Archive for gop fearmongering
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Democratic Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, Kasim Reed, who needs to check his facts:
“Both President Bush and President Obama have kept this country safe.”
Did anyone feel safe on September 11, 2001? Me neither.
Let’s ask the thousands who were killed that day if they felt safe. Oh that’s right. We can’t.
How about all those embassy attacks on Bush’s watch?
Did the families and friends of our troops feel safe during the fraudulent war in Iraq that BushCo lied us into?
Did America feel safe opening their mail after the anthrax attacks?
How safe did we feel when Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of their little gang used fear tactic after fear tactic to scare an entire country into submission? Shock Doctrine, anyone?
Did their use of torture (an illegal practice that doesn’t work) soothe you to sleep at night?
Come to think of it, did any of us feel safe and secure when so many people lost their jobs after BushCo started a major recession?
Just asking.
Here is the entire segment:
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ViaGood grief, speaking of “nutty,” can Peggy Noonan sound any more sanctimonious? Her level of “concern” and condescension is only surpassed by her phony sincerity and inability to stick to facts.
Thankfully, Paul Krugman was there to counter all that with reality checks and reason.
NOONAN: I think it should be noted that we have a president. I think it should be noted that he should be sitting down and talking with those who would move — attempt to move forward on spending. I consider it unusual that this president can never make a deal with those folks.
KRUGMAN: But this is not something you negotiate over. You do not negotiate with hostage-takers. That’s the White House position. They’re right about that. You just don’t negotiate on this. You can negotiate on the sequester, you can negotiate on taxes, but not on someone who is threatening to blow up the world economy if he doesn’t get his way.
NOONAN: My goodness. That appeared to be the White House attitude on the fiscal cliff just a month or two ago.
KRUGMAN: It’s very different.
NOONAN: Why can nothing ever be worked out? We do have a president. We do have legislative leaders. We do what should be noted, have a spending crisis in America. It is not an eccentric thing to worry about the amount of spending that America does. The income, the outcome and the long-term promises.
KRUGMAN: This is really — this is a doomsday — this is really saying I will blow up the world unless you give me what I want. And you don’t negotiate on that.
***
NOONAN: Yes, two things I’d like to say, one is that people are buying guns like crazy now. Not because they’re nutty, not enough because they’re angry, but because I really think they fear their country is falling apart.
It’s defensive and it’s something that I think we all have to be talking about. There’s so much anxiety out in America. And they also fear their government.
Second thing, I guess connected to that, leave gun control and gun reform issues in the Congress of the United States, the president should not be issuing executive orders in this area. It would really be unwise and it will cause great problems, I would think. [...]
STEPHANOPOULOS: It seems that the White House believes that if the president doesn’t move quickly, nothing is going to happen.
KRUGMAN: That’s right. This is the moment. And he certainly has to be seen to be doing something. And by the way, it is crazy to be out there buying guns right now. People are afraid, you know, the reality of life in America is that it’s safer than it has been in decades.
If we walk out of this studio and walk through Manhattan, your chance of getting mugged are less than they have been since, I don’t know, 1960. I mean, this is a — so this is an odd thing, this is a mental state, not about the reality of America.
NOONAN: No, no, no…
KRUGMAN: The big revelation here has been we’ve realized — I didn’t know, that the NRA is no longer about gun owners. It’s actually representing the firearms industry. And that’s something we’ve learned. So…
President Obama was re-elected on November 6, 2012, which is exactly when this video was released.
The Heritage Foundation has lost its collective mind. And by mind I mean empty space between their ears. And by lost I mean defaulting to fear mode aka so business as usual. Yes, they’re busy pushing their usual scare tactics complete with doomsday sound track and jarring jump cuts… as the president is busy doing this.
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The words “powerful” and “effective” don’t do this short segment by Melissa Harris Perry justice.
“This may be practical political strategy: fear of the ‘dangerous black man,’ resentment for the mythical ‘welfare queen.’ It has worked before, but it will not work much longer, ’cause it’s not a dog whistle. We can hear you. And we’re calling you on it.“
Related post here. And back in 2010, Rachel Maddow covered the fears of the GOP feeling threatened by a white minority here: “Be afraid, white people! The black people are coming for you!”
John Dean speaks the truth, just as this Republican did, as you’ll see below:
Welcome to another edition of “Republicans Eating Their Own” courtesy of The Hill:
Freshman Republican Rep. Richard Hanna (N.Y.) compared the parties in Congress to sports teams only interested in “winning,” and this week credited Democrats in Congress with having “less anger” than Republicans toward the other side.
“If all people do is go down there and join a team, and the team is invested in winning and you have something that looks very similar to the shirts and the skins, there’s not a lot of value there,” he told The Syracuse Post-Standard editorial board on Monday, according to the paper. He called his Democratic friends “much more congenial” than Republican ones.
He then went on to warn that House Republicans are becoming “incapable of governing” by habitually deferring to “extremes.”
This is reminiscent of the book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With The New Politics of Extremism and subsequent TV appearances by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein:
Their principal conclusion is unequivocal: Today’s Republicans in Congress behave like a parliamentary party in a British-style parliament, a winner-take-all system. But a parliamentary party — “ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional” — doesn’t work in a “separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will.” [...]
[I]t has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition . . . all but declaring war on the government.”
John Boehner has been deferring for some time now, because he (and others) is more concerned about being booted out of office by those who favor tea party extremists than about the health and welfare of the American people. Politics matter more than we do. His job matters more than we do. Power and profits take precedence. So do scare tactics.
In this case, Hannah was referring to Michele Bachmann’s McCarthyesque warnings and allegations about the Muslim Brotherhood who she claims are magically infiltrating and influencing the State Department, even though they can’t seem to do the same to their own government.
“We render ourselves incapable of governing when all we do is take severe sides,” he said. “I have to say that I’m frustrated by how much we — I mean the Republican Party — are willing to give deferential treatment to our extremes in this moment in history.”
As John Dean said, poor Richard Hannah is sure to suffer the consequences for speaking the truth. Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s not often the best politics. And that’s a shame.
“Conservatives are yelling “stop” when it comes to marriage equality.
They’re yelling “stop” when it comes to climate change legislation.
They’re yelling “stop” when it comes to equal pay for equal work for women.
They’re yelling “stop” when it comes to critical, life-saving stem-cell research.
They’re yelling “stop” when it comes to providing health insurance at an affordable cost to all Americans.
They’re yelling “stop” when it comes to immigration reform.
They’re yelling “stop” when it comes to ending the failed drug war.
And not only are they yelling “stop” – but they’re actively trying to undo most of the progressive victories over the last century that they opposed from the start.
That includes undoing a women’s right to choose – or even have access to contraceptives.
It includes forcing women to submit to mandatory ultrasounds – like they’re children or wards of the state.
It includes passing more and more right-to-work FOR LESS laws – further eroding the rights of working people in America.
It includes gutting food safety programs, unemployment benefits, and food stamps.
And it even includes sabotaging our economy recovery to achieve their ultimate political goal – kicking a black man out of the White House.
This is what Conservativism has been all about in America – and continues to be about: fear, discrimination, and corporate domination.”
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