Are mainstream GOPers going to be better prepared this time?

By: R.K. Barry

Veteran Republican Indiana Senator Richard Lugar said earlier in the week that he'd raised a bit less than $1 million this year for his re-election bid. Apparently, the Senator has a little more than $3 million in total socked away to help him do battle with Tea Party candidate state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in the GOP primary later this year.

You may recall that Lugar, as well as Utah Senator Orrin Hatch (who, coincidentally, also says he has raised $3 million), have been targeted by the Tea Party for their willingness to work with Democrats on important issues, which appears to be a sin well beyond redemption for the hard right.

I note this only because there have been suggestions that these incumbents could be in trouble. I suppose that could be true. I don't yet have a feel for these races.

But what I would suggest is that in 2010 a number of more mainstream Republican hopefuls were seriously surprised by Tea Party challengers and may not have done the work necessary to secure their party's nomination. Sometimes in politics you don't see a tide coming until it's too late and that may have been the case in a number of nomination races.

Based on the fund-raising efforts of Senators Lugar and Hatch, I suspect they don't intend to be surprised this time and that could make a big difference in these contests and elsewhere.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost)

John Boehner's growing Tea Party headache

By R.K. Barry

There were a number of stories over the past few days about how disappointed various Tea Party factions were in the Republican leadership for the budget deal negotiated with the devil himself, a.k.a. the President of the United States.

Not to get into a big thing about "who won" the budget negotiations, or how much money is really being cut, because that's being covered by a lot of people - as interesting a discussion as it is.

What amazed me was the attitude of some of the Tea Party spokesmen. Not that I'm in the habit of feeling sorry for Speaker Boehner, but he does find himself riding quite the beast.

My favourite comment came from someone by the name of Doug Mainwaring, a "real estate agent and local conservative activist from Bethesda, Maryland." Mr. Mainwaring opined that "I'm not sure they (the GOP) have the political willpower to accept the mandate that was handed them by the Tea Party last November."

Elections are won for all kinds of reasons, usually with votes by majorities cobbled together from all sorts of voting blocs, so for the Tea Party to actually think they fully and completely call the tune for the Republicans is, well, just a lot of fun to watch. To put a fine point on it: successful political parties have to keep all manner of constituencies happy and pandering to the loudest to the exclusion of the others is a clear way to lose the next election.

The best part, as the Huffington Post reported, was that:

The budget deal passed the House by a comfortable margin, by a vote of 260 to 167. A total of 59 Republicans voted against the deal, but according to ABC's Jon Karl, only 27 of those no votes came from freshman House Republicans, who comprise the bulk of the conference's Tea Party component.

It seems that even those politicians most closely aligned with the Tea Party have no idea from whom they are supposed to be taking their marching orders. Mostly it seems that the Tea Party is really just a bunch of people who find themselves in front of a camera or talking to a reporter when the media need someone from the radical right to express the appropriate amount of indignation at any given moment in time.

That's hardly any way to run a political party and John Boehner knows it.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost)

Elephant Dung #25: Maine Republicans slam Republican Gov. Paul LePage

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

I wrote last year about "Mainesanity," the takeover of Maine's state GOP by Tea Party wackos. And by that I don't mean your run-of-the-mill small-government Teabaggers, the sort who are extreme but not utterly insane, or not necessarily so, but rather... well, wackos. As Maine Politics explained at the time:

The official platform for the Republican Party of Maine is now a mix of right-wing fringe policies, libertarian buzzwords and outright conspiracy theories.

The document calls for the elimination of the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, demands an investigation of "collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth," suggests the adoption of "Austrian Economics," declares that "'Freedom of Religion' does not mean 'freedom from religion'" (which I guess makes atheism illegal), insists that "healthcare is not a right," calls for the abrogation of the "UN Treaty on Rights of the Child" and the "Law Of The Sea Treaty" and declares that we must resist "efforts to create a one world government." 

This was extreme even by Republican standards.

November 2010 witnessed yet more "Mainesanity" with the election of Tea Party Republican Paul LePage as governor. (It was a narrow win. LePage squeaked by an independent candidate and won with just 38 percent of the vote.) He proved to be a pretty nasty character during the campaign and has done nothing since then to indicate that he's anything but a right-wing extremist who rode the Tea Party wave, got lucky with a split vote, and somehow got himself elected in a state where leading state-wide Republicans typically resemble Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, not, well, Paul LePage.

And like certain other Republican governors -- Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio come to mind -- he's made labor unions (and working people generally) one of his primary targets. But that isn't going over all that well in Maine, including among Maine Republicans, some of whom (presumably not the ones who wrote that platform) are pushing back:

Eight Republican state senators have issued a rare public rebuke of Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R), writing an op-ed expressing "discomfort and dismay" with some of his recent comments directed at labor backers.

The controversy centers around LePage's recent decision to order a mural depicting the state's workers' history removed from the Department of Labor, arguing that it was biased against businesses and employers. When asked how he would react if protesters carried out their plan to form a human chain around the mural, LePage replied, "I'd laugh at them, the idiots. That's what I would do. Come on! Get over yourselves!"

