Rick Santorum finally says something that is true


Give him credit, everyone: he actually gets it right. At the Values Voter Summit, he declares 'We will never have the elite, smart people on our side…our colleges and universities, they won’t be on our side'.

He claims that instead of intelligence and education being allies of the conservative movement, there are only two things that count: church and family. He can keep his church, but he doesn’t get to claim sole ownership of family. Family is whatever human beings bring to it; family evolves; what I consider family, Rick Santorum and his cranky cronies disparage and reject and deny. Family is greater and broader than the narrow, bigoted, and patriarchal version that he wants to promote.

And my ideal of family is not incompatible with intelligence and knowledge and expertise. My families can grow cooperatively and with love and affection while embracing the entirety of human knowledge, seeking more, and adapting to the truth rather than dogma.

My families can go to colleges and universities and come away richer and wiser. At least, those who can afford it…and I want to make that education reachable by more people, unlike Santorum, who wants to limit it and despise it because it undermines his ideology of ignorance.

Comments

  1. Christoph Burschka says

    We will never have … smart people on our side

    Now that’s what the people on your side like to hear, Mr. Froth. :)

  2. raven says

    ‘We will never have the elite, smart people on our side…our colleges and universities, they won’t be on our side’.

    This is the guy who has three degrees from good public universities. One of which is a law degree.

    Which he uses along with his repulsive dark ages mentality to make 3 million dollars per year.

    A typical example of hypocrisy and demogoguery in the pursuit of “god’s will”, in this case more money and attention for Satanorum.

  3. JohnnieCanuck says

    “We will never have the media on our side.”

    If only that weren’t another lie. Mainstream media don’t dare offend people who wrap themselves in ‘Church and Family Values’. None of them will highlight his arrogant ignorance. None of them will ask why leaders must be or pretend to be less than the best they could be. They want the best mechanic for their cars but not the best and brightest in Congress and the Senate?

    Stupid is as stupid does.

  4. raven says

    …and to think ole brown & foamy actually got elected. Pitiful.

    He did lose his second reelection campaign by a large margin.

    I can’t quite remember what the issues were. IIRC, he had set up an office and was selling favors, influence, and laws to lobbyists for money.

    This is exactly what he is doing now but he’s added fundie xian morons to his list of clients.

  5. Sven says

    Church, and the right-wing definition of “family”.

    In other words, superstition and bigotry are what the conservative movement is all about.

    Rick, you’ve summed it up perfectly.

  6. Socio-gen, something something... says

    raven: Mostly, it was not actually stepping foot in his district more than a couple times a year and that the commonwealth of PA (and thus the taxpayers) were paying for his kids’ cyber-schooling while they and their parents were actually residing full-time in Virginia, not in PA.

  7. says

    Some part of me wants to run the experiment; separate liberals and conservatives into two isolated societies and see which one survives longer.

  8. Randomfactor says

    I can’t quite remember what the issues were.

    Among other things, he was only pretending to live in the district he “represented,” and defrauding the local school district in doing so.

  9. says

    Political history buffs may recall a pertinent quip from Adlai Stevenson, when he was running for president back in the fifties. At a campaign stop, a supporter yelled out, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” Stevenson replied, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.

    Fortunately, the likes of Rick Santorum and his armies of the night do not command a majority either. They have the advantage of espousing good old American values (God, family, motherhood, patriotism, blah, blah, blah) that virtually the entire society pays lips service to, but their narrow definitions of those values have frustrated their efforts to turn the U.S. toward Christian fascism. And smart, educated people keep fighting them at every turn.

  10. hypatiasdaughter says

    #5 raven
    Ah, but it is perfectly O.K. for the “leaders” to be educated. But not the followers. They might ask too many questions that the leaders don’t want to answer. Think of it in terms of sheep and shepherd.

  11. Lithified Detritus says

    Yet another irony meter went up in flames when he said the part that PZ left out – “…because they believe that they should have the power to tell us what to do.”

    Wow. I guess it’s OK, though, for the non-elite, non-smart people to tell the rest of us what to do.

  12. says

    @LykeX:

    Don’t say ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ – those words have ill-defined meanings. I suspect that what you mean is ‘non-authoritarians’ and ‘authoritarians’.

