Tuesday, July 08, 2014

THE GOP HAS AN INTELLECTUAL CENTER, AND THAT'S WHERE YOU'LL FIND SARAH PALIN

You probably already know that Breitbart has published Sarah Palin's call for the impeachment of President Obama. Let me just point out some of the wording of that impeachment call, right there in her second paragraph:
Without borders, there is no nation. Obama knows this. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate. This is his fundamental transformation of America.
Does the wording sound familiar? It should if you've been reading my blog regularly, because Palin is saying exactly what Wesley Pruden said in a Washington Times op-ed that was the lead item at Fox Nation for a while yesterday. I quoted that op-ed, the headline of which was:
An immigrant surge en route to a Third World USA

This is the 'fundamental transformation' Obama promised
Pruden wrote:
Mr. Obama promised in 2008 that he intended to transform America, and he is well on his way....

Making the United States over into a Third World country is exactly what this president is about. He is of the Third World. He spent his formative years in the Third World, and when his mother, obsessed with the Third World, brought him back to America, he sought out the company of those who dreamed of making America over into the world's largest welfare state, a France writ large....
Today, Palin writes:
Discrediting the price paid for America's exceptionalism over our history, he's given false hope and taxpayer's change to millions of foreign nationals who want to sneak into our country illegally. Because of Obama's purposeful dereliction of duty an untold number of illegal immigrants will kick off their shoes and come on in, competing against Americans for our jobs and limited public services.
Yesterday, in a post about the radical and insane platform of the Texas Republican Party, Charlie Pierce wrote:
This is the Republican Party. Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru are not.
I'd say the same thing about Sarah Palin, Wesley Pruden, and the guy their both cribbing from, Dinesh D'Souza: their crackpottery about Obama being a revenge-minded anti-colonialist deliberately flooding the U.S. with immigrants is the Republican Party; the reform-minded Deep Thinking of Levin and Ponnuru is not.

The intellectual center of the GOP is a body of conspiratorial superstition; it's a rancid stew of email forwards, right-wing media talking points, and elected officials' demagogic pronouncements. Sarah Palin is reading from canonical texts when she writes that Obama is destroying the country deliberately:
The federal government is trillions of dollars in debt, many cities are on the verge of insolvency, our overrun healthcare system, police forces, social services, schools, and our unsustainably generous welfare-state programs are stretched to the max. We average Americans know that. So why has this issue been allowed to be turned upside down with our "leader" creating such unsafe conditions while at the same time obstructing any economic recovery by creating more dependents than he allows producers?
That's right -- according to Palin, we haven't had a full economic recovery because Obama is "obstructing" a recovery intentionally; we've had an increase in people on public assistance not because CEOs aren't hiring, or because baby boomers are (predictably and inevitably) retiring in large numbers, but because Obama has a conscious strategy of "creating more dependents than he allows producers."

The GOP is a party of ideas -- and these are the ideas.

To quote Charlie Pierce again: "We allow ourselves only two major political parties. One of them is completely out of its fcking mind. This is a national problem."

11 comments:

Victor said...

The GOP is the party of DERP!

It is clinically fucking insane, and it IS the major problem in this country.

We are THIS close to an open Fascist Christian Theocracy!
Scary.

Anonymous said...

So why is Obama permitting (I use the word carefully) this influx of destitute South Americans?

Jest askin'!

David Duff

Steve M. said...

Um, for the same reason every other president in living memory has "permitted" an influx of undocumented immigrants? Because they didn't build a Berlin Wall on the Mexican border either?

Steve M. said...

Also: the current wave of kids can't be shipped back instantly because of a law backed by right-wing evangelicals and signed by Bush:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/us/immigrant-surge-rooted-in-law-to-curb-child-trafficking.html

J said...

Comment inspired by Victor's reference to a Christian Fascist Theocracy.

I sometimes wonder what's saving from a descent to something like Fascism. Our right wingers are vicious and hate-filled enough. And their commitment to unreason is equal to the double-think that would be needed for them to say both 'it's a liberal lie' and 'they deserved it anyway' were there gangs of SA-like vigilantes beating and killing 'undesirables', burning down the houses of black and Hispanic people and the like.

It certainly isn't because prominent figures in public life and leading lights of the establishment are taking a stand against them. There are exceptions of course, but 'the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity' seems about right.

Is it inertia? Are our democratic institutions functioning despite everything. If so how long will they continue to do so if they are under constant attack and no one can be bothered to defend them? Is it because the economy is still working well enough so that there isn't a giant mass of young men with nothing to do and no hope?

Cliven Bundy and his ilk might as well have held up signs saying 'don't worry about us, we're a bunch of useless wankers'? How long can we count on the right wingnuts to be such comically inept figures of fun?

Palli said...

if the median IQ is 80

gocart mozart said...

"last straw that makes the battered wife say, “no mas.”

I think what it means is that Sarah was making pancakes and she got some of the batter on herself hence “battered wife” and then Todd exclaims “OMG, we’re out of bendy straws!” which causes Sarah to respond in mournful sadness “No mas?” At least that’s my best guess.
http://gawker.com/5516572/sarah-palins-speaking-contract-bendy-straws-lear-jets-and-deluxe-hotels

Palli said...

The Median is the Message.

Glennis said...

So why is Obama permitting (I use the word carefully) this influx of destitute South Americans?

Jest askin'!


Because of a Bush administration-era immigration law.

They are in detention facilities awaiting processing.

I'm curious what you think should be the alternative. Shoot them?

Steve M. said...

Don't give them any ideas.

John Taylor said...

Hard to get the word intellectual and Sarah Palin in the same headline but you managed it.