"But for him to announce that he would 'laugh at the idiots' should they choose to engage in our honored tradition of civil disobedience is another personal attack that only serves to further lower the bar of our public discourse," write the senators in the op-ed, which ran in The Portland Press Herald and the Kennebec Journal. "We may disagree with civil disobedience in this particular instance, but it is a fundamental right each and every one of us might engage in if we found the issue important enough. 

Now...

These are "proud Republicans" who "want Gov. LePage and his administration to succeed." They want to see his right-wing policy agenda (lower taxes, less government, etc.) enacted. And their criticism of LePage isn't directed at his opposition to organized labor but at "the tone and spirit of some of the remarks he has made." What they seek to uphold is civil disobedience, the right to dissent, a political culture of dignity and respect, a spirit of civility. While they claim that they "are not the enemy of labor and labor is certainly not an enemy to [them]," it is clear that the rights of workers, and particularly organized workers who bargain collectively, not only isn't their priority but may actually be antithetical to their pro-business ideology.

So is this really dung at all? These Republicans like LePage. They just want him to tone it down and respect their common opponents.

Fair enough, but this is a case of a prominent Tea Party Republican going too far and members of his own party publicly chastising him. And even if these Republicans aren't necessarily pro-labor, and even if they support much of the Tea Party agenda, their call for greater dignity and respect, including towards labor, is very much a rebuke to the politics of extremism and absolutism that characterizes so much of the right these days. 

It's good to see that at least some Republicans have had enough.

Elephant Dung #23: The Tea Party threatens John Boehner

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.) 

Jon Chait had a post the other day arguing that John Boehner has no choice, if he knows what's good for him, but to shut down the government.

Basically, Boehner is in a tough spot. (No, don't feel sorry for him. It's what he gets for being where he is.) He has to try to appeal to independents and moderates if he wants to maintain/maximize the GOP's electoral prospects for 2012, which means compromising with Democrats on the budget, but he also has to try to appeal to the Tea Party wing of the GOP, a significant part of its right-wing base, if he wants to avoid a full-scale rebellion against his leadership (which could also harm the party's electoral prospects), which means refusing to compromise and allowing for a government shutdown:

What is the downside to a shutdown? Republicans get less popular, have a lower chance to win the presidency in 2012, and maybe a higher chance of losing the House as well. What is the downside to cutting a deal? GOP backbenchers revolt against Boehner and depose him as Speaker of the House.

If I'm Boehner, I'm more worried about the guns pointed at my back then the guns pointed at my face. A shutdown increases the small chance that he goes from Speaker to Minority Leader in 2013, but a deal increases the chance that he goes from Speaker to (R-OH) in 2011. The right-wingers do not trust Boehner, and he has very little slack. He also lived through a series of purges and attempted purges in the late 1990s, always taking the form of purists complaining that the leadership had gone soft.

Boehner's top priority is probably staving off internal revolt. That means shutting down the government.

In other words, if he puts his own personal/political self-interest first, he'll appease the Tea Party. That may be so, and he may well do that, but the question isn't just what Boehner will do but what the Tea Party will do to him. And it may not matter what he does -- or, at least, what he does just may not be good enough. The Tea Party already has a bull's-eye on his head:

The tea partyers who helped drive GOP gains in the last election are rallying in the city they love to hate Thursday, urging Republican House leaders – Speaker John Boehner above all – to resist the drive toward compromise in the protracted fight over the federal budget. Even, they say, if that means Congress fails to do its most important job: pay for the government.

And if Boehner opts instead to agree to a deal with President Barack Obama?

"You're going to see massive amounts of (GOP) primaries" in next year's election, said Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots. If the Ohio Republican strikes a budget deal that doesn't cut spending enough, Meckler said Wednesday, "he is going to face a primary challenge."

Boehner, like the rest of the party leadership, has been appeasing the Tea Party all along. But he's also, to his credit, something of a realist in terms of what is and is not doable in Congress:

"We control one half of one third of the government here in Washington," Boehner told reporters at his weekly briefing. "We can't impose our will on the Senate. All we can do is to fight for all of the spending cuts that we can get an agreement to."

He's right, but that isn't going to cut it with the Tea Party. The threats may be enough to keep Boehner from compromising too easily, but compromise he must if he is to avoid a repeat of the Gingrich fiasco of the '90s, when Republicans shut down the government, took most of the blame, and paid for it at the polls. All of this proves once again that the purists in the Tea Party have no clue about governance and are holding the GOP, and its leaders, to impossible standards. And, ultimately, the party will pay for it.

What the Teabaggers think they can gain from this isn't clear, but it seems that they'd rather be "right" (in their own minds) than win. So far, since the emergence of the Tea Party as a major force, Republicans have been more than willing to kowtow to its demands. Indeed, the GOP has fully embraced the Tea Party, and the two have more or less merged into one (though, of course, the Tea Party has always been heavily Republican and decidedly right-wing in its ideology). But how long will that last? At what point will Republicans, who, after all, have elections to win if they actually want to accomplish anything significant, shed this albatross that is clearly bringing them down? 

