The Big Liedaho

The Big Lie that Trump "really" won the 2020 election is ripping up primary slates in several states, and that apparently includes the Gem State.

Idaho’s dominant Republican Party is at war with itself up and down the ballot ahead of its May 17 primaries.

It’s not just Gov. Brad Little, whose reelection campaign became national news when Donald Trump endorsed a primary challenge from Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin. The state attorney general is staring down a challenge from a former rabble-rousing member of Congress. The senior of Idaho’s two GOP House members is facing a primary that has drawn millions in spending. And contentious open races for lieutenant governor and the secretary of state — Idaho’s chief election official — echo some of the national divisions within the party.

There is bound to be some infighting in a state where ambitious pols only have a few routes up the ladder. But there’s more to it in Idaho, where the party’s longtime control over the booming state has bred sharp differences and fierce enmity between two wings of the GOP.

“Some people would describe it as conservative, and then far-right conservative,” said Tom Luna, the chair of the state Republican Party. That “far-right” camp, Luna continued, “would call themselves conservatives and everybody else moderates.”

“We’re probably a microcosm, in some ways, of a lot of places around the country,” said Tommy Ahlquist, a developer who finished third in the 2018 GOP gubernatorial primary.

The normally invisible secretary of state race illustrates the situation. Two of the three candidates running in the GOP primary — state Sen. Mary Souza and state Rep. Dorothy Moon — said they did not believe that President Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane, who oversees elections in the state’s most populous county, said that Biden did win the election.

“It’s just this national rhetoric, and running to a narrative created by Trump that he started when he knew he was going to lose, and started telling the lie,” said Ahlquist, who is critical of the far-right slate of candidates. “And that filters down to Republicans in our state. And in a state as red as ours, that’s still the narrative because that’s what they do to get elected.”

In the state attorney general’s race, former Rep. Raúl Labrador — a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus — and his allies have cast five-term Attorney General Lawrence Wasden as a weak link in the national fight against Democrats.

The Club for Growth, a longtime backer of Labrador’s in Congress, has spent nearly $300,000 on TV ads in the race, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm. Though the group hasn’t formally endorsed Labrador, who finished second in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, they have gone after Wasden.

“Lawrence Wasden is no general,” the narrator of the Club ad says, knocking him for not joining multi-state actions that other GOP attorneys general backed — including the 2020 lawsuit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that tried to toss out the results of the last presidential election.

But it’s the governor’s race that will headline the GOP primaries in Idaho, with Little facing down a challenge from McGeachin after years of public feuding between the two, especially over coronavirus policies. Their horn-locking reached farcical levels: More than once, McGeachin used her power as acting governor while Little was out of the state to issue an executive order on the pandemic, which Little would angrily rescind shortly after returning.

Little is one of two sitting Republican governors whom Trump is opposing, joining Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, whose primary against former Sen. David Perdue is later this month. But unlike Kemp — who had a well-documented public breakup with Trump in 2020, over his unwillingness to help Trump overturn the election results — Little never publicly drew the former president’s ire.

McGeachin, however, was one of Trump’s earliest supporters. She also has ties to the far right, having appeared at the same conference hosted by a white nationalist that drew condemnation and criticism for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). (McGeachin accused a Boise TV reporter of trying to play guilt “by association” by raising the conference, saying she didn’t know the organizer before she spoke.)

Little contonues to have a pretty big lead over McGeachin, but you can't count her out, not with Trump, Michelle Malkin, and white supremacist domestic terrorist outfits like the Three Percenters behind her.

Understand that the only thing that matters in the Republican party anymore is loyalty to Trump.

Last Call For Wesley Clark's Mind

General Wesley Clark at one time was on the short list of veeps for President Obama and ran in 2004 for a short while, he won the Oklahoma Democratic primary even, and he has been a voice of sanity on US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That reign of sanity apparently ended on Friday as his interview with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts was shocking.

We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We've got to cut this off at the beginning. There are always a certain number of young people who are alienated. They don't get a job, they lost a girlfriend, their family doesn't feel happy here and we can watch the signs of that. And there are members of the community who can reach out to those people and bring them back in and encourage them to look at their blessings here.

But I do think on a national policy level we need to look at what self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of terrorists. They do have an ideology. In World War II if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn't say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.

So, if these people are radicalized and they don't support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States, as a matter of principle fine. It's their right and it's our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict. And I think we're going to have to increasingly get tough on this, not only in the United States but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures. 

To be frank here, Gen. Clark is, at minimum, saying we need to round up "radical Muslims" who disagree with the US government and put them in a place like Gitmo.  At worst case, he is openly calling for Muslim internment camps.

This is insanity, and this is verbatim what Gen. Clark has said after Thursday's awful shooting in Chattanooga, that we need to start rounding up Muslims wholesale.

Get this asshole over to the Republican side where he belongs.  This is deep into Malkinvania and for a Democrat to go there is unacceptable.

The Randian Ideal On Immigration

Sen. Rand Paul went to Houston to speak at a fundraiser for the Harris County GOP, and they didn't exactly like what he had to say about immigration.

