Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Mike Pence Makes Friends Wherever He Goes


You get play in the big GOP sandbox by either demonstrating your ability to raise more money than God, or your willingness to publicly punch the fuck out of some minority the Pig People despise.

Mike "Big Sharia" Pence does not have more money than God, and Failgunner Ted has never left a bigot stone unturned.

As a wise man once said, I despair of the rebranding, but the real stories here are:
  1. How little this -- or anything like this -- will budge the needle come 2016.  On the Right, this is already being rewritten as Liberal Gotcha Media mythology.  On the Left, well, when it comes to Republicans, there has long since been nothing left to prove.  And those in the Center will always invent an imaginary hippie outrage somewhere sufficient to balance out the books.
  2. How thoroughly this will reinforce the discipline on the Right to never, ever set foot outside Fox Land without a pre-nup. And,
  3. How much of a national story a teevee media person can create by simply asking simple, yes-or-no questions, and then asking followup questions when the douchbag across from you puts on his weasel clogs and tries to dance away.  

4 comments:

Fiddlin Bill said...

May I recommend Kieth Olbermann's long editorial aired Monday night on ESPN, in which he connects many dots, including Jackie Robinson and the NFL pushback against Arizona just last year. While the NCAA will not move this weekend's men's basketball finals out of Indianapois, hopefully the NCAA will move itself out of the current champion of discrimination. This is a vicious law which, as Olbermann correctly argues, can ground any sort of Jim Crowism. The goal of the racist Republican Party (thanks to the Southern Strategy) is a state by state return to the 1930s.

Dan Hagen said...

Given the fact that the First Amendment already fully protects the exercise of religion in this nation, exactly what “religious freedoms” are crying out to be “restored?” The proponents of the Indiana law fall silent on that point — and well they should — because majority religion Christians are not oppressed or even inconvenienced at any place or any time in this country. What they don’t dare say is that the intent of the law, the practical effect of the law, is to embolden fundamentalist Christians to exercise their bigotry in denying American citizens public accommodations. And that’s hatred (rhymes with “sacred”).

Ivory Bill Woodpecker said...

The 1930s contained that terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad socialistic New Deal. Many plutocrats still do not recognize that the New Deal saved their sorry hides from revolution.

Not only do the plutocrats want to do away with FDR's reforms, they don't like the reforms of his great-uncle Teddy too well, either.

So I'd say Bill underestimates their ambitions. They want to go back to the First Gilded Age; it seems that our current Second Gilded Age isn't "Gilded" enough for them.

crweaver said...

The exchange between George and Mike Pence reminds me of a not too dissimilar exchange a short time ago when a DEA spokeswoman, testifying before congress, was asked whether alcohol was more dangerous than marijuana. Repeatedly, she gave the same non-answer 'all drugs are bad', and couldn't be pinned down to give a yes, no, or I don't know. Clearly, weaselitis and self-righteousness often go hand in hand.