Stay pretty after a hard day of racist tea-bagging!
Of all the prominent woman I can think of to give celebrity beauty tips, I must admit that lemon-faced Republican church lady Sharron Angle, recently defeated in the Nevada Senate race because she’s fucking nuts would not be one of them. Nevertheless, on Janurary 21, Angle was the special guest of SeneGence International at a beauty seminar they held in Las Vega:
Sharron will be sharing her beauty and makeup challenges during the campaign and how she overcame them! She had confidence that she would look great with 14 -16 hour days & with numerous appearances daily… so can you!
Please be our guest… you will be glad you did!
* Girlfriend time
* Chat with Sharron
* Learn some new make-up tips & techniques
* Find out about an amazing revolutionary skin care line (guaranteed to take 55% of your fine lines and wrinkles away in 8 weeks!) NO kidding
* Free gift for all who attend
First of all, my point, in case anyone didn’t get it, was contained in the bold text (”...the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.”). I’m saying that the potential for a blowback against the folks propagating the majority of this hate talk is rather ripe. If you piss in the wind, don’t be surprised when it comes back to hit you in the face. Then poor Eric Fuller went and proved my point about 3 hours later, to his shame. His story is the very embodiment of my argument in the post. The guy should have been arrested, but it’s sad
I hardly see any evidence there of a “full-throated, hate-filled rant,” either, as I was accused of in the comments by “Metzger’s id,” someone who obviously did not read what I actually wrote. (Steve Doocey IS one of the stupidest people on television. He’s a fucking idiot and I will not back down from this position).
Commenter moflcky scores when he asks “Do you think it’s worse now than it was in the 60s/70s with SDS, the Weather Underground, the SLA, the Black Panthers, the Klan and the race riots?”
This is a very good point and worth thinking about. However, I think contrasting the difference of then vs today is best served by comparing *the media* that exists today vs. what we had at that time. With just three TV networks, I think the center could hold very easily back then. In the realm of “public opinion” it was much easier to achieve a broad general agreement 40-50 years ago and so there was, by and large, a very strong “centrist” majority. The GOP of Nixon’s era has very little to do with the GOP of today, they’ve moved far, far to the right of the positions they held in the 70s. And the Democrats of today are pretty much standing in the same place, ideologically speaking, as most of the Republicans were at that time. Nixon, it can be argued, was to the left of Bill Clinton, in many respects.
The political elites of both parties moved significantly to the right in the past 40 years, even if the general public did not. As the politicians shifted rightwards, the population, or some of the population, anyway, reacted by going in the other direction and eventually—sometime in the 90s—modern progressive politics is born (just as the Great Society and Roe vs. Wade saw an awakening of the religious right/Moral Majority as a political force in the late 70s).
You could say it was “the dialectic” or “zeitgeist” in motion or even just a “generation gap”—I refer you to Spiral Dynamics or the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe. I think both get it right. The generation up and coming looks at the Tea party and largely sees a bunch of ignorant, cranky old white people. As the younger citizens of the United States grow up, the folks who are attending these Tea party rallies will be dying off. And as they do, something else will happen that no one can anticipate at the present time. That’s just the way it works.
The Weather Underground didn’t get face time to argue their beliefs on MSNBC in 1970, although admittedly they might today, depending on the ratings potential. I don’t think they had ANY influence on the general public. The same cannot be said of the radical right Tea party-types and folks like Tony Perkins, Bryan Fisher, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and the rest of them.
There is a huge chasm between some misguided grad students who most people were appalled by, and few supported, and an obviously doomed Republican Senate candidate telling her supporters that if they don’t win at the ballot box, they’ll win with guns? This isn’t some group of hippies who appear to be freaks to 99% of the population talking, this is a lemon-faced church lady-type who faced off against the Senate Majority leader and raised a record amount of cash (most from from outside of her state).
William Ayers was brought up in the comments. I find bringing up Bill Ayers, specifically, in this context (and nearly all others) to be utterly meaningless and tiresome. How is he relevant in 2011 or is this situation comparable? Can someone please remind me?. I’ll say it again: the biggest difference between the Weather Underground in 1969 and the Tea party in 2011 is that the Weather Underground never had their own cable news outlet (The Weather Channel?) and 15% of the dumbest and least educated portion of the population did NOT follow or sympathize with their ideals.
Imagine the Democrats were running Bernardine Dohrn for the Senate? Wouldn’t THAT would be the flip-side of the GOP running Sharron Angle? WHO is the equivalent to Sharron Angle on the mainstream Left? (There is NO nuance in advocating “Second Amendment remedies! It’s not a statement open to that much wiggle room in the interpretation!)
