Republicans Say the Most _______ Things

Art Linkletter was right – kids do say the darndest things. If he was alive today he could start a new show – Republicans say the scariest, most dangerous, most asinine things.

That is especially true when it comes to guns, rape, and anything Obama.

Take a look at some of the recent statements from Republican leaders and their followers, particularly the Tea Party and evangelical Christians.

The National Rifle Association, whose top leaders have pushed arming teachers across the country in response to the Newtown, Conn., shooting, have vowed to fight any gun control legislation and have been warning members that President Barack Obama is coming after their guns. That argument has led to a right-wing declaration that a civil war is brewing in this nation.

For example, James Yeager, the chief executive of Tactical Response, which teaches people weapons handling and other tactical skills in Tennessee, produced a YouTube video in which he declared that he will kill anyone who tries to confiscate his weapons. In the clip, Yeager said increased gun measures would “spark a civil war” in which he would be “glad to fire the first shot.”

“If it goes an inch further,” he said, “I’m going to start killing people.” While he now states that his pledge to “start killing people” was just overwrought anger, he has not backed away from his overall claims.

No wonder since Fox has become the major purveyor of the gun control will lead to insurrection meme.

Bill O’Reilly recently warned that we could have a civil war if Obama uses executive orders to alter gun control laws. O’Reilly said Obama could “chose to be a good President or whether he just wants to have blood in the streets.” O’Reilly went on to suggest that the President should cut spending on such things as Medicare and Social Security to avoid armed conflict.

O’Reilly was not the only rabid Fox employee to talk about insurrection. Several conservative – is there any other kind? – Fox contributors compared the President to Hitler and Stalin, and cited Nazi Germany to argue against his policies. They also warned of civil war, revolution, and insurrection if Obama’s policies on guns, spending, and entitlements are enacted.

Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy told their Fox and Friends audience that if the Obama government tried to confiscate guns nationally “there would be an insurrection.” A short time later, Todd Starnes, a Fox radio host tweeted: “I can assure you the federal government will not be confiscating the Starnes family guns,” which seems reasonable since there has been no recommendation that federal officers go door to door taking guns out of people’s homes.

Columnist Arthur Herman wrote in a Jan. 3 op-ed on FoxNews.com that riots in Argentina foreshadowed a coming civil war in America.

“Some have said my warnings about a coming civil war between makers and takers are exaggerated,” Herman wrote. “It’s true that Argentina’s politicians have been waging class warfare since Juan and Eva Peron – and they aren’t fazed when it turns bloody. Obama and the Democrats are relative newcomers to the game. But Argentina reveals who really suffers when those who create a nation’s wealth get mugged by those who spend it.”

Then there are the rape comments.

Months after Todd R. Akin and Richard Mourdock destroyed any Republican chances of picking up U.S. Senate seats with asinine comments about rape, Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia decided to come to Akin’s defense by saying Akin was “partly right” in his declaration that in the case of legitimate rape, women’s bodies have the ability to shut down to avoid pregnancy.

“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things,” said Gingrey, a former OB/GYN. “It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he? But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”

As if such wild comments are not enough, Republicans have threatened to shut down the government or default on the nation's debt in an effort to force the President and Democrats to cut the safety net.

But the most egregious attacks may revolve around Obama’s efforts to fill his cabinet. Republicans have attacked him for seeking like-minded appointees. They have also assailed him for recommending a former Republican Senator, Chuck Hagel, for a major security post. Apparently, reaching across the aisle for talented people is against the rules.

Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, says Hagel should not be confirmed as Secretary of Defense because Hagel was against imposing economic sanctions on Iran. One would think that would make Hagel a good candidate in the eyes of the GOP since its members spent the last election saying the sanctions are weak and ineffective. The Iran sanctions, according to Republicans, made Obama weaker than Jimmy Carter.

Then there are the attacks against feeding poor children in America. Guest on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. spent a great deal of time recently claiming that children receiving food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are becoming a “group of entitlement nation children.” Feeding those kids through the SNAP program, the Fox contributors said, means those children will grow up with a sense of entitlement that will hamper their productivity throughout life.

We can’t forget the comments concerning same-sex marriages. According to one conservative preacher, an acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriages mark the end of time. The pastor, Scott Lively, who is on trial for inciting human rights abuses against members of the LGBT community in Uganda, recently said that the great flood of the Bible was caused by people writing songs about same-sex marriages.

“We need to remember that in the time leading up to the Flood what the rabbis teach about the last straw for God before He brought the Flood was when they started writing wedding songs to homosexual marriage and Jesus said that you’ll know the End Times because it will be like the days of Noah,” Lively said in an interview with Sandy Rios of the American Family Association.

“I think this is the issue of the End Times, homosexuality,” he continued in the interview. “It’s present, if you do a careful investigation of all the scriptures dealing with this from the beginning and all the way to the end, God is painting a very clear picture that this represents the outer extent of rebellion against Him in a society and the last thing that happens before wrath comes.”

His comments echoed those of another conservative southern preacher, Aaron Fruh of Alabama, who also blamed the biblical flood on homosexuality. Fruh said God “knew that the people on the earth were going to destroy themselves through same-sex marriage.”

