Republican Party Continues Disintegrating. PLUS: Billo blows a gasket

Does it surprise anyone that right-wing hack Bob McDonnell is soft-pedalling the fact that he's a Republican in his race for Virginia governor? Neither his TV nor his radio ads mention his party ID. On the other hand he's appealing to wealthy Republican business interests for his campaign financing. Marco Rubio, the far right extremist candidate for the open Florida Senate seat, on the other hand, is broadcasting his Republican Party heritage from the rooftops. He's been kicking mainstream conservative Governor Charlie Crist's ass in one GOP straw poll after another. And yesterday he won another one-- in Lee County (the notoriously right-wing Ft Meyers area).

While the Illinois Republican Party-- with the NRSC behind it-- pushed right-winger Andy McKenna out of his bid for the open Illinois Senate seat, to make room for mainstream conservative Mark Kirk, Florida and Beltway Republicans have been unable to do the same for Crist and it really looks like Rubio has a shot to knock him out during a primary-- even if someone with positions as extreme as his are would have no chance to win a general election in a moderate state like Florida.

John Ensign told the Las Vegas Sun that he has not only decided not to resign but that he intends to run for re-election. “I’m going to work to earn their respect back," he said of Nevadans who were appalled by his personal duplicity and lack of morals and human decency. Presumably Ensign, who is intimately involved with the shadowy neo-fascist group, The Family, figures denying Nevada working families health care is how he intends to win their respect back. No more talk about a run for the presidency though.

In a televised interview last week with Sun columnist Jon Ralston, Doug Hampton said Ensign paid his wife more than $25,000 in severance-- a sum that raised alarm because it was not reported, as would have been required, on campaign disclosure statements.

Knowingly failing to report such a payment could be a felony violation of campaign finance law, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The organization has filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee and asked the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.

Doug Hampton also said Coburn had suggested a payment to the family, a claim Coburn has strenuously denied. Coburn has said he suggested only that Ensign repair the damage he had done.

Ensign’s father is a wealthy former casino mogul, and his parents structured the payments in a way that allows them to avoid taxes, each providing four members of the Hampton family payments of $12,000 each-- the ceiling for gifts... Ensign’s colleagues failed to rally to his side late last week as Ensign revealed the payments.

Meanwhile CQPolitics reported yesterday that 2 of the most extreme right members of the House, Mike Pence (R-IN) and Eric Cantor (R-VA) want to run for president... of the United States. The Republicans need someone; CNN is reporting that even a majority of Republicans feel that Palin is unqualified. "Only 33 percent of Republicans questioned in a CBS News survey released Monday night say that Palin would have the ability to serve effectively as president." Pence and Cantor, high level House Republican leaders under tobacco lobbyist John Boehner, are likely to find themselves leading a smaller caucus come 2010. With Mark Kirk and Mike Castle likely to run for the Senate and Jim Gerlach to run for the PA governorship, three blue-leaning seats are likely to fall to the Democrats, on top of Ahn Cao's in Louisiana. The Republican response to their dilemma? Shamelessly stoking the racism of the shrinking Republican base with gratuitous and unfair race-baiting attacks on the first Latina nominated to the Supreme Court; vicious internal bloodletting instigated by extremist maniacs and fanatics like Jim DeMint; demagoguing against Democratic plans to fulfill American families' wishes for viable health care reform; covering up an unending stream of hypocritical sex scandals among GOP leaders from senatorial whore mongers like Ensign and Vitter to bizarre behavior from religious cultists like Mark Sanford and Tom Coburn; and more clownish antics from RNC head Michael Steele. All good for winning primaries among the 20% or so people who think of themselves as hard core Republicans; not so good when trying to appeal to normal Americans.


RICK PERLSTEIN LOOKS AT THE BUSTED REMAINS
OF THE GOP, AND DRIVES BILLO BATSHIT BONKERS

by Ken



On the subject of "Whither the Republican Party?," our friend Rick Perlstein takes a really thought-provoking look, "Beyond the Palin," in the July 20 Newsweek. For the first time in a long while, the Republican Party may have to reconsider who its natural constituents are, and there are substantial factional disagreements. Populist appeals, for example, have "never been an entirely comfortable fit for elite conservatives," who can't help fearing "that the temptation to woo working-class voters will, you know, shade into policies that actually advantage the working class." And there's an additional factor in the current mix: "It's harder to persuade the economically less fortunate to respect conservative orthodoxy during a recession. That's starting to make conservatives nervous."