Sen. Rand Paul on Saturday predicted that Texas would turn blue within a decade if the Republican Party doesn’t become more inclusive.

“What I do believe is Texas is going to be a Democrat state within 10 years if we don’t change,” Paul (R-Ky.), who grew up in Texas, said at a dinner held by the Harris County GOP. “That means we evolve, it doesn’t mean we give up on what we believe in, but it means we have to be a welcoming party.”

What's this?  Rand Paul pitching a pro-immigration message in Texas?  I bet that went over well.

“We won’t all agree on it,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, what I will say and what I’ll continue to say, and it’s not an exact policy prescription … but if you want to work and you want a job and you want to be part of America, we’ll find a place for you.”

There was some quiet applause in the massive hotel ballroom, in which hundreds of Republicans — a mix of high-dollar donors, activists and state officials — were gathered. But Paul remarked that the response was “kind of tepid.”

You don't say.  So if you're wonder what the change of heart is it's simple:  Randian free-market utopias need ditch diggers too after the minimum wage is gone, right?

I bet he just made a major enemy of Malkinvania.  Time for popcorn!

We Don't Need No Water, Let This Malkinvania Burn

As ABL notes, Michelle Malkin is now trying to blame the Colorado wildfires threatening Fort Collins and Colorado Springs on...you got it in one.

While Colorado burns, conservatives have looked for ways to blame it on President Obama.

Some of the same people who have bashed the president as a big government, big spending liberal now say a wildfire that destroyed hundreds of homes in the conservative stronghold of Colorado Springs can be blamed on the president because he has been too slow to spend money to beef up the federal fleet of air tankers.

The meme began more than a week ago when pundit Michelle Malkin, who lives in Colorado Springs, wrote a piece for the National Review Online titled “Obama Bureaucrats Are Fueling Wildfires.”

“The Obama administration’s neglect of the federal government’s aerial-tanker fleet raises acrid questions about its core public-safety priorities,” she wrote.

If Colorado Springs sounds familiar to readers,  that's because two years ago I was pointing out how the Tea Party had taken over the city and drastically cut city services, including streetlights, park cleanup, the local transit system...and oh yes, city workers including police and firefighters.  Colorado Springs was in fact held up as a model of the new Tea Party governance style and how it would revolutionize America.

Cut to today, where the city is facing a horrific tragedy with massive wildfires ravaging the suburbs and thousands having to evacuate...including Malkin and her family.  Her immediate reaction?  Obama's fault, of course.  It always is.

A reasonable person would have asked "Hey, have we cut spending on things like fire prevention, forestry monitoring, and firefighters lately?"  But of course, we're talking about Malkin here.  If her house should have tragically burned down (and let's be honest here, Michelle Malkin is a boil on the ass of humanity but nothing she says or prints rates having her house destroyed and her family uprooted like this) you think she would be grateful for government to assist her in a time like this.  This is what government is for.

Nope.  You will see more of this, as disasters like this will prove not that the proper response to climate change and increasingly costly disasters is intelligent prevention steps, but to scream, cry, and eliminate as much of the infrastructure preventing tragedies like this anyway just to say "Well the system clearly failed us here so why have common government at all?  You're on your own."

Once again, the lesson of Colorado Springs to wingers is "since government can never prevent 100% of all disasters, government is a failure."

The rest of us get to pay for such stupidity.  A little prevention there, by us voting, goes a long way, folks.  This is what Republican government gets you, and it really is a failure.  It's designed to fail, actually.  Watch.  The solution from sity officials will be "if we had only privatized more of the city functions sooner and fired more city workers, we could have had the money to prevent this tragedy..."  Revenue increases?  What are those?  They don't exist.

Pretty soon that won't be sarcasm.  It will be fact.  But you have a say in how your city, county, state, and country are run.  I suggest you register and vote.

Before that's "cut" too.

Silence: You're Doing It Wrong

As BooMan points out, today is the National Right Wing Nutjob Day Of Butthurt as they go Galt in order to point out the injustice of a liberal activist not having his entrails ripped out on national television, and are collectively pissing themselves and drowning in their fake victimization that they are voiceless and howling that they are being targeted for assassination by Obama's army of Nubian Thug Cyborgs or something.

I haven't seen a collective freakout like this since people started buying duct tape by the crate in 2002. It's hard to think of a worse way to try to protect our First Amendment rights than forming an online lynch mob to smear some random voting rights activist and then coming up with all kinds of conspiracy theories about how you're being persecuted as a result.

They've actually terrified themselves. They're convinced that if they say anything further about this poor activist that a SWAT team will show up at their houses and treat them like an anti-NATO activist.

They are oblivious to the real repression that is going on. Actually, I should correct that. They fully approve of that kind of repression because it isn't aimed at them. 

But they will whine and moan and continue to slash their wrists and swear up and down that liberals are going to murder them any second now, so that they should just start the shooting first you see and it'll be totally justified when they do.  They just need other people to do that whole revolution thing for them because Malkin has a mani/pedi appointment to keep and you know how rescheduling those things are really worse than the London Blitz.