Make no mistake about it, this is what MORE THAN HALF of the country is hearing when we have to listen to this Tea party bullshit: These folks want MINORITY RULE.
They will not get it, obviously, without violence.
Well, we know that Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck and their irresponsible, hateful rhetoric had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the shooting in Tucson, because… well, they (and Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Michelle Malkin and the rest of the right-wing punditacracy clown parade) told us so. Right? Right??
But what of the people who were actually shot, but survived, or who were eyewitnesses to the tragedy? What do they think? Who do they blame for the sorry state of the toxic political climate that led a complete lunatic like Jared Loughner to seek to inflict his “Second Amendment remedies,” on them, as per the innocent, blameless Sharron Angle?
Well, can’t say it’s much of a shock to report that at least one of the shooting victims, Eric Fuller, a 63-year-old disabled veteran who had campaigned for Gabrielle Giffords in her reelection campaign last Fall, DOES blame Palin, Beck and Angle. Fuller, who was shot in the knee and wounded in the back, told Democracy Now that “It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target. Their wish for second amendment activism has been fulfilled.” In remarks Fuller prepared in advance for the interview, he added “Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled—senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic-fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls.”
In my book, Mr. Fuller’s opinion holds more water than Palin’s, Beck’s, Angle’s, Limbaugh’s and the whole of the Fox News staff’s (especially Steeve Doocey, who is a blithering idiot) combined. He took a bullet, two, in fact, so he’s got a right to his opinion. He earned it with his own blood. Suck on that, Sarah Palin!
What’s pathetically ridiculous about the entire argument from the right that the specific words of these specific people had no effect on this matter because Loughner is so very obviously batshit crazy is that this ISN’T the first incident like this in recent memory. It’s (at least) the second (if not the third: the name Richard Poplawski ring a bell?).
Why are so few people in the media talking about what happened when Glenn Beck decided to make the tiny Tides Foundation into a fearsome component of his “the progressive movement wants to destroy America with their evil Socialism” conspiracy theories last year? It HAS happened already that a mentally unbalanced person has decided to fight the vast-leftwing conspiracy that Beck and others subscribe to and propagate, with violence. Just seven months ago, a bank-robber out on parole, Byron Williams, en route to murder the staff at the Tides Foundation, opened fire on Oakland police with a 9mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308-caliber rifle with armor-piercing bullets. Williams told told authorities that he wanted to foment a revolution by “killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.” His mother told the San Francisco Chronicle that her son had been watching Fox News and was angered by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.” Williams thought that the Tides Foundation was part of a conspiracy in which the BP oil spill was a deliberate act of sabotage masterminded by George Soros and progressives.
(Self-described “progressive hunter,” Williams told a reporter that Beck “blew [his] mind.” Who I am to disagree?)
Where will all of this end? Who knows, but what happens when the people who make a living riling up dumb-ass, poorly-educated white people to hate and fear people who are different than they are or who think differently than they do, face a blowback themselves? Sooner or later, a left-wing crazy probably is gonna come after one of them. It wouldn’t stretch the imagination of anyone to figure that somewhere out there in this vast nation of 300 million people, there is a foaming at the mouth far-left nutcase (or a “radical centrist” for that matter) who feels that what’s really destroying America is assholes like Beck, Palin and Sharron Angle and who thinks killing them is the answer to our nation’s problems.
I have a sickening, sinking feeling that this isn’t the end of this, for lack of a better term, “partisan violence,” but just the warm-up acts. There is something eerily Weimar Republic-esque about the sad state of present day America and it’s extremely disturbing to attempt to draw this type of behavior to its logical conclusions. Before anyone writes in to say that it’s only the right-wing who is using the violent talk, the “reload” nonsense and the brain-damaged conspiracy theories, I get that. I know that. What I’m trying to point out here is that I think the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.
Even if the right has always been the spiritual home to the racist and cryptofascist fringe, from the KKK to the John Birch Society to today’s Teabaggers, there are crazy people all across the political spectrum. The next time—and there is going to be a next time—it might be a former member of the American middle class who has lost his home or pension who comes gunning after a Republican. The next shooter might come from the ranks of the 99ers. The next cold blooded killer could be a radical environmentalist. The next political assassin might be someone whose child died because their insurance company didn’t pay for a new medical treatment or ...?
This toxic political climate in America today is a direct or indirect consequence of a small number of politicians and pundits on the far right calling those who they disagree with “evil.” Does anyone with half a brain, really dispute that? Then something awful happens, like what happened in Tucson. And then there is more blame. Then the momentum of the bad craziness builds in some lone-wolf lefty lunatic and this energy reemerges with someone on the right getting hurt. And then it will start again. Back and forth, back and forth.