    In that case, you want what Robert Altemeyer did, to the extent that the Global Change Game is a representative simulation of reality. You can read about his results in Chapters 1 and 5 of his book, “The Authoritarians”, available free here: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ .

  13. billgascoyne says

    How sad that there exists in this country a large audience before which he can say that with a straight face and receive applause.

  14. DLC says

    Santorum loves to bill himself as “just regular folks”, when in fact he is anything but. A lawyer who graduated from a large university himself, he pulls in millions per year. A christian dominionist who got creationist language into the (already questionable) No Child Left Behind act, Santorum deserves contempt. No, Mr Santorum, you will only have bizarre right-wing diploma mills behind you, as any sensible university has long since seen you for what you are.

  15. What a Maroon, el papa ateo says

    Rick Santorum’s history for stupid people: Christ lived 2000 years ago in a world where life expectancy was 35 years and everyone lived on a farm, and he did nothing to change that. In fact, nothing changed for almost 1800 years until the American revolution, when we set up the perfect form of government and started capitalism and had an industrial revolution. And now we live longer and don’t have to work on farms, and parts of the rest of the world copied our system (though they didn’t do it as well as us, of course). But then Obama came along, and he passed Obamacare and told those poor, dirty welfare people that they didn’t have to work and appeased our enemies in the Middle East and was rude to our friends and now no one respects us and it’s all going to shit unless we elect Romney/Ryan.

    (Source)

  16. says

    I’m cross posting some comments I added earlier to the [Lounge] thread. Apologies to those who have already seen these Values Voter Summit comments.

    More news from the Values Voter Summit, (you know this is going to be bad), this time from Gary Bauer:

    Conservative pundit Gary Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council, which puts on the Values Voter Summit each year, told the crowd at the 2012 conference Friday that it needs to turn out in great numbers to defeat President Obama’s army of welfare recipients and fraudulent votes.

    After his speech, Bauer told TPM “voter fraud is rampant in urban areas” and he expected that to help Obama.

    Bauer also told TPM that “there are a lot of people who will vote this November because they depend on government largesse,” meaning checks from Washington. He expects those voters to go Obama as well.

    http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/gary-bauer-voter-fraud-welfare-recipients.php?ref=fpb

    Nope. Nobody has found rampant voter fraud anywhere in the USA. But the right is using the fake issue of voter fraud to pass laws that restrict voting rights, laws that disproportionately affect those likely to vote for Obama.

    As for the dog whistle about all those urban folks sucking down welfare dollars, I’m too fed up to even comment.

  17. says

    More news from the Values Voter Summit:

    “You know, we had a lot of bad news this week,” DeMint said. “On my way over, I was reading another story about a distant place where thugs had put 400,000 children out in the streets. And then I realized that was a story of the Chicago teachers strike. But we’ve got to think of good things.” –Senator Jim DeMint, Republican dimwit

  18. says

    More news from the Values Voter Summit:’
    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#49041111

    The segment begins with the caskets of US diplomats killed in Libyan coming home, with the return ceremony featured. This is followed by a summary of protests around the world, with video and excellent on-the-ground reporting.

    Connecting these demonstrations to whackadoodle right-wing statements and videos on the web, Maddow makes the point that it was right-wingers claiming that Hillary Clinton was responsible for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood that prompted folks throwing rotten tomatoes at her motorcade earlier this year in Egypt. “Clinton is the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood.” (See Jerry Boykin’s wingnut blog, which was believed by people in Egypt.)

    “Where do these conspiracy theories come from?”

    At about 10:00 the segment switches to the Values Voter Summit, to Paul Ryan’s speech, and to excerpts from other speakers, including Boykin, and Frank Gaffney (“The Muslim Brotherhood: the enemy within”).

    Kamal Saleem spoke at the Values Voter Summit after Paul Ryan. “How do you change a terrorist? Introduce him to Jesus!” This is the guy who claims that President Obama is secretly praying Islamist prayers when it looks like he is saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Other Saleem pronuncements:
    President Obama is legalizing terrorism in America
    If the US passes immigration reform, “we’ll be wearing rag heads”
    Roe vs Wade is how the US is being taken over by Sharia law

    And this is the group that loves Paul Ryan, and where Ryan chose to speak.