So they mean to flagellate themselves into fomenting a crowd of angry old people to yell at Democrats in town halls I guess.  Progress!  Victory!  Justice!

About As Bright As A Potted Plant

Because the Winger mindset is that everything political must be motivated by the unending desire to win more power, the only possible explanation of the "horrifying" exchange between the President and a Google employee named Doug Edwards at yesterday's LinkedIn town hall in Silicon Valley where Edwards asked the President to raise his taxes is that the employee had to be an obvious plant in the audience.

Oh, liberals gushed when a rich audience member asked Obama that question today. It seems relevant to point out that this rich liberal is Doug Edwards from the Obama-friendly and regulation-friendly Google.

Edwards has given $300,000 to politicians since 2000 -- every single dime to Democrats. He specifically said he wanted his higher taxes to cover Pell Grants.

Oh, the abject horror of that!  The wingers are in full poutrage mode this morning, with FOX Nation calling Evans a plant and Malkin shrieking about President Obama possibly doing something Bush 43 did for eight years without a peep out of her.

The Right's position on taxes is that every successful businessperson in the country succeeded in spite of them, not because of services and programs funded by them.  The fact that Massachusetts Dem Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren dared to call out conservatives on this has clearly struck one hell of a nerve, and the President took up Warren's argument yesterday at the town hall event.  Greg Sargent:

Conservatives have offered a number of responses to this argument. Some have insisted that if wealthy people like Buffett and the former Google exec want to pay higher taxes, by God, they should go ahead and pay higher taxes. But this badly misses the point: These men are making an argument about the imperative that their whole income group do more to help solve our fiscal mess, not just about their own desire to chip in more themselves. 

And that's what the modern GOP can't comprehend, the notion that with great wealth in society and the power and freedom that wealth brings there comes responsibility to help maintain that society.  Since as I mentioned before the only possible motivation in the GOP worldview is self-aggrandizement and the relentless pursuit of more wealth, it's simply a foreign concept to many of them.

It all comes down to whether or not you believe society's wealthy should work to make the system capable of producing more like themselves, or to do everything they can to produce fewer so that wealth stays with those who have it, and by dint of possession are those most capable and worthy of having it by making sure it's not "malinvested" with the unwashed, unworthy masses.

Or, as the joke goes, American exceptionalism means a bunch of people who were born on third base in life believing they got there because they hit a triple.

Last Call

We end Labor Day tonight with this E.J. Dionne piece on the end of Labor Day as we know it.

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil — the phrase itself seems antique — as worthy of genuine respect.

Imagine a Republican saying this: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the Tea Party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861. Will President Obama dare say anything like this in his jobs speech this week?

I hope he does.  But even the idea that labor can create is anathema to the Republican worldview.  Today, we celebrate the American worker.  The other 364 days of the year, we celebrate the Almighty Job Creator Class that owns us.  And even that one day is too much for some.

Hope everyone had a good day today.

Exciting New Horizons In Obama Derangement Syndrome

As I keep saying, we need all new branches of mathematics just to quantify how much the right despises President Obama.  Oliver Willis catches our old friend Doug "Director Blue" Ross failing at life, and the rest of the wingers failed right along with him.

ABC News' Jake Tapper published the following Tweet yesterday, showing cranes removing a U.S. flag from the Ground Zero site with the caption, "One minute to air and they decided to take the flag down from the live shot".

Some conservative bloggers took this to mean that President Obama ordered the removal of the flag.

And they all picked it up.  Malkinvania, Weasel Zippers, Matt Drudge.  Funny thing happened on the way to Ground Zero.

One problem. It isn't true. Multiple photos show that the flag was on full display when Obama arrived at Ground Zero. Tapper's tweet was posted at 6:30 pm -- hours after the President had left. In all likelihood, Tapper was saying that the flag was being removed before his live shot for ABC World News when he made his tweet.

To their credit, both Malkin and Ross have acknowledged that they got the story wrong, though Malkin erased her erroneous post rather than add a correction to the initial, inflammatory post, while Ross claimed "perhaps Tapper just confused all of us" and added, "I'm sticking by my "Marxist coup d'état" comment."

Conservative media correcting falsehoods is the exception to the norm (here are just a few from Malkin and Ross that have gone uncorrected). Perhaps if they checked if a story sounded plausible before running with it, they'd spread less untruths.

Oops.  Facts don't matter when you have HOT DRUDGE SIREN WOOP WOOP WOOP ACTION to go with.

In all seriousness, folks, Michelle Malkin is still taken seriously by the Village and ends up on TV quite a bit.  Perhaps somebody should pay attention to this flag story the next time they think of calling Malkin in as an expert on anything other than "suffering from serious delusions."

Piling On The First Lady

With news that Michelle Obama is still popular with a majority of Americans came out this month, the Wingnut right had to do everything they could to reverse it, from Glenn Beck...