When, not if, the next politician, government official or TV news pundit who is killed turns out to be someone on the conservative side, Palin, Beck, Angle, Limbaugh, Michael Savage and the idiots at Fox News will have no one to blame but themselves.
UPDATE: Mr. Fuller was arrested today for disorderly conduct after allegedly making a threat to Tucson Tea party spokesman Trent Humphries during a “town hall” TV show taping for ABC. According to sheriff’s deputies at the scene in Tucson, Fuller took a photo of Humphries and then said, “You’re dead.”
I didn’t think events would prove my point this quickly—and regret that they have—but there it is.
Conclusion (and the GOP should hear this one, loud and clear, but won’t): You can’t run racist, scaremongering political ads and expect the targets of these ads to support your damned election! Old white people = a dying base; Latino-Americans a fast-growing one. Look what happened to former governor Pete Wilson (R) in California. His last campaign did damage to the GOP in the Golden State for a good, long time. Damage they never really recovered from and still won’t for some time.
As Dangerous Minds pal, Charles Johnson succinctly put it over at Little Green Footballs:
In this election, the Tea Party GOP made a calculation to pander to the racist and xenophobic elements of their base, and this is a glimpse of the backlash to come. The days when they can count on a racist base to put them over the top are numbered, as Latinos and other minorities make up increasingly large segments of the American population.
Angle’s concession speech was fascinating, too. Did someone slip her some Thorazine about a half hour before she took the mike?
The biggest “downside” to Angle’s loss yesterday—if there can be said to be one—it’s that she didn’t lose by a much larger percentage!
Republishing an entire article here from the Las Vegas Sun because it’s an eloquent discussion of how things got to where they are in Nevada, i.e. how a hateful harpie—a joke of a human being—like batshit Sharron Angle can be in a statistical dead heat with the Senate Majority Leader! Anyone who is reading this blog who lives in Nevada, PLEASE vote (and vote often!) to keep this woman from gumming up the work that needs to be done in Washington. She’s an unsophisticated, bigoted, MEAN AS HELL church lady who intends to inflict her twisted view of the world on the rest of us. That I’m not so worried about (I live in California, everyone would just laugh at her ideas, here) it’s the idea that someone like this, given a forum (such as the Senate, FOX News, et al) will probably be able to stir up enough shit to derail every progressive thing that would get proposed for the next six years. Sharron Angle is a moron, but she’s dumb enough to be dangerous. Her $14 million dollar campaign haul in the 3rd quarter proves it. Jon Ralston writes:
“Sharron Angle produced one of the most successful single quarters of fundraising in the nation’s history for a U.S. Senate campaign. This is a testament to the hatred of Harry Reid, the nation’s disapproval of President Obama, and the unprecedented grass-roots support for Sharron Angle. Harry Reid is losing this race, he knows it, and he is just going to get more desperate over the final three weeks.”
— Angle spokesman Jarrod Agen after reporting GOP Senate nominee had raised $14 million in the third quarter
•••
What’s hate got to do with it?
Everything. Or just enough.
Even though it has been the leitmotif of the Nevada Senate race, even though it is the undercurrent that has electrified the GOP, even though it is the reason Republicans still have hope here after nominating a verbally flawed candidate, it was still jarring to see the word used in a news release.
I’ve read plenty of such missives over the years that have vicious language and stinging adjectives. Indeed, the Reid campaign has called Angle “crazy” and said she has “lost her mind.” But “hatred” is such an awful word — a word I forbid my daughter to use — and yet it sums up exactly why the Senate majority leader may lose to a woman who just last week talked of Sharia law existing in cities in Michigan and Texas.
It’s hatred that has brought this Senate race, with three days until voting begins, to a place where Angle can win. It is hatred that brought her that $14 million haul. And it is hatred that courses through the American electorate, bringing venomous and vitriolic assaults upon anyone who dares to suggest Obama-Reid-Pelosi is not a three-headed monster.
Angle has all but done what she promised to do when she advertised her campaign on conservative talk shows and Fox — “Harry Reid has said he will raise $25 million in this race. I need 1 million people to send $25.”
And you know what: She did it. Or essentially she did.
An incredible 161,358 people sent her checks of $200 or less. Her average donation is $90, Agen says.
This is real, unparalleled (except, perhaps, for Barack Obama in 2008) grass roots. And there is a wildfire blazing through the grass roots, with burning hatred for Reid animating Angle’s chances.