    Michelle Bachmann also spoke at the Values Voter Summit. She spent a lot of time connecting President Obama to the Muslim Brotherhood. I won’t repeat the several pages of that crap. She concluded the Obama-is-in-league-with-terrorists section of her speech with:

    And as President Obama needs to get his priorities straight, what he needs to do is cancels (sic) his interview with David Letterman – (cheers, applause) – cancel his meeting with Beyonce – (cheers, applause) – cancel his meeting with Jay-Z and instead agree to meet with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu – (cheers, applause) – because, you see, America and Israel have a commonality of interests.

    I’ve heard a lot of this meme on Fox News lately, that Obama is playing with celebs instead of doing his job. Bachmann used her position on the Intelligence Committee to back up her story of “appeasement” from the Obama administration.

    Bachmann transcript here: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81225.html

    So let me get this straight. Obama is secretly in league with the Muslim Brotherhood, as is Hillary Clinton, but at the same time, the US government is backing videos with appalling production values in order to insult Muslims.

    I think we may need Rush Limbaugh to explain this one to us. After all, he’s the guy who came up with the theory that Muslims more or less handed Osama Bin Laden over to Obama in order to make Obama look good, and thus to hasten the Muslim takeover of the US government

  19. says

    More news from the Values Voter Summit:
    http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/paul-ryan-featured-alongside-former-terrorist

    … Saleem is clearly useful to their anti-Muslim efforts. He is willing to say pretty much anything to confirm the darkest, most paranoid suspicions of his audiences, e.g.:
    Kamal Saleem Says U.S. Generals Pledged to ‘Destroy the United States’
    Obama Will ‘Legalize Terrorism’
    Kamal Saleem Suggests Obama is a Muslim, Imposing Islamic ‘Fascist Religion’

    I, for one, welcome an investigation by the proper authorities to ensure Paul Ryan’s safety and prevent Michele Bachmann from accidentally palling around with a terrorist. …

  20. says

    In addition to the self-described ex-terrorist at the Values Voter Summit, the following luminaries were in attendance:

    The Republican presidential nominee (via a pre-taped message)
    The Republican vice presidential nominee
    Two sitting Republican governors
    Two sitting Republican U.S. senators
    Six sitting Republican U.S. House members, including the House Majority Leader

    Good. Those Republicans in attendance will protect us from the nefarious plot to introduce Sharia law via the foot-in-the-door of Roe vs. Wade. Link to article giving details of the nefarious plot.

    Now I know why we really must repeal Roe vs. Wade. /sarcasm

  21. Ichthyic says

    Some part of me wants to run the experiment; separate liberals and conservatives into two isolated societies and see which one survives longer.

    there is considerable evidence that authoritarianism has significant selective benefits when group cohesiveness is favored.

    you might not get the results you expect.

    that hardly is a judgement on any other metric though, for example which society would be judged to have higher quality of life for each member.

    I’m just saying it’s actually quite complicated.

  22. Ichthyic says

    I think we may need Rush Limbaugh to explain this one to us. After all, he’s the guy who came up with the theory that Muslims more or less handed Osama Bin Laden over to Obama in order to make Obama look good, and thus to hasten the Muslim takeover of the US government

    I don’t have enough painkillers to mitigate the damage that caused my brain.

  23. says

    More news from the Values Voter Summit:

    “Let us not mistake: The fight for religious freedom starts here at home, because we are one nation under God,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Friday. “This is despite what that other party has put in their platform.”

    “Above all, we must preserve the American spirit of ‘one nation under God.’ As president, I’ll support the expression of religious faith in the public square,” he [Mitt Romney via video] said. “Our government should respect our values, not seek to silence them.”

    …This election is going to determine whether or not the very moral fabric of our country will be upheld or whether it will be torn apart. …

    We are about life. We are about respect for life, for human existence. And that is one of the first votes that we took when we assumed majority in 2010, with your help, was a bill to stand up against any government taxpayer dollars being ever used to kill innocent life. (Cheers, applause.)