On the October 14 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Show, Beck invoked the horror film The Omen while attacking Michelle Obama for her comments. Beck said, "I've never heard that. I've never heard that from a Christian -- I'm not questioning her Christianity, here." Later, executive producer Steve "Stu" Burguiere said, "Thank you, Michelle Obama. Creating jobs." Beck replied, "Jobs? Spooky phrases."

...to Michelle Malkin...

"Keeping the spirits clean around us?" Huh? She sounds like the liberal caricature of Christine O'Donnell. Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble.

As for the "prayer circles" and "Everybody I know in our communities is praying for us" and "we're all proud of Barack and his accomplishments" jabber, have the Obamas learned nothing about the price of arrogance and the value of humility over the last two years.

Question: Does Michelle O ever pray for anyone other than Barack?

...to El Rushbo...

"I've never heard of prayer circles and keeping the spirits clean around us. I mean, I've been praying for things like my family and friends' health, the country, things of this nature, and now I learn that we're supposed to be praying for the hygiene of the spirits?"

 ...to Moose Lady...

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin seemed to have the 2008 election – and, specifically, first lady Michelle Obama – on her mind during a speech at a conservative forum Thursday night.


"You know, when I hear people say, or had said during the campaign that they've never been proud of America, haven't they met anybody in uniform yet?" Palin opined during her remarks at a Liberty and Freedom Foundation forum in San Jose, California. 

...to Matt Drudge.

Did Michelle Obama violate Illinois election law?

The question arose after the first lady, who voted early at her Chicago precinct Thursday, responded to voters who voiced support for her husband. It’s unlawful in the state to have a “political discussion” or engage in “electioneering” within 100 feet of a polling place.

A pool report by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Abdon Pallasch said Obama had a photo taken with electrician Dennis Campbell, 56 years old. It quoted Campbell as saying, “She was telling me how important it was to vote to keep her husband’s agenda going.”

Boy, do you remember all the nasty, vicious, mean-spirited attacks Democrats made on Laura Bush?

Me either.  They didn't happen.  But if you're a Democrat in the White House, your spouse is fair game.  As I've said a few times before, not all Obama Derangement Syndrome is directed at Barack.  You'd think Wingers would have something better to do, but alas, they have no human souls.

Still Missing The Point On Joe Stack

As I said yesterday, the argument over if Joe Stack was a "left-wing or right-wing" terrorist is pointless, petty, and small-minded.  It misses the point that Stack was a domestic terrorists, and homegrown at that.

Naturally, Malkinvania and company are too busy spewing righteous indignation to notice.  There's no such thing as a right-wing terrorist period, ever, to them, and all politically motivated acts are leftist plots only.  They spend so much time justifying why only leftists are terrorists that they forget what terrorism is and why it's effective: it spreads a message of hatred and division that they repeat daily.  Group X is not human, not worthy or seeing as anything other than the Enemy.

The irony is lost.

Joe And Al

More of this, please.



McCain and Malkinvania get in on the act too.

New tag, because he's earned it:  Al Franken Is Good Enough.

The Heretic Gets Out

Via Pam Spaulding, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is heading for the lifeboats on the S.S. Wingnut.  The guy doesn't just burn the bridges behind him, he applies bridge-consuming nannites that excrete acid and schadenfreude.

Why I Parted Ways With The Right

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)

6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)

7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)

8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)

And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

I won't be going over the cliff with them.

Oh my my my.  He dings pretty much every major Wingnut blog out there, El Rushbo, Glennsanity, Malkinvania and the whole crew.  It's been done before, Wingnuts can reform (ask John Cole over at Balloon Juice).  Chuck's former buddies are less than happy with him.  But as Pam says:

These low-brow conservatives that coo over Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush are sheep -- no critical thinking whatsoever, in denial about how they are shilling for policies that hurt them, instead they  focus on blaming on the "other" -- that doesn't look like them, worship like them, believe in reproductive freedom or isn't heterosexual. With fumes that weak, how can that movement sustain itself? It's an incredible feat.

Hatred is self-sustaining.  It's amazing how it keeps going.  But it's even more amazing how people can sometimes redeem themselves from it.

At this rate, I may have to throw Chuck a blogroll link.

Word Play

Even the New Oxford University Dictionary calls them "teabaggers".

a person, who protests President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)

I actually giggled.  "Birther" made the list too.  Oh, and Malkinvania is pissed.

I may have to unfriend her.

The Stupidity Over Fort Hood Gets Louder

Today's contestant: David Warren (emphasis mine):

This deadly enemy of the West -- the Islamist ideology which holds all Jews, Christians, other non-Muslims, and a considerable number of Muslims, too, to be human filth in need of extermination -- is well infiltrated. Events like that at Fort Hood prove this, and from what I can see, the problem can only grow with the passage of time.

Getting at Islamist cells, to say nothing of lone, self-appointed jihadis within our society, means getting over the false sentimentality that turns a terrorist incident into an "incomprehensible tragedy" when it is not incomprehensible, and not a theatrical event.

