A Wingnut Sunday: "their perfect world" Edition

This thread focuses on the wingnut alternate reality which, as the reality of their isolation becomes clear to all except them, becomes more and more delusional as they can't come to terms with the fact that the truths that are so self evident to them are self evidently false to a clear majority of Americans . Good times.

Benen: IN THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE...

It seems like the conservative media item of the day is a Pajamas Media piece from John Hawkins, perhaps best known as the blogger behind "Right Wing News." Hawkins' item is well worth reading, especially for those who don't usually read conservative blogs, because it helps capture the alternate universe that activists on the right seem to enjoy.

Too often today, liberals are using below-the-belt tactics against conservatives and paying no price whatsoever. Meanwhile, those on the right like to pat themselves on the back for being above it all. This is like a boxer priding himself on never taking off his gloves while his opponent nearly beats him to death with his bare firsts. But in the end, there's not much to be said for lovable losers. Conservatives should realize that fair play isn't going to pay any dividends.

While we conservatives don't have to stoop quite as low as the left has, we do need to start giving them a taste of their own medicine, if only to make them think twice about the way they're treating our side.

Just to be clear, Hawkins isn't kidding. This isn't satire. As he sees it, the left is ruthless, dishonest, and destructive, while the right tries to maintain a sense of classy detachment, disappointed by the cheap and vicious acts of unhinged liberals.

He even has some ideas about how the right can respond to the left's nastiness.

Why don't conservatives do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber? Have they ever been arrested? Whom do they own property with? Have they ever been paid to do a speech for someone and then run a favorable news story about him? Certainly Keith Olbermann's personal life is just as newsworthy as Joe the Plumber's, and the details of Maureen Dowd's life are just as noteworthy as those of Bristol Palin -- are they not?

Hawkins goes on to argue that conservative groups on college campuses should "shout down" liberal speakers; state lawmakers should refuse to fund universities that hire liberal faculty members; organizations that work with "poverty pimps like Al Sharpton" should be boycotted; and conservatives should file "obscenity complaints with the FCC" against MSNBC and CNN because of the use of the phrase, "Tea Baggers."

The piece also argues that George W. Bush tried to change the "tone" and Fox News "makes more of an effort to be balanced than any of the other networks and all the biggest newspapers in America." Conservatives, Hawkins added, "need to stop playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules," because Americans just aren't acknowledging that activists on the right are "actually nice guys."

Ron Chusid called this the "most delusional blog post ever." That's arguably true, though I do find pieces like this helpful, to the extent that they shed some perspective on how the right perceives the political world.

With that in mind, I wonder what weather is like in their reality.

• This mindset represents their perfect world where they are the permanent victim and everyone is against them. It provides them with the excuse for everything: they can't accomplish anything because evil liberals are out to foil them at every turn, and they can wallow in their self-pity.

  Posted by: Mustang Bobby on May 2, 2009 at 2:53 PM | PERMALINK

Sudbay: The "New" GOP: “people learn more from listening to Rush Limbaugh than they do in high school or college.”

Today was the first day for the new saviors of the GOP to show their stuff:

Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and rising star Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.) explained their vision for reviving the GOP to a mostly young crowd that packed into a pizza restaurant on Saturday morning.

The leaders said the purpose of the session was to find out first-hand the pressing concerns of voters around the country and to discover solutions that rely on free-market principles and individual responsibility.

But, the new GOP sounds a lot like the old GOP:

The leaders received positive feedback from the crowd, which included reporters, Republican aides and their friends, but not many new ideas.

On the subject of education, one attendee declared that “people learn more from listening to Rush Limbaugh than they do in high school or college.”

It always come back to Rush.

FRANK RICH:

BELIEVE it or not, there are Americans who have a “very negative” opinion of Barack Obama (13 percent, in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll). Some are even angry at him (10 percent, New York Times/CBS News). As the First 100 Days hoopla started to jump the shark last week, I tried, as an experiment in empathy, to see the world through their eyes.

It was difficult at first, but an interview with the official White House photographer, Pete Souza, on CNN, pushed me over the edge. Souza was showing all those beguiling behind-the-scenes pictures that, though government issued, were more or less passed off as journalism by virtually every news outlet in the land.

Inevitably we got to The Dog. “I want to show this picture because I find this to be a fascinating picture,” said the CNN anchor John King, who found almost every picture fascinating. “The president running down the hall with his new jogging partner there, Bo.” What, he asked Souza, is it like “to add this to the diversity of your work at the White House?”

I’ll leave the photographer’s answer to your imagination. But for a second, anyway, I could imagine what it’s like to be among the Limbaugh-Cheney deadenders who loathe Obama. Those who feel the whole world is against them. Those who think the press corps is in the tank. Those so sickened by the fawning that they’d throw a brick through the television screen if the Bush-Cheney economy had left them with enough money to buy a new set.

