Thursday, July 30, 2015

Did Nazi that coming

Is there any Republican anywhere that understands what Godwin's Law means?

The Iran nuclear deal does NOT portend 1930s Germany, and Obama is not Neville Chamberlain.  Mike Huckabee's "ovens" comment is, truly, both ridiculous and sad.  (Even the Israeli ambassador to the US says so.)  Planned Parenthood's health services for women are not like the Holocaust.  But it is accurate to say that the Republican primary voting electorate is torn between those who believe Obama is Hitler, and actual fans of Hitler.

WARNING: This is about to get really gross, really fast.

Genuine conservatives are fending off attacks from Trump’s very pro-white fans who label their opponents “cuckservatives,” which Buzzfeed‘s Joseph Bernstein describes as “portmanteau” of “cuckold,” a hard core porn genre in which “passive white husbands watch their wives have sex with black men,” and “conservative,” a soft core porn genre where people vote against their own interests.

I don't know if those links are SFW or not, because I did not click on them.  At all.

Republicans have long trafficked in color-blind tropes that seek to reverse the gains of the civil rights movements and label all government good as welfare that only helps “them.” Being confronted by the dredges of the Internet and the flies Trump’s sort of rhetoric attracts terrifies even them — especially because they see Trump as a leftist in disguise.

The Gross Old Patriarchs like to think they're turning the tables on Democrats when they say it was a Republican who freed the slaves, that Robert Byrd was a Klucker, and so on like that.  This indicates a misunderstanding and a conflation with what was acknowledged to be the party of conservatives and the party of liberals 150 years ago, and how they switched places over the decades.

Republicans like to point out that their representatives voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in larger percentages than Democrats, who delivered most of the votes along with the signature of president. This is because the vote was largely regional. Southerners generally opposed civil rights the way they opposed Reconstruction. And just as Republicans paid a cost for being identified as the party of black people in the late 19th century, Democrats saw the end of their national majority before the conclusion of the 20th century.

From Reagan Democrats to Republicans to the Tea Party, all in one generation.  If you take it in context, it's a remarkably swift transformation.

Trump’s rhetoric only differs from most Republicans in degrees. While he suggests all undocumented immigrants are criminals, Rick Perry offers a more conservative 80 percent. And the party at large now backs mass deportations of 11 million people, because nothing says smaller government like round-ups and trains filled with human cargo.

The Confederate flag, the swastika, and now even the Gadsden flag and the Holy Bible are the symbols of the continuing devolution of predominantly Southern white -- and, let's tell the truth, some black -- conservatives.  When a wealthy African American pastor aligns himself with the meanest homophobes he can find while running to be the mayor of the nation's fourth largest city, it's difficult to believe he's got any love in his heart for strangers in a strange land, or the poor.  In case you need a refresher course, this article at Media Matters details what we're in for over the next 90 or so days, and the national implications.


This isn't going to be mitigated, or smoothed over, or negotiated away any time soon.  Either compassion, justice, and tolerance will win, or they will lose.  The battle happens every first Tuesday in November, every single year.

Gird up.

Update: On and on it goes.

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