"Another thing that makes some elite conservatives nervous in this recession," Rick writes, "is the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots," especially when "the line between the violent fringe and the on-air harvesters of righteous rage has been harder to find" than in the cases of the "panicky, violence-prone underbrush has always been revealed in moments of liberal ascendency."

This spring the alleged white-supremacist cop killer in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, professed allegiance to conspiracist Alex Jones, whose theories Fox TV host Glenn Beck had recently been promoting. And when Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered in church, Fox star Bill O'Reilly was forced to devote airtime to defending himself against a charge many observers found self-evident: that O'Reilly's claim that "Tiller the baby killer" was getting away with "Nazi stuff" helped contribute to an atmosphere in which Tiller's alleged assassin believed he was doing something heroic.

Billo attacks Perlstein the "far-left zealot"
(Boo! Hiss! String the commie bastard up!)

Cries of outrage have already risen from from Billo, seconded by his currently prized henchschmuck Bernie Goldberg. It would simply be impossible to imagine two human brains any more ignorant or dishonest than this pair. (Even the retarded Bernie notes that the schism in the Republican Party described by Rick is real. He goes so far as to call it a "civil war.")

Billo brands Rick as a "far-left zealot" and repeatedly denounces Newsweek for passing him off as a Newsweek correspondent instead of identifying him as, you know, a far-left zealot.

Of course Billo goes on the warpath every time someone provides an impossible-to-ignore public reminder that he's gone so far off the deep end that he is now an active fomenter of right-wing violence and an accomplice to (if not actually instigator of) murder -- and he could hardly be prouder. As to the substance of his attack, well, alas, there isn't any. He's peeved about all those extreme liberals who just totally dismiss his Princess Sarah (do you suppose he has falafel fantasies about her?), but because he's too lazy, stupid, and dishonest to do a lick of actual work, and obviously couldn't be bothered to read Rick's piece, he's blissfully unaware that the starting point for the piece is the fact, noticed even by Bungling Bernie Goldberg (gadzooks, how humiliating!), that half the fractured Republican Party, including much of the conservative "intelligentsia," is viciously dismissive of the princess.

By the end of this orgy of imbecility, it looks as if one of the poor-schmuck staffers who have to clean up the shit after the diseased elephant has gotten word to him that, as usual, his facts are 100 percent incorrect, that in fact Rick is in fact identified, quite correctly, as the author of what the liar-in-chief promptly dismisses as some book nobody ever heard of. The note in fact reads: "Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America." As the liar-in-chief knows perfectly well, most people who deal in the reality of American politics or modern American history not only have heard of Nixonland but regard it as one of the more important volumes of American history produced in the last decade. If Billo had a working brain and the slightest interest in reality, he could learn a lot from it. (Yeah, like that's going to happen!)

While Rick makes no secret of his progressive orientation, what he is, professionally, is a gen-u-wine historian, and a first-rate one too. His books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America are the current go-to political histories of the '60s and '70s and the shaping of the modern conservative movement, which eventually brought us the disaster of the Bush regime. He's now working on a book that will complete a trilogy covering this chunk of history.

Rick writes carefully and deeply researched books on the political movement whose critical juncture he has written about in Newsweek, and his journalism is the product of the same rigorously investigating mind. It would be harder to drum up better credentials for sensible observation of the current combatants, now split into factions fighting over the future of Princess Sarah (as even poor sad Bernie Goldberg has noticed) and a great many other things.

Of course on the Right they would have no idea what a "historian" is. They think it's just somebody who opportunistically distorts or just plain fabricates stories based on the past to support their Unitary Ideological Truth. Meanwhile, on Fox Noise in particular, but also on all the cable and even many of the network "news" shows, it is now standard practice to have as guests unadulterated far-right zealots who are not only not identified as such but are allowed to masquerade as objective observers while they deliver unadulterated and usually unchallenged propaganda.

This much you have to give to Billo: He is correct in his perception that there are zealots shitting all over his little one-ring circus tent. He just doesn't seem to realize that it's a mirror he's looking into. And who can blame him? How would you react if you saw that staring back at you from the mirror?

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