It may not happen soon, not with all the mutual co-opting that has taken place so far and will the enormous enthusiasm the Teabaggers have brought to the GOP, stirring up a party that seemed catatonic after the '08 election. The Tea Party is just too influential a part of the GOP right now, and that isn't about to change. But I'm just not sure the relationship is tenable, not with the Tea Party threatening any Republican who deviates even slightly from its right-wing orthodoxy, even solid conservatives like Orrin Hatch and successful leaders like John Boehner.

It would probably take another massive defeat or two for Republicans to get the message and run the other way, but, with the party purging itself of insufficiently conservative members and the Tea Party leading primary challenges against those who deviate from its extremism, it is likely that the GOP will nominate more and more unelectable candidates, increasing the likelihood of just such a defeat.

Not that I object to the GOP nominating unelectable candidates. I'm all for it! So let's all enjoy this while we can.

The decline of the Tea Party and the return to sanity (let's hope)

By R.K. Barry

Well, this is interesting. It seems support for the Tea Party isn't what it used to be:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Wednesday indicates that 32 percent of the public has a favorable view of the two year old anti-tax movement, which also calls for less government spending and a more limited role for the federal government in our lives. The 32 percent favorable rating is down five points from December. 

47 percent of people questioned say they have an unfavorable view of the tea party, up four points from December and an increase of 21 points from January 2010.

So the Tea Party movement may be losing steam, or, what is more likely, as Nate Silver cautions:

It’s not clear, on the other hand, that favorable views are decreasing; they’ve never been much higher than the low 30s, and that’s roughly where they remain today. Instead, this is almost certainly a case of Americans who had ambivalent views about the tea party before now coming to a more negative impression.

But what I find most interesting is the profile of those who may be going from an ambivalent to a more critical view. As CNN reports:

The tea party movement's unfavorable rating rose 15 points since October among lower-income Americans, compared to only five points among those making more than $50,000.

As the pollster postulates:

It's possible the drop among lower income Americans is a reaction to the tea party's push for large cuts in government programs that help lower-income Americans, although there are certainly other factors at work.

I’m afraid this is one of the oldest political dynamics in the book. If you ask people a general question about whether government should be smaller or taxes should be lowered, a large number will certainly agree.

If you start to put content into that abstract concept, a surprising number will start to reconsider, reasoning that they didn’t mean that programs that directly benefit them should be cut or that taxes should be lowered if it adversely impacts delivery of programs on which they depend.

Republican candidates in the last campaign knew this would happen which is why they almost comically refused to provide details about what they would cut to make government smaller. They knew their support was based on keeping the concept of reducing the size of the public sector as abstract as possible.

It’s a common sleight of hand by conservatives and too many voters fall for it. Convince them you can get it done by cutting unnecessary spending and creating efficiencies and punishing fat cat public employees. Convince them that you can cut government programs that only benefit “other people,” people not as deserving. And then when they realize that the only way to cut budgets to promised levels is to gut important public services that they rely on, many unsuspecting folks may come to understand that they have been duped.

They seem to be figuring this out in Wisconsin and Ohio and Michigan and Florida if a tad too late.

As I infer from Nate Silver’s comments, much of the support for Republicans in 2010 may have come from those who were ambivalent but decided to give them a shot. 

Let’s hope these latest numbers suggest that many are indeed waking up and that the metaphorical coffee is in fact being smelled. 

(Cross-posted from Lippmann's Ghost.)

So you think the Tea Party GOP isn't a cesspool of bigotry?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Add this to all the evidence that's accumulated so far:

As the Republican presidential nomination process begins, one GOP candidate is making a name for himself as the Islamophobia candidate: Herman Cain.

Earlier this week, Cain gave an interview to Christianity Today in which he declared that, "based upon the little knowledge that I have of the Muslim religion, you know, they have an objective to convert all infidels or kill them."

ThinkProgress caught up with the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza [on Saturday] at the Conservative Principles Conference in Des Moines, Iowa, to discuss his comments further. We asked him, in light of his statements on Islam, would he be comfortable appointing any Muslims in his administration. Rather than skirting the question or hedging his answer, as most presidential aspirants are wont to do, Cain was definitive: "No, I would not."

You'll note that Cain won a fairly significant Tea Party straw poll last month, is a major figure in the Tea Party, and is one of those on the right for whom the Tea Party and the Republican Party should be one and the same.

And now he's on record exposing himself as a bigot -- and as someone who apparently has no regard for the Constitution, which states that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Much of the anti-Muslim bigotry within high-profile Republican circles -- say, among the likes of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich -- is carefully constructed so as to appear not to be bigotry. (Consider, for example, the flap over the Park51 community center near Ground Zero.)

At least Cain is being honest with us.

Michigan power grab

By Mustang Bobby.

Via Steve Benen comes a story about the new governor of Michigan being granted basically limitless power to do anything he wants.

Newly elected Republican governor, Rick Snyder, is set to pass one of the most sweeping, anti-democratic pieces of legislation in the country -- and almost no one is talking about it.

Snyder's law gives the state government the power not only to break up unions, but to dissolve entire local governments and place appointed "Emergency Managers" in their stead. But that's not all -- whole cities could be eliminated if Emergency Managers and the governor choose to do so. And Snyder can fire elected officials unilaterally, without any input from voters. It doesn't get much more anti-Democratic than that.

