Year: 2010
Verbatim
I do not believe that our society can ever live up to the promise of equality, and the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, until we stop invidious discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
— Ted Olson, making the conservative case for gay marriage in Newsweek.
When House Majority Leader Dick Armey Called Rep. Frank a ‘Fag,’ No One Called for Him to Resign
Republicans are trying to gin up an equivalence between this comment about then-Sen. Barack Obama by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid during the 2008 presidential campaign:
[Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he later put it privately.
…And this statement by former GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott during festivities at the 100th birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond in 2002:
LOTT: “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
But there is no fair comparison between calling someone a “Negro” — the appellation preferred by African-Americans 40 years ago — and suggesting that America’s ills can be laid at the feet of uppity black people.
After his gaffe, Lott was essentially fired as majority leader by Karl Rove, who preferred the more malleable Sen. Bill Frist for the job. In the current kerfuffle, Pres. Obama personally accepted Reid’s apology. Yesterday, however, GOP Michael Steele called on Reid to resign and accused Democrats of having a double standard. Since Lott had to resign, so should Reid, Steele said. Since then, all the usual Republican suspects have rushed to the cameras to ditto the demand that Reid should go.
While it is plain silly to compare these two gaffes by majority leaders, there is a relatively recent scandal in which a Republican majority leader suffered no repercussions after he insulted a fellow congressman by calling him a “fag.” The leader was Dick Armey, who now heads Freedomworks, the outfit that astroturfed the Tea Bagger movement:
The House majority leader, Representative Dick Armey of Texas, set off a dispute on Capitol Hill today when he referred to Representative Barney Frank, one of several openly homosexual members of Congress, as “Barney Fag.”
Mr. Armey said later that he had simply mispronounced Mr. Frank’s name. First privately and then in addressing the House, he apologized to Mr. Frank for the remark, which he had made in an interview with a group of radio broadcasters.
No one believed Armey’s assertion that he’d had a slip of the tongue, including Rep. Frank:
[In] an interview with reporters after he and Mr. Armey had spoken privately, [Frank] seemed clearly upset. He said the remark reflected “a climate of meanness and intolerance with the Republicans.” While he declined to undertake a full-fledged attack in response, he also refused to wholly accept Mr. Armey’s apology.
“I don’t think it was on the tip of his tongue, but I do believe it was in the back of his mind,” Mr. Frank said. “There are a lot of ways to mispronounce my name. That is the least common.”
Armey’s name-calling occurred in January 1995, just weeks after Republicans took control of the House for the first time in 40 years — since voters tossed them out on their ears in the wake of the GOP’s communist witch hunts and other scandals. Here’s what the majority leader said:
“[House Speaker Newt Gingrich is] a very patient fellow and able to handle a harangue going on around him better than I,” Mr. Armey said. “I like peace and quiet, and I don’t have to listen to Barney Fag — Barney Frank — haranguing in my ear…”
There is a double standard here, but has nothing to do with the gaffes by Sens. Reid and Lott. What this shows is that it is okay with Republicans if one of their leaders calls a colleague a “fag,” but it is outrageous — a fireable offense — if a Democrat calls a black person a “Negro.”
Verbatim
There were numerous instances that she said things that were … that were not accurate that ultimately, the campaign had to deal with. And that opened the door to criticism that she was being untruthful and inaccurate. And I think that is something that continues to this day.
— McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, in an interview on 60 Minutes, on Sarah Palin.
Verbatim
Top 10 Michael Steele Quotes, courtesy of Taegan Godard at PoliticalWire
1. Crazy nonsense empathetic. I’ll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind. Craziness.
— Explaining why he’s opposed to empathetic judges.
2. The problem that we have with this president is we don’t know him. He was not vetted, folks … He was not vetted, because the press fell in love with the black man running for the office.
— Forgetting President Obama actually won a national election.
3. Could you help a brother out? No more national conventions with 36 people of color in the room.
— Urging Florida Republicans to send delegates to the Republican National Convention who “look like Florida.”
4. It’s not even really a Web site.
— Trying to downplay technical problems with the redesigned RNC Web site.
5. I can say without hesitation that this government is totally theirs … Everything that comes out of it and everything that results from it is on their plate.
— Almost gleeful that Republicans lost the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota.
6. Well, I’m the cow on the tracks.
— Explaining how he would stop President Obama’s health care train.
7. Our platform is one of the best political documents that’s been written in the last 25 years. Honest Injun on that.
— Defending the Republican platform.
8. If you don’t want me in the job, fire me. But until then, shut up. Get with the program or get out of the way.
— Saying he’s “done” with criticism from top Republicans.
9. God has a way of revealing stuff to you, and making it real for you, through others. And if that’s part of the plan, it’ll be the plan … If I run it’ll be because that’s where God wants me to be at that time.
— Explaining how he’ll decide if he will run for president some day.
10. I’m the gift that keeps on giving.
— Stating the obvious.
Tea Bag Party to Hold First Convention – Palin Reportedy Being Paid $100k to Speak
With the mid-term elections looming, it is clear that the Tea Baggers’ populist, anti-Obama energy is being channeled into the the formation of a new national political party. With funding from wealthy right-wing extremists, including the Koch brothers and others, political operatives like former House Majority Leader-turned lobbyist Dick Armey have masterfully astroturfed the Tea Baggers into a new power base comprised of the most easily duped and manipulated segment of American society: poorly educated, white Southerners and their counterparts in other regions.
The objective of the astroturfing is to organize working-class opposition to government regulation of the sources of corporate wealth — energy, health care, the media, etc. — and roll back and eventually kill government policies and programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Civil Rights protections that help, yes, working class Americans. It could be said that the corporate oligarchs are attempting to create a 21st century version of the Dixiecrat Party, which, in 1948, had a platform that is nearly identical to Tea Bagger positions today: local control, shrinking the federal government and — although this goes unstated, it’s there in the optics at the rallies — racial segregation.
