FDL Book Salon Welcomes Max Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. [Welcome Max Blumenthal, and Host Watertiger - bev] "The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking. " – Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom The G.O.P. of the 21st century bears scant resemblance to the Party of Eisenhower. Certainly, the Left has been quick to point out each example of blatantly hypocritical behavior of these conservative politicians drunk on sanctimony, and religious leaders on the Right who rarely, if ever, practice what they preach.
Picking up from where John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience and Jeff Sharlet’s The Family have left off, Max Blumenthal’s < Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party continues the conversation by offering a psychohistorial analysis of the authoritarianism of the Religious Right and the damage it has wrought on the Republican Party as a whole.
White America Has Lost Its Mind. About 12:01 on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, the white American mind began to unravel. It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing. White people, after all, had managed to invent a spiffy new form of self-government so that all white men (and, eventually, women) could have a say in how white people were taxed and governed. White minds had also nearly universally occupied just about every branch of that government and, for more than two centuries, had kept sole possession of the leadership of its executive branch (whose parsonage, after all, is called the White House). But when that streak was broken—and, for the first time, a non-white president accepted the oath of office—white America rapidly began to lose its grip. Todd Harrison (iStockphoto) Rush Limbaugh Glenn Beck Tom DeLay Laura Schlessinger Related Stories More About.
Sarah and Her Tribe - The New York Review of Books. Going Rogue: An American Life by Sarah Palin Harper, 413 pp., $28.99 Sarah from Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe PublicAffairs, 301 pp., $26.95 When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid. There’s a moment of near rapture in the video of Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention in St. In contrast to Barack Obama, who maintained a detachment verging on aloofness from his most fervent and adulatory campaign crowds, Palin achieved an extraordinary at-oneness with her supporters; not least, perhaps, because she appeared to be such an enthralled fan of her own performances.
Her nasal voice, pitched in the upper register, with the upsy-downsy, singsong delivery of a kindergarten teacher, became, rather improbably, a great electoral asset. Going Rogue is about further cementing her connection to the tribe. I love meat. Fox manipulates video to attack Obama. Media Matters has caught another Fox fabrication. This time, Fox News 'reporter' Wendell Goler repeatedly aired a video clip in which President Obama seems to declare his support for imposing a "European-style" universal health care system on the United States.
Goler used the clip to support Republican attacks on the President's spending policies and his supposedly "European" priorities. The problem is, President Obama never said any such thing. The clip Goler used was from a March 26 online town hall event, and President Obama was paraphrasing a written question submitted by the audience. In his answer, the President said that while he does support universal health care, he doesn't support imposing a European or Canadian system on the United States. I actually want a universal health care system; that is our goal...whether we do it exactly the way European countries do or Canada does is a different question, because there are a variety of ways to get to universal health care coverage... The GOP: divorced from reality. If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments.
It's been a week now, and I still don't know what those "tea bag" protests were about. I saw signs protesting abortion, illegal immigrants, the bank bailout and that gay guy who's going to win "American Idol. " But it wasn't tax day that made them crazy; it was election day. Because that's when Republicans became what they fear most: a minority. The conservative base is absolutely apoplectic because, because ... well, nobody knows.
Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law. Do these sound like the concerns of a healthy, vibrant political party? It's sad what's happened to the Republicans. I know. Republican Rep. Look, I get it, "real America.
" Frank Schaeffer: Open Letter to the Republican Traitors (From a Former Republican) Dear Republican Leaders: The Republican Party has become the party dedicated to sabotaging the American future. Check out the sermon I just delivered about the Republican Party on CNN when being interviewed by D.L. Hughley -- and/or read on. You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes.
You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created. I used to be one of you. In the mid 1980s I left the Religious Right, after I realized just how very anti-American they are, (the theme I explore in my book Crazy For God). How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Bush Proposes Budget With $400B Deficit, Education, Health, Housing And Anti-Poverty Programs Face Budget Squeeze In $3 Trillion Blueprint. US President George W. Bush 2007/9/20 AP The spiraling growth of Medicare and the high cost of renewing President Bush's tax cuts are squeezing popular education, health, housing and anti-poverty programs in the budget blueprint that he hands lawmakers Monday.
Even with difficult-to-digest proposals to curb Medicare costs and kill programs to repair dilapidated public housing, fund community action agencies and provide food to the elderly poor, Mr. Bush's $3 trillion budget will project deficits around $400 billion this year and next. Mr. Bush's submission is already absorbing brickbats from Democrats castigating him for inheriting a government in surplus and leaving Washington with a budget deficit that is likely to break the $413 billion record set four years ago, once war bills and the cost of giving the economy a fiscal jolt with tax rebate checks are factored in.
"The next president is going to inherit a colossal mess because of the fiscal irresponsibility of this president," Sen. White House blocks inquiry into construction of $736m embassy in Iraq | World news. The Bush administration is blocking an inquiry into the delay-plagued construction of the $736m US embassy in Baghdad, a senior Democrat in Congress said today. Henry Waxman, who is chairman of the oversight committee in the House of Representatives, asked US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice today to explain why her department certified the embassy as "substantially completed" in December despite inspections that reveal continued deficiencies in the facility's water, fire alarm and kitchen systems.
The Baghdad embassy, which stands to become the largest US diplomatic facility in the world, had an original opening date of mid-2007. But the project stalled amid ballooning cost estimates as well as charges of corruption and shoddy work by the private contracting company overseeing the project. In addition, two US state department employees who worked on the embassy project are now under criminal investigation.
Dan Sweeney: There's No Arguing With Conservatives ... No, Seriously, Scientific Studies Prove It. A new study out of Yale University confirms what argumentative liberals have long-known: Offering reality-based rebuttals to conservative lies only makes conservatives cling to those lies even harder. In essence, schooling conservatives makes them more stupid. From the Washington Post article on the study, which came out yesterday: Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. Eschaton. Since it's the controversy of the day, let me make my views more clear. It obviously was an attempt at satire, but it fails. It represents the basic stuff that you get from the Right about Obama, but it neither mocks nor exaggerates them.
It's a sad state of affairs that conservatives are hard to satirize or parody because they're so insane, but that's where we are. The only context is that it's on the cover of the New Yorker and Everybody Knows That They're Good Liberals So It's Satire. But, look, whatever the merits of the New Yorker it's more "elite chattering classes of New York" than "good liberal. " Not quite the same thing, even if there's some overlap. Had the Sadlynaughts created that cover it could've been funny because they have a long history of mocking right wing lunacy, though had they created something like that it would have been much more over the top because the lunatic right is much more over the top about Obama. ...and the Doughy Pantload says: