As I was saying earlier, I wish I had a wall of video screens so as not to miss a single second of the insanity going on in Washington, DC today. It’s such an incredible spectacle to witness. The ultimate reality show and it’s on thousands of channels at once. It’s hard for me to do anything else other than just gawk at it slack-jawed and scour the Internet for new news. I’ve been called “perpetually amused” and that description more fits me to a tee, but never have I been more amused than I have been in the past few days. Today especially.

Shit is getting GOOD. The DC follies is the greatest show on Earth now that Breaking Bad is over.

I feel like we’re just about three-quarters of the way through a movie where the bad guys are about to get their asses handed to them, but then again, maybe not. The end of this one hasn’t been written yet, so there’s genuine suspense. From where I’m sitting, it does look like the Republicans have overplayed their hand, yes, and I think the outcome to all of this self-inflicted damage is all but assured, yes to that as well, but it also seems certain that we’re going to see at least a few more twists, turns and moments of high drama—and low humor—along the way.

Anyway, in my voracious appetite for vacuuming up and processing every bit of information I can about the government shutdown and the lunatics who are at present in charge of the asylum, nowhere have I seen it put better than by THE GREATEST AMERICAN WRITER OF OUR TIME, CHARLES P. PIERCE, writing at Esquire. This is required reading:

Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress—or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress—a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn’t seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation’s insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson’s account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do—to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

Read more…

Charles P. Pierce. He’s the best of the best, right? He’s also one of the last sane men left in America. Miss his wisdom at your peril. He’s good. Mark Twain good. Hunter S. Thompson good. Joe Bageant good. Jon Stewart good. He’s damned good!

Read Charles P. Pierce daily at the Esquire Politics blog

 
No, it might not have quite the same humiliating panache as yesterday’s classic “House of Turds” cover, but it certainly shows just how OUT OF THEIR CONTROL the “shutdown” narrative has gotten from the hapless Republican Party, doesn’t it, when they’re losing the support of even the mainstream conservative papers like The New York Daily News?

Yesterday there were essentially two competing and contrasting visuals: On Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge Report and the like, all you saw were signs of strutting cock-of-the-walk Republican imbeciles grinning, bragging, proudly acting like they’d just beaten the hell out of the black guy in a barroom brawl. Each and every one of them seemed ridiculously oblivious to the way people outside of their bubble might regard the accuracy of what they were saying, the validity of their “true believer” arguments and also the ridiculous hubris of their behavior. Consider the non-verbal message the Republicans are sending by turning on Fox News for a little while with the sound down, and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m not gonna lie, I’m all over this stuff. I wish I had a whole wall of TVs like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. I can’t get enough. Watching the GOP dig itself deeper in shit IN REAL TIME? Pass me the popcorn and a shot of Jim Beam each time they say it’s the Democrats who won’t negotiate. (I’m seeing this sentence in triple, and sliding off my chair, jus’ so’s you fine people know that, okay?...Hiccup!)

Back in the real world, where most people don’t get their “informations” from screaming lunatics on AM talk radio and ALL CAPS EMAILS FILLED WITH PARANOIAC IDIOCY forwarded from someone they go to church with, well, we saw some of that, too, but what of the millions who were desperate to sign up for affordable healthcare yesterday?

That was news, too and so it now sets up a battle of images that the GOP—who were all so sure that Obamacare would be a resounding flop—did not perhaps anticipate:

One side is against the interests of sick people. This party is also the one favored by the vast majority of Christians, go figure.

How many of these Republican voters truly feel in their heart of hearts that if their savior came back TODAY he’d kick the crutches right out from under a sick person or deny health insurance to someone who can’t afford it? What VERSION of Christianity is that? It’s THE AMERICAN VERSION. No wonder young people want no part of it.

We’re witnessing one of the single most absurd moments in all of American history! These people seem to want to bring on another Civil War solely to deny poor people healthcare! It’s sad, it’s pathetic, delusional, too, but in the main, it’s simply absurd.

When all’s said and done, one factor in all this is is becoming more and more obvious and yet no one will say it out loud: It’s not merely a Right vs. Left political conflict in America anymore, it’s a Smart vs. Dumb thing!

Idiocracy is NOW.
 

Why the frown, Senator?

Well, would you look at that, another anti-gay Republican has just been outed…

Mike Rogers is the Managing Director of The Raw Story and the director of the Netroots Nation Netroots Connect program. Yesterday, after GOP Sen. John Barrasso denounced Obamacare during an appearance on Fox News, Rogers tweeted:
 

@senjohnbarrasso on Chris Wallace had the chance to come out as gay on @foxnewssunday out and be proud. #maybenexttime #bustthehatecloset

— Michael Rogers (@MichaelRogersDC) September 29, 2013

Mike Rogers, it should be noted, has a perfect record in such matters. He’s exposed several anti-gay conservatives such as Congressmen Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Dreier, Edward Schrock and former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, who ran George Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004.

Via Towleroad:

Barrasso, a twice-married Presbyterian with three children, has voted against the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. He has also bragged about his votes against gay marriage.

Said Barrasso in 2004: “I believe in limited government, lower taxes, less spending, traditional family values, local control and a strong national defense. In the state Senate, in addition to receiving an ‘A’ rating from the NRA, I have voted for prayer in schools, against gay marriage and have sponsored legislation to protect the sanctity of life.”

Lucky for Barrasso, this news came in the midst of all of the Breaking Bad / impending reichwing government shutdown media hoopla. That hasn’t stopped mention of Rogers’ allegation from making it to Barrasso’s Wikipedia page already.

Below, Barrasso, himself a physician, delivers a GOP radio address against Obamacare. I’d love to know if this Republican hypocrite is opposed to the Affordable Care Act in the same “principled” manner that he is against gay rights?
 