It also means ripping through the politically-correct drivel that is put in the way of investigators. They should surely be allowed to assume that every loyal Muslim will be eager to give information to help them identify any potential killers in their midst.

We'd be better off confronting that Islamist enemy, than spraying perfume after each fatal strike.

Yep, let's just assume that any American Muslim who would be insulted by his or her countrymen assuming they are terrorist sympathizers until proven otherwise is actually guilty of something.

Why stop there? If they are not eager to point the finger at other jihadists terrorists that they must be aware of, we should separate them from the rest of American society. Now is not the time for pesky Bill of Rights garbage, after all that was assumed to be given up when they became the Muslim Enemy.

We'll have to hold them for a while before we can interrogate all of them, so we must brace for the long haul. So sayeth Our Lady Of Perpetual Internment, so sayeth us all, right?

Snark aside, I love how the people accusing President Obama of being the most vile totalitarian fascist to ever walk the Earth are the same folks who think it's a perfectly acceptable idea to segregate millions of Americans from the general population, assume they are guilty, and question their loyalty because of course the innocent ones have nothing to hide.

A Pyrrhic Victory In New York -- UPDATED

Frank Rich's opinion on the Hoffman Effect is definitely worth reading today as he takes the limiters off and tears into the Teabaggers.

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

Kudos to Rich for this one...and better still, he digs into the whole picture of Obama Derangement Syndrome and the Teabagger victim card, and why it will continue to be a loser.

These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.

This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile.

That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for independents).

Needless to say, Rich is already being attacked by the usual suspects this morning who are throwing hissy fits that anyone would dare say such a thing as the truth about these idiots.

It's the speed and the vehemence of the reaction to Rich's column that assures you that he has hit an artery on the Body Wingnut. The civil war in the GOP I've long been predicting is now in full swing, and the Teabaggers are winning. They will most likely win this battle.

And they will now lose the greater war.

[UPDATE 10:16 AM] Dan Riehl's reaction is All-Star Wingnut material.

As for moderates, too few to worry about are talking about a purge driven by the Right. Everyone with any sense knows there are districts where we must cooperate. Worse than that, it is precisely these moderates who have been so vocal in demonizing the Right as Far Right crazies, which we are not. They should learn their lesson and shut-up, as they have no clue what they are talking about.

"We're not crazies and we're not trying to purge you. NOW SHUT UP BEFORE WE PURGE YOU!"

[UPDATE 12:37 PM] The paper of record in NY-23, the Watertown Daily Times, is reporting that Dede Scozzafava is privately pushing her supporters to vote for the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens.

In her statement Saturday morning, the assemblywoman explained the reasons behind her decision: "It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support. Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so."

During the day Saturday, she began to quietly and thoughtfully encourage her supporters to vote for Democrat William L. Owens.

...as is the Watertown Daily Times, now openly endorsing Owens.

The Watertown Daily Times initially endorsed Ms. Scozzafava as the best-qualified candidate in the race. We still think she is. However, in suspending her campaign she released her supporters' commitment to her. That left voters to choose between Mr. Owens and Mr. Hoffman.

Of the two, Bill Owens is by far the superior and only choice.

The Wingers are now apoplectic, but at least one seems to think that driving moderates out of the GOP and into the Democrats' tent just might be a bad idea in 2010. But make no mistake, the GOP has now all but fully thrown in their lot with the Teabaggers. The remaining moderates will be excised from the party.

And along with it, any chance they might of had in 2010 or 2012. I've said this before: the Democrats will need a corrective force to prevent them from making the mistakes of excess. As long as the Republicans are reduced to a fringe party of extremists, then that will never happen.

Last Call

There's an odd reaction from the Winger blogs tonight about this story where several Village news outlets got burned by a fake US Chamber of Commerce press conference stunt Monday morning, and I have to call them collectively on it.

In a story posted Monday morning, Reuters declared: “The Chamber of Commerce said on Monday it will no longer opposes climate change legislation, but wants the bill to include a carbon tax.”

Reuters updated the story to acknowledge the hoax, but it was too late: The Washington Post and the New York Times had already posted the fake story on their Web sites.

"Reuters has an obligation to its clients to publish news and information that could move financial markets, and this story had the potential to do that,” said a Thomson Reuters spokesperson. “Once we had confirmed the release was a hoax, we immediately issued a correction, and in keeping with Reuters policy, the story was subsequently withdrawn and an advisory sent to readers."

The Yes Men, a left-leaning activist group that often impersonates officials from organizations they oppose, took responsibility for the hoax.

Andy Bichlbaum—an alias the activist uses for Yes Men demonstrations—told POLITICO that his group is targeting the Chamber for what he considers “retrograde” positions on climate change.

Very cool Yes Men versus the Village Stenographers story aside (and more on that here) it's, as I said above, the Winger reaction to the Villagers getting completely embarrassed that I have to call attention to. While some are blaming MoveOn.org and some aren't, all are having a good laugh at the Villager's expense and are quick to say "Gosh, looks like the MSM doesn't fact-check, hurr."

