Day: May 20, 2009

Florida GOP Almost as Lame as the National Party

Buck Banks

A recent Gallup poll found that the Republican Party is losing members from nearly every demographic group, including a 10 percent drop in college graduates. The only group that didn’t lose membership is the demo that attends church frequently. Meanwhile, national Chairman Michael Steele is threatening to quit if he doesn’t get to hold the party’s purse strings.

Nationally, the GOP is slouching toward irrelevance. But in Florida, the GOP is still a nasty, scrappy group of old white guys.

You know, I used to kick Florida Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman pretty hard for being a dingbat. But since I’ve signed up to receive the RPOF (Republican Party of Florida) newsletter, I’ve got to say that Chairman Jim Greer makes Thurman look like a freaking Einstein.

What got Greer’s nose out of joint this time was a recent New York Times article in which freshman Democrat Florida Representative Alan Grayson was quoted voicing his opposition to the $98 billion military-spending bill before Congress:

“There is no need in the 21st century to do this, to make us safe. This is a 19th-century strategy being played out at great expense in both money and blood in the 21st century, in the wrong time at the wrong place.”

“It’s wrong,” Mr. Grayson added. “That’s why I am going to vote against it.”

So Greer released a rant-filled “press release” attacking Grayson, whom he calls “the representative from ACORN.”

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is a favorite whipping target of the GOP, and last year during its voter-registration drive caught an extra load of crap when it appeared that Mickey Mouse had filled out an ACORN registration card, which was rejected. Greer cites the following video as evidence that Grayson is “the representative from ACORN”:

[…]

Gays’ Unease with Obama Ratchets Up Over Firing of Decorated Combat Pilot

Jon Ponder

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In a dramatic move just hours after author/activist Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out (TWO), posted a round-up of growing dissent among gay writers and activist arising from Pres. Obama’s lack of progress and even backtracking on gay issues, a decorated Air Force pilot came out of the closet on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and announced that he was being fired from the military today because of the Obama administration’s failure to act to rescind the ant-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Here’s an overview of the pilot’s career from Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, writing for the Huffington Post:

Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach, a fighter weapons systems officer, has been flying the F-15E Strike Eagle since 1998. He has flown numerous missions against Taliban and al-Qaida targets, including the longest combat mission in his squadron’s history. On that infamous September 11, 2001, Lt. Col. Fehrenbach was handpicked to fly sorties above the nation’s capital. Later he flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has received at least 30 awards and decorations including nine air medals, one of them for heroism, as well as campaign medals for Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is now a flight instructor in Idaho, where he has passed on his skills to more than 300 future Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force weapons systems officers.

Since 1987, when Fehrenbach entered Notre Dame on a full Air Force ROTC scholarship, the government has invested $25 million in training and equipping him to serve his country, which he has done with what anyone would agree was great distinction. He comes from a military family. His father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, his mother an Air Force nurse and captain. Lt. Col. Fehrenbach has honored that tradition.

And the Air Force is about to discharge this guy, a virtual poster boy for Air Force recruiting, because he is gay? Someone has to be kidding. This is sheer madness.

In his interview with Rachel Maddow, Lt. Col. Fehrenbach said that, until his appearance on her show last night, no one in the Air Force knew he was gay, except for superior officers and military lawyers working on his discharge.

In an email to supporters before Fahrenbach’s surprise announcement yesterday, TWO’s Besen offered a round-up of growing discontent among influential gay writers:

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Not SNL, RNC’s Steele Really Promised ‘Change’ That ‘Comes in a Tea Bag’

Jon Ponder

Believe it or not, those clips being shown on the news channels are not from a Saturday Night Live sketch of a comedian imitating RNC Chairman Michael Steele — that is, as we say in LA, the real Michael Steele.

It couldn’t be SNL, of course, because Steele’s speech was funny, albeit unintentionally laughable.

Trish wrote yesterday about Steele’s jaw-dropping assertion that the era of Republicans apologizing for their mistakes was over. As she said, “Was I out of the room when the Republicans apologized for the Bush years?”

But the biggest unintentional laugh from the speech may have been Steele’s
rallying cry toward the end of the speech in which he asserted that the hope for the GOP lies in the teabagging movement:

Those of you who live outside of Washington know what I’m talking about. Those of you who actually attend Lincoln Day dinners, and county party events, those of you who toil in the vineyards, spending time in communities, in diners, in barber shops, and in coffee shops where real, every day people can be found. You know it is real. You can see it and feel it.

This change comes in a tea bag! And that’s a wonderful thing.

It’s doubtful Steele thought it was such a wonderful thing when organizers of the Chicago teabagging rally in April rejected his offer to speak at the event.

And in the same way adults bow to a kindergartner’s stubborn determination to wear her princess gown to the mall, Steele and the GOP deserve credit for forging ahead with teabagging, despite having been relentlessly mocked this spring for choosing branding that is a famous frat-boy double entendre.

But if it’s true that the GOP is betting its future on an astroturf “movement” that is orchestrated by party fatcats, paid for by Republican lobbyists and promoted on hate radio and Fox News — and that uses crypto-racist messaging to rally mostly uneducated whites to protest tax increases on people with incomes over $200,000 — then Democrats, and the country at large, can rest easy.