But only for a second. I confess to being among the 81 percent (per Wall Street Journal/NBC) who like the guy. And I share the belief of nearly two-thirds of the American people (per every poll) that he has made an impressive start. The new president is largely doing what he promised, and he is doing it with the focus, brainpower and preternaturally calm temperament that kept his campaign on track even as the political press dismissed him as a hope-mongering naif next to the supposedly far more organized and more moneyed Hillary.
...

Yglesias: Profiles in Courage

I continue to feel that the House GOP’s impressive level of partisan unity hasn’t been explored to the extent that it should. You often hear it explained with reference to the fact that most members have uncompetitive, very conservative districts. Which is true enough. But most is not all. Take Ken Calvert, Dan Lungren, and Brian Billbray in California, for example. These guys all represent districts that Barack Obama carried in 2008 and they themselves won 51 percent, 49 percent, and 51 percent of the vote respectively in fairly close 2008 House races.

These are not people who can count on the angry anti-Obama minority to win elections for them. And John Boehner has little in the way of favors to hand out, while Nancy Pelosi is in a position to give them something to take back to their district at home in exchange for acquiring a veneer of bipartisan cover. And yet not a one of them—nor even a single House Republicans nationwide—could be induced to vote for the Obama Recovery Act or the Obama budget plan. It’s impressive. My best guess is that the Club for Growth has really put the fear of God into everyone, but maybe there’s more to it.

C&L: Kay Bailey Hutchison: I think we would have to be ostriches with our heads in the sand if we weren't worried.

Heather Saturday May 02, 2009 5:30am

Rick Sanchez talks to Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison about what's happened to the Republican party and asks if she's worried after Arlen Specter's defection.

Hutchison: Of course we're worried. I think we would have to be ostriches with our heads in the sand if we weren't worried. We need to look at ourselves thoroughly inside out and anyone who is whistling past the graveyard saying "Oh, we need to do exactly what we're doing. We're right by god" is wrong.

I hate to break it to you Senator, but you're surrounded by a whole lot of ostriches right now. I guess we'll find out shortly if she ends up next on Boss Limbaugh's list for daring to say there might be anything wrong with the way the GOP is doing business these days.

Full transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

digby: Engineers Of The Train Wreck

Blogometer picked up this interesting tidbit from Red State that perfectly illustrates the right's problem:

Meanwhile, RedState's hogan wants Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to replace ex-Republican Arlen Specter (D-PA) as the Ranking Member on the Judiciary Cmte: "Jeff Sessions should be Republican Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee. Not [UT Sen.] Orrin Hatch. Not [IA Sen.] Chuck Grassley. [...] To have Orrin Hatch or Chuck Grassley at the helm would be an unmitigated disaster. Each are cut from the same cloth -- that of the old guard Republicans in the Senate who have given us the train wreck that the Party has become. They would hire terrible staffers who would neither be the smartest lawyers nor actually conservative -- and, potentially, maintain a significant number of Specter's former staff. Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, would field a talented team who could educate America on just who America is getting in the next Supreme Court justice."

Sessions is an ignorant ideologue who was denied a federal judgeship when it turned out he was a raging bigot:

Sessions entered national politics in the mid-'80s not as a politician but as a judicial nominee. Recommended by a fellow Republican from Alabama, then-Senator Jeremiah Denton, Sessions was Ronald Reagan's choice for the U.S. District Court in Alabama in the early spring of 1986. Reagan had gotten cocky by then, as more than 200 of his uberconservative judicial appointees had been rolled out across the country without serious opposition (this was pre-Robert Bork). That is, until the 39-year-old Sessions came up for review.

Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers--including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.--on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions's focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause célèbre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites, at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.

On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU ) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes "loose with [his] tongue." He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings

All of that's a GOP qualification for elected office in Alabama, so being rejected on that basis naturally vaulted him into the Senate. Making him the ranking member today means the Republicans will put their ugliest face forward during judicial confirmation hearings. But hey, it's their long, ongoing funeral.

The assertion that he's the guy with the smart staffers may very well be true. I don't know. But the idea that it's Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley who are to blame for the Party's fortunes, while confederate radicals like Sessions are the great hope for the future makes me laugh. And it's a perfect illustration of the GOP's problem. Hatch and Grassley are to the right of the vast majority of Americans at the moment but have longstanding mainstream conservo-cred. Sessions, on the other hand, is the very picture of the harsh, hard-right movement conservatism that the country has rejected. Bring him on.

These wingnuts truly seem to believe that the reason people voted for a left leaning Democratic government across the board was because they actually wanted a far right government. If that makes sense to you, then you must be a conservative too.

Think Progress: Steele: Americans don’t trust the GOP because we were ‘getting high’ ‘drinking that Potomac River water.’

Yesterday, RNC Chairman Michael Steele spoke to his party faithful in LaCrosse, WI. Steele tried to claim that moderates were welcome to his “big table” party, but said that in order to join him for dinner, they had to first silence their own opinions and agree with him and other far-right Republicans:

“All you moderates out there, y’all come. I mean, that’s the message,” Steele said at a news conference. “The message of this party is this is a big table for everyone to have a seat. I have a place setting with your name on the front.

