The religious right has been having a grand old time at the Faith and Freedom Conference this past weekend. Some of it is laughable, like this decorative addition to the urinals at the venue.
That’s silly and stupid, but part of the usual political discourse. I’d have been happy to piss on Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush myself — but I’d also recognize that this isn’t the way to win elections.
This is worse. Bobby Jindal is delusional.
Are we witnessing right now the most radically, extremely liberal, ideological president of our entire lifetime right here in the United States of America, or are we witnessing the most incompetent president of the United States of America in the history of our lifetimes? You know, it is a difficult question,he said.I’ve thought long and hard about it. Here’s the only answer I’ve come up with, and I’m going to quote Secretary Clinton: `What difference does it make?’
Obama is neither radical, nor liberal, nor particularly ideological. He’s also not a socialist, nor is he a Kenyan. Obama is a middle-of-the-road, right-of-center, conservative Democrat who has not done anything particularly dramatic while in office. Even Obamacare, which has Republicans chewing the scenery everywhere, was a compromise. Every time some nutcake on the right screams Socialist!
it just convinces me further that no one of that party should be in office — we need real solutions to real problems, not this imaginary tribalism.
This is worser. Jindal wants to foment rebellion.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Saturday night accused President Barack Obama and other Democrats of waging wars against religious liberty and education and said that a rebellion is brewing in the U.S. with people ready for
a hostile takeoverof the nation’s capital.Jindal spoke at the annual conference hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a group led by longtime Christian activist Ralph Reed. Organizers said more than 1,000 evangelical leaders attended the three-day gathering. Republican officials across the political spectrum concede that evangelical voters continue to play a critical role in GOP politics.
I can sense right now a rebellion brewing amongst these United States,Jindal said,where people are ready for a hostile takeover of Washington, D.C., to preserve the American Dream for our children and grandchildren.
That’s all we need: an army of fanatical and self-righteous gun nuts fanned into fury by supposedly responsible leaders of a political party marching on DC for a hostile takeover
. Fantasy is sequeing into visions of violence.
Perhaps the Secret Service ought to have a little conversation with Mr Jindal about the legality of encouraging sedition.
Perhaps the Secret Service ought to have a little conversation with Mr Jindal about the legality of encouraging sedition.
I should have thought that would be the FBI. Assassination, though, that’s for the USSS.
Silly PZ. It’s only sedition if a Republic is in power and it’s only patriotism is a democrat is in office.
I guess Jindal doesn’t realize that if his fantasy revolution did succeed, the first thing the new overlords would do is round up the people who look like him.
Take note of my avatar picture; my dog can hear those whistles.
Strange how far the center has moved. Obama would have been to the right of Reagan on many issues, and RR is deified by the right to this day.
Obama has been a very capable administrator, and certainly more competent than his predecessor. By and large, he has appointed competent people to important posts. The recent appointment of Tom Wheeler to head the FCC and supervise the dismantling of Net Neutrality is a notable exception.
” Even Obamacare, which has Republicans chewing the scenery everywhere, was a compromise.”
Based on a Republican-invented outline, at that. With Newt Gingerich involved.
Oh, Mr. Jindal. I think you need to heed your own advice:
Jindal sez:
You keep using that phrase.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Also,
IOKIYAR.
Is Bobby Jindal the most incompetent governor ever, or is he one of the leaders of a seditious cabal? I’ve thought long and hard about this* and my conclusion is it matters not a whit. No one who employs false dichotomies in rhetoric the way he does deserves public office.
* Actually I didn’t. But I am reflecting on Jindal’s words. It’s not as good as the reflecting that Bullard and his Dazzle Dart team performed, but it’s something.
I am very seriously concerned, what with the open carry nuts, the language coming out of the Tea Party and the rest of the extreme right, and the recent events in Nevada, that something is going to happen soon that will entail more than just lone or paired shooters and amount to serious, large scale, violent events involving large numbers of perpetrators and significant casualties. I am heartened, however, by the fizzle that was the recent attempted march on Washington.
But I’m still pretty nervous, and my planned trip to the Georgia Aquarium has been cancelled in the wake of their new law allowing guns to be brought nearly everywhere and preventing government buildings like libraries from keeping guns out. I won’t be stopping in Georgia anymore.
1. Obama won two elections by 9 million and 5 million votes.
2. The Rebellion, Operation American Spring, had maybe 100 people attending instead of the millions they claimed. I’ve seen more people at a kid’s soccer game!!!
