The GOP Freak Show

Woe are they! :cry: And if 'turfers' aren't rethugs, what exactly are they?


http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-07/the-gop-freak-show/full/


The GOP Freak Show

by John Batchelor

Conservative radio talk-show host John Batchelor says the whack jobs disrupting health-care town halls confirm the Republican Party has become a cruise ship to the seventh grade.

snip//

None of this feared Republican virility is any more real than the charge that the GOP manufactured the Turfers. That is the true misery of the matter. The Turfers are freakish, passionate, half-baked, dignified, defiant, rude, anarchistic, but they are not Republicans. They are not even much of a mob, and references to the classic American uprisings from Shays Rebellion to the Wide-Awake Brigades at the birth of Republicans over the Kansas-Nebraska Act are distorting and tendentious. Studying the videos from Texas, Wisconsin, New York, what you can see and hear is frustration, fear, voyeurism, a sugar-high yearning for local TV sound bites and YouTube burlesque. If this is all you ask for in a mob, what are circus clowns for?

And what does the Republican Party provide the generally despairing and alienated American citizens who come out to the town halls? It answers shouts for help with teasing and cooing, the behavior of groupies with the language of quitters. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner wrapped his teenaged threat of rowdyism over health care inside a flimsy, clichéd metaphor of summer, “I think it’s safe to say that, over the August recess, as more Americans learn more about their plan, they’re likely to have a very, very hot summer.”

Republican Party chief Michael Steele used the passive aggressive rhetoric of denial to aggrandize the reports of brouhahas at town halls, “We’re not encouraging people to be angry to the point of being mean, or nasty, or brutish. There is legitimacy to the protest. How people protest—I have no control over that.” Following up on his cheapskate mischief-making, Steele air-drops an RNC fund-raising screed that accuses the DNC of lies and by the way, concludes Steele admiringly, the Turfers are only using the DNC’s “standard playbooks of name calling and outright lies to stifle debate.”

With Boehner and Steele cheering like gamblers at a cockfight, with the tempestuous DNC joining in the food fight with both hands, the shabby, timid GOP is left exposed to the predations of the demagogues of talk. The usual cynics are outperforming in fear-mongering and self-promotion. Limbaugh swerved all over the road to combine the Turfers with his imagination of the younger chief executive, “Obama is the guy who taught people how to show up at events like this over and over again and rip ‘em apart and tear ‘em down, disrupt ‘em, and make sure they don’t happen again.” Lou Dobbs is toothless in comparison to the Limbaugh bite, but Dobbs can gush like Bruno, “I love it when the audience of this broadcast is engaged and making their voices heard. And you’re getting louder by the day. It’s an amazing thing to watch.”

If the Republican Party existed except as a club of groupies and roadies for the rabble-rousers on radio and cable, it would rouse itself from its narcotized self-satisfaction of second best and give a speech that the Turfers, Birthers Tea-Baggers and all the other amateurs of dissent must sit down and listen to the reason of statesmanship or else leave the halls of Congress. The GOP would tell the snipers that this is a somber, modest political party, not a cruise ship to the seventh grade. Somewhere in the outline of this speech, this make-believe worthwhile Republican Party would include the language of liberty and restraint. And then this never to be given speech by a non-existent leader to the never again to be dignified Republicans would build to a quiet conclusion that very much resembles Edmund Burke. "But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”

...at least as much as are any of the other millions of suckers willing vote against their own interests on behalf of their super-rich gods.

"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”

Oh puhleeeeze. Does anyone believe a single Tea Bagger or Birther would have even half a clue what that means?

:)

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groupies and roadies for the rabble-rousers on radio and cable, it would rouse itself from its narcotized self-satisfaction of second best and give a speech that the Turfers, Birthers Tea-Baggers and all the other amateurs of dissent must sit down and listen to the reason of statesmanship or else leave the halls of Congress. The GOP would tell the snipers that this is a somber, modest political party, not a cruise ship to the seventh grade."

But, of course, this guy knows that his Republican Party is dead and it now is a cruise ship to the seventh grade!