Of those small contributors, my guess is only a handful of the 161,358 people know much about Angle. They have no idea about her religious fervor, fail to separate her church (which apparently doesn’t like Mormons) from our state, or her multifarious positions on Social Security and Medicare, her sympathy for “Second Amendment remedies” or her latest incendiary comments about Dearborn, Mich., and nonexistent Frankford, Texas, implying “the Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming.”
But they don’t need to know much about Sharron Angle. They know enough about Harry Reid — Obamacare, bailouts, stimulus, good old boy (emphasis on “old”) and part of a corrupt Congress that has bankrupted this country and led it down the inevitable path to socialism.
I think I got most of the message points. Set the kindling, pour on some gasoline, light the fire and poof: You have $14 million, half of it last month.
Almost every national reporter, as I have said before, wants to know why people “hate” Harry Reid. I always say the same thing: 40 years in politics, familiarity breeds contempt, terrible retail pol, bizarre statements, face of unpopular Democratic agenda. But there’s more to it, as I realized after the $14 million revelation. As a headline on New York magazine’s blog said: “Sharron Angle’s Cash Haul Says Something About America’s State of Mind.”
Team Reid has understood this mental state for a while, which is why it has adopted a scorched-earth policy of its own, determined that if their guy is all but in ashes they have to take the blowtorch to Angle. And have they ever, executing one of the most relentless, laserlike assaults in campaign history, turning Angle from the darling of the Tea Party on June 8 to the butt of national jokes as the election nears.
And so we go to the finish line, with the pair matching each other gaffe for gaffe — Reid answered a question recently about who he thought was the greatest living American by naming two dead senators, Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy.
But Reid’s serpentine rhetorical peregrinations seem addled; Angle’s seem dangerous. So do we want the dotty guy or the crazy woman?
Or, to use that word I don’t let my daughter say: Who do you hate least?
According to the Louisville Courier-Journal. Republican extremist Rand Paul—who, natch, has had Sarah Palin fundraising for him—is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the same group who are supporting Nevada’s batshit crazy GOP Senate nominee, Sharron Angle, who seems to believe that abortion causes breast cancer and that Medicare is “immoral” and “evil” (but letting elderly people is what Christ would have wanted???)
Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul belongs to a conservative doctors’ group that, among other things, has expressed doubts about the connection between HIV and AIDS and suggested that President Barack Obama may have been elected because he was able to hypnotize voters.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, based in Tucson, Ariz., advocates conservative and free-market solutions on health care and a variety of other political issues.
But it also uses its medical journal and Website as forums for unorthodox medical views.
Maybe their blog is where Sharron Angle got her information for her comments about “autism” (I added the quotation marks, watch the video and see why. What galls me about this woman is how proud of herself she seems! She is PROUD of being ignorant. You can’t top that, she’s on a suicide mission!):
Group promoting Angle event: Medicare “evil” and “immoral,” Obama is a “covert hypnotist” and HIV may not cause AIDS (Las Vegas Sun)
Just when you think that it’s not even possible that Sharron Angle, the Nevada nincompoop running on the Republican ticket against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, could say or do something even nuttier than she already has, a past incident from her “career” has come back to haunt her: In 1991, Angle, who says her Senate candidacy is divinely inspired (“a calling from God” as she put it!) was part of a group who successfully lobbied that a local high school football team in Tonopah, NV, not be able to have black football jerseys.
Why? Because the color black is “evil” of course! That’s right, it’s a thoroughly evil color!
Also opposing the black jerseys was another group including Angle, a member, if not its leader.
They argued against our charges wearing black on religious grounds.
I cannot quote scripture as they did to justify their point but the gist of their argument was that black as a color was thoroughly evil, invoking the supernatural and especially the devil may take from dictionary definitions and not from scripture .
Angle may or may not have thought this a political statement. But she became a high profile advocate of a specific religious position during her very first campaign.
Whichever argument prevailed, school administrators caved in and prohibited the Muckers from wearing the black apparel.
And here we see another side of the multi-faceted, one-woman lunatic fringe that is Sharron Angle: She’s a low IQ combination of Gladys Kravitz, the nosey, disapproving neighbor on Bewitched and a desert dumbass version of Abigail Williams, one of the accusers in the Salem Witch Trials!
And SHE is best the Republicans can do to run against the Democrat’s Senate Majority Leader??? A foaming at the mouth Christian Fundamentalist lunatic who wants to ban alcohol, abortion, leave the UN and do away with the EPA, the IRS, Social Security and Medicare? A mentally ill person? Why, YES, apparently she is!
