Unless something unexpected crops up, Judge Sonia Sotomayor is going to be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice in the Senate, and by a comfortable margin. Knowing that, you would think that the Republican leadership (if not some of their more intemperate backbenchers) would avoid alienating the much-needed Latino community and causing unnecessary political damage to the GOP brand. But, amazingly, that is not the case.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is leading the way by accusing Sotomayor of racial bias, and he is being following by the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama. These are the two most visible Republicans in any judicial confirmation process, and they’re out there making comments that are sure to upset every Latino in the country? The comments are especially galling coming from Sessions, a cracker from the old-school who was denied confirmation as a circuit judge in the 1980’s because of his overtly racist comments and behavior. Sessions once said he thought the KKK was alright until he found out a bunch of them smoked marijuana. Lynching and terrorizing black people is okay, but smoking the ganja, not so much.
It’s hard to do worse on the optics, and it raises the question of whether the Republicans simply can’t help themselves. Are they fundamentally a racist party that cannot set aside their hatred even in the interests of political advantage? What’s driving their self-destructive behavior? Is it a need to please their base and keep the money flowing? What is the point of money if you’ve lost the ability to win elections because over 90% of blacks and latinos are not going to vote for you?
A political party wants to pick fights they can win. Accusing Sotomayor of racial bias isn’t going to prevent her from being confirmed and it is going to make it much harder for Republicans to win elections. It will actually imperil many Republicans that are already serving in office, including the three Cuban-American representatives from South Florida.
There are no black Republicans in Congress. Sen. Mel Martinez is retiring, and he is the only Latino Republican in the Senate. Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia is the only remaining Jewish Republican in Congress. There are no openly gay Republicans in Congress. The Republicans ought to take notice of what is happening to their party and discontinue the kind of rhetoric that alienates everyone but straight white males. But they can’t seem to do it. Even at the leadership level, they are making the decision to anger Latinos on a very high profile vote.
I almost want to welcome this development because it is so suicidal for the Right. But, I can’t welcome it when a major American political party resorts to overt racism. I oppose it and wish they would stop.
Are they fundamentally a racist party that cannot set aside their hatred even in the interests of political advantage?
YES.
I wish the Republicans were so deeply concerned about racial bias when the the victims of that bias were minorities.
Its obvious that, as a party, they just haven’t hit bottom yet:
“We admitted we were powerless over our
addictionneo-conservatism and our lives had become unmanageable.”The GOP is the party of business. Stands to reason they’d make politics their businesses. They’ve found a profitable marketing niche among their dual-tongued base. Profitable for the elected and their handlers, that is, so why give up a good thing? McConnell and Sessions are set for life as long as they keep pandering to the closet racists and gummint haters who will keep voting for them and the neo-fascist corporate interests who will keep throwing money at them.
Quit thinking of the GOP as an ideological organization and start thinking of it as an entrepreneurial one and all your questions are answered. Even the remaining conservative ideologues don’t really need to worry much now that they’ve seen how compliant the Dems can be to their wishes.
The conservative party is gone. We need another one besides the Dems.
Well, what they are doing makes perfect sense to me if you think about it. These people are still subconsciously positioning themselves for the post race-war society that, to their fervent base, is only inevitable. To them it is only a question of “When?”.
Why anyone should find it the lease bit amazing that the core of the GOP is, at best bigoted, and at worst racist, is a little puzzling to me. In reality there is no middle ground in present day GOP. The racism that has been a foundational tenet of the party for the last few decades has never had such a wide open conduit to the surface as it now does in the form of a black President who is also furthering the mainstreaming of minorities into the halls of power in this country. Up until now, the outright racism could be held in check because they were able to keep the continue to propogate and maintain the power in the hands of the white, corporate elite without resorting to overt racism.
Now they are running scared. I hear it every day. All of the rampant fear comes down to the fact that they are afraid of the coming rise of influence by the minority community in this country.
So in that context, the insane accusations of people like McConnell and Sessions make perfect sense. It’s not nice to say it in polite company, but all of the Republican’s strategy now consists of nothing but racial dog-whistling and outright racist actions. There is just no other way to put it. They are hanging themselves with their own rope. But they can’t help it. This is who they are and have been for years. Especially when they are behind closed doors and in the comfortable presence of like-minded people. But now the curtain has been pulled back and we see these people for what they really are. Many of us have known all along. But now it’s in the light of day for everyone to see. It was always just a question of how desperate they would become and how necessary it might be to completely drop the facade and “take off their hoods”, in a manner of speaking.
And now we know. And it is a disgusting sight.
I disagree with your opposition, BooMan. Surely it is in EVERYONE’S interests for a political party to be up front and honest about its beliefs, isn’t it?
I mean, is that a whole lot better than the old Lee Atwater/Ronald Reagan coded message thing?m Now everyone can see exactly what the GOP stands for, no matter how abhorrent.
