Rush Limbaugh tells us that True Americans are being betrayed, and not just by the usual Antichrists:
Right talk radio is turning its focus this week to Arizona's controversial bill that would allow business owners to deny service to gay and lesbian customers, and Rush Limbaugh is leading with the charge that Gov. Jan Brewer is being "bullied" into vetoing the measure "in order to advance the gay agenda." ...(Emphasis added.)
"She's being bullied by the homosexual lobby in Arizona and elsewhere," he said. "She's being bullied by the nationwide drive-by media, she's being bullied by certain elements of corporate America in order to advance the gay agenda...."
Certain elements of corporate America? Actually, quite a few. Companies urging a veto of the bill include Apple, Intel, AT&T, Delta Air Lines, Yelp, PetSmart, American Airlines, and Marriott, not to mention Limbaugh's beloved NFL.
Remember how we used to be told years ago that the tea party movement was angry at big business as well as big government? Remember how, more recently, there's been a lot of discussion of the Chamber of Commerce's war against absolutist tea party types who are happy to shut down the government and cause government credit defaults in order to get their own way on taxes and spending?
Shouldn't this battle really be heating up now? After all, we know that there's really no point at which the tea party ends and the religious right begins. It's basically the same movement.
Where's the tea party/social conservative outrage against big business? Where are the boycotts? The threats to withdraw from the mega-economy and spend only on goods and services provided by small business people and family farmers?
I'm kidding, of course. Nothing like that is ever going to happen, any more than a wide-scale tea party/religious right rejection of the Republican Party is going to happen. It's not going to happen as a result of the Arizona situation, even though, as Politico notes, the GOP establishment wants the Arizona bill to die a quiet death:
As Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer weighs whether to sign a bill that would allow businesses to deny services to gay customers, top national Republicans just want the issue to go away.So the party will pressure Brewer to veto the bill, she'll probably veto it -- and social conservatives will still vote GOP in November. Where are they going to go? You've heard about a lot of right-wing insurgents running for established Republicans' seats this year, but how many of those insurgents are running third-party? There's no sign that any of the crazies are moving in that direction. So there'll be primaries, and establishment Republicans will win most of them and insurgents will win a few, and then these fiercely independent voters, many of whom claim to loathe the GOP, will dutifully vote for whoever's in the R column. Because that's what they are, first, last, and always: Republicans.
... many Washington Republicans see it as a political loser, giving the left another cudgel to attack conservatives as intolerant while motivating liberals and younger voters ahead of the midterm elections....
7 comments:
It don't matter what brand the lipstick is named, it's still being applied to the lips of the same hate-and-fear-filled pig.
There are crack ups and crack ups. The tea party will never turn against its corporate masters, but it might stop doing voter turn out if it dosn't get fed its hot mash of gay baiting/anti immigrant/anti black legislation. That's the only problem. The point of the tea party, from the viewpoint of corporate america, was that it was the outreach and mobilization arm of their extremely unpopular and unpopulist economic programs. It was too successful in that it let a large number of complete kooks into the congress--people who couldn't be fully controlled by the older guys who like to just to business like Boehner.
At the state level there absolutely is a war going on between people who like to do business and people who like to tear down the house. The end result is going to be the tea party voting base taking their ball and going home, or going to even more extremist and fringe candidates,w hile the republican party and its owners try to play clean up and get in some people who are not completely crazy.
The tea party won't turn against the top level in any obvious way because their entire focus is on the middlemen as traitors. Its like Corporations are not really visible to them except as icons of liberalism or icons of republicanism and for that they rely much more on media interlocutors and their daily news intake. If Fox news wants to whip them up against X corporation they can, easily, not qua corporation but qua the owner (Soros, some named person). Or in the case of the anti vaxxers they can easily believe any evil of "big pharma" but htat is collapsed into their anti government hate.
Rush would know from bullying, that's for sure.
What aimai said!
Brilliant!
I think this is apropos (from politico via someone but I already can't remember who)
The House Republican leadership has not yet weighed in on the details of this plan. This is not a fight they are relishing in the middle of an election year. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) all raise piles of money from Wall Street and their reaction will be watched closely by industry insiders.
“Tax reform is hard,” one House Republican aide said. “This is why nobody likes to put these specifics on a piece of paper — you have to [screw] somebody. There’s a magical belief among some of our members that you can lower the rate to 25 percent by just eliminating unpopular deductions. The math doesn’t work. You have to end up [screwing] somebody.”
Consider that this "war for religious liberty" is being fought primarily in the South and the heavily Protestant West.
Consider that if these people are allowed to discriminate against gays on religious grounds it won't be long before somebody reminds us that for at least some brands of American Christians discrimination against non-whites would also be a free exercise issue.
If they can refuse to provide services to same sex couples they can refuse to provide services to couples of mixed race.
You think nobody today would insist that miscegenation violates God's law?
Even the Supremes should be smart enough to see the connection, and unwilling to allow racial discrimination.
Don't expect the federal courts to let this kind of nonsense stand, even if Brewer signs the bill.
Wll, thats the whole point of the bill, of course, to be a provocation and a thumb in the eye of the federal state and of the national state--that is: another way of reminding certain voters that "local" feelings and standards are not being respected.
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