The Death of a Red State-Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone 10/30/08

A couple of snippets from a long article. Taibbi dissects the Democrats too. Great read.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638607/the_death_of_a_red_state


I have come to the 4th Congressional District in Colorado — a massive territory encompassing virtually all of the state north and east of Denver — to cover the re-election campaign of Rep. Marilyn Musgrave. Musgrave was Sarah Palin before Sarah Palin, a turbocharged born-again supermom who went into politics because she couldn't stand all the naughtiness. Her first political gig was on the school board in Fort Morgan, where she devoted her energies to blacking out — literally blacking out — passages in sex-education textbooks. Later, as a state legislator, she pushed a concealed-weapon law that would have allowed guns on school grounds. She was a preposterous caricature of an evangelical politician, an Anita Bryant with a beer gut, but like Palin she was already on her way to a Major Elected Office by the time anyone thought to stop laughing. Her first act upon making it to Congress in 2003 was to introduce an amendment to ban gay marriage. She declared unequivocally — after 9/11 and the launching of two wars — that the union of same-sex couples is "the most important issue we face today."

Musgrave was re-elected twice by a 4th District that since 1972 has been among the most solidly Republican territory in America. Her grandstanding against buggery and other forms of extra-biblical recreation has helped earn her a 100 percent rating and a top spot on the American Conservative Union's list of the most right-wing members of Congress. She's a living symbol of the Era of Rove, when all a politician needs to do to get elected is go to church, make freckled babies and whine about how things are going to shit because some minority group is queering the deal.

---
But even as Republicans were winning that battle, there was another shift taking place. Gay people started walking around in even the most remote parts of the country. Women became bosses, mayors, senators. Some of almost everybody's best friends really were black. Next thing you know, even the most backward dickhead is quoting Dave Chappelle's Rick James skit. So what the Democrats lost in their base, they gained in the form of a generalized tolerance that seeped unconsciously into the brains of a whole generation. They became more of a demographic than a political party united by common interests.
---
At the Loveland event, I listen as a woman named Jessica Peck Corry stumps for this year's race-baiting Trojan Horse ballot maneuver, a little thing called Amendment 46. This one actually calls itself a "Civil Rights Initiative" — which naturally turns out to be a law banning all forms of affirmative action.

Peck Corry, representing "the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative," tells voters that affirmative action no longer makes sense. "There's been a twentyfold increase in the number of interracial marriages" — leaving the races too mixed up to sort out who's entitled to government help. She adds that, while her group "accepts the inevitable," it doesn't think giving preferential treatment to anyone is the right path for America after "getting it wrong on race for 200 years."

Even worse is Donna Gallup, a GOP candidate for the state House. A stocky, anti-communist schoolmarm, Gallup gives a speech opposing "laws that blindly give criminals the opportunity to molest the innocent in public restrooms." It turns out she's referring to a bill that protects gays and lesbians from discrimination. Afterward, I ask Gallup what the hell the bill has to do with molestation. "If you're perceived to be gay," she says, "then you can go into a public restroom without any hostility toward you, according to this law."
---
These tactics almost always worked in the past and have carried more than one man into the most powerful office in the world. But they were a house of cards all along, with no substance behind them, and when they are at last put to a vote next month, they'll blow away forever. That's what happens with weak ideas: They don't die a slow, lingering death but lose their power all at once, like a broken spell.

I busted out laughing a couple of times on this one

The scariest thing about Sarah Palin isn't how unqualified she is - it's what her candidacy says about America
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/author/matt_taibbi

All around me, a million cops in their absurd post-9/11 space-combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in papier-mache puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other "wild" drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the "unbelievable time" they will inevitably report to their pals back home. Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they're at a party.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

Palin's charge that "government is too big" and that Obama "wants to grow it" was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical Bush-era Republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $14.7 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK'd a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the fucking thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that "taxes are too high," and Obama "wants to raise them."

Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to "forfeit" to our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a very run-of-the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, its absolute unrelation to the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over.