Tag: tea party nation
5 Reasons It’s Time For The GOP To Dump Sarah Palin And The Tea Party

5 Reasons It’s Time For The GOP To Dump Sarah Palin And The Tea Party

Ted Cruz Sarah Palin

Conservative columnist Matt Lewis seems relieved.

“We may have finally reached a tipping point: Conservatives, it seems, are finally safe to criticize Sarah Palin (without fear of being written out of the movement, that is),” he wrote on Tuesday.

A flurry of criticism from the right has swarmed around the one-time Republican nominee for vice president since she used her platform at the National Rifle Association’s national convention to defend waterboarding and “comically” compare torture to the Christian rite of baptism.

Most Republicans understand that the former governor of Alaska will never run for elected political office again. Her meddling in primaries has cost the party Senate seats and her star seems to be on the wane even among the devoted who made her book about the fictional War on Christmas a bestseller.

Mrs. Palin became the face of the Tea Party in 2009 and personifies the kind of intolerant nonsense and willful graft that the movement is prone to at its worst. Now that it’s safe for Republicans to point out that Palin hurts more than she helps, the party should use this moment to cast aside the grifters who turned their party’s once-savvy rebranding scheme into a clown show that typifies what many Americans hate about the far right.

Here are five reasons it’s time for Palin and the Tea Party to go.

Photo: Ted Cruz via Flickr

The Scam Is On Republican Donors

Tea Party I'll Remember In November

The Tea Party that was pushed by Fox News in 2009 led to the creation of thousands of organizations that took ownership of the brand. Tea Party Nation and Tea Party Patriots were two of the largest.

Last weekend, the suspicion of many appeared to be confirmed: “A Washington Post analysis found that some of the top national Tea Party groups engaged in this year’s midterm elections have put just a tiny fraction of their money directly into boosting the candidates they’ve endorsed,” the Post‘s Matea Gold wrote.

Red State’s Tea Partier-in-Chief Erick Erickson defended his fellow fundraisers, pointing out that “71 percent of the money it spent went to its non-electioneering operations. That looks terrible. But it is not.”

Erickson often pontificates about how much primaries matter. So if he’s happy with where the money is being spent, why are the results in the primaries looking so miserable for his movement?

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Tea Party Candidates Are Getting Crushed

bevin

Businessman Matt Bevin has a simple case in his Republican primary: He’s polling better against his likely Democratic opponent than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Despite this, Bevin is getting crushed by double digits and was caught dissembling about an event he attended supporting cockfighting.

Ex-shock jock Chris McDaniel is being similarly clobbered in his attempt to primary Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS). And the Tea Party hasn’t been able to find a candidate who can beat its least favorite RINO, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-#Benghazi).

Tea Partiers will point to Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY), who both beat establishment Republicans to win seats the GOP would have won anyway. But Cruz worked in the Bush administration and Paul inherited his dad’s movement.

The Tea Party’s chief accomplishment thus far is helping Democrats keep the Senate. This year they’ll be shut out in the primaries before they can do that again.

Photo: Matt Bevin for Senate

Its Outrage Machine Dooms The Party

immigration reduction tea party

If Republicans don’t pass any sort of immigration reform this year, the issue becomes absorbed in presidential politics.

Mitt Romney regretted the self-deportation stand he took to beat Rick Perry. How will the next GOP nominee feel about endorsing mass deportations as the Latino vote becomes even more essential?

Tea Partiers punch above their weight. They know the numbers to call and the buttons to push to scare Republican politicians, especially when it comes to immigration reform.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) knows some reform needs to get done and that Latino voters who supported President Obama by 70 percent aren’t going to accept the GOP’s plan to blame the White House for reform’s failure. He also knows that the polls say reform won’t hurt his party at the polls this year and it will likely help in 2016.

The question is whether can he ignore his party’s loudest voices to do it.

Photo: Fibonacci Blue via Flickr

Voters Are Tired Of It

cruzandpalin

The 2014 election was made for Tea Party economics, but each successive election finds the electorate more and more opposed to policies that leave the middle class to fend for itself.

The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent explains:

The GOP’s stance on many economic issues seems to remain in thrall to the basic Tea Party economic worldview, which holds that a leading problem in American life is excessive downward redistribution of wealth, unfairly penalizing hard work and discouraging investment by job creators while government aid traps people in dependency.

