Eye On Miami Memo to Hispanic Republicans: you should be standing in the streets burning your party affiliation cards today.
I don't find much quarrel in Charles Pierce's "The Reign of the Morons" in this month's Esquire. No nuanced point of view can explain the current catastrophe in Washington as a bipartisan disaster, although the nation's newspapers editors do their best to make that case. The shut down and brinksmanship is not just the GOP's doing, it is the exultant result of radical extremists who were allowed to hijack the GOP by the party's grand masters. Period.
Miami-Dade's Republican delegation to Congress and the state legislature fit right into the disaster. So assuming there are sentient Republican voters -- unlike their elected officials -- why don't Miami-Dade Hispanic Republicans jump ship?
Why Hispanic? Because the angry white minority is coalescing around the grievances of racial and ethnic identity.
I share Pierce's despair that the Democratic party can find the footing and clarity to explain the answer. I have plenty to say on the subject (and have on this blog), and that will come later. But for now: how in the world did the GOP become the party of morons?
The reason is less in Pierce, than writings in the New York Times by Thomas Edsall. So, yes: read Pierce. But more importantly, try to understand what Edsall is saying. It's angry white voters who are dominating the GOP. They are angry because globalization (supported by Democrats and Republicans, alike over the past forty years) fundamentally re-arranged the economic deck chairs. It took decades to unfold, but now it is clear and the Tea Party found the source: all the equity in our decades of "happy motoring" middle class values has vanished in the smoke of broken promises. Who are the angry voters who "want their country back"?
Edsall writes: "Until more white voters come to terms with their status as an emerging American minority, the forces driving voters to support Tea Party candidates and elected officials who adamantly reject compromise will remain strong — and the Republican Party will remain fractured." (How Did Conservatives Get This Radical?, Sept. 24, 2013)
In "Anger Can Be Power" (October 8, 2013), Edsall focuses on the current work of Democratic pollster, Stan Greenberg, who has endeavored to decode the opposition. Greenberg has been conducting focus groups of Republican voters. Edsall observes, "The participants “are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority.” Republican voters are threatened by Obama and the Democratic Party, but they are angry at their own party leaders. “The problem in D.C. is not gridlock; Obama has won; the problem is Republicans failing to stop him.” Together, evangelicals and Tea Party supporters comprise more than half the party. Moderates, about a quarter of Republicans, “are very conscious of being illegitimate within their own party."
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/10/08/opinion/09edsall-ss-slide-6UP3/09edsall-ss-slide-6UP3-tmagArticle.jpg
If Edsall and Greenberg are right -- and I believe they are -- then where do Miami-Dade Republicans, who are mostly Hispanic American -- fit? In the torrid radicalized GOP, Hispanics are targets.
Let me put this another way to my Hispanic Republican friends in Florida: do you think that the evangelical movement in white America has your best interests at heart?
If any constituency needs to be concerned about the GOP death rattle in Washington and Tallahassee, it is Hispanic Republicans. That's the straight truth. Your elected representatives are not only on the wrong side of history, they are part of a movement that is turning on you.
Now, read "The Reign of Morons Is Here". If you hear from your elected officials in Tallahassee and Washington, or your evangelical churches, that you are protected from those angry white GOP extremists north of the Florida border, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Edsel writes: "These are extraordinary times. The depth and strength of voters’ conviction that their opponents are determined to destroy their way of life has rarely been matched, perhaps only by the mood of the South in the years leading up to the Civil War." The Greenberg focus groups and polling tell the story. I put it in plainer language: you (Hispanics) and Obama (African American) have much more in common than with the radical extremists in control of the GOP.
Miami-Dade Republicans who are Hispanic ought to be standing on the streets now, burning their party affiliation cards.
The Reign Of Morons Is Here
By Charles P. Pierce
Only the truly naive can be truly surprised.
Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately.
The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way."
Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making.
For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing. With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.
Among other things, the Library Of Congress is closed as a result of what the vandals have done. Padlock study and intellect. Wander aimlessly down the mall among the shuttered monuments to self-government. Find yourself a food truck that serves monkey brains. Eat your fking fill.
Read more: Government Shutdown - The Reign Of Morons Is Here - Esquire
Follow us: @Esquiremag on Twitter | Esquire on Facebook
Visit us at Esquire.com
I don't find much quarrel in Charles Pierce's "The Reign of the Morons" in this month's Esquire. No nuanced point of view can explain the current catastrophe in Washington as a bipartisan disaster, although the nation's newspapers editors do their best to make that case. The shut down and brinksmanship is not just the GOP's doing, it is the exultant result of radical extremists who were allowed to hijack the GOP by the party's grand masters. Period.
Miami-Dade's Republican delegation to Congress and the state legislature fit right into the disaster. So assuming there are sentient Republican voters -- unlike their elected officials -- why don't Miami-Dade Hispanic Republicans jump ship?
Why Hispanic? Because the angry white minority is coalescing around the grievances of racial and ethnic identity.
I share Pierce's despair that the Democratic party can find the footing and clarity to explain the answer. I have plenty to say on the subject (and have on this blog), and that will come later. But for now: how in the world did the GOP become the party of morons?
The reason is less in Pierce, than writings in the New York Times by Thomas Edsall. So, yes: read Pierce. But more importantly, try to understand what Edsall is saying. It's angry white voters who are dominating the GOP. They are angry because globalization (supported by Democrats and Republicans, alike over the past forty years) fundamentally re-arranged the economic deck chairs. It took decades to unfold, but now it is clear and the Tea Party found the source: all the equity in our decades of "happy motoring" middle class values has vanished in the smoke of broken promises. Who are the angry voters who "want their country back"?