“Understand that when you come into someone’s house, you’re not looking to change it. You come in because that’s the place you want to be.“

Steele also talked about why the GOP had fallen out of favor with the American public. It’s not that the country is “less conservative,” he said. “It’s that our credibility with them is shot. It’s that we left them along the side of the road on our way to drinking that Potomac River water, getting high on power and influence and forgetting how we got where we are.”

hilzoy: "He Used ... Sarcasm"

Erick Erickson informs us that "The Obama Thugocracy Has Arrived", and that Obama is "turning to the bully pulpit and the press to beat the hell out of dissenters."

"Beating the hell out of dissenters"? With the White House Press Corps? It all sounded very peculiar, so I clicked the link Erick provided, expecting an account of Obama sending Helen Thomas to a tea party with a truncheon. To my surprise, I found a story about a lawyer for the hedge funds who sent Chrysler into bankruptcy, claiming that Obama had threatened his clients with "the full force of the White House Press Corps". The White House denies the story. But suppose it's true: how does this amount to a "thugocracy", or to "beating the hell out of dissenters"? Luckily, Erick explains:

"Yes, yes, the White House denies the story. But while denying it, the White House was also proving the story true. Barack Obama took to the bully pulpit to heap scorn and derision on the the bankruptcy attorney’s hedge funds and money managers."

Ah. I see. He used scorn. He's a veritable Doug Piranha, that President of ours:

"Vercotti: Doug (takes a drink) Well, I was terrified. Everyone was terrified of Doug. I've seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.

2nd Interviewer: What did he do?

Vercotti: He used... sarcasm."

Though Obama added a twist that even Doug Piranha never thought of: not just scorn, but derision. Next time, he might go even further and add ambition, distraction, and uglification, or even -- I shudder to think of it -- fainting in coils.

I am a bit confused, though. Not by the fact that Erick, who just called a sitting Supreme Court Justice a "goat f*cking child molester", objects to "scorn and derision" -- we all have our moments of weakness. What puzzles me is how someone who thinks that waterboarding is fine and dandy can simultaneously believe that scorn and derision are just too much for the human heart to bear.

Thers' gets rude. LATE NIGHT: Wingnut Crap of the Week (Now with Wookie Nookie!)

From beauty pageants on the Death Star, to imaginary encounters in bookstores, to sober contemplation of the gravitas of Sarah Palin, Philosopher-Queen of the Arctic, our conservative friends have been full of piss and vinegar this past week, most of which they ingested nasally.

ONE. The Gay Patriot West believes that the Left has been very, very mean to Carrie Prejean, winner of the Miss Wingnut USA Pageant and champion of Opposite Marriage, who has done more to make mainstream bigotry look winsomely brainless than even Ramesh Ponnuru. But did you know Miss California is also a gristly Jedi Knight? TRUE FACT!

Instead of mocking Miss Prejean, the [Left?] would do well to consider the wisdom of a titan of another sort: "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." The more they attempt to strike her down, the stronger she becomes. And the more popular she becomes among her suporters and Americans increasingly irritated by the crowd continually eager to find someone to belittle and to blame.

Well, sure. Until she gets caught fucking a Wookie.

TWO. A Red State monkey informs us that Sarah Palin is too politically viable for 2012, stampy feet temper tantrum, because, uh, she's the alltime champeen winner of the Miss Wingnut USA Pageant.

There are those who wish to bury Sarah Palin, not praise her. Leftist Democrats, their drive-by media assassins and Republican backers of some of her potential opponents for leadership in the Republican Party have been pushing the meme that the former vice presidential candidate no longer has a future in national politics. They want to convince others that the governor’s political career has been ruined by the recent tug of war she has been engaged in with the Alaska legislature and the noisemaker tabloid media’s exploitation of some problems in her family and would-be in-laws.

The notion that the Left is trying to "bury" Sarah Palin is hilarious; please please more Sarah Palin, front and center, wingnuts! Heh, Sarah Palin. If she got caught fucking a Wookie it would frankly only burnish her policy credentials. The Wookie's political career, of course, would be blown up like Alderaan.

THREE. Red State's resident sexually obsessed primate Warner Todd Huston, whom no self-respecting Wookie would ever admit to wanting to fuck (too hairy and inarticulate), presents us with a hallucination he apparently experienced in a bookstore because he can't handle the decaf latte. We are supposed to believe that WTF, oops WTH, believes he overheard two Stereotypical Liberals conversing, and from this he is right to draw some Profound Conclusions about The Left, none of which need detain us, except for this bit about how The Left does not Love America Properly:

On reflection, I found ponytail to be perfectly emblematic of an American liberal. Not just with his relationship with his wife, but with his relationship to his country. Ponytail couldn’t stand that whole “America thing” that his wife seemed to love. Ponytail wanted it to go away to be replaced by his vague idea of what he thought is the proper America. It was obviously one that didn’t include the flag, patriotism, or Fox News. It didn’t include any thoughts about American tradition, history or a respect for our troops. That all seemed gauche to ponytail.

"The flag, patriotism, or Fox News." Brilliant. No wonder Chewbacca won't fuck him.