    It was important for us in reflecting that very moral fabric of who we are as a people, who we are as a majority, to stand up, stand tall as a strong pro-life majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. (Applause.) What we need is your help because we need a president, we need a Senate who will stand up with us in defense of life forever. (Cheers, applause.) [excerpt from Eric Cantor’s speech]

    Transcript of Cantor’s speech: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81231.html

  24. Ichthyic says

    ah yes, the republican war on words.

    where “seeking to silence” in reality means: “not echoing exactly”

  25. otrame says

    Wait, Ichthyic, you mean a healthy society has a balance of many personality types in a social framework that allows maximum personal freedom, making use of the positive aspects of each type, while discouraging behaviors that are harmful to individual and/or society?

    That’s so crazy it just might work!

    Or to paraphrase Vetinari: “Everyone pulling together? I hope not. That just leads to tyranny. Free people pulling in all different directions is the only way to make progress.”

  26. says

    What santorum has to say isn’t true at all. Its only meant to deter regular people from investigating academic topics, or to endear an already anti-intellectual population to their cause. George W Bush pretended to be something other than ivy league educated too, it made him popular but it didn’t actually make him uneducated or stupid. The idea is to appear common. Shunning higher education would mean completely rejecting things that have proven advantageous to their party.

    Higher education provides all kinds of people to serve right wing institutions- high powered lawyers, business executives, social scientists, engineers, historians, political science analysts, etc. Many specific things in the bush administration come to mind- the way that military technology was presented to the public as universally good, the way that lawyers helped the administration torture other people, the way that big businesses profited from the war, the way that the PR industry exploited 9/11 to make people compliant with war and rights violations, etc. I’m sure there are things I am forgetting. The people responsible didn’t form in a vacuum- they are absolutely products of the system they came from.

    Noam Chomsky has written extensively about how the intellectual class of the US is used to serve powerful institutions all the time. They have plenty of the educated class on their side, and there are plenty of consequences for people who veer too far from the party line in specific parts of the higher education system.

    http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19670223.htm

  27. Ichthyic says

    That’s so crazy it just might work!

    given the history, sadly, one might actually conclude it IS crazy to think it works.

    inevitably, history shows that even in mixed cultures, authoritarians typically eventually become empowered and significantly contribute to the destruction of that society.

    I think, really, that the only way to avoid that is both to acknowledge that authoritarian personality traits are a real thing, that they can lead to dangerous outcomes, but that they also are not something that can simply be “removed”. Where authoritarian personalities have ended up being destructive, it is always the case they have been empowered to do so, usually by others who see that they can be manipulated as a group to further their personal gain (power, money, or both).

    there has been a deliberate effort to empower and extremeize authoritarian personalities in the States for the last 40 years (same thing that happened with the “Islamic Revolution” in the Middle East, for that matter). History, as mentioned, has shown us this never ends well (as in, you typically end up with destroyed societies and/or wars). The only question now is whether the tipping point has been reached, or whether there is still time to reverse the process and re-integrate.

    I think it’s too late. I hope I’m wrong. I see those whose plan was to utilize authoritarians for personal gain to be working feverishly to gather their profits as quickly as possible. Tells me that they themselves don’t think there is much time left.

  28. says

    Lynna #21

    More news from the Values Voter Summit:

    “You know, we had a lot of bad news this week,” DeMint said. “On my way over, I was reading another story about a distant place where thugs had put 400,000 children out in the streets. And then I realized that was a story of the Chicago teachers strike. But we’ve got to think of good things.” –Senator Jim DeMint, Republican dimwit

    I can’t even. There are literally no words for how angry I am right now.

  29. thecalmone says

    Beautifully composed piece, PZ; sounds almost like a speech. Ever considered standing for public office?

  30. naturalcynic says

    Some part of me wants to run the experiment; separate liberals and conservatives into two isolated societies and see which one survives longer.

    At a first approximation, this looks like an experiment that compares r/K reproductive strategies. The r conservatives would be led by the quiverfull strategy with an increasingly crowded consumtion society at the expense of its environment. The K liberals would restrict reproduction to a sustainable level and try to keep a more sustainable level. Just how does one expect the r’s to keep looking with envy on the K society?