Edsall writes: "Until more white voters come to terms with their status as an emerging American minority, the forces driving voters to support Tea Party candidates and elected officials who adamantly reject compromise will remain strong — and the Republican Party will remain fractured." (How Did Conservatives Get This Radical?, Sept. 24, 2013)
In "Anger Can Be Power" (October 8, 2013), Edsall focuses on the current work of Democratic pollster, Stan Greenberg, who has endeavored to decode the opposition. Greenberg has been conducting focus groups of Republican voters. Edsall observes, "The participants “are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority.” Republican voters are threatened by Obama and the Democratic Party, but they are angry at their own party leaders. “The problem in D.C. is not gridlock; Obama has won; the problem is Republicans failing to stop him.” Together, evangelicals and Tea Party supporters comprise more than half the party. Moderates, about a quarter of Republicans, “are very conscious of being illegitimate within their own party."
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/10/08/opinion/09edsall-ss-slide-6UP3/09edsall-ss-slide-6UP3-tmagArticle.jpg
If Edsall and Greenberg are right -- and I believe they are -- then where do Miami-Dade Republicans, who are mostly Hispanic American -- fit? In the torrid radicalized GOP, Hispanics are targets.
Let me put this another way to my Hispanic Republican friends in Florida: do you think that the evangelical movement in white America has your best interests at heart?
If any constituency needs to be concerned about the GOP death rattle in Washington and Tallahassee, it is Hispanic Republicans. That's the straight truth. Your elected representatives are not only on the wrong side of history, they are part of a movement that is turning on you.
Now, read "The Reign of Morons Is Here". If you hear from your elected officials in Tallahassee and Washington, or your evangelical churches, that you are protected from those angry white GOP extremists north of the Florida border, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Edsel writes: "These are extraordinary times. The depth and strength of voters’ conviction that their opponents are determined to destroy their way of life has rarely been matched, perhaps only by the mood of the South in the years leading up to the Civil War." The Greenberg focus groups and polling tell the story. I put it in plainer language: you (Hispanics) and Obama (African American) have much more in common than with the radical extremists in control of the GOP.
Miami-Dade Republicans who are Hispanic ought to be standing on the streets now, burning their party affiliation cards.
The Reign Of Morons Is Here
By Charles P. Pierce
Only the truly naive can be truly surprised.
Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately.
The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way."
Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making.
For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing. With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.
Among other things, the Library Of Congress is closed as a result of what the vandals have done. Padlock study and intellect. Wander aimlessly down the mall among the shuttered monuments to self-government. Find yourself a food truck that serves monkey brains. Eat your fking fill.
Read more: Government Shutdown - The Reign Of Morons Is Here - Esquire
Follow us: @Esquiremag on Twitter | Esquire on Facebook
Visit us at Esquire.com
7 comments:
Oh please. Everyone knows the Democrats are the party of stupid. They have spent us into oblivion and saddled our children with staggering debt. In just his first term, Odumbo took a $10.6 trillion debt and turned a $17 trillion debt. In five short years, the amateur hour president has turned America from respected world leader to international laughingstock.
And when it comes to voters, we all know the low IQ's are found in the Democratic Party. EVERY study has shown that a person who has failed to attain a high school diploma is almost certainly a Democrat voter. Libtard politicians appeal to their idiot base by promising them free stuff -- welfare, condoms, foodstamps, healthcare, etc. -- just like a one would bribe a child to behave.
They don't call them Dumbocrats for nothing!
Democrats are concerned about people. It is this legacy of administering to the needs of people that has made America the beacon of light among nations. Our egalitarian values are firmly rooted in human equality irrespective of one's educational, social, political, or economic status. We are the party of inclusion. And because of that, we are leading the country and the world in the 21st century.
Pete,
You are typical of the morons to which the article refers. The Democrats have spent us into oblivion? Please! What about Bush II who took a surplus and squandered it on wars and tax cuts? What about Regan under whom deficits skyrocketed? The deficits under Obama are largely due to the smelly turd of an economy that Bush left him. That was only 5 years ago, yet you have forgotten. Alzheimer's?
And your 2nd paragraph. All poles of highly educated people in this country invariably indicate that they they support liberal causes. Look at the education level in states like Mississippi and see how they vote.
Facts Pete, mere facts. There is more to the world than right wing talk radio.
One thing about Democrats is that we are forward thinking. We are not complaining. We play the hand we are dealt. But we know that as a country we have the wherewithal to address all of the issues effectively and fuel our economy and the world's economy at the sametime. We understand our role in the world and we don't take it lightly. But we must get republicans to see is that they must pull their fair share of the load, and working together the possibilities for us and the world are unlimited. So much wasted time and effort that should be focused on the economy.
I think the comment from Pete helps make your point. Angry republicans have no room in their angry brains for facts and figures. It is pretty sad.
Pete,
You gave yourself away when you used the nodlogism (what's that, you say?) "libtard". I want to see EVERY study that shows people who have failed to obtain a high school diploma is a Democrat. You call Odumbo a laughingstock? You should look in the mirror. And I'm no fan of Obama, either. Thanks for the chuckle, you idiot.
in a country where both parties care more about their next election, or as you point out, which talking points will resonate better with voters, it's unfortunate that you'd call followers of any particular party more moronic than followers of either party.
I must be a confused for thinking that President Obama and his administration lying to the public and the international community, chronically and overtly breaking international law, as well as continuing to support authoritarian regimes the world over, is all pretty crappy.
Notice how I don't mention any party once. Because I am not biased for one over the other.
You, unfortuantely, seem to have a never ending bone to pick with republicans, with nary a mention of Democrat party tom-foolery, at least not in the few months I've been following your blog.
Republicans are scum, the same as Democrats are scum.
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