And besides, this can’t last a whole lot longer. Once the Democrats gain seats during a same-party-administration midterm election, and they have 62 Senate seats, the GOP will completely crack, and the rhetoric will start changing. It will have to. Or else somebody might try to bring the Whigs back.
Yes
Their scorched earth tactics against the Obama administration. A successful black president scorches their chaps.
It certainly has to do with keeping the money flowing so that they can hold out until 2012. Their base isn’t asking them to do what they’re doing, but they are cheerleading every Republican move because the real leader of the Republican Party is Rush. He barks; the base cheers. It’s the reduction of politics to sports fans.
The point is the hope that the “white oppressed minority” solidifies into a voting bloc giving them a temporary majority again–long enough to disenfranchise blacks and Latinos.
If you’ve lived long enough in the South it has its own peculiar logic.
Not to worry. They are going to start losing the South as soon as the Southern working class realizes that they are getting jobs, good wages, and healthcare as a result of the Democrats. There was a reason that Southerners of my parents’ generation loved FDR. (And Eisenhower, for that matter).
When 72 percent of Republicans say it is very or somewhat likely that they would vote for Sarah Palin for president in 2012, then you know there is some bizarre alternate universe reality going on with their base. It’s just stunning how differently they view the world from the rest of us, and it really took eight years of Bush for this to become clear. If they follow through with nominating Palin or anyone like her, the punishment is going to be staggering.
Who else could they nominate? Romney? I suppose he could still pull off a masquerade suggesting that he’s significantly different than Palin, but that would probably sink him in the primaries.
It’s remarkable, but in a way the fate of the Republican Party lies in the hands of Dem “moderates” in open primary states. They are the only conceivable path to them nominating a candidate who isn’t pathologically nuts and/or stupid.
It’s in their party platform:
-Racial bigotry.
-Christian zealotry.
-Denial of reality re: climate change.
-No taxes for rich people.
It’s ALL THEY HAVE.
Pretty much. The point of the is the maintenance of the oligarchy of wealthy white Protestant men, period. They’re hardly going to abandon their entire reason for being. Everything else is window dressing.
I ran across this blog post on Talking Points Memo that helps explain, at least to me, what the GOP is about.
Sadly, he’s dead-on correct.
It’s taken me a while to accept this, too.
And it has consequences. It gives the rest of a terrible responsibility to govern this country in perpetuity.
You know, if you shoot yourself in the foot, your foot will hurt and you probably won’t be able to run or even walk. Shoot yourself in the foot again and again and you will probably become a cripple.
I think the Republican party is on the way to becoming permanently paralyzed and, if it doesn’t stop inflicting injuries upon itself, it might well disappear into the museum of American History to join other unsuccessful political organizations like the National Republicans, the Free Soil Party, the Know Nothings and the Whigs.
I think its death spiral has begun and it might be fitting if the Alaskan airhead be the last candidate of the GOP in 2012. There is something poetical about Sarah Palin presiding over the last hurrah of the party of Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Reagan and the Bushes. You know like ending with a whine and a whimper, and a claim of foul (fowl) play.
A sixth party system? Realignment theory places us in the fifth, which started in 1932 with the FDR. We were expecting a major realignment and I predicted one (it began in 2006, so to speak), but I hadn’t really expected the Republican party would disappear. However, it’s happened before. The Whigs (their predecessor, whom you mention) collapsed in the 1850s over slavery.
I hadn’t taken the idea too seriously but I’ve been giving more credence of late. Parties that can’t resolve their problems do disappear, and it’s not particularly unusual.
BTW — the National Republicans become the Whigs and the Know Nothings emerge from the remnants after the Whigs collapse. The Know Nothing element is what we’ve been seeing lately in the Republicans. The historical parallels are both intriguing and suggestive.
I think we forget the Obama isn’t the only one who can play a long game. The GOP is not just the base and the corporate bribesters. The ones pulling the strings, the party’s true axis of evil — eg the Cheney, Wolfowitz, Norquist, Bushes, Limbaugh types — is not panicking because the GOP is disintegrating. Their aims are equally well served by Republicans who are driven into the Dem Party.
The Axis has time to continue pursuing its short-term goals as it watches the Dem Party swell and then splinter, even if that takes years. Any genuine Left is still co-opted and the implosion of the Dems clears the field for new players more directly dedicated to enhancing the corporate/war/royalist coalition. It’s pleasant to crow about the demise of the GOP, but our real task is to build a Left with an unapologetic agenda and the organizing clout to make it a serious contender against the Axis.
Unfortunately for them, “the base” is all they’ve got left. And there is true poetic justice in that, if you think about where that base comes from and how they got it. Like Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and the “Moral Majority,” etc. founded in the lead-up to the election of Ronald Reagan.