Thursday, September 30, 2021
The GOP
Bob Burnett: Whatever Happened to Personal Responsibility?
"It may be hard to imagine but, a couple of decades ago, Republicans described themselves as “the Party of personal responsibility.” The Grand Old Party imagined itself as the party of rugged individualists, folks who clawed their way to the top with an unstoppable combination of ambition, perseverance, and moral rectitude. Republicans claimed the moral high ground. No more.
In the last year, we’ve seen Donald Trump, and his Republican cohorts, dodge responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic and for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Each of these actions was shameful and should be sufficient to tarnish the GOP for decades..."
Dick Polman: John Boehner reminds us Republicans lived in 'Crazytown' long before Trump
" It’s not exactly news that Boehner feels this way – he quit in 2015 because he was sick of all the “morons” (again, his word) – but an excerpt from his book, posted the other day, vividly refutes the lazy and widely mistaken belief that it was Trump who drove the party into a ditch. Truth is, the party was already there – stewing in racism, anger, and grievance – when Trump trudged onto the scene and turned the brush fires into a bonfire.
This scorching passage, from Boehner’s book, says it all:
“In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called ‘a shellacking.’ And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name – and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category … I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way … You could tell they weren’t paying attention because they were just thinking of how to fundraise off of outrage or how they could get on Hannity that night.”
That was 11 years ago – long before the advent of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other Trump demon spawn. Greene doesn’t care that she was recently kicked off a House committee, because she thinks that legislating is boring anyway, and she just wants to focus on her performative propaganda. That’s not new behavior. As Boehner writes about the tea party class of 2010, “They didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.”
Indeed, Boehner writes, their “Crazytown” was built on a solid foundation of hatred: “This new crowd hated – and I mean hated – Barack Obama.”
(Gee, I wonder why. And no wonder a failed casino operator got so much mileage from his birther lies.)
It’s nice indeed that Boehner is calling out the “crap” he had to deal with, but we should also remember that he too occasionally indulged in it. One of the racist dog whistles about Obama was that he was a secret Muslim. When Boehner appeared on Meet the Press in February 2011, he was specifically asked about that pejorative lie: “As the speaker of the House, do you not think it’s your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?”
Boehner’s answer: “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think …The American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t – it’s not my job to tell them.” Not exactly a profile in courage. Especially when we remember ( I do, anyway) that Boehner at that time was trying very hard to tell the American people what to think about Obamacare – that it was a job-killing train wreck catastrophe. But apparently he didn’t think it was his duty to enlighten the “morons” about the president’s Christian faith.
So Boehner’s hands are not totally clean when he writes that “by 2011, the right-wing propaganda nuts had managed to turn Obama into a toxic brand for conservatives…spreading dangerous nonsense like they did every day about Obama.”"
Juan Cole: We Could Have Greened Half the US Electrical Grid With $2.26 Wasted on Afghan War
Much of the money spent in Afghanistan was wasted and disappeared into a fog of corruption.
"It may be hard to imagine but, a couple of decades ago, Republicans described themselves as “the Party of personal responsibility.” The Grand Old Party imagined itself as the party of rugged individualists, folks who clawed their way to the top with an unstoppable combination of ambition, perseverance, and moral rectitude. Republicans claimed the moral high ground. No more.
In the last year, we’ve seen Donald Trump, and his Republican cohorts, dodge responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic and for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Each of these actions was shameful and should be sufficient to tarnish the GOP for decades..."
Dick Polman: John Boehner reminds us Republicans lived in 'Crazytown' long before Trump
" It’s not exactly news that Boehner feels this way – he quit in 2015 because he was sick of all the “morons” (again, his word) – but an excerpt from his book, posted the other day, vividly refutes the lazy and widely mistaken belief that it was Trump who drove the party into a ditch. Truth is, the party was already there – stewing in racism, anger, and grievance – when Trump trudged onto the scene and turned the brush fires into a bonfire.
This scorching passage, from Boehner’s book, says it all:
“In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called ‘a shellacking.’ And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name – and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category … I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn’t have brains that got in the way … You could tell they weren’t paying attention because they were just thinking of how to fundraise off of outrage or how they could get on Hannity that night.”
That was 11 years ago – long before the advent of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other Trump demon spawn. Greene doesn’t care that she was recently kicked off a House committee, because she thinks that legislating is boring anyway, and she just wants to focus on her performative propaganda. That’s not new behavior. As Boehner writes about the tea party class of 2010, “They didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.”
Indeed, Boehner writes, their “Crazytown” was built on a solid foundation of hatred: “This new crowd hated – and I mean hated – Barack Obama.”
(Gee, I wonder why. And no wonder a failed casino operator got so much mileage from his birther lies.)
It’s nice indeed that Boehner is calling out the “crap” he had to deal with, but we should also remember that he too occasionally indulged in it. One of the racist dog whistles about Obama was that he was a secret Muslim. When Boehner appeared on Meet the Press in February 2011, he was specifically asked about that pejorative lie: “As the speaker of the House, do you not think it’s your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?”
Boehner’s answer: “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think …The American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t – it’s not my job to tell them.” Not exactly a profile in courage. Especially when we remember ( I do, anyway) that Boehner at that time was trying very hard to tell the American people what to think about Obamacare – that it was a job-killing train wreck catastrophe. But apparently he didn’t think it was his duty to enlighten the “morons” about the president’s Christian faith.
So Boehner’s hands are not totally clean when he writes that “by 2011, the right-wing propaganda nuts had managed to turn Obama into a toxic brand for conservatives…spreading dangerous nonsense like they did every day about Obama.”"
Juan Cole: We Could Have Greened Half the US Electrical Grid With $2.26 Wasted on Afghan War
Much of the money spent in Afghanistan was wasted and disappeared into a fog of corruption.