  31. says

    Just how does one expect the r’s to keep looking with envy on the K society?

    if you’re trying to study the internal dynamics, you’d really have to take the “isolated” part of the experimental setup seriously. like, two different earth-like planets, with no space-flight between (or, more lo-tech, two continents with no possibility of ocean-travel)

  32. Subtract Hominem says

    From Lynna’s VVS summary @28

    And that is one of the first votes that we took when we assumed majority in 2010, with your help, was a bill to stand up against any government taxpayer dollars being ever used to kill innocent life.

    They wrote a bill to defund and disband the military, DOD and CIA?

  33. demonhype says

    Lynna, OM @ 20:

    You’re forgetting the Republican conservative doublespeak. By “fraudulent” votes, they mean “not Republican” votes. By their standards, all votes for any Democrat are fraudulent and need to be purged from the ballot box. The only fair election is one where a Republican wins, and if the Democrat wins that is a dead giveaway of voter fraud!

    How does it work? Here’s how!

    You see, there’s Real America where all the lily-white, straight, male militaristic gun-totin’ authoritarian Christians and their non-penis-having slaves/ambulatory wombs live (as well as any minority sympathizers who are Godly and gracious enough to know their place and keep it).

    And then, of course, there’s Fake America where everyone else lives.

    And only the Real Americans have the right to vote in our country.

    And no Real American would ever vote anything but Republican.

    So if you vote for Obama or for any other Democrat you are by definition a Fake American casting a vote you don’t actually have a right to cast–therefore voter fraud.

    See, simple!

  34. demonhype says

    Oh, crap. I think I just made myself sad. Or maybe more like abjectly pants-shittingly terrified for the future of this country.

  35. tbp1 says

    @40. Yep. I am increasingly glad my wife and I don’t have kids, but I am terrified for our nieces and nephews (who are starting tom have their own kids).

  36. ckitching says

    Nope. Nobody has found rampant voter fraud anywhere in the USA.

    I don’t know about that. It seems that voter intimidation is pretty popular in your country through the use of poll challengers. Or maybe they could try what “Pierre Poutine” did during Canada’s last federal election – robocall hundreds or thousands of non-conservative supporters and tell them their polling station has changed.

    Funny how the fraud actually seems to be coming from the parties who claim to be most committed to fighting it.

  37. unclefrogy says

    I hope they are just warming up and will soon come all the way out and say out loud what they really mean, what they really think. They live in such an echo chamber they might just do it. If they feel so justified and superior and at the same time threatened by everyone that is different. That they to include Mr. Romney just say it all one national TV and stop pretending that they believe in any form of representative government at all that they only believe in power that is wielded by them any thing else is wrong, and they should not have to comply with any of it.

    I’ll stop now
    I wish there was something I could do but nothing I could do would make it any different.
    I vote
    I talk I watch

    uncle frogy

  38. don1 says

    It seems Santorum is just agreeing with John Stuart Mill;

    ‘Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.’

  39. DaveL says

    Some part of me wants to run the experiment; separate liberals and conservatives into two isolated societies and see which one survives longer.

    Oh, conservative societies can survive a long, long time. As shitholes for the majority of the population, so that the privileged few can live in luxury. That’s what conservatism is for: the establishment and preservation of aristocracies.

  40. says

    Awww. Tiny violins. Signs of trouble in the right wing of American politics.

    Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group, slammed Mitt Romney on Friday for running a “lackluster campaign” void of any ideas and accused the campaign of “putting a bag over” vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s head.

  41. says

    Michaeil Tomasky, a journalist writing for The Daily Beast, summed up the Values Voter Summit, and Mitt Romney’s pandering to that element of the Republican party. Excerpts below:

    … basically, push every known button of the wingnut psyche and hope that, despite their tepid feelings about their candidate, they’ll march to the polls like columns of ants to stop the Kenyan appeaser from destroying America.

    That means they have to go all in on every front—class warfare, culture, and foreign policy. The rapturous cheers Ryan and Bennett hear at events like Friday’s [Values Voter Summit] seem to affirm to them that they’re on the right track. I’m sure also that Richard Williamson, the Romney foreign-policy adviser who has been making various eye-popping statements in the media these past few days, is getting nice, rah-rah text messages from the usual suspects egging him ever onward.