Except it does. The governor simply has to declare a financial emergency to invoke these powers -- or he can hire a private company to declare financial emergency and take over oversight of the city. That's right, a private corporation can declare your city in a state of financial emergency and send in its Emergency Manager, fire your elected officials, and reap the benefits of the ensuing state contracts.  [Italics in the original.]

Ironically, this was the kind of thing all the tea-partiers were screaming about last year that President Obama was plotting to do with the stimulus and healthcare law: he's a tyrant who will stop at nothing to take away the power from the people and turn it over to the bureaucrats and the evil Soshulists.  So, naturally, you'd think that the tea-folk in Michigan would be apoplectic about this.  Well, you would be wrong.  They're delighted with it.

One of the Republican state lawmakers who supports this effort characterized the plan as "financial martial law" -- and as far as he's concerned, that's not a criticism, that a defense for this little scheme.

Rule Number 1 of Dictators: It's not tyranny when we do it; it's "emergency powers." (See: Mubarak, Hosni; Castro, Fidel & Raul).

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

In Madison, the voice of Main Street speaks for America

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Conservatives will continue to spread their dishonest nonsense that the "voice" of the Tea Party is the voice of "real" America, but, on Saturday, a newer movement, rising up in response to the right-wing assault on labor in Wisconsin (and on working people everywhere), spoke loud and clear, giving voice to the forces of justice and fairness against the plutocratic Republican effort to keep them down:

Police estimated up to 100,000 people turned out in Madison, WI [on Saturday] to protest Gov. Scott Walker's (R) assault on unions, making it bigger than any protests the city has witnessed, even those during the Vietnam War. The Madison rally is part of a much larger Main Street Movement of average Americans demanding fairness in labor laws, social spending, and taxation that has emerged in Ohio, New Jersey, Florida, Michigan, and elsewhere. But [Saturday]'s rally in Madison is noteworthy because at 85,000-100,000, it was bigger than the biggest tea party protest, the September 12, 2009 rally in Washington, D.C., which turned out only an estimated 60,000-70,000. A photo of the Madison rally [on Saturday]:


For two years, tea party activists and their allies in the GOP have claimed that the hard-right movement represents the true beliefs of the American people. But the crowd in Madison and numerous polls tell a different story.

And, of course, the media establishment -- whether suckered by or sympathetic to conservative objectives -- will continue to hype up the Tea Party into far more than it really is. Yes, to be fair, the protests in Wisconsin have garnered a great deal of attention, but we know what narrative the media will push.

All the more reason why the Main Street Movement must not let up. It must demand to be heard -- and must demand real change the American people, and not just Tea Party fanatics, can believe in.

Remember that slogan, Mr. President? It used to mean something. Maybe 100,000 people in Madison, along with the voices of the middle class, not to mention the poor, who are usually dismissed entirely, throughout the country, will make it mean something again.

Cowards and conservatives: Much ridiculous ado about Ron Schiller, NPR, and James O'Keefe's latest right-wing scam

By Michael J.W. Stickings

There has been much ado today -- I'm late coming to this, but I haven't been feeling well -- about NPR being caught in yet another gotcha sting by right-wing activist James O'Keefe and his ironically-named Project Veritas.

Basically, if you haven't heard the details yet, NPR executives Ron Schiller and Betsy Liley had lunch with two men posing as representatives of the so-called Muslim Education Action Center Trust, a fictitious philanthropic organization backed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The group, the two men said, wanted to give $5 million to NPR because, they said, "the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere." During the lunch, Schiller went off on Republicans and conservatives, saying, for example:

-- "The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian – I wouldn't even call it Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of move."

-- On the Tea Party: "It's not just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America, gun-toting. I mean, it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people."

That's about it. O'Keefe got it all on video, and now the story's flying around the Internet, with the anti-NPR ire of the right ramped up to new levels of vitriol.

Let me address the above comments first:

-- The Republican Party is indeed socially conservative and deeply theocratic. On the whole, it seeks to impose right-wing, fundamentalist Christian "values" on the country. One might object to Schiller's assertion that such evangelical fundamentalism isn't "Christian," but Schiller is right.

-- Schiller does somewhat misrepresent the Tea Party. While there are indeed racist elements in it, it is for the most part an anti-tax, anti-government, hyper-libertarian movement.

Undeniably, there are xenophobic and anti-Muslim strains in the Republican Party, significant if not dominant strains, but they are to be found more among the paleo-conservatives (and some neoconservatives), as well as within the party "establishment," not really, or at least not exclusively, among the Tea Partiers. (Rand Paul isn't really the problem here, it's more the likes of fear- and hatemongers like Pete King.) Still, the Tea Party is overwhelmingly white, pro-gun, and "middle" American. It may not be as racist as Schiller suggests, but it's certainly scary.

Okay, so what else did Schiller say?

-- "What NPR did I'm very proud of. What NPR stood for is a non-racist, non-bigoted, straightforward telling of the news. Our feeling is that if a person expresses his or her personal opinion, which anyone is entitled to do in a free society, they are compromised as a journalist. They can no longer fairly report. And the question we asked internally was, can Juan Williams, when he makes a statement like that, can he report to the Muslim population, and be believed, for example? And the answer is no. He lost all credibility and that breaks your ethics as a journalist."