3. Tea Party approval, never high, is at record low levels.
There is a mass movement brewing. It might not be what Jindahl the idiot thinks it is. A lot of people are sick and tired of right wing extremist politics and the America Haters.
Right now, I see them as a powder keg with wet flints (like Jindal, Cruz, Boehner, McConnell, Rubio, Graham, McCain, Palin, et cetera). The 2014 elections will hopefully sop the saps even more. But I’m not sure. My relatives and friends I once considered reasonable are making it known how wrong I was about that. Many more are indifferent. It’s not helping that some of them are in the military.
AFAICT, Jindahl has been a disaster for Louisiana.
1. The oil and gas industry continues to wreck their coastal environment. As the sea levels rise, this is only get to make things worse for the coastal areas.
2. Speaking of which, Louisiana is one of the most vulnerable places in the world for sea level rise. I suppose Jindahl’s plan here is to pray a lot and hope people in Louisiana forget who he is, by the time the coast is flooded.
3. He’s also done a lot of damage to their educational system, which was never that good to begin with. In a complicated Hi Tech society, being uneducated is a disadvantage.
Duh.
The Right Wing is on a suicide mission, plain and simple. They don’t recognise it as such, but that is precisely what’s going on. The contemporary world, modernity writ large is simply an obstacle they can’t overcome (having unnecessarily defined it as an obstacle in the first place). Every posturing temper tantrum throws them further and further into cultural impotence and irrelevance. Being suicidal hower makes them dangerous…So sad those lives wasted on fictional enemies and fictional battles when there were very real and very dangerous ones right in front of them…
For fans of the data driven life (which automatically disqualifies Jindal and the Tea Partyists.)
1. Tea Party support is at record low levels, 22%. They don’t even have a majority of GOPer support any more.
2. The Tea Party didn’t do well in the primaries. They lost all federal level primaries except Cantor/Virginia, an anomaly not yet explained, and perhaps Mississippi where Cochran is almost even in a near future runoff.
This isn’t quite as good as it seems. They’ve pulled the GOP so far to the right that the choice is between Fruitbat loons and really Fruitbatty loons.
Come on, PZ, Obama has done and continues to do one dramatic thing as president: being African-American.
(That’s apparently dramatic enough for these fruitbats.)
This sort of nonsense does nothing to discourage my little dream of kicking out the former Confederate States and letting them be their own country, though of course we would have to set up a significant humanitarian relocation program to allow anyone currently living there to come live in the rest of the country. They could take over the spaces vacated by the fruitbats we would strongly encourage to go live in the newfound Sanctuary of Republican Idealism.
Heck, I wouldn’t even require a one-for-one exchange! Give us fifty systematically impoverished families who want better opportunities in exchange for every wealthy modern robber baron. Five scientists in exchange for every anti-vaxxer. A union organizer in exchange for every Tea Party politician. (Hmm. Probably have to give multiple TP politicians for each union organizer. There can’t be many left down there.)
I would be perfectly happy to have my tax dollars contribute to that. We’re already drastically subsidizing those states; may as well do one last pile of spending to rescue people, and then let the idiots go Galt on their own dime.
raven:
Nothing unites more than a hatred of furriners. I think the writing is large on the wall that Cantor’s support of immigration reform hurt him. Not even amnesty, just reform, however he would define it to suit his own political bent. That’s not good enough for the yokels in the 7th district of VA.
Why does the GOP use “Socialist” as a pejorative? Did they somehow manage to inanely connect the term with “the Red Scare”? Isn’t that awfully 1950s?
Signed, a quasi-Socialist Canadian.
jrfdeux, mode d’emploi
Yes. Yes.
To piggyback on what Raven pointed out, the right had another “revolution” recently in which several hundred — hundreds, I tell you! — showed up for a NOM rally. To paraphrase an old slogan, “What if they held a revolution and nobody came?” The right is finding out what that looks like.
Every time I here these nuts talk about “Armed Insurrection” I pray that they are stupid enough to go through with it.
Nothing I would love more than to watch a bunch of delusional, right wing nutballs and their crappy ARs get mowed down by an A-10 Warthog.
