I often wonder how much of what Republicans say is purely for what they perceive to be their political advantage and how much of it just that they genuinely cannot understand what motivates us. The idea that everyone pushing for immigration reform is just trying to piss off the right is a very strange and grossly incorrect idea. People are trying to address a major source of correctable human suffering.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a Boehner ally, accused Obama of intentionally trying to provoke a fight with the new Republican Congress.
“I’m mystified by the political calculation,” he said. “There’s a new Congress coming in. Why would you do this on the eve of Thanksgiving going into the holiday unless you just want to create a political crisis?”
In a fact-based universe, everyone knows that the president wanted to make this announcement prior to the election and that the timing was delayed at the behest of worried Democrats. It wasn’t done tonight because the president wants to create a political crisis. It wasn’t to make himself relevant again. It wasn’t to divide the right or to distract them from their agenda. It wasn’t to provoke them into a frothy racist rage and another government shutdown.
It was because he could not put off doing what is right any longer.
That’s it.
What the right does is designed to puss of the left. Its a big part of why the tea bag gets love Scott Walker. Its no surprise they apply that calculus to their opponents since its already their frame of reference.
I am sure that’s correct. And that’s because their leaders are either sociopaths, idiots, or both.
That may be true of some of the hard core believers. But the party leaders didn’t want Obama to take action because it puts Republicans between a rock and a hard place. Their preference is to continue to obstruct in a low-level way. They talk of waving red flags in front of bulls. Well, it’s their base that’s the bull and when it starts snorting and stomping, it scares the bejezus out of guys like the Kochs.
How are their candidates going to get elected in 2016 if Latinos are turning out in droves to protect their interests? How can they demagogue on issues more easy to manipulate if all the oxygen on the continent is getting sucked into this debate?
I was following you until you wrote, “when [their base] starts snorting and stomping, it scares the bejezus out of guys like the Kochs.”
Was that possibly a slip of the keyboard? The bullish base you refer to was gathered, funded and tenderly nurtured by the Kochs. The Tea Party is their creation.
There are definitely party leaders scared of the raging bull, but surely not the Kochs.
Americans aren’t Germans. They have a serious strain of polymorphous perversity, probably due to that multicultural background so often and recently remarked on here.
They’re more like cats than sheep, and dreadfully hard to herd.
Here in Richmond CA Chevron just spent about $280 per vote cast for them in the city council/mayor election, and EVERY ONE of their candidates lost badly.
I’m sure the Koch advisors noticed that. And when the TeaBaggers turn against you, they’re armed. And likely will be enraged at the treason of the Kochs.
Glibertarians. I like that.
Many Americans are as you describe. Not those, however.
The Koch brothers are Birchers. Their father Fred Koch was one of the founders of the JBS. The Bircher goal, stated at the outset by JBS leader Robert Welch, was to take over the Republican Party. They have come a long way towards that goal. The Bircher public has been fed on a diet of hokum since the founding in 1958, and they are no wmainstream.
I do think the Koch brother will be defeated, but not by their followers. And BTW, I bet you that the vast majority of their followers don’t even know who the Koch brothers are. And the Kochs don’t use the name John Birch Society publicly any more (though it still exists), they use myriad spinoffs like ALEC, etc.
http://thecentristword.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/is-it-a-koch-brothers-front-group-find-out-here/
Their weakness is that they are predictable. So, why aren’t Democrats taking lessons from “the trickster” or Br’er Rabbit?
Once you understand that Republicans simply react to whatever God-hating, America-hating libruuls say by opposing it, you realize that Republicans operate purely by Projection coupled with Cognitive Dissonance.
And that could be a dangerous mixture.
It always has been.
It’s the easiest way to weaponize stupid, as Booman brought up the other day.
Well, it was really done to cement future Hispanic support for the Party. If the President really wanted to do what was right, he would get behind the committee trying to stop NSA abuses instead of hindering it.
Oh, I’m sorry, I thought this post was immigration.
I mean, what?
He certainly backed the bill they put out.
He severely redacted the report.
Grand Ole Projection
The sole purpose of the Republican Party is to piss off the left by shutting down government. (Military and law enforcement excepted, of course.) Even Orrin Hatch is there.
Projection is the sucker punch to the media that exonerates their intended strategy. Ex. “Voter fraud” charges presage election fraud.
And tyrrany charges presage a coming Congressional tyranny that will make the Coming of the Newts look tame.
I think Rep. Cole is simply reflecting and parroting the type of information that is swirling in, and being shared by, all of those who exist solely within the right wing bubble of completely contrived information. It’s not as if they really care to try and “understand us”. Anything outside their bubble is always grossly caricatured and misrepresented in order that everything they wish to be true conforms to the necessary standards. Rep. Cole is a very smart man. But when a smart person has to work and live within the asylum, surrounded by crazy people with pitchforks, they sometimes have to adapt, either consciously or unconsciously, some of the characteristics of the crazy people in order to fit in and not be an obvious outlier to the lizard brained foaming-mouthed masses.
If, like some of us, you have to spend much of your time around the people in that type of information bubble; then you simply shrug your shoulders and move on, because it’s obvious that this is simply another day at the office in crazy-town.