I didn't necessarily think Williams should have been fired on the grounds that what he said crossed the line -- though I certainly would have supported firing him for his long record of being a shoddy pundit -- but it's not like Schiller said anything outrageous in defending NPR's decision.

-- "I think what we all believe is if we don't have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air... it's the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn't have female voices."

And? There is widespread anti-Muslim bigotry in America right now, most of it stoked and espoused by the right, and there should indeed be "Muslim voices in our schools." That doesn't mean that "our schools" should be Muslim, though conservatives are also stoking fears of a Muslim takeover and the imposition of Sharia law, just that Muslims in America are part of the American fabric.

-- NPR "would be better off in the long run without federal funding."

This was perhaps the most controversial thing he said, but only because it contradicts NPR's official position. If it's just his opinion, so what? He should have avoided talking corporate policy, and shouldn't have spoken for NPR given his dissenting view, but that's an error of judgement, nothing more.

So can we move on? Conservatives will make a big deal of this, but they were already anti-NPR, and, as far as I'm concerned, Schiller's remarks don't amount to much.

Well, let's address a few points first:

-- NPR has commented officially on the matter already:

The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept.

We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for.

Mr. Schiller announced last week that he is leaving NPR for another job.

In other words, NPR was not about to take the money, quickly distanced itself from Schiller's remarks (going so far as to call them appalling), and further distanced itself from Schiller, who had already announced that he was leaving NPR to take a job elsewhere.

-- I am actually somewhat appalled the NPR called Schiller's remarks appalling. Again, is what he said really so bad, so outrageous? Fox News people, including on-air personalities, say far worse all the time. NPR has different (i.e., higher) standards, obviously, but it seems to me that NPR is going too far the other way, trying to defend itself from any and all possible association with partisanship. And for what? For the small amount NPR takes in federal funding every year?

-- NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation) said Schiller's remarks were "deeply distressing to reporters, editors and others who bring fairness, civility and respect for a wide variety of viewpoints to their work every day." They may have been, and may still be -- how should I know? -- but Schiller was a fundraiser and was not involved with NPR content. So it's not like it was an editor or reporter, or executive responsible for such matters, was caught saying such partisan things.

-- Schiller himself has already apologized:

While the meeting I participated in turned out to be a ruse, I made statements during the course of the meeting that are counter to NPR's values and also not reflective of my own beliefs. I offer my sincere apology to those I offended. I resigned from NPR, previously effective May 6th, to accept another job. In an effort to put this unfortunate matter behind us, NPR and I have agreed that my resignation is effective today.

Again, why this embarrassing self-flagellation? Were his remarks really "not reflective" of his "own beliefs"? So what? And whom exactly did he offend? Republicans? Tea Partiers? Anti-Muslim bigots? Why does he need to apologize to them? Perhaps he should have apologized to NPR to openly objecting to corporate policy, at least in terms of federal funding, and perhaps he should have admitted that he spoke too freely, but more than that was hardly necessary.

And yet here he is, along with NPR itself, issuing one big mea culpa while conservatives point fingers, sneer, and gloat.

Please. Does he have no self-respect? Does NPR have no self-respect? Do we liberals have no self-respect?

I'm sick and fucking tired of the double standard. Conservatives can say whatever the hell they want, going so far as to promote extremist views on every media channel they can get hold of, but liberals have to bend over backwards to apologize for even the slightest hint of bias. It's truly and utterly pathetic.

And, in this case, it's coming from a guy who was already on the way out! (And a cowardly NPR just kicked him out the door sooner.)

-- As John Cole puts it in his usual blunt way: "The latest scoop from the wingnutosphere is that some former NPR fundraiser thinks that the teahadists are nuts and that the GOP has been hijacked by crazy people. This is being spun as some grave sin, when in reality it should be met with a resounding -- 'No shit.'"

My thought exactly.

Elephant Dung #19: The Tea Party prefers Charlie Sheen to John Boehner

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

Poor Johnny B.

Try as he might, he just can't win -- that is, win over the Tea Party that is now so much an integral part of the GOP. And the radical rightists are placing him squarely in Palin's crosshairs:

A national tea party group is in revolt against House Speaker John Boehner and wants to see him defeated in a 2012 primary, arguing that he looks "like a fool" in the debate over spending cuts and makes less sense than actor Charlie Sheen.

"You look like a fool," Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips wrote in a post on the group's website, directing his message at the Ohio Republican. "Charlie Sheen is now making more sense than John Boehner."

Ouch. That's like saying you have less musical talent than J-Lo. (Yes, American Idol reference. I went there. I'm not watching this year -- why, without Simon? -- but I did catch her new video on last night's show. "This is the worst song ever," said The Reactionette. Hyperbole, to be sure, but only slight. "That was terrible. Just awful." Agreed.)

Boehner "did not get the message" from the tea party movement demanding big cuts to federal spending, Phillips said, and "the honeymoon is over." The movement should respond, he said, by finding "a candidate to run against John Boehner in 2012 and should set as a goal, to defeat in a primary, the sitting Speaker of the House of Representatives."

