Republicans declare war on themselves

Bombing the shit out of people on false pretenses is what they're good at, after all, but this is ridiculous. First it was El Rushbo, as part of a larger rant on The End of the World as They Know It (i.e. when Obama is re-elected)...

(Limbaugh) went on to refer to MSNBC host Chris Matthews saying last week that an Obama re-election would mean the end of conservatism. “Nope,” Limbaugh disagreed, “if Obama wins, it’s the end of the Republican Party.”

“There’s going to be a third party that’s going to be orientated towards conservatism — or Rand Paul thinks libertarianism,” he continued. “If Obama wins, the Republican Party will try to maneuver things so conservatives get blamed. The only problem is right now, Romney is not running a conservative campaign.”

“But they’re going to set it up, ‘Well, the right sat home, the right made Romney be other than he is.’ They’ll try to deflect the blame, but they got who they want,” he said of the Republican Party’s selection of Mitt Romney for president.

Then it was Laura Ingraham...

During her syndicated radio program on Monday, conservative host Laura Ingraham had harsh words for the Republican Party and the way Mitt Romney‘s campaign has underperformed despite a flailing economy and high unemployment figures.

[...]

“If you can’t beat Barack Obama with this record, then shut down the party,” she said. “Shut it down, start new, with new people because this is a give-me election, or at least it should be.”

Ingraham added that part of the blame lies with political consultants who get re-hired after each failed presidential bid. She lamented the “millions and millions of dollars that are paid to these political consultants election after election. We hire people who have lost previous campaigns, that run campaigns that have failed, who have message campaigns where the message fell flat. And they keep getting rehired. I don’t understand that. I don’t know why those are the people you hire.”

And today it's the political advisor to Todd Akin (who was the advisor to Newt Gingrich earlier in the year)...

(Rick) Tyler replied that, if Obama wins and the GOP fails to retake the Senate, “I think that this Republican party will have to completely, utterly and totally revamp its thinking, its strategy, what it stands for, how it trains, what it speaks about, how it recruits and the total abandonment – actually the professionalization of the party – and the abandonment of the grassroots.”

“If we lose the race, we only have ourselves to blame and I think there will be a revolution in the Republican party,” Tyler concluded.

So the talking points went out first thing Monday morning. Everybody outside of the establishment is on board. And the message is the same old, same old fear and loathing.

I'd like to pop some corn and just watch the implosion, but as much as I want it, it's not going to happen. This is just how the GOP motivates its base.

They have to stoke the xenophobia every week -- preferably every day -- and as ignorant as the people who listen to Limbaugh and Ingraham are, even they occasionally get wise to the manipulation. Besides that, it's difficult to come up with a new conspiracy theory every week.

"Pallin' around with terrists like Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky", Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the birth certificate, no hand over his heart as the National Anthem is played, bowing before other world leaders, Fast and Furious, Soshulist/Muslim/"Arab"/Kenyan/Marxist/Communist and back to the start again. Did I leave anything out? Oh yeah, un-American, destroying this country, and worse than Jimmy Carter.

It's tiresome just typing that. Imagine how you'd feel constructing a rant around it every single day for the past four years. From the aspect of repetition, it's amazing that it's not winning.

That has to do mostly with the quality of Obama's competition.

Sheryl Harris, a voluble 52-year-old with a Virginia drawl, voted twice for George W. Bush. Raised Baptist, she is convinced -- despite all evidence to the contrary -- that President Barack Obama, a practicing Christian, is Muslim.

So in this year's presidential election, will she support Mitt Romney? Not a chance.

"Romney's going to help the upper class," said Harris, who earns $28,000 a year as activities director of a Lynchburg senior center. "He doesn't know everyday people, except maybe the person who cleans his house."

She'll vote for Obama, she said: "At least he wasn't brought up filthy rich."

White lower- and middle-income voters such as Harris are wild cards in this vituperative presidential campaign. With only a sliver of the electorate in play nationwide, they could be a deciding factor in two southern swing states, Virginia and North Carolina.

Reuters/Ipsos polling data compiled over the past several months shows that, across the Bible Belt, 38 percent of these voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is "very wealthy" than one who isn't. This is well above the 20 percent who said they would be less likely to vote for an African-American.

The above is not just the last nail in the coffin of Romney's presidential hopes, it's also why the GOP isn't going anywhere, IMHO. Oh, they'll fuss and fight and scream and cry 60 days from now just as loudly as they did in mid-November of 2008, but they will always have Texas to fall back on.

John Cornyn won't even get any blowback from screwing up a Senate capture. He'll just pivot right with the rest of the establishment and blame Romney for being a weak-as-rainwater candidate.

He'll be correct.

If this nation survived George W Bush, it can surely survive Barack Obama. Besides, the decline is incremental no matter who gets elected. You know, we're all frogs in the boiling pot, anyway.

Now, if the Republicans nominate Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich in 2016... then we can talk about the end of the GOP.

Nine Eleven Wrangle

On the 11th anniversary of the national tragedy, The Texas Progressive Alliance stands in solemn remembrance of the fateful events of that fall day in lower Manhattan. Here is a selection of photographs and a panaromic slideshow that display the area we call Ground Zero, as its transformation into a open-air shrine to those who were lost is nearly complete.

Here is this week's roundup of blog posts from the best of the left of Texas from last week.

Off the Kuff says that the state of Texas has clearly demonstrated the ongoing need for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

BossKitty at TruthHugger sees this election year faced with critical health issues hurting working class people, when bubonic plague and Legionnaire's disease and hantavirus still occur in America: are we Unprepared, Careless and Incapable In 2012?

The GOP's plan may have backfired; by intentionally discriminating they may have actually saved the Voting Rights Act. Because, as WCNews at Eye on Williamson shows, The Voting Rights Act is still working as designed.

Neil at Texas Liberal saw Mitt Romney's jet plane in Cincinnati last week. Neil offered up his view of what the letters on the tail of the plane were meant to convey.

Lightseeker at Texas Kaos reminds us that it is easy to throw the low-level supervisors to the wolves when scandal strikes, but we should not forget where the fundamental problem lies. Are you listening, Rick Perry and Republican legislators? Check out Behind the Drug and Rape Kit Scandals.

Rick Perry wants Texas women to get pap smears at colonoscopy clinics.  CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme didn't think that even Rick Perry was that stupid.

Update: Here's my post from last year, on the tenth anniversary. It does seem as if the raw sensations have ebbed since then.