 
Republican Senator Ted Cruz (Texas) is sort of the new Michele Bachmann, the new take-no-prisoners hero of the grassroots right wing of our country, who from every rooftop has bellowed his determination to stop the wheels of government turning if he can’t get the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as “Obamacare”) repealed. He’s tarred any Republican who can count votes and see legislative reality a “surrender caucus.” He’s a demagogue, pure and simple. To some, the Brylcreem-wearing Senator from Texas is even worse than a slightly more masculine Michele Bachman, he’s a Joseph McCarthy redux.

It’s been a fascinating week for Cruz, as his efforts to filibuster a budget bill lacking language that would defund Obamacare were finally revealed to be a pipe dream. That hasn’t prevented Cruz from alienating almost all of his Republican colleagues in Congress, among whom, according to the National Review, Cruz is currently so unpopular that “Nancy Pelosi is more well-liked around here.” Wow.

But we keep learning more. Cruz went to Princeton for his A.B. in public policy (he graduated summe cum laude) before moving on to Harvard Law School, where “during the first week, he announced that he was creating a study group and only people with high GPAs from the Big Three Ivies could apply for admission. In short, Ted managed to come off as a pompous asshole at Harvard Law.” Cruz is posing as a man of the people, but there are few people more nakedly elitist than he is. But then again, IOKIYAR (It’s OK if you’re a Republican), I guess. Jason Zengerle at GQ has reported much the same thing about the Ivy League elitism.

But it gets better once you delve into the details of his undergrad days, remembered by those who knew him firsthand, including his “creepy” habit of wandering over the women’s side of the dormitory wearing little more than a paisley bathrobe, as The Daily Beast reported:

[S]everal fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” “intense,” “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant.” Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived.

Virtually everyone described Cruz as very smart and as a flaming asshole—read the above links for more of that. The overall portrait emerges of a man who made up his mind—about everything—when he was still in high school. Cruz is a bit like a grown-up, oilier version of Andrew Breitbart’s boy wonder, Ben Shapiro.

The hard right is hoping for another Democratic debacle à la 2010, but I’m not seeing it. Obamacare is not legislation currently under consider consideration—it’s been passed, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court has okayed almost all of it. The economy is doing much better than it was doing in 2010, and we haven’t been signing a lot of trillion-dollar bailouts into law lately. Off years are always tough on the White House incumbent party, but Republicans relying on that pattern may be disappointed next year. Right now it looks a lot more like that “Republican Civil War” we keep hearing about.

On top of everything else, shutting down the government in the name of stopping Obamacare from going into effect is massively unpopular:

Opposition to defunding increases sharply when the issue of shutting down the government and defaulting is included. In that case, Americans oppose defunding 59 percent to 19 percent, with 18 percent of respondents unsure.

So yeah, keeping pushing that message, Senator Cruz.

It’s gotten so bad for Cruz lately that Republicans are feeding FOX News the kind of opposition research usually reserved for the vilest of pinko Democrats (see video below). Whatever happens, Cruz is a wildly entertaining figure and I hope he remains the greasy public face of the Republican Party for a while to come.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Republican Healthcare
Vile Republican policies set the stage for socialist revolution in America

 
This “open letter” to “caring conservatives” is a must-read for all Americans, but especially for the Fox News-watching ignoramuses who seem to believe, in the words of Paul Krugman, that “freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat.”

If a large percentage of the population constantly experiencing food insecurity is the new normal in America, ask yourself how much longer this can possibly continue?!?! It’s a simple fact that hungry people are not going to just roll over and die the way the Republican Party seems to hope they will. What a surprise it will be to them when hungry mobs show up at their houses looking for something to eat!

My name is Jason.  I turned 35 less than a week ago.  My first job was maintenance work at a public pool when I was 17.  I worked 40-hours a week while I was in college.  I’ve never gone longer than six months without employment in my life and I just spent the last three years in the military, one of which consisted of a combat tour of Afghanistan.

Oh, and I’m now on food stamps.  Since June, as a matter of fact.

Why am I on food stamps?

The same reason everyone on food stamps is on food stamps: because I would very much enjoy not starving.

I mean, if that’s okay with you:

…Mr. or Mrs. Republican congressman.

…Mr. or Mrs. Conservative commentator.

…Mr. or Mrs. “welfare queen” letter-to-the-editor author.

…Mr. or Mrs. “fiscal conservative, reason-based” libertarian.
 

Saving $40 billion dollars by starving 3.8 million Americans will cut a whopping .25% from the deficit!

I do apologize for burdening you on the checkout line with real-life images of American-style poverty.  I know you probably believe the only true starving people in the world have flies buzzing around their eyes while they wallow away, near-lifeless in gutters.

Hate to burst the bubble, but those people don’t live in this country.

I do.  And millions like me.  Millions of people in poverty who fall into three categories.

Let’s call them the “lucky” category, since conservatives seem to think people on welfare have hit some sort of jackpot:

Those living paycheck to paycheck?  They’re a little lucky.

Those living unemployment check to unemployment check?  They’re a little luckier.

Those living 2nd of the month to 2nd of the month?  *ding* We’ve hit the jackpot!

The 2nd of the month being the time when funds gets electronically deposited onto the EBT card, [at least in NY] for those who’ve never been fortunate enough to hit that $175/month Powerball.

I fall into the latter two categories.  But I’ve known people recently - soldiers in the Army – who were in the first and third.  They were off fighting in Afghanistan while their wives were at home, buying food at the on-post commissary with food stamps.

And nobody bats an eye there, because it’s not uncommon in the military.

It’s not uncommon – nor is it shameful.  It might be shameful how little service-members are paid, but that’s a separate issue.