Guess what, assclowns? Neither do you. Or do we have to go on about how several blogs on the right spout the same unchecked talking points from the GOP on a daily basis. Death panels? Obama's concentration camps? Those one point nine million invisible teabaggers? The whole goddamn birther stupidity?

You guys fact check?

My ass. Bunch of hypocritical jagoffs that refuse to deal in the truth even more than the Villagers: at least they pretend to be balanced once in a while and do get their facts straight. But let's not pretend for a moment that spouting various viral Obama Derangement Syndrome garbage makes you somehow better that the Village Idiots, especially when you're so quick to blurt out any Drudge, El Rushbo, Glennsanity or Malkinvania fabrication of the day about Obama, Nancy Pelosi, any White House staffer you don't like, whatever. You're not fooling a damn thing.

Most of you exist to lie.

Jagoffs.

Last Call

Gosh, you mean there's a backlash against multiculturalism in this country and whites are moving out of urban areas and into gated communities since it became clear that the Republicans were failing and Democrats were on the rise?

Didn't see that coming. Nope.

Traveling some 27,000 miles, African-American journalist Rich Benjamin roamed the United States from 2007 to 2009 exploring a major demographic shift that's attracting remarkably little attention — the flight of white residents from cities and integrated suburbs into cloistered, racially homogeneous enclaves. Tidy communities such as St. George, Utah and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho — places Benjamin calls Whitopias — have grown at triple the rate of America's cities in recent years, raising troubling questions about the country's multiracial cohesion. The Stanford literature PhD chronicled his adventure in a new book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, and spoke with TIME about what he found.

Here's what the Wingers will be screaming about tomorrow:

What is the danger Whitopias pose to America as a whole?

You can call me old-fashioned, but I'm an integrationist. A democracy can't function at its optimum unless all members are integrated as full members.

A community full of like-minded people tends to enforce their own view of the world and closes off opposing viewpoints. You can go to parties in New York City where the liberal smugness is intolerable, because they're only hearing liberal viewpoints. On the Whitopian conservative side, it's spinning out of control. Look at the teabagger movement, where people are concerned their taxes are going to be wasted on minorities and illegal immigrants. Same with the movement that says Obama is not a citizen.

Poor Rich Benjamin. He has no idea what's about to happen to him for speaking truth to power. Ask Charisse Carney-Nunes about the Winger revenge squads.

Then again, maybe Rich Benjamin is fully aware of what's going to happen. If so, he's going to need some help, folks.

El Rushbo, Glennsanity and Malkinvania will direct their frothing minions to swamp Harvard with e-mails and phone calls demanding Benjamin's job and his head. He will be called a racist. He will be called much worse. I expect this TIME article to spawn some pretty serious hate here as Rich Benjamin becomes the new Skip Gates/Jeremiah Wright/Al Sharpton/Whatever Black Man the Wingers are hating as an Obama proxy this week.

It won't take long. I'm preempting the Winger meltdown here tonight, but before the end of the week, Rich Benjamin here will be a target.

Maybe in more than just the figurative sense, too.

The Village Perpetrates Actual Journalism, Film At 11

WaPo's Ann Gerhart discovers the Pretty Hate Machine, Malkinvania edition.

Late last month, Charisse Carney-Nunes fired up the computer at her home in Northeast Washington to check her e-mail. Her brain already was on morning drive time: breakfast for the kids, her day's work at a government agency. She glanced down at her screen, then froze.

"Ms. Carney-Nunes," began the e-mail from Michelle Malkin, a best-selling and often inflammatory conservative writer with a heavily trafficked Web site. "I understand that you uploaded the video of schoolchildren reciting a Barack Obama song/rap at Bernice Young elementary school in June. I have a few quick questions. Did you help write the song/rap and teach it to the children? Are you an educator/guest lecturer at the school? Did you teach about your book, 'I am Barack Obama' at the school? Your bio says you are a schoolmate of Obama. How well-acquainted are you with the president?"

Carney-Nunes looked at the time stamp -- 6:47 a.m. -- and closed the file without replying. She knew Malkin had driven criticism of President Obama's back-to-school speech, streamed nationwide, as an attempt to indoctrinate students. Now Malkin was asking about a YouTube video of New Jersey public school children singing and enthusiastically chanting about Obama from a Black History Month presentation.

By nightfall, Carney-Nunes's name was playing on Fox News and voice mails on her home phone and cellphone were clogged with the furious voices of strangers. The e-mails kept pouring in, by the hundreds, crammed with words spam filters try to catch: She was a "nappy-headed" traitor; she would lose her job and go to jail; she was Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who glorified Hitler.

Once again, to sum up:

Now replace the "normal person" at the beginning there with Michelle Malkin, or Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh, and the "anonymity" with "Obama Derangement Syndrome" and you have the current Winger state of insanity.