    So no doubt Williamson thinks he got off a great zinger when he commented to The Washington Post that “for the first time since Jimmy Carter, we’ve had an American ambassador assassinated.” But let’s think through the ramifications of that comment, and of the posture the Romney campaign has now staked out, given that it has already demonstrated that it’s perfectly happy to try to use attacks on American territory and personnel for political gain.

    The main thing that wrecked Carter, of course, was the Iranian hostage crisis. I’m not saying that Mitt Romney and his people are hoping and praying for Americans to be taken hostage or harmed. But neither am I saying that, within limits, they would exactly mind. Such an eventuality would, after all, fulfill their Carter talking point and enable them to go to town on it. They presumably don’t want bad things to happen to their country, but they most certainly do want bad things to happen to Obama. That can be a pretty fine moral tightrope to walk. And Romney’s already fallen off it once.

    What’s been happening since Tampa and Charlotte is that Americans are finally taking the time to size up these two men next to each other, and it’s pretty clear which way they’re leaning. This is shocking and inexplicable to Romney and his partisans in anti-Obama America, so they seem to think that if they can just manage to show the country the real Obama in ever-starker terms, people will finally see the prince of darkness they behold.

    But instead of seeing this “real” Obama, Americans are seeing the real Romney, a man with exactly the wrong proportions of ambition and core. I would guess that we’ll see in the next round of polling that these attacks, too, didn’t quite work. And then they’ll try something else desperate, and something else. They’ll wake up on November 7 wondering why America rejected them, without realizing that the candidate and his surrogates showed America why every day of the campaign, and never more so than during this past, disgraceful week….

  42. jetboy says

    This makes me so angry. Yeah, why is that, Mr. Santorum? No one is asking, “Why can’t we attract them?”

    I’ve been a working stiff for years; the only way I’ve been to school is on my own dime, a class or two a year.A third of my life is past, and my education level is still “some college.” The more education I’ve gotten, and the more I’ve learned to use my critical thinking skills, the less conservative I’ve become. Then there’s this prattling well-educated bastard telling people they don’t need no book larnin’, not if they’s real Americans.

    This is serious pushing-down. Just this morning they had a panel discussion on the radio talking about how there was a serious shortage of educated technical professionals in the USA, (It was on a BBC program they run overnight on the NPR station here), and how American companies were looking to developing nations to augment their technical expertise. (Which, given the models they were proposing, frankly stinks of some new bizarre form of colonialism, if nothing else)

    Just – why is that, Mr Santorum? I think it’s very telling that no one on that side is willing to ask the question – or to offer solutions. It says to me, “the American worker is no longer necessary, we can squeeze them out, and starve them out, and keep them stupid until they die out. They were just another thing to step on, on our way to full and absolute authority.”

    I’ll stop here. No doubt the more educated among you will read this differently than I do. I really hope so, anyway…

  43. loopyj says

    “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do…Without the Church and the Family there is no Conservative Movement, there is no basic values in America ENFORCED.” (emphasis mine)

    Is it that Santorum thinks that the stupid and ignorant should have the power to tell you what to do, or is he saying that if the elite were smart enough they’d join the Conservative Movement so that they could enforce and impose their values better?

  44. kreativekaos says

    Ichthyic@33:

    I think, really, that the only way to avoid that is both to acknowledge that authoritarian personality traits are a real thing, that they can lead to dangerous outcomes, but that they also are not something that can simply be “removed”.

    Excuse the pedantry, but probably pretty obvious.

    there has been a deliberate effort to empower and extremeize authoritarian personalities in the States for the last 40 years

    Agree– though I would start the most significant part of the timeline thirty-two years ago with the installment of the Reagan admin. The proverbial foot was in the door at that point:

    -repainting the political portraits of Nicaragua (and El Salvador as well), with Sandinistas as bad guys/Contra thugs as ‘freedom fighters’
    – political denigration and severe de-funding of alternative energy research (taking down the solar energy panels put up by Carter at the White House being a right-wing ‘spit in your eye’ at energy advancement)
    – spending huge sums accelerating SDI research even as critics rightly pointed out its ineffectiveness and impact on potential nuclear weapons disarmament
    – the steady drum beat of rhetoric about how regulation is the enemy of the economy and growth,…and on and on.
    -war on (or apathy for) environmental integrity and a sustainable
    planet

    Most of the major right-wingnut inertia that we are trying to resist, even today, were born mostly out of those eight years.