The fact remains anyone at a certain income level can find it difficult from time to time to pay for everything.  And when you’re poor you learn to make sacrifices.  Food shouldn’t be one of them.

The whole concept is un-American.  People living here, in the greatest country on Earth, with the most abundant resources,  should be forced to go hungry because of the intellectual notion of fiscal conservatism and the ideological notion of self-reliance.
 

 
Are you fucking kidding me?

I didn’t risk my life in Afghanistan so I could come back and watch people go hungry in America.  I certainly didn’t risk it so *I* could come back and go hungry.

Anyone who genuinely supports cutting food stamps is not an intellectual or an ideologue – they’re a bully.

And nobody likes a bully.  Except other bullies.

It’s time for regular Americans to stand up to these bullies.  Not cower in the corner, ashamed of needing help.  Because if there’s one thing life has taught me, it’s that you never know when you’ll be the one in need.
 

 
Via Class Warfare Exists

 
Although the claim has been made, most prominently by Dr. Martin Luther King’s own niece, Republican activist Alveda King, that her uncle was a Republican and conservative groups have purchased billboards across the country, apparently trying to claim the mantle of the slain civil right icon for their own, the claim has been debunked by King’s son, Martin Luther King III. He would probably know. It was also debunked by his biographer, David Garrow.

There’s also the fact that King campaigned tirelessly for Lyndon Johnson in 1964…

But if you really want to know how King felt about Republicans, why not simply take him at his own word, in this excerpt from his autobiography.

The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism. All people of goodwill viewed with alarm and concern the frenzied wedding at the Cow Palace of the KKK with the radical right. The “best man” at this ceremony was a senator whose voting record, philosophy, and program were anathema to all the hard-won achievements of the past decade.

It was both unfortunate and disastrous that the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater as its candidate for President of the United States. In foreign policy Mr. Goldwater advocated a narrow nationalism, a crippling isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude that could plunge the whole world into the dark abyss of annihilation. On social and economic issues, Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century. The issue of poverty compelled the attention of all citizens of our country. Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated. On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.

While I had followed a policy of not endorsing political candidates, I felt that the prospect of Senator Goldwater being President of the United States so threatened the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that I could not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represented.

I don’t see a lot of wiggle room there myself, but imagine how many halfwits who heard about King being a Republican from Fox News or talk radio are strutting around today believing, repeating and arguing about this nonsense. Is the ignorance of the right funny? Tragic? Dangerous? I can’t tell anymore! It’s all three, no doubt.

Here’s what Martin Luther King III had to say about the billboards claiming his father was a Republican:

It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican. It is even more outrageous to suggest that he would support the Republican Party of today, which has spent so much time and effort trying to suppress African American votes in Florida and many other states.

During his public life, King was constantly accused of being a Communist. He was, for the most part, rather circumspect about making public statements that might be seen as “commie,” but in private, this was apparently not the case. In one of his speeches, King stated that “something is wrong with capitalism” and “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

Does that sound like much of a Republican OR a Democrat to you?

King, though probably a socialist, rejected Marx—whose philosophy he studied at Morehouse College—because Marxism rejects religion and he considered the Soviet system too totalitarian.
 

 

 
Although they’re not quite yet on the endangered species list, the dwindling number of Americans who self-identify as “Republican” must have the GOP’s top political strategists laying awake at night. They’re the smart guys and gals who are really the ones in charge of “the stupid party.”

Talk about a fuckin’ thankless task! Can you imagine?

According to Think Progress, the rolling average of GOP party identification prepared by The Pollster.com shows Republicans at 22% of the American public, a percentage that has been declining steadily for several years as the party caters more and more to its fringiest members, who are increasingly looking like its only members! Their problem with broadening the party’s appeal goes far beyond a “Catch 22%” as an apparent civil war among the GOP’s constituent parts is coming to a nasty boil. Damned if they do, damned it they don’t, should the GOP decide to join this century, they’d lose the remainder of their old guard voters.

Pew Research Center has it looking even worse for the GOP, down to only 19% of Americans! If this is accurate, then what percentage of these folks would live north of the Mason-Dixon line? It can’t be that many anymore. And Republican voters aren’t merely primarily located in southern states, they’d also, in the main, be some pretty long in the tooth southerners.

Senior fellow at both the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, Think Progress blogger Ruy Teixeira writes that the Republicans’ lockstep intransigence to the Affordable Healthcare Act, while offering nothing better—nothing at all—to replace it, is being seen as just a big “fuck you” to the folks that will be covered now.

Maybe they’re placing their bets on the wrong horse, especially when it comes to Obamacare. Start with the fact that roughly a third of the opposition to Obamacare stems from the view that the program isn’t liberal enough rather than too liberal. That doesn’t fit with the GOP’s blow-it-up paradigm. Nor do recent polls that show an average of only 35 percent saying they want to repeal Obamacare as opposed to keeping it as is or with changes.

That’s not an insignificant point: I have had pollsters call me on three separate occasions over the past four years to ask about my attitude towards the healthcare law and I was not once given the option of saying “I’m not much of a supporter of the ACA because it’s not liberal enough” or to in any way indicate that I thought the expansion of Medicare for all would be a better way to go. I was only offered a “yay or nay,” vote it up or down choice. From the tone of the questioning, I’m pretty darned sure that each of these polls were paid for by conservative groups. It seemed odd that they were conducting polls, not to find out scientifically what the public really thinks, but to instead get them to confirm or imply agreement—even if nothing of the sort was intended—by deliberately proscribing the parameters of the debate to twist statistical arms.

The point being that MY opinion—I’m a staunch socialist—was being tallied as an “I’m agin’ it!” vote and used to confirm some delusional Republican bias. That’s simply ridiculous.

