Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Still fighting the Civil War

Flying the Confederate flag at Obama's White House

Could this shutdown stuff be getting any crazier?

From AmericaBlog:
Sarah Palin, God bless her self-serving media savvy. As if the Republican party didn’t have enough troubles, Palin today emerged alongside Ted Cruz as the new face of the GOP government shutdown.

Yes, there really is a God.

Palin joined GOP Tea Party Senator, and shutdown leader, Cruz and other Tea Party supporters of the GOP’s shutdown of the federal government in a “million vet march” to protest the fact that the government has actually been shut down.

Point of fact: Neither Palin nor Cruz have actually served in the military, and both support the GOP government shutdown which closed the WWII memorial. But don’t let that get in the way of a good visual.

This was supposed to be the "Million Vet March on the Memorials," scheduled for Oct. 13, 2013, but they apparently ended up with less than one-tenth of one percent of that number.

Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee were there to lead the faithful, and Sarah Palin - wonder of wonders - joined them. Of course, none of the three has ever served a day in the military. And they were for the shutdown before they were against it.
Palin on the shutdown not two weeks ago:
“Let government chill for a little bit.”

Palin said Republicans should not “fear some kind of government shutdown.” She then emphasized that Republicans must “stand firm,” “not blink,” and not “allow the media to drive this whole narrative” that a shutdown would be bad for Republicans.

Palin said that a shutdown would allow the American people to realize “how irrelevant the federal government could and should be in our lives.”

And now she’s leading a protest of the shutdown she supported.

Adorable.

Well, they're batting a thousand so far, aren't they? So what could make it better? How about displaying the Confederate flag at this supposed protest of United States veterans?


I keep reminding you of the Republican Party's notorious 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists, because that's how we got here. The GOP thought to use those people, and Republican leaders were overjoyed at taking all those old Dixiecrats into their own party.

But this is what happens when you combine all of America's crazies into the same political party. Those Dixiecrats combined with the John Birchers and other crazies already in the GOP to become today's Republican base.

They may not be the majority of Republicans even now, but they're active, they volunteer, and they reliably vote, even in the primaries,... so they pretty much control the party.

And they're still racist,... not to mention, you know, crazy:
According to CNN, the Tea Party protesters gathered at the White House are also very concerned that President Obama is a Muslim:
One speaker went as far as saying the president was a Muslim and separately urged the crowd of hundreds to initiate a peaceful uprising.

“I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up,” said Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, a conservative political advocacy group.

The Tea Party has a whopping 21% approval rating in America, which makes it even less popular - slightly - than the rest of the Republican Party.

So, hmm,... what could make that number even better? Ted Cruz? Check. Sarah Palin? Check. Non-veterans supposedly leading a "veteran's march" and promising a thousand times better turnout than what they got? Check. Waving the Confederate flag at our first black president and his family? Check!

Republicans in the George W. Bush administration might have been faith-based and ignorant, but they knew how to stage a photo op. Remember Bush, dressed in a flight suit, taking a helicopter to an aircraft carrier and giving a speech under that "Mission Accomplished" banner?

But I guess there's crazy and then there's crazy, huh?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting picture, I wonder if that guy knows that the US Marines killed confederate soldiers in the civil war.

Bill Garthright said...

Heck, he probably thinks that the South was fighting about smaller government!

Anonymous said...

the rebel flag is not about racims it been around before the cw

Bill Garthright said...

Yeah, and the swastika has been around for centuries. So what? It's racist because racists have made it racist. It's a symbol of the old South - the slave-owning South, the segregated South, the racist South.

If I were a Southerner, I would be eager to put that behind us, to repudiate that old racism and bigotry, so the South could move forward. Of course, I'm not a racist.

Why would Southerners who are not racist want to use a symbol of the old, racist South? That doesn't make any sense at all. It would be like Germans wanting to use the swastika as a symbol, arguing that it's just historical, nothing more.

Anonymous said...

i got mexiacan friend that likes the rebal flag i have a black friend i used to work with had one in his house

Bill Garthright said...

So? Maybe you have a Jewish friend who likes swastikas, too? People are people. I swear, you can find one of everything.

But my previous point stands. For the vast majority of African Americans, the Confederate flag is a display of racism. And for the majority of people who display it, I'd say it's meant to be racist, too. (Not all, I'm sure. I'm not calling you a racist. I don't even know you.)

It's a symbol of the old South, the racist South. It's time to move past that. Heck, it was time decades ago. It's the 21st Century. It's long past time to admit the faults of the past - fully - and repudiate that kind of thinking.