Extremist Wingnut Gresham Barrett Booed By His Teabagging Neighbors For Hypocrisy-- End Of His Gubernatorial Campaign?

End of a wingnut's dream?

A few weeks ago we mentioned how right-wing extremist Gresham Barrett is running for governor of South Carolina. There aren't any members of Congress more clueless, more extremist and less sincere. Seeing a sea of anti-Obama signs at the teabagger party in Greenville yesterday, Gresham assumed he would be welcomed with open arms. Instead he was vociferously booed. Since none of the other elected officials-- including Governor Mark Sanford and Senator Jim DeMint (Miss Lindsey knows better than to get anywhere near a crowd of angry yahoos)-- were booed, Gresham used every trick in the book to ingratiate himself with the mob. Nothing worked. Watch the fascinating video below; I was surprised he didn't start screaming that Obama is a nigga. He tried everything short of that-- from pathetically begging for their forbearance and telling them how much he respects them to throwing out red meat terms like "the librul Democrats in Washington DC," "trillions of dollars in pork barrel spending," "raising tax levels that would make the French blush," "rewarding illegal behavior with amnesty at your expense," "abortion," "waste in the name of Stimulus," "gluttony of reckless spending," "automatic pay raises [for Congress]," even a claim that he introduced a bill they inspired called "the Tea Act."

No doubt Gresham's career flashed before his eyes as all his efforts at demagoguery and pandering to the Know Nothing base he's always courted elicited nothing but louder and more persistent booing and a sea of people turning their backs to the stage. It must have been especially galling for the reactionary rabble-rouser because his own congressional district starts about 10 miles from where he was speaking and the Greenville media is where most of his constituents get their local news. (Obviously they get their national news from Limbaugh and Hannity.)

Earlier today we asked you to look at how John Nichols at The Nation dealt with the hypocrisy of other Republican hacks trying to glom onto the Know Nothing teabagger movement, particularly the biggest hypocrite of all, Wisconsin Congressloon Paul Ryan. "Sam Adams and the more radical of his Boston compatriots," wrote Nichols, "would, presumably, have been bemused by the image of conservatively-clad Middle Americans recalling the revolutionary acts of December 16, 1773, by meekly clutching tea bags." He points out, though, that the congressional Republicans who chose to run out in front of the parade and make like they were leading it-- the way we can see the hapless Barrett doing in Greenville and the way clods like John Shadegg did in Phoenix and Sue Myrick did in Charlotte and Paul Ryan did in Madison-- was pure hypocrisy, since each of these wingnut pols voted in favor of Bush's Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which gave hundreds of billions of dollars to banksters and speculators. You can see the angry anti-Obama sore losers booing Gresham. I wonder what they would have done to him if they knew that his vote for the bill was at least in part motivated by the $786,873 in legalized bribes he took from the financial/insurance/real estate sector. Ryan, who Nichols points out as the most hypocritical of all the teabagger Republicans, has gobbled up $1,555,321 from the FIRE sector while Shadegg took in $1,191,961 and Myrick's haul was a cool $1,140,388. Why does he single out Ryan?

The ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee has emerged as the GOPs pointman on "fiscal responsibility" issues. Yet, this Tory legislator played a key role in passing the Wall Street bailout last fall, rallying Republican votes for the measure when sincere conservatives wanted to vote "no" to the $800-billion giveaway with Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders, who said, "rescuing the economy does not mean we have to just give away $700 billion of taxpayer money to the banks," and Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, who said, "Taxpayers deserve a plan that puts their concerns ahead of those who got us into this mess."
Technically, Ryan represents Janesville, Wisconsin, but his real designation ought to be: Paul Ryan, R-Wall Street.

Janesville is, or at least was, a manufacturing town. Yet, Ryan has since his election to the House in 1998 consistently voted for free-trade pacts-- including the extension of most-favored nation trading status to China-- that have been devastating to the community and others in his southeastern Wisconsin district. How devastating, last winter, the sprawling General Motor plant that had been the community's top employer for nine decades, was shuttered.

What was Ryan doing in the months before the plant closed? Campaigning for a scheme to gamble Social Security funds on the stock market and gut Medicare and Medicaid. Had Ryan gotten his way, tens of millions of Americans who lost most of their retirement savings when the stock market crashed in the fall would also have lost much of their Social Security safety net. And they would have had an even harder time getting access to medical care.

Fiscally responsible? Not Paul Ryan.

His whole career has been about redistributing wealth upward, rewriting trade rules to favor multinational corporations, robbing the federal treasury to enrich his banking industry benefactors and running up debts to bail out Wall Street.

If Sam Adams had encountered this Tory, they would have tossed him in Boston Harbor with those crates of tea.

Forgive me if you read this earlier. There's never enough exposing the hypocrisy of Paul Ryan at this site. (At least I'm not using his clown picture again.) If you'd like to help stop him dead in his tracks, please donate here. And today's an especially good day to do just that since every donor today will get one of the books we write about at DWT sent to the address on the ActBlue account.



H/T: Adam Fogle at Palmetto Scoop. It's worth going over to his right-wing lunatic fringe site to see the comments. I especially enjoyed the one asserting Barrett is a socialist. I'm sure he did as well.