Apparently equating better access to healthcare with Hitler has been a bit of a bust for the GOP. A recent Hart Research/SEIU poll on voter attitudes toward Obamacare vis a vis the 2014 races found that:

Voters feel intensely negative toward Republican candidates who have worked to repeal or undermine the law, especially those who are unwilling to help their constituents take advantage of the benefits and protections available to them under the ACA….Seventy-one percent of voters express unfavorable feelings toward “a Republican who, as an elected official, refuses to help individuals and small businesses understand how best to deal with Obamacare and take advantage of its benefits.”….Two-thirds of all voters (including 60% of undecided voters) have an unfavorable impression of “a Republican who repeatedly voted to cut the funding needed to effectively implement the law, and refuses to provide information to employers and individuals about it.”

“Intensely negative” doesn’t really beat around the bush, but you know, they’re assholes, pure and simple! It’s always been a puzzle to me why it practically takes an electric cattle prod to get most Democrats and non-Republican leaning independents to actually vote, despite the clear-cut shit sandwich alternative if they fail to make that tiny, tiny civic effort. I’m looking at YOU lazy-ass North Carolinians who didn’t even bother to vote last year. Look what it got you, especially those of you who just got your jobless benefits cut.

If you could do it all over again, would you do anything differently?

More from the Hart survey summation:

Our generic congressional trial heat shows a relatively narrow, three-point advantage for Democratic candidates (44%) over Republicans (41%) nationwide. However, when the choice in the 2014 election is presented as “a Democrat who favors fixing and improving Obamacare rather than repealing it altogether” versus “a Republican who wants to totally repeal Obamacare,” voters favor the Democratic candidate (51%) over the Republican candidate (36%) by 15 percentage points.

The biggest problem the Republicans have is… themselves. Almost everyone hates ‘em, so why not double down on everything they hate the most?

And if you happened to catch any of the news coverage of this weekend’s anniversary of the March on Washington, exactly what sort of snake the GOP has stepped on by trying to curb voter rights for African-Americans is becoming pretty apparent, isn’t it?

Don’t ever change GOP!

The skeleton with the wig on, above left, and her husband, don’t want poor people to have health insurance

You might think from the way that it’s getting reported that the 13 members of the Maine Republican Party who are leaving the GOP decided to ditch the party because it had gotten too extreme, too stupid, too racist, too xenophobic, was in bed with the oligarchs, etc.

“As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” you maybe hoped?

Well, if you actually read the entire resignation letter (which frankly isn’t really all that interesting) that’s not what they’re saying at all. These folks are hardcore Tea party types who loathe John Boehner and who are supportive of Maine’s governor Paul LePage, surely one of the very dumbest people in America to currently hold an important political office. There’s fierce competition as to who is actually the dumbest, but LePage is every bit as egregiously inane as Michele Bachmann, Steve King or Louie Gohmert are. Just yesterday LePage was revealed to have said that Obama “hates white people” at a private GOP fundraiser last week. Truly, when you assert support for Paul LePage, you are endorsing stupidity itself, in its most offensive, know-nothing, force your ignorance on others form.

So yeah, it seems pretty clear to me that this renegade baker’s dozen aren’t leaving the Republican Party because it’s too extreme, they’re heading out the door en masse because it’s not nearly extreme enough! The way Huffington Post lazily half-reported on the matter, you might well think they were “moderates.” Most of the tweets I’ve seen about it were from folks who seemed to be under this impression, too. Or maybe they just read the headline and… assumed.

What I did find interesting about the letter, though, is how it smacks so strongly of the Ron Paul-style free market/no foreign intervention school. When you have office-holders and elected officials (including a 2006 candidate for Congress) of a political party willing to denounce it in public and renounce their memberships, this is an interesting development indeed and one that should have the GOP establishment quaking, on both a state and national level. Will other Libertarian/Tea party types, emboldened by the defection of the Maine Republicans, do the same in their states and form break-away parties and political action groups? I sure hope so!

This whole “GOP Civil War” thing we’ve been hearing about sounds like it’s about to get very interesting, very quickly. This is a loud shoe dropping. With the deep, deep unbridled fanaticism within the party’s ranks, any sort of perceived ideological “betrayals” by former allies in the conservative movement makes the likelihood of that once ironclad coalition splintering into warring former Republican factions seem likely indeed.

The demographic tide that turned, hard, against the GOP in recent years as their voters got older (and deader) while the country as a whole has become younger and browner, is merely one of their seemingly insurmountable problems. Should they split up into two or more rival factions, to my mind, that would be just great. United they stand, but divided, well… the entire conservative movement will be about as impotent as their stalwart old white male voters. The oligarchs, the stupid, the religious, the stingy, they need each other BADLY. If that coalition frays—and then they go to war against each other like feuding hillbilly relatives with rabies, which they will—the GOP is doomed. Put-a-stake though-its-heart and piss-on-its-grave doomed.

Can a Republican ever win the White House again? Consider this, on a national level, the 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee will basically start out with 246 electoral votes. Imagine the finger-pointing rancor between say, the “Chris Christie Republicans” vs the Rand Paul fans and then turn the volume knob up to ten on that noise. The names may change, but the negative, hateful energy is turning inwards now. Without a black guy for them to unite against, what hope does the GOP have in 2016?

Update: Then there was this.

Keep in mind as you watch the video below that it was paid for by a Republican-affiliated PAC!
 

 
In which Stephen Colbert uses an old adage to expose the preposterously illogical position the House Republicans have taken on the matter of food stamps:

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Take away his food stamps, and he’ll found FishCo, a multinational food conglomerate that gets a massive subsidy in the next Farm Bill.