These people have absolutely no idea how good they have it here. They have exactly 0 problems in their lives in relation to their government. Their religious freedom is almost a little too sacrosanct, they have way more freedom of speech than they deserve, they are not subject to reprisals for their political beliefs. If they actually did start a war, they would be so much worse off then they are now.
Let me explain:
Communist = programs the GOP doesn’t like.
Socialist = policies or programs the GOP doesn’t like.
Big government = interference from the government, only if the GOP doesn’t like it.
Capitalism = monopoly, unless somehow that monopoly causes problems for the GOP.
See, its really easy to figure out what is in the bloody dictionary these people use. They could declare the Tea Party a separate entity, pass a law making it illegal to belong to any party other than the GOP or the Tea Party, nationalize half the industries in the country (probably, in our case by letting those industries buy up parts of the government), and then scream bloody murder, to the effect, “What have you got against Democracy!”, and call everyone that thought it was insane, un-American, and a traitor, when those people dared to ask, “Isn’t this an awful lot like China now?”
They would, literally, not comprehend what the objection is to everything they just did.
Not to mention, many of them live on government transfer payments, i.e. Social Security, government pensions of one sort or another, SSD, Medicare, Medicaid etc..
Many of them are weird, angry, old white men. We could eliminate the Tea Party simply by not paying Social Security and Medicare.
In the two Tea Party stronghold areas I know best, both rural, not well off, and “Okie”, I’d estimate that half the income is government transfer payments including heavily subsidized agriculture payments e.g. Crop Reserve Program. In one school, 88% of the students qualify for free state supplied lunches. And oh yeah, they hate the government!!!
Why do they use Socialist as a pejorative? Why do they use “liberal” as a pejorative? Why do they use “progressive” and especially “secular progressive” as a pejorative? Why have they successfully convinced a lot of people that the other party is called the “democrat party” rather than the Democratic Party and used that as a pejorative?
Because it works. Because if they can turn the common name for what they oppose into a negative term, then they’ve won.
Also because Ronald Reagan. Here’s an interesting take on how Reagan turned everything the Greatest Generation fought for into a pejorative, while pretending they fought for something else entirely: http://billmoyers.com/2014/06/06/ronald-reagan-d-day-anniversaries-and-the-suppression-of-memory/
Ain’t going to happen for the same reason that any domestic terrorists like Mr. Bundy and his followers aren’t getting a well-deserved series of waterboardings at Gitmo: what laughably passes for a Left in America is afraid of shutting down these traitors for fear of another Waco or Oklahoma City or that detaining them will make them martyrs to the right and that mainstream right-wingers can use them rally their side.
It’s all about politics. Never principal.
Edit: Never principle.
Sorry, just got up. Need caffeine.
“That’s all we need: an army of fanatical and self-righteous gun nuts fanned into fury by supposedly responsible leaders of a political party marching on DC for a hostile takeover. ”
We already had that last month and both busloads of rebels acheived zip.
Not that I don’t think the crazies are getting crazier, I just think they had the combined planning ability & courage of a bunch of two year olds just before nap time.
I have great difficulty in staying rational when I hear or read he crap that purports to be the patriotic wisdom of the right and far right.
I do think there is a growing hostility in the country but I do not think it is coming from the right I could be wrong though it may be my own frustration, distrust and dissatisfaction I am responding to.
The more the conservatives say what they really believe and advocate out loud and not just the phony patriotic rhetorical sloganeering that usually spew the better off the people will be. Keep them talking is the best thing we can do.
In some ways the horrible socialist Kenyan is to the right of Nixon
uncle frogy
“Obama is neither radical, nor liberal, nor particularly ideological. He’s also not a socialist, nor is he a Kenyan.”
Is this finally a concessin that he’s Muslim?
“Republican officials across the political spectrum…”
Somewhere between extreme conservative and extreme conservative?
erichoug:
You hope for such a thing? For people to get injured or die? For families to be destroyed?
Your empathy meter may need re-calibrating.
And yet you still can’t manage to raise an opposition from the left.
Kind of like the gulf between Al Qaeda and ISIS.
#34 — Exactly.
Forgive the potential offense one may have reading this comment, but has the White, ‘Murican, Jesus lovin’, Bible thumpin’, gun totin’ “American Dream” infected politicians of Indian descent too?
Hey, when the militant christian extremists descend on Washington, can I have the food service contract? The menu would be easy and tasty with a selection of baked jesus fleshy bits and some of his bodily fluids, chilled as it’s Summer.