Right, because Boehner is all-powerful and can therefore make it all happen, even with a Democratic Senate and president. Not that I wish to defend him, but he's reasonable and sane compared to the Tea Party, which largely sits on the sidelines spouting ideological extremism, and attacking sinners while seeking to cleanse the Republican Party of the ideologically inadequate, while legislators like Boehner are forced to work within the parameters of a democratically-elected legislature, that is, to seek compromise to get anything done.

The Tea Party completely misunderstood last year's midterm election results, just as it misunderstands politics generally, and expected right-wing revolution right away. But revolution was never to be, and not just because of Boehner. It's not just extremism but delusional ignorance that drives the Tea Party.

The Republican right, the party's new mainstream, has taken over. It's pulling the party further and further to the right, away from its former establishment, and it's purging the party ranks of those who aren't sufficiently right-wing, who aren't ideologically acceptable to the new Bolsheviks. Among its many targets are some of the most reputable members of the party, including those with long careers advancing conservative causes, like Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar. We can now add Boehner to the list, a long-time loyal partisan who's been speaker for just two months.

And Democrats, of course, are salivating.

Lugar faces the Tea Party music

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A couple of weeks ago, R.K. Barry wrote an Elephant Dung post on how the Indiana Tea Party is going after long-time and highly-respected Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, planning a 2012 challenge that could ultimately bring down one of the few remaining sensible Republicans on Capitol Hill. Well, it ain't lookin' good for Lugar:

Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock will launch his primary challenge to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) on Tuesday with the support of a majority of both the state's 92 Republican county chairmen and its state party executive committee, he told the Fix in a recent interview.

"I feel bad that he's going to be humiliated by this list," Mourdock said.

Mourdock added that he believes Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) and Rep. Mike Pence (R), the party's two leading figures in the Hoosier State, are going to stay neutral in the primary -- though Daniels, who was Lugar's campaign manager three different times, has already committed to voting for the senator.

That such a large contingent of the party establishment should come out against or withhold support from an incumbent senator is highly unusual and reflects the difficult path ahead for Lugar in advance of the May 8, 2012, primary fight. It also suggests there is a clear path to victory for Mourdock.

From what I can tell, Mourdock isn't just another Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, or John Raese. While he's to the right of Lugar, he would appear to be a competent figure who could well win a general election in what is already a red-leaning state. And he's not a full-on Teabagger:

Mourdock is clear on one thing: he is not running as a tea party candidate. While he welcomes the support of tea party groups and says he expects them to coalesce around his campaign, he recognizes the limitations of being defined as a tea party candidate.

"Mr. Lugar will try to paint me that way, because he's speaking very demeaningly about the tea party right now," Mourdock said. "I think he's doing it that way to set it up and say, 'Mourdock is some wild-eyed extremist.'"

Well, an extremist he is, if well within the mainstream of today's GOP, but Lugar will likely have a hard time making his case stick, what with so much of the state party likely to line up behind Mourdock. (Although an endorsement from Daniels would help.)

What's interesting, though, as we continue to track the GOP's civil war, is that Lugar is hardly a moderate. As R.K. put it:

It seems that Lugar's sin is that he voted to confirm a couple of liberal Supreme Court justices and voted for the START treaty to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. It's not like he voted for health-care reform or the economic stimulus package, offenses that would likely have gotten him beheaded before they threw him out of office. No, just a couple of votes on the Supremes and a missile treaty seems to be enough to incur the wrath of the radical right.

Never mind that based on so many other indicators he's a fairly conservative fellow, which is born out by the fact that he's always been pro-life and pro-business, and an advocate for lower taxes and smaller government.

He's a solid conservative, in other words, and a loyal Republican -- not that either is good enough these days, not with the Tea Party demanding absolutism on a broad core of policy positions. And even compromising on a couple of issues (which pretty much everyone in Congress has to do over the course of a long career), even showing a breadth of understanding beyond narrow ideological parochialism (which Lugar, a foreign policy expert, certainly has done), can bring about one's downfall at the hands of the Republican Bolsheviks.

R.K. notes that Lugar is "just too damn strong and viewed as unbeatable by the political establishment," and hence that a Tea Party challenge would be "a colossal waste of time," but this isn't just about the Tea Party anymore. Rather, it's about a broader conservative challenge to Lugar, including from within the state party establishment. It's hard to imagine Lugar losing, but it's easier now than ever before, what with the Tea Party and the Republican establishment making nice all across the country, endangering not just Lugar but even the likes of Orrin Hatch in Utah, hardly anything other than a hardcore conservative.

This says a lot about the state of the Republican Party today as it looks ahead to 2012, a party of increasing extremism that, with the Tea Party pushing its buttons, is trying -- often successfully -- to purge its ranks of "sinners," of those who have deviated from the far-right line.

And I'm all for it, because it just makes Republicans even more unelectable. They won the House last year because of a bad economy and low voter turnout (and successful propaganda), but things will be different next year, with Obama rebounding, the economy (hopefully) improving, and enthusiasm among Democrats returning (if not quite to '08 levels). Moving further and further to the right while dismissing even the likes of Richard Lugar would just make their chances even worse.

(photo)

Elephant Dung #16: House Republicans face internal turmoil

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

Poor Republicans. Poor, poor Republicans.