This kind of rabid hate has been going on long before Obama, but the fact that he won and the Republicans lost have driven these guys over the edge. It's gotten to the point these nutjobs are going after ordinary people who have the unmitigated gall to not think Obama is the most evil fascist Manchurian candidate in the history of the universe. Much like thugs, bullies, or really crappy supervillains, they're not going after the target, they're going after everyone around him in order to try to terrify the country into refusing to support the guy.

They'll attack anyone who works in the Federal government, for example, or any of the President's supporters. The tactics are classic: if you can get someone to pause and say to themselves "Hey, if I say Obama is a good guy, these whackos will come after me" and then they choose to remain silent, then the thugs here have won.

The nation's political discourse seems sour, angry, even dangerous; "uglier than it's ever been" is a phrase often volunteered -- as if President George W. Bush had never been depicted as Hitler, declared a dunce and heckled by Code Pink during his second inaugural address.

Critics are using the YouTube video of the children's song to argue that Obama is becoming a brainwashing dictator. To raise money for the Republican National Committee, Chairman Michael S. Steele has compared the song to "the type of propaganda you see in Stalin's Russia."

Carney-Nunes, swept up in a viral tornado of vitriol, had nothing to do with the children's song. She was doing an author's reading in the school that day.

We don't have political discourse in 2009 because it takes two sides willing to have discourse in order for discourse to proceed. One side says "We have our problems with Obama but there's much about him to like, let's work together, our country is in trouble here." The other side says "I refuse to recognize he is even legally President or even an US citizen. He is black. He is a Muslim. He is not my President. There's nothing to talk about. I will never support anything he does, and I want to rid the country of him and anyone who does support him."

This is what the Wingers see as discourse: "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Kenyan?"

One noteworthy change is that the face of the federal government is African American for the first time, a factor that heightens animus in some and protectiveness in others.

"We've come a long way," said civil rights icon Dorothy Height, who attended the Black Family Reunion, which took place alongside the national Tea Party protest on Sept. 12. "But I stood on the National Mall watching people pass by carrying posters of Uncle Sam in blackface and I said, 'There's still a lot of work to be done in this country.' "

"Completely false allegations incubate in the fringe and jump within days to the mainstream, distorting any debate or progress we can have as a society," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which released a report last month noting a rise in the "militia movement" over the past year. "What's different is that a great deal of this is real fear and frustration at very real demographic and cultural changes."

Imagine that, a newspaper journalist actually admitting that fear of Obama's race, ethnicity and culture is scaring the hell out of the Wingers, and they are attacking back.

Yes. It's about race, as I have been saying since this blog started.

Carney-Nunes, who writes children's books and was a year behind Obama at Harvard Law School, watched as strangers posted her personal information on the Internet. She read, "You're a dirtbag commie propagandist trying to infect children with your failed Marxist ideology." And "your Obama chant is right out of Africa." And "get ready for a massive attack!!!" And "my friend GLENN BECK will also shove this in your face until justice is served." She made copies (which she shared with The Washington Post) and then deleted the messages, hoping the tornado would set her back down.

"I was fearful," she said. "I was looking over my shoulder." The disrespect for the office of the presidency disturbed her. "I won a contest in college and President Reagan gave me an award, and that signed letter is still hanging in its frame in the foyer of my mother's home. We are very proud of that letter, even though my mother didn't vote for him."

After a few days, with the outcry expanding to calls for the school principal and district superintendent to be fired, Carney-Nunes issued a statement through a publicist saying that she "did not write, create, teach or lead the song about President Obama in the video," and that "the song was presented to her by a teacher and students as a demonstration of a project that the children had previously put together." The district superintendent gave the same account in a letter sent home to parents.

Carney-Nunes said an associate of hers videotaped the children's performance and later uploaded it, along with video and photos from other of her readings, to Carney-Nunes's YouTube account.

An e-mail to Malkin Saturday seeking comment was not answered.

Carney-Nunes spends a lot of her free time teaching children how to bridge divides, but she has no idea how to build a dialogue with those who attacked her.

"How can I talk to those people?" she said. "These are people who persist in believing that Barack Obama is a Muslim, that he isn't a citizen of this country. You tell me: Where is the beginning of that conversation?"

And that is the question we have to face, all of us. But in order to have a conversation, both sides have to be willing. One side is. The other side wants no part of an America where we even have that conversation.

[UPDATE 6:20 PM] Jesse Taylor notes that Gerhart missed the entire point of the Malkin story:

Yes, a great number of conservative bloggers and demagogues are terribly, stupidly mean, like cavemen who can’t understand why the rock doesn’t have delicious meat inside. But more importantly, they’re terribly, stupidly dishonest, and it’s the dishonesty that’s the real danger. The Washington Post spent eight paragraphs writing about a conservative scandal and only managed to toss in a single fact-checking line in paragraph nine, at which point they went back to being observant scolds of the political discourse.

And it really is kind of pathetic that this is largely considered an improvement in our journalism in America.

Putting Out The Good McChrystal

Irony: Wingnuts like Maklinvania screaming at Obama that he doesn't have a plan for Afghanistan and he should do whatever Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal tells him he should be doing, but Obama's plan on health care is facism as opposed to the invisible, non-existent Republican health care reform bill.