In the harsh daylight of, I dunno, REALITY, what do the GOP really think is going to happen if they gut the food stamp program? That the 47 million Americans currently dependent on them—the most ever, double what it was five years ago—are just going to curl up in the middle of the road and die? They’re simply going to say “Hey, kids, the jig’s up, let’s just stop eating. The Republicans are right. Why don’t we all buy one last pizza and eat it in the garage with the car’s engine running?”

Or will they come into the rich neighborhoods looking for a snack?

Starve poor families out and they might be forced to become entrepreneurial, it’s true!

They just won’t be the kind of entrepreneurs that these Republican halfwits want…
 

“Goldman Sachs 2020 Slave Labor Camp International” by Lee Harvey

Considering the appalling number of Americans these days who are paid as little as their bosses can possibly get away with paying them, you would think that citing opposition to the notion that hard work should, you know, pay a living wage and provide for some level of human dignity in the world’s richest country, would be perceived as a toxic issue by the elders of the Republican Party. Something you wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot pole…

But you would be wrong.

During a hearing on raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, Sen. Bernie Sanders got Lamar Alexander, the ranking Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee to admit that he wants to abolish the minimum wage.

It was remarkably easy—he wasn’t even trying—for Sanders to provoke a remarkable reaction to this statement:

“There are certain conservatives who do not believe in the concept of the minimum wage. The concept of the minimum wage. In other words, if the economy as such, and I offer you three dollars an hour.”

Alexander took the bait, interrupting Sanders (“Let me jump in. I do not believe in it” he says) and offering his two unsolicited cents:

Sanders: So you do not believe in the concept of the minimum wage?

Alexander: That’s correct.

Sanders: You would abolish the minimum wage?

Alexander: Correct.

Sanders: If someone had to work for two bucks an hour, they would work for two bucks an hour?

Senator Alexander is not a stupid man. He’s a graduate of Vanderbilt University and NYU’s law school. He’s been in government since the Nixon administration, he was the 45th Governor of Tennessee from 1979 to 1987 and he served as George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Education. He’s run for president twice.

Alexander was not caught off guard and this was not exactly a trick question that Senator Sanders posed to him, either. He volunteered this information: Alexander really means this shit.

Oy vey. When will these Republicans ever learn?

The exchange between Sanders and Alexander starts (after Sanders lays the groundwork discussing the situation that fast food workers find themselves in making $7 bucks an hour) at the 5:48 mark. At the end of it, the asshole from the conservative Heritage Foundation asserts that the minimum wage hurts “the beneficiaries”!
 

 
Via Politics USA

Rising GOP star Dave Agema, neither a hater or bigot, just a good, clean-living, God-fearing conservative Republican

The humiliating self-immolation of Dr. Ben Carson apparently wasn’t enough, so the comedy gods must be demanding another GOP sacrifice. Dave Agema, the Republican National Committee member from Michigan—a small-minded dumbass whose anti-gay Facebook posting that suggested gays were responsible for “half the murders in large cities” (among other things, but Agema didn’t write it, he just posted it) made national news last week—isn’t going to go away quietly as he proved during a remarkably idiotic conservative talk radio interview.

Move over Louie Gohmert, you’ve got some brain-damaged competition in the “Male Michele Bachmann” sweepstakes!

Via Deadline Detroit:

“It’s not about hate, folks,” he says of warnings about purported physical and mental health risks of homosexuality. “What it is, is hey, if you’re in this lifestyle, if you really love somebody that’s in this lifestyle, you want to ask them and try to get them out because they’re not going to live as long. It’s going to hurt them emotionally and physically.

“That’s what it’s about. So it’s really more about caring than it is hate,” Agema adds during an outspoken, defiant conversation Monday with sympathetic hosts at WPIQ in Manistee in northern Michigan.

That talk-format station airs syndicated shows from Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Comfortable turf, in other words.

Comfortable turf for unhinged morons like Agema who don’t know when to quit and detestable Republican fuckwits, in other other words…

Agema, a Michigan state representative from 2007-12 first got himself noticed about a year ago, when the newly-minted RNC member made some very confused remarks about Muslims, terrorism and how Obama was a Muslim terrorist. Or something like that. Agema is so witless that he once agreed to appear with Koran-burning Yosemite Sam look-a-like Pastor Terry Jones before backing out.

A bigot? Where’s the proof? Ahahahahahahahah. This guy’s fucking funny!

The Republican National Committee-man had this to say during his time on air with WPIQ’s Morning Breakfast Show hosts, Davin Lawrence and Doug Sedenquist, a Republican activist:

School messages: “I don’t want my kids – my grandkids, I should say – taught in school that this is an alternate lifestyle, [that] you should accept it. I would rather have them taught, hey look, here’s what happens in this lifestyle. Here’s what’s going to happen to you physically. Here’s what’s going to happen to you emotionally. Instead we’re going to teach just the opposite..”

Personal experience: “I’ve been involved in this issue for years, way back when I worked for American Airlines this became an issue, because we had, you know obviously we had a lot of homosexuals in the flight attendant realm, and, uhh, we had issues.”

Social change: “Society in general has been tolerant of any behavior that doesn’t affect others in a general stance. But this does affect others. . . . When you look at this stuff, it’s just amazing what’s happening in our society, how fast it’s happened, I mean just 20 years ago, you wouldn’t think this would happen, or 25 years ago, and look where we are now—we’re just like they are in Europe. And some of those studies over there show the same thing: This is not a good thing for us, folks. And all I want to do is maintain our principles, and I want to stay on the conservative side, not on the liberal side.”

Critical response: “They’re trying to say you’re a bigot if you’re bringing it up and I think that’s what bothers me more than anything. I never heard such amount of name-calling, threats and bigotry on their part, calling me a bigot, for bringing up this information. I have never seen anything like it. . . . I’ve been threatened just by speaking out. And that’s the key, they are trying to shut anyone and everyone down from saying anything, that’s what they do. . . . What you get thrown back in your face is nothing but hate.”