It looked like they were doing so well in 2010, propagandizing against health-care reform and otherwise lying to stir up their base, with the media eagerly repeating their talking points, obstructing anything and everything the Democrats proposed, using the filibuster in the Senate to block any number of Democratic initiatives, and capitalizing on angry Tea Party sentiment to whip up electoral success. Their poll numbers rose, they crested into the midterms, and they gave Obama and the Democrats a shellacking, slashing the Democrats' majority in the Senate and winning back the House with overwhelming force. Obama was down, the Democrats were in a state of apparent disarray, and the Republicans were back, baby!

Or not.

Lame-duckery notwithstanding, Congress used its time after the elections to put a cherry on top of Obama's first two years in office, repealing DADT, ratifying New START, and giving the Democrats hope that all was not lost.

Maybe it wasn't the Republicans' time after all. Maybe it was all something of an illusion, their success having more to do with a terrible economy and low voter turnout than anything else.

And then there was the question of what they would do back in power in the House. Obstruction would still be the name of the game in Congress, thanks to Mitch McConnell et al., and there would be overreach by over-eager Republicans looking to paralyze Congress through hearings and investigations to score political points, but with the Tea Party emerging as a major force in the Republican Party, and with Teabaggers and those sympathetic to them heading off to Washington, it was probably inevitable that the cracks in the GOP would deepen, dividing the party and threatening even the limited power it could wield in Congress. 

Yes, of course, House Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a meaningless vote, but since then things haven't exactly gone smoothly: 

Under pressure to make deeper spending cuts and blindsided by embarrassing floor defeats, House Republican leaders are quickly discovering the limits of control over their ideologically driven and independent-minded new majority.

For the second consecutive day, House Republicans on Wednesday lost a floor vote due to a mini-revolt, this time over a plan to demand a repayment from the United Nations. Earlier in the day, members of the party’s conservative bloc used a closed-door party meeting to push the leadership to go well beyond its plans to trim about $40 billion from domestic spending and foreign aid this year, demanding $100 billion or more.

The spending rebellion came after the House on Tuesday rejected what was expected to be a routine temporary extension of anti-terrorism Patriot Act provisions when Democrats and about two dozen conservative Republicans balked at a fast-track procedure. Republicans, still searching for their footing after assuming control in January, were also forced to pull a trade assistance bill from the floor after conservatives raised objections. They found themselves mediating other internal fights as well.

Speaker John A. Boehner conceded that the fledgling majority was encountering turbulence. "We have been in the majority four weeks," Mr. Boehner said. "We are not going to be perfect every day."

There's your understatement of the day. 

Now, Washington has a way of corrupting everyone who steps foot in it, and it's likely that some of these supposedly principled conservatives, many of them Teabaggers of some variety, will ultimately cave. They may want to stand for their extremist right-wing ideals, but such extremism generally doesn't go over well in Congress, not least when you have to compromise to get anything done and when you have to bring home some bacon to win re-election votes.

But what these two votes tell me is that the Tea Party is very much for real not just as a loosely coordinated "movement" at the grassroots level but within the Republican Party in Washington.

The fraying of party unity, if not of a scale or intensity that imperils Mr. Boehner's ability to advance the main elements of his agenda, nonetheless stood in sharp contrast to the record of Republicans in remaining remarkably united against President Obama and the Democrats over the past two years. The infighting foreshadowed potential difficulties for Republicans in holding their troops together for clashes with the White House and the Democratically controlled Senate as well as their ability to corral reluctant Republicans to vote to increase the federal debt limit.

Yes, Republicans like order and stability and are awfully good at being a united front against Democrats, but how long will that last in the current Congress, what with the competing priorities of the leadership, the more conservative (and rigidly ideological) rank and file (including the new Teabaggers), and renegades looking to advance various personal interests, with Obama rising again in the polls and looking extremely strong (along with a strengthening economy), and with Republicans already at each other's throats in anticipation of 2012?

This series -- Elephant Dung -- is about highlighting the divisions within the Republican Party. Much of the time, the divisions are personal, with one leading figure attacking another (often Sarah Palin), but what these latest developments in the House show is that the divisions are also political and ideological, with the various constituencies of the party, usually at peace with one another, eagerly vying for supremacy in the wake of the party's reacquisition of power (at least in the House). There have been such divisions before, there always are to some degree, but what makes their emergence more threatening this time is the rise of the Tea Party, which came out of 2010 with a sense of arrogant righteousness that makes it feel entitled to get its way and therefore not to have to compromise not just with Democrats but even with other elements of its own party, the GOP, mostly notably the less rigidly ideological establishment represented by the likes of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. 

And I think we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Elephant Dung #14: Tea Party goes after Republican Senate icon Richard Lugar

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By R.K. Barry

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

Long-time Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana is up for re-election in 2012 and, it seems, he just isn't conservative enough for the local Tea Party contingent. But who is? Really. I wouldn't be the first to claim that the sainted Ronald Reagan would be hard-pressed to pass muster with this gang, given his penchant for tax increases and signing missile treaties with those darn Ruskies. Imagine anyone calling Ronald Reagan a RINO (Republican in Name Only).