Today’s GOP consists mainly of the “I got mine, F*** you” philosophy; ppl like that don’t understand other people who have more complex motives than pure self promotion and acquisitiveness. Recall the questioning of Betty Curry, Clinton’s secretary during impeachment. Questioners wanted to know what her self interest was (the only motive they understood), who was paying her to do what she did, what did she stand to gain from it. It was pitiful actually.
Look, this turd from OK is a longtime coach of Team Conservative. He understands Obama (and us) just fine. He knew this would happen 3 months ago. He probably thinks it’s comic Obama listened to the “terrified Dems” and delayed the matter. He’s not “mystified” in the least.
The coaches of Team Conservative are simply laying out for their cogs and boobs and poisoned-brained, hate-filled imbeciles the manufactured reasons for why it’s totally moral and just for them to continue to bitterly oppose the prez they already passionately hate—because they were “provoked” by King Obama’s tyrannical action, because he needlessly “taunted” the Real Americans (TM), etc. And on the “eve of the Thanksgiving holiday!” no less! Outrageous! And of course they have also manufactured supposed reasons why these new executive actions have created a “political crisis”—hordes of “illiterate” “low wage” brown people will soon be “flooding” the country (somehow). All willful, irresponsible and total lies, but so what?
The goal of coaches like Coal and Coburn (both from the fine state of OK) is also to induce and foment even more spittle-flecked, bug-eyed rage in their (heavily armed) base of dangerous cretins, and the strategy will absolutely succeed because their base wants to increase their rage to even higher levels.
Anyway, the plain message is that the “conservative” Right is not to blame for the coming paralysis, defaults, shutdowns, impeachments, whatever the fourth and fifth acts of the tragedy “King Obammy” may hold for us. Rightwing movements thrive on their perceived “victim” status and this is just manufacturing some more “evidence” of their humiliating “victimization”. Like the Hitler movement of the 30s, they are thus justified in whatever they do to the person or forces that needlessly and blithely “provoked” them.
And of course the enabling, complicit corporate media plays along and doesn’t challenge the violence inducing statements of monsters like Cole and Coburn in the least.
Bring on Act IV, American Fascists!
It IS the right thing to do, but on a more visceral level it craps on the republican victory lap. They were expecting Obama to roll over after the the election and he basically pointed out that he is still president and GOP doesn’t have power they thought they had.
The right isn’t howling just because of pigment and language fears. They need to seem powerful to appeal to their id-controlled base, and Obama just through that meme into question.
No, the Republican Party does not understand. They threw a cog years ago and have never been able to come back. They are a party of selfishness and greed, period.
You know a political party has lost its humanity when it has nothing to run on; no fresh ideas, no problem-solving, no leading figure to rally the base. All of their party leaders are caricatures.They have no reason to exist as a party because they only keep going on a single purpose: defeat Democrats.
They exist as a black hole, sucking away anything decent and good in our society. Everything that Democrats embrace: health care, fair immigration, minimum wage raises, care of the environment, the Republicans seek to destroy. They can’t promote anything positive because they don’t comprehend the concept of helping those who need it. They exist as judgmental deniers of what is decent and fair.
So We the People limp along, outnumbered at every turn, like whipped dogs. We don’t even raise our heads because we know we’ll be beaten again. This is what angers me. We don’t fight back. We don’t know when to stand up and punch them back. We lick our wounds and whine about it, but we can’t overpower them.
And so it goes.
repeat after me..
POTUS has no more elections.
And No.More.Phucks.To.Give
They believe what they are saying.
The biggest mistake people make in dealing with conservatives over the eons is thinking that “they don’t really mean that”. They mean every word – both their analysis of the situation and the intent to respond with violence.
There was a short era of a few decades after WW2 when elected conservatives were more rational than their fire-breathing rank and file. That time has long passed. Even their SCOTUS members, their presidential candidates, and their billionaire backers believe most of this shit (and to the degree they don’t believe it, they won’t speak up and they certainly won’t act to counter it – just look at how GOP presidential candidates refuse to admit to believing in evolution).
Because they believe and think as they do they assume everyone who opposes them functions the same way, only in a mirror image. Of course they don’t understand what motivates us. Conservatives’ primary emotions are anger and fear – ours are empathy and guilt.
Steve Stockman is the mainstream of the Republican Party, and not just in Texas, and not just in the South. It has metastasized. What was said in grift has attracted so many adherents, that they have to deliver–something–or face rebellion. Not metaphorical rebellion, guys with guns and open carry rebellion.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this of late. I really believe they cannot conceive of actions that are not designed to make oneself more powerful, actions that are all “about MEEEEE.” And they project that mindset on every action Democrats make. They really don’t understand policy for the public good. And, as a party, they used to.
“I’m mystified by the political calculation,” he said.
Always with the projection.
there’s no misunderstanding. the just fucking hate us. http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/02/05/they-fucking-hate-you/
In my opinion as an American Indian, I believe that Senator Cole and all other members of Congress who are not American Indian are illegal immigrants.