From The Daily Beast -- March 4, 2010
Playing The Fear Card
By Eric Alterman:
A Republican National Committee memo demonizes Obama and promises to save us from Socialism. Eric Alterman on the GOP’s breathtaking contempt for their own—and how the Dems should respond. Plus, Conor Friedersdorf on the RNC's self-inflicted wound.
Well, this is something. Just when you thought politics could not possibly get any more cynical than phony accusations of “Death Panels” and “Tea Party” conventions that rip off crazy people with the promise of revolution, we discover that the Republican National Committee thinks its funders are so stupid that they can soak them the basis of “Fear,” “Socialism,” and "Tchotchkes".
No, really. According to a document uncovered by Politico, RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart gave a presentation at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida, on February 18 in which he explained how “ego-driven” Republican donors could be bilked by a campaign of fear and the promise that only the Republicans could "save the country from trending toward socialism."
Ironically, this memo might present Democrats with just the kick in the ass they so desperately need. This is the party demanding compromise and bipartisanship?
The document is breathtaking in the contempt demonstrated for Republican supporters, expecting them to insist that a president who, on the one hand, is accused by his own supporters as being overly cozy with Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry—to say nothing of his hawkish foreign policy—while he's also dubbed the second coming of Joe Stalin. "What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate...?" the memo asks. The answer is apparently a series of cartoons in which Obama is portrayed variously as The Joker, and “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid are depicted as Cruella DeVille and Scooby Doo, respectively.”
Conor Friedersdorf: The RNC’s Self-Inflicted Wound The document, which stretches on for 72 pages, has been both defended and disowned by RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s staff. This is understandable. On the one hand, it’s bad form for a party to admit that the only way to excite its base is to treat them as, er, mentally challenged. On the other hand, the guys who came up with it are themselves big-money guys and so were all the people present for the horror show they presented. (The document was apparently leaked by someone who found a stray copy lying around the Gasparilla Inn & Club, the hotel hosting the $2,500-a-head retreat.)
In many ways, the document is a parody of what liberals think conservatives are actually like.
The small-donor schmucks—the ones who give of their tiny incomes so that fat cats might enjoy even more tax breaks—are to be shaken down on the basis of their stupidity. Under the heading “Visceral Giving,” the rich Republican folk seeking to bilk them describe their rationales for giving as “fear” (of a black planet?) based on “extreme” feelings and a “reactionary” outlook. The commies at The Nation could not have put it any better themselves. Meanwhile, the fat-cat donors are credited with more “Calculated Giving.” They don’t trumpet the scare tactics: Rather, they need to have their egos stroked with “Peer to Peer Pressure” and “access.” Both, presumably, get their tctotchkes, though one imagines they get more tasteful—or less scary—as one moves up the money ladder. (An aside: The party also appears to be selling meetings with Washington Post—and ex-New York Times columnist—William Kristol. I know that op-ed page is a mess, but can that really be kosher with Post policies?).
The document raises a number of issues with regard to the media coverage Republicans have been earning of late. For instance, while Politico’s Ben Smith deserves kudos for breaking the story, what the hell are we to make of this piece that ran just last week by Kenneth Vogel in the same publication, as well as this one in the Los Angeles Times? Both take the tack—based on the skimpiest of evidence that moderates are actually in the process of taking the Republican Party back from the people building bunkers and demanding birth certificates. "I'm very optimistic the elections this year are going to bring back a resurgence of the center,” says Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, duly and respectfully reported by the L.A. Times’ Janet Hook. Sure it “seems paradoxical” to Hook, because absolutely everything the Republicans have said and done since losing the 2008 election belies this, but what the hell? And Tom Tancredo’s shockingly racist Tea Party speech calling for literacy tests and condemning the election of "Barack Hussein Obama” was not, according to Vogel, “widely condemned by conservative intellectuals or media,” but why allow so wonderfully contrarian a trend to be weighed down by a lack of evidence?
In a nod to the need for mindless objectivity, Smith asserts in his story on the memo that “Democrats raised millions off George W. Bush in similar terms” to those presented by the Republican memo, but presents not a shred of evidence for it. Here again, he would be hard-pressed to do so. But the reality of this revelation is so far beyond any precedent for official party fundraising practices before it, even the reporter who unearths it feels a need to minimize just how far beyond the political pale it reaches.