It seems that Lugar's sin is that he voted to confirm a couple of liberal Supreme Court justices and voted for the START treaty to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. It's not like he voted for health-care reform or the economic stimulus package, offenses that would likely have gotten him beheaded before they threw him out of office. No, just a couple of votes on the Supremes and a missile treaty seems to be enough to incur the wrath of the radical right.

Never mind that based on so many other indicators he's a fairly conservative fellow, which is born out by the fact that he's always been pro-life and pro-business, and an advocate for lower taxes and smaller government.

As David Weigel points out at Slate, the challenge probably won't mean very much. He writes:

Indiana's going to be complicated. If Mike Pence runs for governor, as everyone expects him to, does he throw his senior senator under the bus? Doubtful. If the GOP race for president drags on a bit, it will drag on to Indiana, driving higher turnout -- and Tea Party coups have not been won with high turnout, but with voter enthusiasm in sleepy late primaries. 

Add to that the fact that Lugar is just too damn strong and viewed as unbeatable by the political establishment and you have a colossal waste of time in the making. But that won't stop them.

 As one Tea Party activist remarked:

[We're saying to Lugar] thank you for what you've done. We respect you greatly as a person and for what you've done in the past. But to go forward, we feel it's going to need to be a different candidate.

Yeah, I'll bet that made him crap his pants.

You have to admit that these Tea Partiers are not shy. In any case, there seem to be a couple of candidates available more to their liking, though it appears doubtful that either will have much traction.

One of the things that comes through consistently with Tea Partiers is their utter lack of practical political sense. They are true believers. Fail their purity test, which is probably inevitable for any politician who has been in D.C. for more than a weekend, and expect to hear about it -- in a big way.

That may make them all feel good and noble but it won't do much for their electoral chances. Someone really should explain that to them, but I'm not going to be the one to do it. It'll be more fun if they figure it out for themselves. 

Makes you wonder what other Republican heavyweights they're going to go after next.

********** 

Update (by MJWS): Lugar, for his part, is being gracious, though you can tell he's rather annoyed. Take this brilliant comeback, for example:

"I've been working systematically for 20 years going to Russia trying to help direct a situation in which we're taking warheads off of missiles every day, destroying missiles that were aimed at us; destroying submarines that carried misslies up and down our coast," said Lugar. "I've got to say 'Get real'. I hear Tea Party or other people talking about they were against START. I said 'Well, now, hang on here.'"

Lugar continued, "If you want to get into START, let's talk about it, but realistically as Americans, not as some Republican renegade. [I'm] trying to take warheads of Russia [out of circulation] so they won't hit Indiana."

Lugar's an admirable guy, I say from across the partisan divide, but there's no way the Tea Party is about to "get real."

The Arizona shooting and the context of right-wing extremism

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Offering some of the best commentary yet on the Arizona shooting, Slate's Jacob Weisberg makes the crucual distinction between what may have been going on inside Jared Lee Loughner's troubled head, "politically tinged schizophrenia," and outside:

To call his crime an attempted assassination is to acknowledge that it appears to have had a political and not merely a personal context. That context wasn't Islamic radicalism, Puerto Rican independence, or anarcho-syndicalism. It was the anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic populism that flourishes in the dry and angry climate of Arizona. Extremist shouters didn't program Loughner, in some mechanistic way, to shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But the Tea Party movement did make it appreciably more likely that a disturbed person like Loughner would react, would be able to react, and would not be prevented from reacting, in the crazy way he did.

At the core of the far right's culpability is its ongoing attack on the legitimacy of U.S. government -- a venomous campaign not so different from the backdrop to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Then it was focused on "government bureaucrats" and the ATF. This time it has been more about Obama's birth certificate and health care reform. In either case, it expresses the dangerous idea that the federal government lacks valid authority. It is this, rather than violent rhetoric per se, that is the most dangerous aspect of right-wing extremism. 

Yes, yes, yes. As I've been saying all along, this isn't just about political speech. To focus on speech, which is what the media are doing (and what even prominent Democratic/liberal/progressive commentators are doing, including Bill Clinton) is to deflect attention away from what this is really all about, that is, the context behind the shooting, and behind right-wing political violence generally, the context of ideology.

That context is what Weisberg describes, and more. It is about anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic, racist extremism, combined with paranoid conspiracy theories of the kind spun by Glenn Beck on a daily basis. It is about warmongering and fearmongering, about scapegoating the Other, the different, about terror and torture, about a mythical alternate reality of delusion, about a refusal to deal with the world as it is, about a refusal to accept change of any kind unless it is change to some mythical past of right-wing supremacy.

And it doesn't just flourish in Arizona but all throughout America, in the hearts and minds of conservatives and in a Republican Party that has embraced the Tea Party and that is becoming ever more extreme in its outlook and ideology. Weisberg writes:

First you rile up psychotics with inflammatory language about tyranny, betrayal, and taking back the country. Then you make easy for them to get guns. But if you really want trouble, you should also make it hard for them to get treatment for mental illness.

True, "none of this says that Tea Party caused the Tucson tragedy," but "its politics increased the odds of something like it happening."

And it happened, as perhaps it was bound to happen. The right may not have directly caused the shooting, but it is certainly culpable.