Threat to churches: “The next thing I fear is they’ll come to your churches and say oh, you won’t marry same-sex couples? Well that’s interesting. This is a hate crime, you just lost your tax-exempt status. This is going to go from one step to the next, it’s part of the plan.”

Challenge to party: “I just wish our leadership would get behind this, and stand, have backbone, and stand for what our core principles are in the Republican Party.”

I have to agree with Agema on that last point. Don’t ever change GOP!

Don’t. You. Ever. Change.
 

 
H/T Wonkette

Can you find all four idiots in the above image?

Was it entirely predictable that Dr. Ben Carson, the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University and rightwing media darling would implode this publicly and this fast?

You’d think—or at least I did—that a man intelligent enough to run a department at a prestigious medical university would be… you know… well… smarter than the average conservative. Less prone, perhaps, to making idiotic comments when there’s a live microphone around?

You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. Dr. Ben Carson is a fucking idiot, as he proved on Fox News’ Hannity program last week when he compared marriage equality with bestiality and sex with children, and as he continued to demonstrate Monday on conservative talk radio troll Mark Levin’s show. Via TPM:

Carson, who is the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University, said he represents an existential threat to liberals. “They need to shut me up, they need to get rid of me,” Carson said. “They can’t find anything else to delegitimize me, so they take my words, misrepresent them and try to make it seem that I’m a bigot.”

“And you’re attacked also, in many respects, because of your race,” Levin said. “Because you’re not supposed to think like this and talk like this. A lot of white liberals just don’t like it, do they?”

“Well, you know, they’re the most racist people there are,” Carson said. “Because, you know, they put you in a little category, a little box, you have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

Um… sorry Dr. Carson, you might see yourself that way, but it seems rather obvious, based solely on, hey, your own words, that clear-thinking people, be they white, liberal or whatever else they may be, think you’re a plank. You and ANYONE else, of any race, who would say such nasty, ignorant and petty things. In public.

Dr. Carson, this is not a black thing or a white thing, this is a stupidity thing. YOUR stupidity. To imply otherwise is preposterous!

No one needs to look any further than your own words to conclude that YOU are the bigot in this equation. It’s got everything to do with the actual words that came out of your mouth, on national television!

You say that your words were twisted? HOW? Where is the nuance in comparing civil rights for America’s LGBT population to sex with animals and children?

Quite a leap to compare the reaction to what you said to, well, you know… actual bigotry!

If you were white, Dr. Carson, not a whole lot would change—you might even still be invited to come on Fox News, for instance, if you weren’t black—but people would still still be perfectly justified to call you an idiot. Because you are one.

The students at Johns Hopkins who want you out as their commencement speaker aren’t racists, but you sir, are most certainly an asshole.

HOW DARE these liberal bigots speak the truth to you…

UPDATE: I just read the following on Huffington Post in a piece by Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert on Carson’s travails and found it quite amusing:

“You know, intelligent people tend to talk about the facts,” Carson recently said, condemning those who reduce political disagreements to the kind you find on a “third grade playground.” He urged partisans to “find some accommodation” and to “tone down the rhetoric a little bit.”

He said these things while appearing on Fox News, the cable bastion of name-calling and blind partisanship. (Emphasis added)

Superb!

Here’s a link to yesterday’s Hannity, where one of the whitest men in America discusses supposed “racism” directed at black conservatives and gets his dumb ass handed to him on a platter by LA-based civil rights attorney (and talk radio host), Leo Terrell.
 

 
In yet another stunning example of, well, fucking idiocy—why look for an alternate way to state it, this shit doesn’t deserve the dignity, only cruel mocking—one of the top GOP officials in Georgia, Sue Everhart, the chairwoman of the state Republican Party there, told the Marietta Daily Journal that gay marriage will just encourage straight people to exploit the system to scrounge benefits!

“Lord, I’m going to get in trouble over this, but it is not natural for two women or two men to be married,” Everhart said. “If it was natural, they would have the equipment to have a sexual relationship.”

Everhart said while she respects all people, if same sex marriage is legalized across the country, there will be fraud.

“You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow,” Everhart said. “Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”

Everhart said if she had a young child, she wouldn’t want them to have gay parents who would influence that child’s sexual orientation.

“You’re creating with this child that it’s a lifestyle, don’t go out and marry someone else of a different sex because this is natural,” Everhart said. “But if I had a next door neighbor who was in a gay relationship, I could be just as friendly to them as I could be to you and your wife or anybody else. I’m not saying that we ostracize them or anything like that. I’m just saying I’m against marriage because once you get the gay marriage you get everything else.”

Sorry Sue, but just like Chuck and Larry, gay people do want it all.

Via TPM:

 
My wife recently asked me: “So why aren’t you writing any more of your political screeds for the blog lately?”

Some readers have written in and asked the same thing: When did I stop hating on Republicans, anyways?

I promise you I haven’t, but generally speaking, I get pretty burnt out on politics after an election year. This time, though, I think it goes deeper than that. The main reason I think I care less about politics today than I did only five months ago is that for years I’ve long expected to see a steep decline in the size of the GOP’s voter base and the party’s influence and I think that’s now pretty much a fait accompli. We’ve seen it happen. 2012 was the very last year that the Republicans still had a decent shot at getting in on a national level and cementing the rules of, ahem, “democracy” to favor themselves—but as we all know, that didn’t happen.

I certainly think there were very valid reasons for fearing the rise of the far right—the brief Tea party moment was admittedly not something that I saw coming—but I’m not feeling that so much anymore.