Ironically, this memo might present Democrats with just the kick in the ass they so desperately need. This is the party demanding compromise and bipartisanship? These are the votes they’re chasing? Perhaps instead, they’d decide it’s time to fight fire with fire.
And, all of this happened in Boca Grande. Welcome Home to Florida, GOP, the scene of your greatest upset victory -- ten years ago.
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4 comments:
An article to devour.
Did everyone hear about the latest CON news?
How to get donations going, one for the poor CONS, one for the RICH CONS.
I said in a previous post that the CONS are dogs because they have the intelligence of a 2 year old.
The media calls their proposed actions "juvenile" roflmao
I realize that you were trying to make a point, but is that it? You are saying that conservatives are dogs? Equal to dogs? Stupid?
I must be great to be you.
The link below will suit nicely here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/the-tea-party-is-all-abou_b_484229.html
"The Tea Party Is All About Race
I was going to open this piece with an analogy about the tea party groups and why they're treated seriously by the press and the Republicans. The analogy would go something like: "Imagine [insert left-wing activist group here] getting a serious profile in a mainstream newspaper, and imagine serious Democratic politicians appearing at their convention."
The problem is, when I really evaluated what the various far-left activist groups are all about and compared them with the tea party movement, there really wasn't any equivalency. At all.
Because when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that's left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there's no comparative group on the left that's similarly motivated by bigotry, ignorance and racial hatred.
I hasten to note that I'm talking about real racism, insofar as it's impossible for the majority race -- the 70 percent white majority -- to be on the receiving end of racism. That is unless white males, for example, are suddenly an oppressed racial demographic. But judging by the racial composition of, say, the Senate or AM talk radio or the cast members playing the Obamas on SNL, I don't think white people have anything to worry about.
This isn't an epiphany by any stretch. From the beginning, with their witch doctor imagery, watermelon agitprop and Curious George effigies, the wingnut right has been dying to blurt out, as Lee Atwater famously said, "nigger, nigger, nigger!"
But they can't.
Strike that. Correction. TeaParty.org founder Dale Robertson brandished a sign with the (misspelled) word "niggar." So they're not even as restrained as the generally unstrung Atwater anymore.
Most of the time, they merely imply the use of the word. Rush Limbaugh referring to the president as a "black man-child," for example. Every week, a new example pops up on the radio and somehow the offenders are able to keep their job while Howard Stern is fined for saying the comparatively innocuous word "blumpkin." Limbaugh, on the other hand, can stoke racial animosity on his show by suggesting that health care reform is a civil rights bill -- reparations -- and no one seems to mind. And no, the impotence isn't an adequate Karmic punishment for Limbaugh's roster of trespasses.
The tea party is an extension of talk radio. It's an extension of Fox News Channel. It's an extension of the southern faction of the Republican Party -- the faction that gave us the Southern Strategy, the Willie Horton ad, the White Hands ad and the racially divisive politics of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It's an extension of the race-baiting and, often, the outright racism evident in all of those conservative spheres.
But unlike the heavy-handedness of Dale Robertson and others, the tea party followers are generally more veiled about why they're so outraged by our current president.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrea-chalupa/hate-groups-on-the-rise_b_487466.html
Worth reading in it's entirety.
Excerpt:
"Hate groups on the rise - it's only the economy, stupids"
"The economy is driving people crazy, literally when it comes to the growing number of hate groups in this country. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights organization that monitors the activities of such groups, reports that the worsening recession, soaring public debt, bailouts for bankers, and misinformation -- death panels, really? -- over President Obama's attempts at health care reform are fueling the radicalism. Good thing South Carolina charges only $5 for these subversive groups to register!
"Already there are signs of ... violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, rightwing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers," says the report, according to the leftish English newspaper, the Guardian. "Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton, Massachusetts – who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites – is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases."
The SPLC says it hasn't seen this level of activity since the 1990s, when the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 left 168 dead, including 19 children.
Last month, Joseph Stack, the pilot who flew his plane into the Internal Revenue Service office in Austin, Texas, posted this message online hours before killing himself and injuring dozens: "Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer."
Familiar names on the right: Fox News, Fox's Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann are blamed for encouraging this sentiment. The conservative meeting CPAC counted the extreme John Birch Society, which believes that President Eisenhower was a communist, as a sponsor. Some militias are printing their own money.
The SPLC report also says that anti-immigration vigilante groups are up 80%, growing by 136 new groups in 2009, begging the question -- why can't y'all take up yoga instead of trying to hurt people?"
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