So much craziness exists in the Republican Party in Congress in 2013, that it will require a long, detailed book to trace all of the insanity that exists, and that is not including talk radio, Fox News Channel, right wing journalism, and the Governors and state legislatures that are Republican controlled!
Today, in Washington, DC, the Tea Party Republicans held a rally, including such “stars” as Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas, and Congressman Steve King of Iowa, three of the leading “certifiable” whackos of the House of Representatives!
But the rally also included wing nut Glenn Beck, and had support also from Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, among other “embarrassments” on Capitol Hill!
The rally was held to oppose immigration reform, support abortion restrictions on women, and most crazily of all, to call for abolition of the Internal Revenue Service, therefore making it impossible to collect income taxes and corporate taxes, effectively wiping out the 16th Amendment to the Constitution! And when fellow Senator Marco Rubio of Florida was mentioned, he was booed, because he is negotiating an immigration reform bill with Democrats and Republicans Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Jeff Flake.
So this nation is supposed to exist without taxes, apparently! A nation of 315 million people, with massive overseas responsibilities; high levels of poverty; growing need for infrastructure expenditures, health care, education; the threat of terrorism within our shores; and all of the other responsibilities of a modern nation in the 21st century, is supposed to live based on praying for God’s good wishes, but only if it is Jesus Christ, no other concept of religion!
So much has occurred in recent years that is mind blowing, but this day, we have seen true insanity and lunacy unseen in the history of the American Republic, and we can now say that believing in any hope that the Republican Party will come back from its terminal illness, getting rid of the cancer of the far right wing nuts, seems hopeless!
Whig Party, anyone?
I would love to know how those crazies purpose to pay for infrastructure, education, etc. without taxes.
Hey Leia,
How about their own salaries? …. What a bunch of dolts!!
Bachmann, Gohmert and king are irrefutable proof that evolution occasionally takes a wrong turn.
I LOVE your sarcasm, Maggie! LOL
I find their revisionist history rather amusing. For instance, when Michele Bachmann said that the Founding Fathers freed the slaves, I wound up rolling on the floor laughing! 🙂
I agree, Princess Leia, but everything that comes out of Michele Bachmann’s mouth, as well as Steve King’s mouth, and Louie Gohmert’s mouth, is totally false and asinine in nature! And there are plenty of others who are true embarrassments, and show that we do NOT get the best, most talented, and most brilliant people running for and serving in Congress, and this includes some Democrats as well! It is hard to understand how Bachmann graduated law school, but then her school, connected to evangelical Christianity, no longer exists!
I was watching Stephanie Miller’s program Friday morning on Current TV.
The “Abolition Of IRS” commercial ran just short of 10 a.m. ET and starred Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
If the congressional Republicans come up with “Abolition of the Military Industrial Complex,” I might be impressed.
I LOVE Stephanie Miller, who was about five years old when her dad, NY Congressman William E. Miller, ran for VP on the Goldwater ticket 49 years ago, the biggest disaster the Republican Party ever had. And, looking back, Goldwater was not as looney and radical and dangerous as Ted Cruz and other Tea Party wing nuts, who are ready to destroy our government.
And Goldwater actually believed in keeping religion out of government, and favored abortion rights and gay rights, for which he was attacked by the Christian Right in his later years, such a vicious attack that was uncalled for! But the Christian Right has no boundaries in their hate and poisonous rhetoric! They would dispose of their own children who turn out gay or have abortions, absolutely reprehensible!
Ronald,
After his 1964 presidential landslide loss, Barry Goldwater stated that had he had Jesus Christ as his vice-presidential running mate, he would have lost anyway. Part of that had to do with the aftermath of the Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of 35th president of the United States John Kennedy. That the country making the necessary move, over the loss, to a different president [No. 36 Lyndon Johnson] came with a feeling of not wanting to have a third different commander in chief within, say, a 15-month period.
Barry Goldwater apparently didn’t fit into any one mold. He believed in conservatism. But he didn’t look to conservatism the way the current Republican party considers it. In the 1980s, there was animosity to 40th president of the United States Ronald Reagan’s nomination of fellow Arizonan Sandra Day O’Connor to the United States Supreme Court. The target was motivated by sexism. Goldwater had no problem with her nomination and supported her. Years later, he expressed having no objection to gays serving in the United States military. (He said something along the lines, All that’s important about one being straight is the ability to shoot straight. Just a way of bluntly stating his position.)
One reason many found Goldwater unacceptable was his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was passed and signed into law President Johnson. At that time, the south was still aligned to the Democrats and the north to the Republicans. And had Goldwater not been so opposed maybe the powerful figure Martin Luther King, Jr. would not have switched party preference (not to be mistaken for allegiance) away from the Republicans to the Democrats. That missed opportunity has been a problem with the Republicans over the last 80 years. They destroyed loyalty within their coalition, saw many allegiences flip to the Democrats (with and after Franklin Roosevelt), and ultimately flipped their party to the brand to something more in line with the late-19th century Democratic Party. (The Dixiecrats.)