In London, Gen McChrystal, who heads the 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan as well as the 100,000 Nato forces, flatly rejected proposals to switch to a strategy more reliant on drone missile strikes and special forces operations against al-Qaeda.

He told the Institute of International and Strategic Studies that the formula, which is favoured by Vice-President Joe Biden, would lead to "Chaos-istan".

When asked whether he would support it, he said: "The short answer is: No."

He went on to say: "Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support."

The remarks have been seen by some in the Obama administration as a barbed reference to the slow pace of debate within the White House.

Gen McChrystal delivered a report on Afghanistan requested by the president on Aug 31, but Mr Obama held only his second "principals meeting" on the issue last week.

He will hold at least one more this week, but a decision on how far to follow Gen McChrystal's recommendation to send 40,000 more US troops will not be made for several weeks.

A military expert said: "They still have working relationship but all in all it's not great for now."

BooMan has said that Obama is trying to dial down the Afghanistan war in an effort to begin effecting our exit. Clearly, the good General does not agree with his Commander-In-Chief.

It's one thing to disagree with the President. McChrystal has already threatened to resign, which was fine. But he has no intention of doing so, and he's publicly attacking the President on this, and that, as Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft says, is unacceptable in the extreme.

I have stated previously that I tend to favor Gen. McChrystal's assessment of and recommendations for the situation. But his behavior has been unacceptable. I believe the White House should adopt his recommendations and then sack him.

And I would have to agree. There are some good recommendations that the General has made, but Obama doesn't want to escalate, he wants to withdraw.

If McChrystal can't handle that, then he needs to turn over his command. It really is that simple.

Blame It On Rio

The unrestrained Wingnut glee in "Obama's crushing defeat" in yesterday's rather stunning loss of Chicago as the site of the 2016 Olympics is summed up by HuffPo's Sam Stein.

Upon being informed of the news, a gathering of conservatives at the Americans For Prosperity -- one of the main organizing groups behind the tea party protests -- erupted in applause. They cheered once more after they were told that Chicago had been eliminated during the first round of voting.

Nice guys, conservatives. But it gets worse:

Around the same time, RedState's Erick Erickson took glee in Chicago - and, by extension, Obama's - rejection.

"Hahahahaha," he wrote. "I thought the world would love us more now that Bush was gone. I thought if we whored ourselves out to our enemies, great things would happen. Apparently not. So Obama's pimped us to every two bit thug and dictator in the world, made promises to half the Olympic committee, and they did not even kiss him."

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, meanwhile, wrote that the news effectively ended the Obama campaign motto of "Yes We Can" by dawning in a new slogan: "No, You Can't."

"This is a big win and a massive relief for taxpayers," she wrote. "But Chicago cronies are not going to take this well. Gird your loins."

Story continues below

The National Review Online called the episode an "embarrassment for Obama," before adding the predictable conservative ribbing: "If he can't work his personal magic with the Olympians, why does he expect it to work with the Iranians?"

Rush Limbaugh called it "the worst day of his presidency," adding that Obama "has failed" and the entire episode was an illustration of Obama's "Mars-sized ego."

The Drudge Report -- topping them all -- blared the headline: "THE EGO HAS LANDED
WORLD REJECTS OBAMA: CHICAGO OUT IN FIRST ROUND."

They hate Obama so much that they look for his failure and their own vindication in everything he does, to the point where average Americans are scratching their heads going "What the hell is wrong with these guys?"

And I guarantee every single of one of these idiots would be calling for a boycott of the 2016 games if this same first-round rejection had happened to President McCain.

But this is the worst day of Obama's already failed presidency, apparently. And people wonder why these guys lost in 2008.

[UPDATE 7:56 PM] TBogg notes the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes is now fully expecting the Village to turn against President Ofailure's failed faily presidency of abject failure to prove they aren't in the President's back pocket.

And even Fred Barnes (Fred Barnes!) knows that only fools bet on long shots because they have failed to weigh all of the available evidence and tend to think not with their heads but with their ---

Sorry. What? Oh...

Standard editor Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”

Well yeah, but what about that time when the Huffington Post asked 27 Very Smart People (including Karl Rove, George Will, Ed Rollins, and Morton Kondrake) on 11/2/2008 who was going to win the election and all 27 of them picked Barack Obama---

What? Oh, one person didn't:

Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard editor
Winner: McCain
Electoral College: Obama 252 McCain 286
Senate Seats: 55 Democrats 43 Republicans
House Seats: 255 Democrats 180 Republicans

How bad was that? Even Mark Halperin (Mark Halperin!) got it right, and I'm pretty sure that he's brain damaged.

Because the only thing matters in America to the Wingnuts is that Obama fails.

[UPDATE 2 8:10 PM] Steve Benen has more. And yes, the Wingers are actually saying if the Obamas hadn't gone to Copenhagen, we might have won. And actually, what counts as "we" and "America" to these assclowns anyway?

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/02/conservatives-revel-in-ob_n_307794.html