Right Wing Revolution Eating Its Children-- And Parents… GOP Needs A Time Out

It's nothing new to hear progressives bloggers-- particularly this one-- try to persuade donors, and even Members of Congress, to defund the DCCC, particularly while Steve Israel is recruiting fellow corrupt conservatives to serve in the interests of Big Business and undercut ordinary working families. The Democratic Establishment, Beltway "professional Democrats," don't care for us either. You might have caught Wall Street whore Chuck Schumer's hissy fit about liberal bloggers the other day. He was bitching to Isaac Chotiner about how misunderstood his Wall Street financiers are: "You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be." Chotiner asked him if he thought the left-wing blogs are as bad as the Tea Party. He probably thinks the left-wing is even worse. What he said though was "Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout." Wow less credibility than the Tea Party… at least in Schumerland-- the exact same creepy, self-obsessed guy I remember from high school in Brooklyn.

I had to laugh yesterday when I saw a report that one of the tea baggy operations, DeMint's old Senate Conservatives Fund, was calling on Republicans to defund the NRSC, as corrupt a mainstay but of the stinking Beltway Establishment as the DCCC is.

The Senate Conservatives Fund said Friday that its supporters say Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) need to be replaced and the National Republican Senatorial Committtee (NRSC) needs to be defunded.

In an email to supporters, Senate Conservatives Fund executive director Matt Hoskins said that results of a new poll show that the group's supporters want Graham, Alexander and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to be replaced.

…Hoskins also wrote in the email on Friday that a majority of supporters want Senate Republicans' campaign arm to be defunded: "On the question of whether the grassroots should stop donating to the NRSC because of its bias against conservative candidates, 86% said the NRSC should be defunded, 5% said it should not, and 9% were unsure."

Having missed Jacques Mallet du Pan's tragic adage from the French Revolution, "la révolution dévore ses enfants," the GOP, in the midst of a deadly civil war, is doing just that. Georgia crackpot Paul Broun-- in the ad above-- claims he's a doctor but neglects to say he was a severely strung out drug addict while he was going door to door soliciting patients. He's running for senator and making it clear that he's far to the right of all the other extreme right-wing candidates, especially of Jack Kingston. And he's scared Kingston so badly that he's running far off into right field as well.

And after some right-wing heroes praised Nelson Mandela-- who conservative mouth-breathers had always been taught to despise-- the National Review website comments section exploded into an orgy of hatred and insane bigotry. Ted Cruz, the gold standard for a deranged neo-fascist, who was just the other day wishing aloud that there were 100 Jesse Helms in Congress, said he mourns the loss of Nelson Mandela and said he "will live in history as an inspiration for defenders of liberty around the globe. He stood firm for decades on the principle that until all South Africans enjoyed equal liberties he would not leave prison himself, declaring in his autobiography, ‘Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.’ Because of his epic fight against injustice, an entire nation is now free." Cruz's Facebook page went bonkers and so did the neanderthals who comment at National Review.

One GOP lunatic fired the first salvo: "Yes, you can tell that to the civilians who never harmed anyone, many of them well under 18, whose murder Mandela sanctioned via one of his goons. Mandela should have known better as forcible confiscation of land had such bloody consequences in the past, and the idea that anyone could associate with a communist party in the aftermath of what was known in the mid 20th century and still be considered an ethical person is unfathomable. Mandela also praised Mugabee after he knew that Mugabee had tortured and killed well beyond anything done by any colonial government. The track record of post colonial governments has been violence and brutality well in excess of the proportion allotted to their predecessors. South Africa is the last chapter in a very sad saga. He is nothing like a hero in the way that Solzhenitsyn is, someone who suffered and endured just as much and who did not resort to such things, though he could have and someone who's death, because he stood up to their moral and political nonsense, the left largely ignored."

Last I looked there were 410 comments, mostly from people in bad need of professional psychiatric help who seem to think Ted Cruz isn't right-wing enough. I hope some of them caught President Obama this morning though and listened with open minds and open hearts as he urged Congress not to leave for their vacations before extending unemployment insurance for 1.3 million workers who lost their jobs because of the ideologically-driven GOP economic agenda in the Bush years.

Our top priority as a country should be restoring opportunity and broad-based economic growth for all Americans. And yesterday, we learned that our businesses created about 200,000 jobs in the month of November. That’s more than 8 million new jobs in the last 45 months. And the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level in five years.

But we need to do everything we can to help businesses create more good jobs that pay good wages even faster. Because the hole that we’re still digging out of means that there are still millions of Americans looking for work-- often because they’ve been laid off through no fault of their own.

We also have to look out for the Americans working hard to get those jobs. That’s why, as a country, we offer temporary unemployment insurance-- so that job-seekers don’t fall into poverty, and so that when they get that job, they bounce back more quickly.

For many families, it can be the difference between hardship and catastrophe. It makes a difference for a mother who suddenly doesn’t know if she’ll be able to put food on the table for her kids. It makes a difference for a father who lost his job and is looking for a new one. Last year alone, it lifted 2.5 million people out of poverty, and cushioned the blow for many more.

But here’s the thing: if Members of Congress don’t act before they leave on their vacations, 1.3 million Americans will lose this lifeline. These are people we know. They’re our friends and neighbors; they sit next to us in church and volunteer in our communities; their kids play with our kids. And they include 20,000 veterans who’ve served this country with honor.

If Congress refuses to act, it won’t just hurt families already struggling-- it will actually harm our economy. Unemployment insurance is one of the most effective ways there is to boost our economy. When people have money to spend on basic necessities, that means more customers for our businesses and, ultimately, more jobs. And the evidence shows that unemployment insurance doesn’t stop people from trying hard to find work.

Just this week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that allowing benefits to expire will be a drag on our economic growth next year. A report by the Department of Labor and my Council of Economic Advisors estimated that it could cost businesses 240,000 jobs. And without the ability to feed their families or pay the bills, many people currently looking for work could stop looking for good.

So extending unemployment insurance isn’t just the right thing to do for our families-- it’s the smart thing to do for our economy. And it shouldn’t be a partisan issue. For decades, Congress has voted to offer relief to job-seekers-- including when the unemployment rate was lower than it is today.

But now that economic lifeline is in jeopardy. All because Republicans in this Congress-- which is on track to be the most unproductive in history-- have so far refused to extend it. So this holiday season, let’s give our fellow Americans who are desperately looking for work the help they need to keep on looking. Let’s make it easier for businesses to attract more customers, and our economy to grow. And together, let’s keep doing everything we can to make this country a place where anyone who works hard has a chance to get ahead.