The documentary “Mr. Conservative” is interesting. One person stated having a feeling that, by the last 20 years of his life, Goldwater in some ways become a liberal.
“The rally was held to … support abortion restrictions on women ….”
This is another example why Republicans haven’t nationally won the female vote in a U.S. presidential election since the 1980s.
These people named are representatives of the wonders of gerrymandered congressional districts. The House is a different beast due to their level of electoral office. That they are not campaigned on and won by statewide office. We’ll see whether Steve King has any real testicles to fun for the U.S. Senate, from his home state of Iowa, in 2014. (Insiders at the Republican party want him nowhere near the nomination.)
There is this part of me that just looks at these congress people as buzzards. They’re annoying. But they are also marginalized.
D, you are absolutely right in your view of Goldwater, who came across as very different in later years, and was always opposed to the Christian right, and always supportive of women’s rights and gay rights, unlike the Tea Party and other right wingers in the GOP today!
And the House of Representatives allows members to be looney and get away with their craziness, while they tend to lose much of the time in statewide races, as in Nevada, Delaware, Colorado in 2010, and Missouri and Indiana in 2012. Hopefully, whacko Steve King will be eliminated from Congress from Iowa by running for the Senate in 2014!
And yes, the Republicans never did anything for African Americans after 1877, living off their laurels for the next fifty years, and showing little concern ever since, particularly when the South turned Republican over time. But Northern Republicans (liberals) were courageous enough to stick their necks out for civil rights, and now they are hated within the right wing GOP, and no one is willing to say they are liberals, or even moderates!
The Republican Party has NOT been the haven for African Americans, really since Reconstruction ended, although they did a good acting job at times, but no substance. This is not praising Southern Democrats, but as early as Hubert Humphrey, northern Democrats were fighting for civil rights, leading Southerners to start the migration to the GOP in the 1960s and after!
Ronald writes: “D, you are absolutely right in your view of [Barry] Goldwater, who came across as very different in later years, and was always opposed to the Christian right…”
Mr. Conservative said something to the following effect about Jerry Falwell: He needs a good kick in his ass.
I think Goldwater was the only conservative in the Republican Party who expressed that position.
He knew they were ruinous to his party.
“And the House of Representatives allows members to be looney and get away with their craziness, while they tend to lose much of the time in statewide races, as in Nevada, Delaware, Colorado in 2010, and Missouri and Indiana in 2012. Hopefully, whacko Steve King will be eliminated from Congress from Iowa by running for the Senate in 2014!”
The U.S. Senate elections is one thing, because they are based on carriage of statewide election (just as the cases with gubernatorial and presidential, for the Electoral College, races). The House is based on carriage in elections of individual congressional districts. This further adds to my theory why I believe we’re in a realigning presidential period for the Democrats. (We’ve discussed plenty about the electoral map and other related issues.) In the presidential elections of 2004, 2008, and 2012 roughly 80 percent of the states which had scheduled U.S. Senate elections had outcomes where the same party carried at both the presidential and senatorial levels. And parts of those included wins from key states. (This parallel has happened in Wisconsin every presidential year since 1976. It has also been applicable with leading bellwether Ohio since 1992.)
This leaves the U.S. Senate to continue at a Democratic advantage as well. But on the flip side is with the House, dealing with individual and limited boundaries and not statewide-held contests. The fact that Democrats are winning the population centers more so starkly contrasts with Republicans for their carriage outside those areas in smaller-populous counties and other areas. Add them individually. It’s a Republican advantage. In the previous realigning period, 1968 to 2004, the Republicans won 7 of 10 presidential contests; but they didn’t win the House until more than 25 years passed with the “Republican Revolution” of 1994. During that period, they first won majority control of the U.S. Senate as Ronald Reagan unseated Jimmy Carter in 1980. And they held that majority control up until 1986. (Howard Baker, of Tennessee, and 1976 vice-presidential and 1996 presidential nominee Bob Dole, of Kansas, were majority leaders.)
Reasons why I see the likes of Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann and Texas’s Louis Gohmert as marginalized is because they feed their own. What they say doesn’t have to be believed by them. They just do their Watch Me Dance for My District gig. If they were running for statewide office, their “language” wouldn’t be what it is. And this is what amuses me about any talk, in recent months, about Iowa’s Steve King potentially running for the U.S. Senate. If he were to win his party nod, he’d better pray hard that 2014 would be like the Republican midterm wave that was not 2010 but 1994.
D, I hope that your analysis that Senate elections usually follow Presidential elections is so, as that way the Senate would stay Democratic controlled. Otherwise, we would have the nightmare of Republican control of both houses, and we know how disastrous that was from 1995-2007, as it was in 1947-1949 and 1953-1955.