I live in Minnesota’s 7th congressional district. Our representative is a Blue Dog Democrat, Collin Peterson.
I do not like Peterson.
I never voted for the guy until the last election, when I held my nose and punched his name in the voting booth because the Republicans have become the party of intransigent ignorance and bigotry, so even Peterson looks good in comparison. Unfortunately, I think he relies too much on the odious nature of the opposition to skate by.
And then I looked at the Facebook page for the Minnesota 7th Congressional District Republican Party. They really hate Collin Peterson. They think he’s a liberal, dont’cha know. By comparison with the poison they spew, I guess he might be.
What brought me to look at their page was that I learned that the 7th district Republicans, my neighbors, had posted this:
Wow. My neighbors suck.
Head Muslim Goat Humper
? Seriously, dudes? Can you get any more racist?
Worst thing about it: now I’m going to have to vote for Collin Peterson, or whatever Blue Dog substitute comes along, again, and it left a foul taste in my mouth last time.
That’s an official statement from the republican party?
Wow, holy shit, they must feel like it’s OK to just blurt whatever pops into their heads. I wonder where they could have gotten that idea?!
Good to know that an official Republican page endorses the White Supremacist ideology of people like Horowitz and does not even try to hide its creators’ irrational Islamophobia. Democrats have their problems but I doubt we would see similar postings on any FB or social media site affiliated with the Democratic party.
Well, to be fair the party chair did repudiate this and they took it down. (TPM has the story. Still, this does provide a window into the Republican id.
Wow, I’m impressed. Making Collin Peterson look good is no mean feat.
Oh, shit, and they’re referencing Horowitz?
By the way, I kind of question your use of the word “choice” in the title. Is there really a meaningful choice here? It’s a carefully constructed pseudo-choice between two options that nobody who wasn’t completely controlled would probably choose. I.e.: not a choice at all.
@ Marcus Ranum, comment #5
It’s a choice in the same way that choosing to either work in a massively underpaid job that destroys one’s mind, body, and spirit, or starving to death is a choice. So it technically is a choice, in that you get to choose how you’re damned. Unless you’ve fallen afoul of one of the countless laws designed to take even that much choice away from you…
Land of the free!
You’d think that they’d be worried that using a picture Ellison doing something so utterly American, turkey hunting, would be an own goal.
It’s come to choice between the (at best) so-so and the downright disgustingly evil. That’s what happens when people sit out the political process between elections. Most of the really important decisions are made by active party members well before the so-called “election”.
Join and be active in a political party as long as you physically can. For one thing you get a say in who sits on the executive as well as who gets to run (well, down there you have primaries so the last point is probably less important).
No, that’s not the worst thing. Abject bigotry against innocent people is far worse than your personal distaste in the voting booth.
And at any rate, it’s a mistake to think about voting as a form of virtue signaling rather than as an optimization strategy.
Justice Democrats wants to run progressive primary challengers for next year’s elections. You may have options after all.
Are you talking state or federal politics? Ignorant canuck here?
Not sure why I put the second question mark.
I have a question about said picture. Why is he posing with the animal? I’ve been around hunting my whole life, I even go myself from time to time. I’m never been able to figure that one out. Then again I’m the one who never got into selfies either. Is there a connection I’m missing or am I just making baseless assumptions?
Well there’s your first mistake.
Federal. The MN 7th district is a Congressional district and is allotted a representative in the US Congress.
But as the old saying goes, all politics are local.
Pipefighter@#13:
“Look at the pretty animal I killed for my amusement!!”
Given a choice between Not Good Enough and Catastrophically Awful, I’ll vote for Not Good Enough every time.
@timgueguen #7 – Based on the “goat humper” appellation in the caption, I was under the impression that they were trying to make it look like Ellison was sexually assaulting the turkey from behind. I could be reading too much into it, but, as you say, the photo seems like an odd way to demonize him otherwise.
Even 16 years after 9/11, it still surprises me that people choose to accept the terrorists’ own narrative that their mass murders constitute acts of “war.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t soldiers typically considered less morally culpable for killing large numbers of people than the general population? It may simply reflect my own ignorance about both warfare and international law enforcement, but I wonder if it wouldn’t actually be more effective (not to mention less disastrous to our international relations) if we treated terrorism more like organized crime and less like a war that just happens to be conducted by a decentralized international organization instead of a country.
Republican mindset–yup. Senator Michael Enzi has been spending the past week cleaning up remarks he made to a classroom of students in Greybull, Wyoming, about a guy here who wears a tutu to bars and then is surprised he gets beat up, and says he’s kind of asking for it. There was outrage, and a ton of people who went to bars wearing tutus as a response, indicating that a lot of us here in Wyoming aren’t quite as conservative as our elected officials make us out to be.
I must study the history of the US electoral system one day. I don’t understand how you ended up with first past the pole voting instead of preferential. It locks in a two party system and when one is really bad the other doesn’t have to raise the bar much.