Republicans Who Gag Over Interracial Marriages And Dream Of The Good Times Are Racist

Richard Cohen explained why Chris Christie will have a hard time winning the Republican presidential nomination:

From a Web site called the Iowa Republican, I learned that part of the problem with John McCain and Mitt Romney, seriatim losers to Barack Obama, “is they were deemed too moderate by many Iowa conservatives.” The sort of candidates Iowa Republicans prefer have already been in the state. The blog cited Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah (considered to the right of Cruz, if such a thing is possible), Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s recent vice presidential candidate and its resident abacus, and the inevitable Sarah Palin, the Alaska quitter who, I think, actually now lives in Arizona. If this is the future of the GOP, then it’s in the past.

None of these candidates bears the slightest resemblance to Christie. And the more literate of them — that’s not you, Palin — must have chortled over post-election newspaper columns extolling Christie as precisely the sort of candidate the GOP ought to run in 2016. This is the dream of moderate Republicans, but not many of them vote in the Iowa caucuses or the South Carolina primary, two of the early nominating contests.

I agree so far with Cohen, except that the major problem Chris Christie faces is not that he isn’t conservative but that he has been willing to compromise in the manner which has been necessary to succeed in New Jersey. To Republican primary voters, compromise is evil, and to compromise on conservative principles is as bad as not believing in conservative principles.

Cohen gave this description of how the Tea Party sees the world:

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

As with the Dixiecrats, the fight is not over a particular program — although Obamacare comes close — but about a tectonic shift of attitudes. I thank Dennis J. Goldford, professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, for leading me to a live performance on YouTube of Merle Haggard singing “Are the Good Times Really Over.” This chestnut, a lament for a lost America, has been viewed well more than 2 million times. It could be the tea party’s anthem.

I might agree if not for the statement that today’s GOP is not racist. If they gag when they see a white man married to a black woman and if they gag over biracial children,  they are racist. When they dream of the Good Times, they are dreaming of a time when minorities were kept in their place. Their views on immigration are based upon the racist desire to keep out people of other races. Their economic policies are based upon scaring low-information white males into thinking that if they don’t vote Republican, minorities will take what they are entitled to. The Southern strategy of Lee Atwater remains in place:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Beyond this rather major error, Cohen is right that the Tea Party cannot handle the modern world, and will not support a conservative such as Chris Christie who, unlike them, is not totally out of touch with reality.

Quote of the Day: Bill Maher on NSA Surveillance

“The same conservatives who were all for the Patriot Act are now freaked out about this. They’re like, ‘When we said the president could do whatever the f*ck he wanted, we didn’t mean a black guy.'” –Bill Maher

Bonus Quote:

“Trusting the government to monitor your calls without listening – it’s kind of like trusting Chris Christie to pick up the McDonalds and not the fries on the way home.” –Bill Maher

Democrats To Run Against Republican Inability to Govern

Although more people voted for Democrats than Republicans for the House in 2012, the Democrats have an uphill battle to retake control. Think Progress calculates that the Democrats would have to boost their lead in the popular vote to over seven percent due to gerrymandering. The higher concentration of Democrats in cities also contributes to the higher total number of Congressional districts won by Republicans.

Running against the Republicans for their extremist views isn’t enough for Democrats to win control of the House since so many members of Congress are gerrymandered into safe seats. Many Republicans have more to fear from even more extreme conservatives beating them in primaries than from moderate or liberal Democrats defeating them. Politico reports that instead Democrats are planning to run against the Republicans for being ineffective at governing:

Democrats, facing a challenging fight to retake the House of Representatives in 2014, see a promising new line of attack rising out of the fiscal cliff follies: casting the Republican congressional majority as a terminally dysfunctional body that cannot perform the basic functions of government, let alone lead the country through difficult times.

It’s a meaningful shift from the Democrats’ message in 2012, when President Barack Obama’s party gained a modest eight seats in the House attacking Republicans as ultraconservative allies of the super-rich.

