Perry, four months after he was caught palling around with neo-Confederates, suggesting that it is the president of the United States who does not “love” America:
For Christmas, it’s a blanket pardon for Hunter,
And that’s torn the whole political world asunder.
Everybody’s mad at Joe Biden
For doing some lyin’,
But that’s just one for old Joe and 30,573 for the Trumpster.