The connections between the corporate oligarchs and their rent-boys like Armey are relatively easy to research. But Tea Baggers themselves are oblivious to their roles as the pawns in this new power grab. They have been kept in the dark because, over the past decade and more, conservatives have trained their base to trust only right-wing media outlets like hate radio and Fox News, and these outlets scrupulously avoid reporting on who is pulling the strings and why.
For regular Americans, however, the connections are hard to miss. In the weeks leading up to the Koch-funded Freedomwork’s Tea Bagger rallies last summer, for example, right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News gave the rallies hundreds of hours of free promotion. On the day of the rallies, Fox covered the live events wall-to-wall, frequently displaying racist anti-Obama signs on its air without comment. Just last month, Bill O’Reilly, the senior propagandist at Fox, did a segment cheerleading the formation of the Tea Bag Party (TBP), citing a poll that found that 41 percent of Americans favor the TBP over Democrats (35 percent) and Republicans (28 percent).
“Well, look,” O’Reilly told his panel of TBP supporters — no representative of the other parties were included to make the discussion, you know, “fair and balanced” — “if you want a viable third party, you got to break it down. I mean, you just got to kick the door in like [1992 third-party candidate Ross] Perot did and other people did.”
There’s even a Tea Bagger social-network group on Murdoch’s Wall St. Journal website promoting the formation of a national political party because — speaking of easily duped — the GOP and Dems are too cozy with corporate interests:
This is good news for the nation. Both the Republican and the Democrat party have been serving the private corporations for a long time. Everyone sees what has happened to this country are [sic] both their watches; they have failed. Leaving, or not running again is best for the USA. The ststaes [sic] need to fill out the proper forms and certify the TEA polictical [sic] party in their state. Do it, stop talking and blogging about it, actually do it and register a few TEA candidates for 2010. The time to act is now, not later. Returning to the American Constitution is correct, turning away from corporation bylaws is correct, watching these unAmerican kickbackers leave in [sic] good for the country. Jorge Lovenguth TEA Florida
At least one state group has made it official. Last November, right-wingers in Florida filled out the paperwork to register the TBP as an official political party in the state.
Around the same time, organizers announced that Tea Baggers would be holding a convention, Feb. 4 – 6, in Nashville. As it stands now, Sarah Palin has agreed to address the mob as the keynote speaker for the closing-night banquet. (There will be bibs.)
Palin is, of course, most famous for quitting and/or not showing up, and one pro-Tea Bag insider (he says he believes that “Palin and the grassroots Tea Party efforts are forces for good”) reports that Palin will be paid as much as $100,000 for the gig.
This calls into question the legitimacy of the Tea Baggers’ meeting in Nashville. Is it a step toward the birth of a national racist political party, or is it just a for-profit mass meeting to shake down America’s most hapless half-wits — a political version of an Amway convention?
If it is the former, it represents the first time a putative front-runner presidential candidate required payment to address her party. If so, it also shines a light on the astroturfing of this movement. If the Tea Baggers were a legitimate grass roots movement, they could have easily invited Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., a whackjob easily as looney-tunes as Palin, who would have spoken for free.
Writing back in November, even the Tea Bagger sympathizer is suspicious about the real purpose of the convention:
The schedule mentions break-out and discussion sessions with no topics, no list of moderators, etc. It’s unclear what anyone will be doing in Nashville for three days other than waiting for Sarah Palin. On top of that, the planning looks to be very poorly done.
The conference sessions, whatever they may be, end at 12:30 PM Saturday afternoon. There’s nothing happening again until the banquet at 6 PM that night. In most cases, all that will achieve is driving up participation costs due to the need for another night in a hotel. Attendees traveling any distance to the event would be all but forced to travel home on a Sunday. That may be fine if one is looking to maximize revenue for the area and some hotels. But it doesn’t seem to take Tea Party goers interests in mind at all.
But if the past is prologue with Palin, the controversy over whether she’s being paid to speak to her followers will soon be shoved aside for the eternal question about her: Will she show up, or will she quit the event before Feb. 6?
Verbatim
Michael Steele makes a number of old-time Republicans very nervous. He comes out of a different background. He went to seminary … he’s African-American … But I think he’s pretty close to what we need. He’s different, he’s gutsy and he’s going to make a number of Republicans mad.
— Newt Gingrich, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, on the RNC chairman.
Lieberman Has Pissed Off 67 Percent of Connecticutians
It’s a good thing Sen. Joe Lieberman is an independent because his antics during the health care debate have made him unpopular with both Republicans and Democrats. Wait — 61 percent of independents disapprove of him, too!
In the Public Policy Polling survey, even Barack Obama is twice as popular with Lieberman’s constituency. He has a 54 percent approval rating in Connecticut versus Lieberman’s 25 percent.
Lieberman has hit a low point with Democrats usually reserved for Republican politicians, with 81percent of them disapproving of him to just 14 percent happy with his performance. Republicans give him bad marks by a 48 to 39 margin.
Lieberman’s actions on the Senate health care bill have made 68 peercent of voters say they disagree with how he handled the issue, to just 19 percent giving him support. Among those who support the health care bill, 84 percent say they disapprove of Lieberman’s actions, but even among those opposed to the initiative, 52 percent say they disagree with how Lieberman handled himself.
“Joe Lieberman isn’t popular enough with the Democrats or the Republicans to receive their nomination for the Senate in 2012,” said Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling. “And since the independents don’t like him much these days either it’s hard to see how he’ll be around for another term.”
Connecticut voters are divided on the health care plan, with 47 percent supporting it and 43 percent opposed.