After the past two weeks of tumultuous negotiations over the fiscal cliff, which ended late on New Year’s Day with a majority of House Democrats and minority of Republicans voting to raise taxes on upper-income Americans, Democratic strategists now say that competence, as much as ideology, will be at the core of their midterm message.

New York Rep. Steve Israel, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said the political reality is that “people do tend to blame Republicans for this chaos” and the minority party has two years to explain to voters how the fallout from that hurts their lives.

“If we continue to be the problem solvers and Republicans continue to be the problem, we will have a very strong path to getting the majority,” Israel said. “Republicans are drawing those contrasts with every cliff they try to throw us off.”

The House’s image took another hit Wednesday when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a potential Republican presidential candidate, lashed out at congressional Republicans for failing to schedule a vote on aid for Americans affected by Hurricane Sandy.

“Americans are tired of the palace intrigue and political partisanship of this Congress, which places one-upsmanship ahead of the lives of the citizens who sent these people to Washington, D.C., in the first place,” Christie said. “New York deserves better than the selfishness we saw on display last night. New Jersey deserves better than the duplicity we saw on display last night. America deserves better than just another example of a government that has forgotten who they are there to serve and why.”

There is hope that voters who generally vote Republican will change their votes if they realize how much harm the current Republican leadership is doing to the country. Actually these two strategies are synergistic. The Republicans are ineffective at governing because of their extreme views. Their extreme views also leads them into taking action such as hindering economic recovery and placing the nation at risk of defaulting on its debts.

The next battle over the debt ceiling will provide a clue as to whether the Democrats can stand up to Republican tactics. The Republicans are demanding large cuts to Medicare and Social Security, and are essentially threatening to crash the global economy if they do not receive these cuts. Obama forced the Republicans to back down at the last minute before going over the fiscal cliff. He needs (and probably intends) to handle Republican economic terrorism in the same way with the debt ceiling. My bet is that voters will side with the Democrats in opposing cuts to Medicare and Social Security, and blame the Republicans for any consequences of not increasing the debt ceiling. Once that dynamic is clear, there is hope that the Republicans will again fold, as opposed to demanding unpopular cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

GOP Convention Day Two: They Built A Lying Narrative

It  is a real sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party that they have no ideas of their own to make their main theme. Their theme comes from Barack Obama. Of course they don’t have the courage to confront Obama’s actual ideas and are resorting to distorting a comment from Obama taken out of context. If Republicans were honest they would say: “Deficit, high unemployment, a weak economy, an a climate of bigotry–we built it.”

With so many lies coming from Mitt Romney, David Letterman began a new feature, Ann and Mitt Romney Lies:

The Republican convention got underway today and they managed to nominate a ticket to the right of Goldwater/Miller in 1964. Their new slogan might be: Extremism In Defense Of Wealthy Avoiding Taxes Is No Vice, Moderation in Pursuit of Anything is No Virtue.

We’ve heard a lot of bogus attacks on Barack Obama but the Republicans have no ideas of their own. They have nothing to offer. Republican economics is to real world economics what creationism and climate change denial are to science. It says a lot about the incompetence of Republicans at running government programs that they think that running a lemonade stand is the most important training for a president.

The speakers haven’t even said much about Mitt Romney until Ann Romney came on. Ann Romney is an excellent speaker. It is a shame she is working for the dark side. I do feel sorry that her horse didn’t do better in the Olympics, but I sure don’t want to see her husband become president. Being a good speaker doesn’t mean she is honest. We heard about her father, but she left out how he was an atheist, and how Mitt converted him to Mormonism after his death. She repeated past fantasies about the two being poor in college when they were actually quite well off living off stock options.

Forget Ann Romney’s fantasy biography. If you want to read a better Mitt Romney fantasy biography, put aside any dislike you might have for David Brooks and read his column today. The biography begins:

Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America, and especially its national parks. He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god of mutual funds, and launched into the world with the lofty expectation that he would someday become the Arrow shirt man.

Romney was a precocious and gifted child. He uttered his first words (“I like to fire people”) at age 14 months, made his first gaffe at 15 months and purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.

