Feel the dumb:
The new African American head of the Republican party making racist comments about Indian-American Governor Bobby Jindal, going on about ’slum love’. Same guy who was talking about his hip-hopization of the face of the GOP (I want to watch Boehner and Cantor do hip-hop in the well of the House, yes I do) and threatening GOP Senators who voted for the Stimulus Bill to cut off their future campaign funding in public. Needless to say, the Senators are not amused.
The GOP just can’t give up the whole Obama-is-not-American idea. Of course, the state of Hawaii (run by a Republican Governor) has come out and squashed the whole idea, stating absolutely that state records show that he was indeed born in Honolulu. But folks like Senator Richard Shelby and conservative nutballs like to keep this going.
Why? Well, part of this is because it’s useful to hot up the idiots who are looking for some sort of way that they can declare a Democratic President a Traitor To The Realm on the git-go, and adding in the racists who don’t really think Africans can be Americans doesn’t hurt, either. Some are riled enough to talk up secession, armed rebellion and the like. After all the damn kill-the-socialist stuff last fall, I’m only partly surprised.
Wonderful stuff from conservative pundit Daniel Larison on this after the cut:
It seems to me that conservatives and Republicans have assumed the GOP is the natural governing party, at least regarding the Presidency and to some extent as it relates to Congress since ‘94, which is why so many have continued to insist that America is a “center-right nation” in face of mounting evidence that it is not and hasn’t been for a while. Symbolic gimmickry does stem in part from a lack of confidence, but it is more the product of a movement and party that have ceased to understand, much less address, most of the pressing concerns of working- and middle-class Americans. The party assumes that all it needs to do is show up, push the right pseudo-populist buttons and reap the rewards, and for the most part the movement cheers. See Palin, Sarah.
The GOP settles for offering “symbolic, substance-free BS” because enough conservatives are already persuaded that Republican policies obviously benefit the middle class, so there is no pressure to make Republican policy actually serve the interests of Republican constituents. It is taken for granted that this is already happening, but voters have been showing for several cycles that many of them do not believe this. Politically Democrats have been gaining ground in such unlikely places as Ohio and Indiana, which would be inexplicable if the GOP obviously and reliably represented working- and middle-class Americans. Of course, lately these voters don’t see it that way, but instead see the right’s pseudo-populists denounce workers for being overpaid, reject measures that would direct some spending to American industries that their free trade zeal has helped gut and even talk about a spending freeze in the middle of a severe recession.