The face of the Republican Party

Matt Taibbi wrote a great article for his Rolling Stone web log this week, picking apart a post-election broadcast by Rush Limbaugh line by line, and concluding that it is the attitude of people such as Limbaugh, rather than the actual Republican policies, that prevents the Republicans from enlarging their base of support among Hispanics, women and young people.

The fact that so many Republicans this week think that all Hispanics care about is amnesty, all women want is abortions (and lots of them) and all teenagers want is to sit on their couches and smoke tons of weed legally, that tells you everything you need to know about the hopeless, anachronistic cluelessness of the modern Republican Party.  A lot of these people, believe it or not, would respond positively, or at least with genuine curiosity, to the traditional conservative message of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility.

But modern Republicans will never be able to spread that message effectively, because they have so much of their own collective identity wrapped up in the belief that they’re surrounded by free-loading, job-averse parasites who not only want to smoke weed and have recreational abortions all day long, but want hardworking white Christians like them to pay the tab. 

Their whole belief system, which is really an endless effort at congratulating themselves for how hard they work compared to everyone else (by the way, the average “illegal,” as Rush calls them, does more real work in 24 hours than people like Rush and me do in a year), is inherently insulting to everyone outside the tent – and you can’t win votes when you’re calling people lazy, stoned moochers.

It’s hard to say whether it’s good or bad that the Rushes of the world are too clueless to realize that it’s their attitude, not their policies, that is screwing them most with minority voters.  If they were self-aware at all, Mitt Romney would probably be president right now.  So I guess we should be grateful that the light doesn’t look like it will ever go on. But wow, is their angst tough to listen to.

Click on Hey, Rush Limbaugh: ‘Starting an Abortion Industry’ Won’t Win You Female Voters for Matt Taibbi’s full essay.

The problem for the Republican leadership is that although Limbaugh is perceived as a spokesman for the Republican Party, the Republican leadership has no control over him.  The influence runs the other way.  Republican politicians don’t dare defy Limbaugh, even when they know he is harming their party.

It’s not just Limbaugh.  It’s the Fox News team, Glenn Beck and all of Limbaugh’s imitators on talk radio.  Or recall how Mitt Romney went to the NAACP convention and boasted about how he lectured the delegates on the superiority of hard work to food stamps.   NAACP delegates, as anyone familiar with that organization would know, are respectable, middle=class, achievement-oriented African Americans who need no lectures on the value of work from the likes of Mitt Romney.  He didn’t even try to win their support.  Rather he used the occasion to boast about how he doesn’t cater to black people.

So black people didn’t vote for him.  Big surprise.  Romney told a group of fund-raisers that he was handicapped because he wasn’t born Hispanic instead of a rich white guy.  So Hispanics didn’t vote for him.  Big surprise.  I’m not accusing either Limbaugh or Romney of being racist.  I’m accusing them of either not being intelligent enough to know the consequences of insulting large number of potential voters, or not being intelligent enough to know when they are being insulting.

Click on The GOP Must Choose: Rush Limbaugh or Minority Voters for Conor Friedersdorf’s thoughts in The Atlantic Monthly.

Rush Limbaugh defends traditional marriage

Hat tip for the link to Rod Dreher, a thoughtful Christian conservative who does not believe in gay marriage, but is embarrassed by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich setting themselves up as defenders of family values and traditional morality.

President Obama and the race card

President Obama at the Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Arcadia, Fla.

Ever since Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President, he has been accused on a fairly regular basis of “playing the race card.”  This is a great example of the principle of accusing your opponent of the very thing of which you are guilty.

It is Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Andrew Brietbart and the rest of the radical right, not President Obama, who are the ones who are trying to make every issue a racial issue.

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly said during the campaign that Obama was a threat to “the white power structure that you and I belong to.”  Rush Limbaugh said Obama’s election was a form of affirmative action. Glenn Beck has said repeatedly, based on nothing at all, that Obama is a “racist” who “has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”  His economic stimulus plan, his health reform plan and his other initiatives have been called a form of “reparations” or “affirmative action.”