The Tea party foolishness, Glenn Beck, the birthers and the rapid rise and fall of Sarah Palin can already be seen in the rear-view mirror as the frenzied flailing of a dying elephant. By 2016, a pretty good chunk of the Grand Old Party’s aging baby boomer base will have at least one foot in the grave and by 2020 and 2024, well, forget about it.
 

 
In the very near future, America will be truly unrecognizable to itself, and this will be especially hard on the folks who don’t even live in the present to begin with. Progress cannot be stopped. Entropy is simply not possible in a country this big and with such a radically changing demographic makeup, no matter how certain personality types—low IQ authoritarians, xenophobes, racists, religious busybodies, I’m talking about the GOP base, here, of course—try to force it on everyone else.

I’m just so over it. Aren’t you?

The dam has burst on a lot of issues: immigration reform, LGBT civil rights, cannabis laws, healthcare, and the water is rushing past the reichwingers and they just got drenched.

This is not to say that I’m not still amused by soaking wet Republicans, it’s just that the 2012 election showed, I think definitively, the hard and fast limits to their influence and that the national brand is truly a spent force, one perhaps best left behind as a relic of another era (like plaid golf pants, Brylcreem, Lawrence Welk… or Jim Crow laws).

To my mind, it all looks pretty downhill from here on out for the Republican Party. Any argument that posits a resurgent national GOP moving forward is an argument made by someone who apparently still thinks that the most recent US Census was just a big ole fat gubmint LIE and who probably voted for Michele Bachmann in the Iowa Caucus.
 

 
There simply aren’t enough of them anymore. That’s a demographic fact, Jack. Don’t believe me? Go argue with reality, I don’t care what you think. Get real: The so-called “two party system” is not some immutable law of American political physics that needs to carry on without end, especially not when one of the parties has opted to radically remake itself, taking on the classic features of an extremist fringe group.

Some Republicans kinda got the “voter revulsion” message, but not really. When Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus presented the 97-page report of the RNC’s “Growth and Opportunity Project,” a post-mortem on the GOP’s 2012 losses at the National Press Club on Monday, he said:

“When Republicans lost in November, it was a wake-up call. And in response I initiated the most public and most comprehensive post-election review in the history of any national party. As it makes clear, there’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement.”

In short, a sizable majority of the American electorate thinks the Republicans suck eggs and their own internal polling backs that up to the extent that they don’t even try to spin it anymore! (Something remarkable in and of itself).

The report is actually pretty brutal, acknowledging that women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, college-educated Caucasians and the mainstream media basically hate Republicans. These, er, “special interest groups” are, for all intents and purposes, immune to the GOP’s charms. They’re not going to just suddenly jump on the Republican train for any reason, this much seems assured.

Not to mention:

“Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents…”

Yeah, the young people. They simply aren’t that into inheriting a country with insane wealth inequality, the 1% elite owning half of everything and keeping the productive capital within their own families, tainted meat, bad air and undrinkable water. Try rounding up an electoral majority when women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, college-educated Caucasians and young people of all races think you’re shit!.

‘Nuff said, eh GOP?
 

 

“We sound increasingly out of touch.”

That’s putting it mildly. The GOP talk about minority outreach, and then they introduce voter ID bills in their statehouses! It’s even a matter of Republicans appearing not to be able to differentiate fiction from reality anymore, let alone shit from shinola.

I mean, they’re exactly what Bobby Jindal said they—and by extension he, himself—are: “the stupid party.” Many Americans simply perceive the GOP as being closely synonymous with idiocy and they have no trouble articulating this to the GOP’s own pollsters. And like, this somehow appears to be NEWS to them! The stench of stupid is so thick on the modern Republican party brand that it’s going to be a really difficult odor to wash off.

Hands up, who wants to be a member of the stupid party? How about you?
 

 

“At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago—meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President.”

OUCH, OUCH AND DOUBLE OUCH! A knife thrust deep into the Republican heart! Why it’s conservative treason… even if it’s true!

They’ve had no new ideas since the Reagan era, either. Since before most people owned a personal computer. Since there were just three TV networks and PBS for most of America! Why would the smartest, most capable young conservatives of the up and coming generation want to make a career investment in the GOP instead of someplace… you know, not so dumb? How will the party attract talent?
 

 
And furthermore, how will the party raise money when they’ve proven to be such a shitty investment for their deep-pockets donors. Even the Koch brothers seem to be turning their back on the GOP. Who could blame them, they’re ruthless businessmen? They know the score. The ROI the GOP offer blows. Expect them to act accordingly. If Rand Paul would bolt the party for the Libertarians (as his father once did) the Kochs would be right there behind him.

“If Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

Hahahaha. No shit. Well, then someone had better essplain that to the loudmouthed lamebrain from Texas, Rep. Louie “anchor babies” Gohmert, who insists that the GOP must never give into immigration reform because “they” will never vote for Republicans if offered a pathway to citizenship. It’s a “trap” Democrats have laid for the GOP, in Gohmert’s eyes.

Look, Louie Gohmert’s a fucking idiot, that’s glaringly obvious to everyone but him and his fellow idiots, but if you think about it, he’s actually quite right in this instance. It’s a real damned if they do, damned if they don’t sort of situation these Republicans have put themselves in regarding immigration reform, isn’t it? But they’ve insisted upon it, the Democrats didn’t trap them with anything. This is a giving them an awful lot of credit for what amounts to a Catch 22 that’s been hatching under their noses and in their own districts, literally for DECADES, don’tcha think?
 

 
As New York’s Jonathan Chait wrote about the RNC’s seemingly intractable woes:

The report determinedly avoids confronting the party’s most fundamental problem: Its attachment to an economic agenda that most voters correctly identify as serving the needs of a wealthy minority. Rather than confront the problem, the report is a detailed and generally shrewd plan for working around.