Of course, there is also the denial of climate change (Fox asked if the government faked the hottest year on record data released recently); Wyoming’s effort to nullify any federal firearms regulations by making it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison for any federal official to enforce any gun laws; the downplaying of a government default on the nation and the world economy; the hostage style negotiations over the debt limit; and Sean Hannity’s attacks against John Brennan.

Indeed, Republicans say the scariest, most dangerous, and most asinine things.

When the "Big Tent" Collapses

One has to wonder what is happening to the Republican Party and its members. Is the party’s establishment having a Grinch moment, finally coming to its senses on a myriad of issues, growing a heart where one did not seem to exist before? Or is it having a Scarecrow moment, finally realizing that having a brain is about whether one actually uses it? What about its members? Are they having the opposite experience, rejecting both the Grinch and the Scarecrow?

Those are some of the questions that hover over the GOP national convention in Tampa, Fla., this week. While the party of Lincoln appears united in its desire to defeat President Barack Obama, it seems more divided than it has been in some time, with various factions trying to out conservative the others, instigating a battle over such hot button social issues as abortion, making xenophobia part of the party identity, and articulating a disdain for government that has made the GOP far too extreme for most Americans.

Even Republicans – from Dan Quayle to George Pataki to Chuck Hagel to David A. Stockman to Jeb Bush to Mike Lofgren – have articulated the problems stemming from the party’s hard-right turn.

“The Republican Party needs to re-establish its philosophy of the big tent with principles,” former Vice President Dan Quayle told The New York Times recently. “The philosophy you hear from time to time, which is unfortunate, is one of exclusion rather than inclusion. You have to be expanding the base, expanding the party, because, compared to the Democratic Party, the Republican Party is a minority party.”

Former New York Gov. George E. Pataki said: “What I fear is that that very positive desire to limit the power and the role of the federal government could turn into a philosophy that is antigovernment. Sometimes, those who I fear have that antigovernment view, as opposed to the limited-government view, rise to the center of the nominating process. I think that is not a good thing for the Republican Party.”

Indeed, the GOP has moved so far to the right that Ronald Reagan, the man neo-conservatives praise repeatedly as their beacon, would not want to be part of it, according to Chuck Hagel, a former U.S. Senator from Nebraska who now teaches at Georgetown University.

“Reagan would be stunned by the party today,” Hagel told Josh Rogin for a story posted in The Cable on Foreign Policy’s Web site in May. “Reagan wouldn’t identify with this party. There’s a streak of intolerance in the Republican Party today that scares people. Intolerance is a very dangerous thing in a society because it always leads to a tragic ending....

“Ronald Reagan was never driven by ideology. He was a conservative but he was a practical conservative. He wanted limited government but he used government and he used it many times. And he would work with the other party,” Hagel said.

Hagel compared the battle over the soul of the current Republican Party to a similar battle in the 1950s, when such moderates as Dwight D. Eisenhower fought such conservatives as Joseph McCarthy. The moderates won that battle. Their heirs are losing this one.

“Now the Republican Party is in the hands of the right, I would say the extreme right, more than ever before,” Hagel said. “You’ve got a Republican Party that is having difficulty facing up to the fact that if you look at what happened during the first eight years of the century, it was under Republican direction.”

Hagel decried the current Republican Party as schizophrenic and intolerant of dissent. He cited the resignation of Republican senator Lamar Alexander from a leadership post last year as a clear indication of how the party has changed. “There has been a litmus test, purity factor that has been applied over the years. I saw it in the Senate myself,” said Hagel, who was in the Senate from 1997 to 2009.

Hagel is not alone in his assessment.

In an Aug. 13 op-ed piece in The New York Times, David A. Stockman, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, described Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan as “the same empty conservative sermon.” Stockman should know since he was the person that oversaw Reagan’s budget office.

“Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to ‘job creators’ (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse,” Stockman wrote. “Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neocon conservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion ‘defense’ budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.”

Stockman went on to say that Ryan folded “like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout.” (Ryan the shrink-the-government radical also sought federal dollars to save a GM plant in his hometown, the same one he has repeatedly accused President Obama of failing to protect. GM announced in June 2008 that it was closing the plant, which happened in December 2008.)

“But the greater hypocrisy is his phony ‘plan’ to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade,” Stockman said. “A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing.”

The criticisms of the GOP by its old guard go further than just the budget lies being told by Romney and Ryan, and the abandonment of what were once Republican principles. Jeb Bush assailed the party for its harsh anti-immigration stance, saying in essence that the GOP is becoming the party of angry white people. Bush urged his colleagues to recognize that the shifting national demographics mean that the party must soften its rhetoric if it wants to lead.

Possibly more revealing was the warnings presented by Lofgren, who spent nearly 30 years as a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill. In a September 2011 article for Truth-Out.org, Lofgren lambasted both the Democrat and Republican parties for their ties to corporate America. He also described each as being rotten, but he was especially harsh on his fellow Republicans.

“Both parties are not rotten in quite the same way,” Lofgren said. “The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP. To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics.”

The “crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center” of the GOP today, Lofgren said. “Steve King, Michele Bachman, Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy,” he said.

“It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” Lofgren wrote nearly a year ago. “This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.”

He is right.