Black kids and white kids get into a fight on a school bus, and Rush Limbaugh said this is “Obama’s America.”  After the Haitian earthquake, Limbaugh said the reason Obama ordered aid to the stricken population was to merely to boost his credibility with “the light-skinned and dark-skinned black community.” Glenn Beck said during the Gulf oil spill that the problem is that Obama “hates white CEOs.”  Limbaugh said Michelle Obama’s expensive vacation in Spain escapes criticism because of a feeling “it’s only fair that people of color get a taste of the wealth of America.”

The latest and most absurd attack on Obama, by Commentary magazine, is based on an interview he gave to the South African Broadcasting Corp. about al Qaeda in Africa, in which he said terrorist organizations “do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself.”  Supposedly this shows that Obama only cares about attacks on black people, not on white people.

In this game, President Obama has no race card to play.  Whenever there is a conflict with a black person on one side and a white person on the other, he tries to keep out of it, even if the black person is clearly in the right, or a valuable political ally.  His enemies chip away at him, week by week and month by month. If he were to argue back, it would just reinforce the meme of white vs. black.  It is a lose-lose situation.

Barack Obama is not the first President to be the target of unrelenting attack.  It is not as if the right-wing media treated Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore or John Kerry with kid gloves.  But the use of race as a wedge issue is more than a problem for President Obama, it is a problem for the country as a whole.  Framing every issue as a question of white against black is deeply divisive.  It puts at risk all the progress toward racial tolerance of the past 40 or 50 years.  Unless there is a push-back, the conflict could become violent, as in northern Ireland or the USA itself in earlier eras.

Obama, the Gulf oil spill and the lunatic fringe

President Obama’s response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the least you could expect under the circumstances. And he is under attack from the right wing even for that.

When the seriousness of the disaster became apparent, President Obama formed a task force of top administration officials, while the Secretaries of the Interior and of Homeland Security and then Obama himself flew to the scene. But they left the actual work of trying to cap the spill was left to BP.  President Obama scolded BP, the oil rig owner Transocean and the oil services company Halliburton, but he reaffirmed his policy of continuing offshore oil drilling.

He announced a temporary moratorium on new oil drilling, and since then there have been seven new drilling permits and five environmental waivers (no permits for new wells, however).  He announced he will appoint a special commission to investigate the causes of the disaster and make recommendations, and one of the first two appointees to the commission is the head of the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency.

From the standpoint of the shrimp fishermen and property-owners along the Gulf Coast, this must seem like thin soup. But it is too strong for Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican Senatorial candidate. He said it is “un-American” for Obama administration officials to speak so harshly of BP, a foreign-owned company formerly known as British Petroleum.

Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican objected to a proposal to increase the cap on oil company liability for such disasters from $75 million to $10 billion (that’s million and billion) because it would be too burdensome. BP’s profit was $26.5 billion in 2008 and $14 billion last year, so such liability would not put it out of business.

But all these folks seem positively reasonable compared to Rush Limbaugh, who speculated, on the basis of nothing at all, that supporters of President Obama may have sabotaged the oil well in order to advance some kind of environmentalist agenda.

We don’t yet know how bad the Gulf disaster will be.  Some scientists expect a long-term degradation of the Gulf fishery and environment, rather than spectacular pollution as in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster.

And we don’t whether better regulation could have averted the disaster. Maybe if we follow the best practices of the oil industry elsewhere, such as in the North Sea, we can guarantee it won’t happen again.  Maybe it is inherently impossible to drill for oil 5,000 feet beneath the ocean floor and do it safely. When you stop and think about it, it is amazing that it is possible at all.

The country wouldn’t suffer if we suspend drilling for now.  The Gulf provides a tiny fraction of our oil supply and provides a tiny fraction of our reserves.  If we ever really need it, it will be there. It won’t go away – except of the millions of gallons each day gushing out into the ocean from the failed Deepwater Horizon well.