    The only question now is whether the tipping point has been reached, or whether there is still time to reverse the process and re-integrate.

    That’s the question that many of us have been asking. My feeling is that I share your concern that….

    I think it’s too late. I hope I’m wrong. [emphasis mine] I see those whose plan was to utilize authoritarians for personal gain to be working feverishly to gather their profits as quickly as possible. Tells me that they themselves don’t think there is much time left.

  45. says

    More news from the Values Voter Summit:

    Link.
    Rep. Steve King (R-IA) used his speech at the Values Voter Summit in Washington to decry what he warned was an urgent problem: gay soldiers getting married.

    King has authored a bill that would block military facilities from hosting same sex marriages and bar military chaplains from participating in such ceremonies.

    “On bases around the world, at bases in the United States: same sex marriage in direct offense to the Defense of Marriage Act,” he said.

  46. says

    More News from the Values Voter Summit. Mother Jones reports extensively on Kamal Saleem and on his speech. This article is particularly good at debunking Saleem’s ex-terrorist-come-to-Jesus claim.

    Saleem also lies about his name, which is really Khodor Shami. He lies about his football career in college, and about a title of “Grand Wazir” he claims an ancestor held (not a real title in Islam).

    None of this background bothers the Values Voters. They seem to like liars.

  47. says

    More on Kamal Saleem’s I was a terrorist … Seriously! story.

    This explains Saleem’s appeal to anti-immigrant right wingers. Saleem tells them he was a dangerous immigrant before he found Jesus.

    He warned the lawmakers that Islamic extremists were sneaking into the country with nefarious plans. “If we don’t pass this bill,” the fiftysomething Lebanese American told them, “we will be legalizing terrorism to be part of our culture.”…

  48. Ichthyic says

    though I would start the most significant part of the timeline thirty-two years ago with the installment of the Reagan admin.

    actually, I probably would put it back with Nixon’s “southern strategy”.

  49. kreativekaos says

    actually, I probably would put it back with Nixon’s “southern strategy”.

    Point taken. Although, I feel the real acceleration happened after 1980, when there was a greater willingness of the population to sip the Kool-Aid so artfully prepared by the right.

  50. says

    More telling details from the Values Voter Summit:

    Link.

    The video that sparked the unrest in Egypt and Libya was created and promoted by anti-Muslim activists who have worked with backers of Bachmann’s effort to purge the U.S. government of Muslim Americans and key players in the effort to block the so-called Ground Zero mosque (e.g. ACT! for America and the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission)

    In July, misinformation promoted by Bachmann and two upcoming speakers at the Values Voter Summit, Frank Gaffney and Jerry Boykin, sparked aggressive protests against American diplomats in Egypt, including Secretary Clinton, whose motorcade was pelted by protestors – Boykin and Gaffney have been the leading forces behind Bachmann’s witch hunt against Muslim Americans in the U.S. government

    Former Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, now the executive vice president of the Family Research Council, which hosts the conference, significantly set back American diplomacy in 2003, drawing a rebuke from President Bush and Pentagon investigators, when he repeatedly denounced and insulted Islam in uniform and characterized the “war on the terror” as a war in the name of Jesus

  51. says

    “Sexual Rampage” news from the Values Voter Summit. Lord save us.

    Speaking at the Values Voter Summit, Star Parker blasted Sandra Fluke and hailed her own Christian conversion for saving her from her own “sexual rampage”

    Parker also said that the “HHS Mandate has Made Sandra Fluke a National Icon for Sexual Promiscuity.”

    Video of Parker’s speech: Link.

  52. johnmarley says

    @Lynna

    Awww. Tiny violins. Signs of trouble in the right wing of American politics.

    Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group, slammed Mitt Romney on Friday for running a “lackluster campaign” void of any ideas and accused the campaign of “putting a bag over” vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s head.

    I certainly hope so, but I tend to think these guys just know their audience. They know they can say anything at all, until about Nov 5th, when they will start chanting “Vote Romney”, with full confidence that the rubes won’t actually remember what they were saying more than a few hours, let alone weeks, ago.