Mitt grew up in a modest family. His father had an auto body shop called the American Motors Corporation, and his mother owned a small piece of land, Brazil. He had several boyhood friends, many of whom owned Nascar franchises, and excelled at school, where his fourth-grade project, “Inspiring Actuaries I Have Known,” was widely admired.

The Romneys had a special family tradition. The most cherished member got to spend road trips on the roof of the car. Mitt spent many happy hours up there, applying face lotion to combat windburn.

The teenage years were more turbulent. He was sent to a private school, where he was saddened to find there are people in America who summer where they winter. He developed a lifelong concern for the second homeless, and organized bake sales with proceeds going to the moderately rich.

Chris Christie came on next to give the keynote speech, after stepping outside to snack on Hurricane Isaac. He went off-topic and spoke of how his father went to a public university under the GI Bill. He did leave out a few facts about the New Jersey economy. He bragged far more about things he tore down than things he built, setting up his campaign for 2016 after Mitt Romney loses in 2012.

David Letterman: Top Ten Reasons Chris Christie Endorsed Mitt Romney

David Letterman: Top Ten Reasons Chris Christie Endorsed Mitt Romney

10. Romney sounds like pastrami
9. Perry wouldn’t let him fry eggs on the Texas electric chair
8. Two liters of Shop Rite root beer and a king size Snickers did the trick
7. If elected, Romney said he’d overturn rule requiring enormous people to buy extra airplane seat
6. Needed something to do between lunch and second lunch
5. Acting on direct orders from Colonel Sanders
4. It was a close call between him and Rick Santorum — just kidding
3. Mistook Mitt’s repeated ‘bi-partisan’ references to mean two kinds of cheese
2. Movie star good lucks — who could resist?
1. Only other options were the nutjob, the crackpot, the pizza dude and Newt

Quote of the Day

“On Tuesday New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced he that he was not running for president. And then on Wednesday Sarah Palin also announced that she would not run. Palin said she would love to be president but she just couldn’t handle the two-year commitment.” –Seth Meyers

David Letterman: Top Ten Reasons Chris Christie Is Not Running for President

David Letterman: Top Ten Reasons Chris Christie Is Not Running for President

10. As always, he’s following his gut
9. Wants to spend more time with pie
8. There isn’t a Quiznos within five miles of the White House
7. Afraid of going up against the Newt Gingrich juggernaut
6. Doesn’t own a tie without a mustard stain
5. He was advised against it by his closest confidante, Duncan Hines
4. Constitution requires every candidate to be able to see their feet
3. Can’t understand response because of chewing
2. Hank Williams, Jr. just compared him to Stalin
1. He was born in Kenya

Quote of the Day

“Not only did Christie say he’s not going to run, he’s also not going to jog or walk anymore.” –Jimmy Kimmel

Christie Holding Press Conference Today

Chris Christie is holding a news conference today, presumably to say whether he is running for the Republican nomination. I’m not sure how many will watch, considering he is competing with the announcement of the next version of the iPhone. I do wish that rather than dwelling on whether Christie is too fat to be president, more pundits were asking if Christie (and other GOP candidates) are too right wing to be president.

Update: Various sources including ABC News and National Review are saying that Christie will announce that he is not running.

David Letterman: Top Ten Ways The Country Would Be Different If Chris Christie Were President

David Letterman: Top Ten Ways The Country Would Be Different If Chris Christie Were President

10. Al-Qaida taunts America with ‘Your president’s so fat’ jokes
9. Goodbye White House vegetable garden
8. Cabinet will now have a Secretary of Cake
7. New state: Fatbuttachusetts
6. Congress does whatever he wants, because fat guys are, like, super-strong when they freak out
5. Presidential retreat moved from Camp David to Hershey Park
4. Taxpayers would have to pay for the president’s second seat on Air Force One
3. New national anthem: the ‘Chili’s baby back ribs’ song
2. Instead of Iraq, we’d invade IHOP
1. Scandal when president is caught in Oval Office with Betty Crocker and Sara Lee