Yup. Tuesday on MSNBC, RNC chair Reince Priebus told Luke Russert that the party’s platform on gay marriage has not changed despite efforts to make the party appear more inclusive:

“I know our party believes marriage is between one man and one woman.”

That’s some “effort,” Reince (if that is, in fact, your real name).
 

Paul Ryan, the GOP’s pathetic idea of an intellectual…

Obviously there’s a gigantic problem with this entire RNC re-branding enterprise: It’s dead on arrival and anyone with a brain capable of critical thought on the level of, say, a peanut, can see the fatal flaw that’s got a flashing neon sign and a bunch of old coots in Revolutionary War uniforms pointing their replica muskets right at it. Republican voters, especially the ones who never went to college, the cranky old farts who are to varying degrees racist, close-minded Christianists, anti-immigrant homophobes and just angry, disapproving people, en générale, will have none of this shit!

And these troglodytes make up about half the party’s registration rolls and everyone knows it. Good luck with the fucking rebranding, boys.
 

 
Writing about the RNC autopsy at the NY Times, Thomas B. Edsall had this to say:

The highly visible presence of the candidates these voters prefer – recall the party’s Senate nominees in Missouri and Indiana, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, and their bizarre views on rape and abortion — suggests that the Republican Party has a severe, if not toxic, problem: a septic electorate that, in the words of the Mayo Clinic, “can trigger a cascade of changes that can damage multiple organ systems, causing them to fail.”

But let’s leave these trifling inconveniences aside for now, shall we? Suffice to say, there’s a major split occurring in the GOP that’s going to seriously impact their ability to ever get back to a place of national influence. This was already obvious at the start of the primary season. As a national party, they’re no-hopers within a decade, splintering into factions (Tea party and social conservatives, RNC establishment and the wealthy elites, “Ron/Rand Paul Libertarians,” etc) and facing an increasingly insurmountable demographic irrelevancy that will grow by leaps and bounds every four years.
 

 
I don’t think the Republicans can do that much—or at least as much—damage to the country moving forward. It’s clear that there are (at least) two factions of the party who are locked in a civil war. The endgame of everyone taking their toys and going home seems like a forgone conclusion. They’re just not going to be able to work together anymore. You’ve got the wealthy elites who would like the game to stay rigged vs. the Rick Santorum “stupid” folks. They desperately need one another to add up to a nationally viable party. Divided they don’t really amount to much anymore.

They’ve been humbled, their electoral impotency was on full display for the entire country to see on election night.

Furthermore. there are boundaries now that they know they can’t cross. Those boundaries weren’t there before, but they are now. Public opinion can be employed much easier as a prophylactic against the worst Republican power grabs (like this talk of changing Electoral College rules, something that everyone is already wise to). Of course, I’m not suggesting completely ignoring what the GOP gets up to—I’m not usually someone to underestimate the power of stupid people in a group—but their best days are behind them, and I think that’s a pretty uncontroversial thing to say at this point, without any caveats coming readily to mind.
 

 
I’m noticing that this attitude is increasingly, and I think correctly, becoming the default position of the mainstream media, that the uh… I guess threat of low IQ authoritarian Republicanism has diminished considerably. Bill Maher touched on this topic on his Real Time program on HBO last week when he mocked Christian bluenose group One Million Moms (the churchladies who protest the Skittles and Geico commercials for promoting bestiality) who have not one million Twitter followers, but fewer than 3000.

When Bill Maher is brushing off silly reichwingers as a source of comedy, like a canary flying out of a coalmine, hey, he’s probably onto something: They’re a joke.

It’s a pretty steep fall from Andrew Breitbart to Ben Shapiro to put it a different way.

The 2012 election was a real “man behind the curtain” moment for the Grand OLD Party and its increasingly tenuous relationship to modern America and the up and coming generation. The slow, agonizing death of the Republican Party seems all but certain, done in by hubris, idiocy, greed, hypocrisy, terrible ideas, loathsome shit-for-brains politicians, moronic uninformed voters, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the list can go on and on and on. They suck, but fuck ‘em, they’re not really worth nearly as much energy being expended in their direction.

Maybe it’s simply time to push past them and leave these nitwits behind to play in their sandbox of stupidity. The zeitgeist is not with the Republican Party and I think the big story of American politics in 2013 is that most people are starting to realize this.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The nightmare (free market) scenario the GOP faces: THEY’RE A VERY BAD INVESTMENT

The Republicans are way, way, more screwed than they thought!

Republican explains to other Republicans why the GOP is so totally fucked

 
This ridiculous footage was shot over the weekend at the conservative Republican convention, CPAC, during a seminar titled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” led by a black conservative by the name of K. Carl Smith. (As Bill Maher pointed out Friday on his HBO show Real Time, if you’re “sick and tired” of being called a racist, chances are that you ARE a racist, but nevermind that rather obvious logic for a moment).

TPM’s Benjy Sarlin was present at the seminar and wrote that Smith “mostly urged attendees to deflect racism charges by calling themselves ‘Frederick Douglass Republicans.’” (Now THAT’S rebranding for ya, ain’t it?)

Watch what happens when CPAC attendee, Scott Terry of North Carolina, speaks. It’s mind-boggling. This asshole—who was with a buddy in a Confederate flag tee-shirt—shocked even his fellow CPAC attendees with his “food and shelter” remark about slavery. I don’t think that was easy to do in a place like CPAC—in particular to offend the kinds of clowns who’d sign up for something called “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?”—but somehow Scott Terry managed it.

Scott Terry is “proud” of “his people”! So proud that he felt the need to go to a meeting about perceived racism in the conservative movement and explain how as a white, Southern male, HE’S BEING DISENFRANCHISED by all this talk of minority outreach!

Genius!