Some national polls show broad disagreement with this basic worldview. Pew found that a majority favors taxing the rich to fund programs for the poor, and a plurality of Americans think government aid to the poor does more good than harm. CBS found that Americans disagree with the idea that unemployment insurance makes you less motivated to look for work by 54-42. In those cases independents sided with the public at large.

Republican economics is Tea Party economics. But the frame of rigidly siding with the rich is a loser for the party, given the way the American people’s views are evolving, which leads us to the real reason the Tea Party is no longer necessary for the GOP…

Screenshot via Senator Ted Cruz YouTube channel

The Establishment Has Won

George W. Bush

The dirty secret of the Tea Party is that it’s always been just another way to label the party’s base, a base embarrassed to identify with the GOP after eight years of George W. Bush.

While some will credit the Tea Party with making the party more insistent on spending cuts and less driven toward war, those claims are ridiculous. Republicans were driven to cut spending after the Contract for America in 1994, and the entire “anti-war” wing of the party is pretty much made up of three elected officials — namely Reps. Justin Amash (R-MI), Walter Jones (R-NC) and Senator Paul. Republicans abided them and opposed intervention in Syria for a simple reason — it was a way to oppose Obama.

Amash and Jones face a primary challenges from the establishment, while the wave of scary Tea Party primary challenges to House members always promised has not materialized.

Tea Partiers may be losing primaries but their extreme policies have been appropriated by Republicans when convenient, and ignored when it’s time to keep the government open.

The Tea Party brand is less popular than the GOP’s. So why should a party that’s united in its agenda to cut taxes, spending and regulation (except for marriage and reproduction) pretend that it’s actually divided?

Unless they’re just trying to make a buck.

This Week In Crazy: ‘Bow The Knee To The God Of Gayness,’ And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: ‘Bow The Knee To The God Of Gayness,’ And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five

5. Chris Mapp

Chris Mapp

Screenshot: YouTube

One week after Texas Senate candidate Dwayne Stovall dropped one of the craziest campaign ads you’ll ever see, another challenger to Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) has exposed his wingnut bona fides.

In an editorial endorsing Senator Cornyn for re-election, the Dallas Morning News noted — in the understatement of the century — that “the other candidates are less informed, little known and generally offer extreme, vague or impractical ideas.”

“South Texas businessman Chris Mapp, 53, told this editorial board that ranchers should be allowed to shoot on sight anyone illegally crossing the border on to their land, referred to such people as ‘wetbacks,’ and called the president a ‘socialist son of a bitch,'” the editorial board wrote.

Mapp’s unique “shoot wetbacks on sight” immigration plan unsurprisingly caused controversy in Texas, forcing Mapp to explain himself. It did not go well; his defense to the San Antonio Express-News was that using the racial slur is as “normal as breathing air in South Texas.”

When Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) launched his insane campaign to depose “Liberal John Cornyn,” it seemed like a safe bet that he’d be the craziest candidate in the race. But this being Texas, perhaps we should have known better.

4. Louie Gohmert

Louie Gohmert2

Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Of course when it comes to crazy Texas politicians, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is still the reigning champion.

Gohmert, predictably, was a big fan of the controversial anti-gay bill that passed through Arizona’s legislature before being vetoed by Governor Jan Brewer. But the rationale for Gohmert’s support was rather bizarre — even by his standards.

“These are religious beliefs and how have we gotten so far afield from the Constitution that we say, well if you’re not willing to embrace the liberal beliefs that we have then your religious beliefs are not protected?” Gohmert said during a Wednesday appearance on the Janet Mefferd show. “It doesn’t say that in the First Amendment, it avoids the establishment of a religion. Well some are establishing the religion of secularism and everybody else’s religion has just got to basically go to blazes.”

You may be stuck trying to figure out what the “religion of secularism” is, but Gohmert plowed right ahead, explaining how discriminating against gay people is the natural conclusion to the civil rights movement.

“Some of them are very shocked, they participated in the civil rights movement and then to turn around and have gay rights folks saying now ‘you can’t practice your religious beliefs…’ Wait a minute, wait a minute, we stood up for you and your beliefs and now you’re saying we can’t stand up for our beliefs because they conflict with you?” Gohmert exclaimed. “That’s not what freedom is about.”

In case this was somehow not clear already, don’t take history lessons from Louie Gohmert.

Audio of Gohmert’s comments is available atRight Wing Watch.

3. Bryan Fischer

It may not shock you to learn that America’s most paranoid homophobe, American Family Association mouthpiece Bryan Fischer, was also a big fan of the Arizona law.

On Monday, Fischer explained that the law would be a critical weapon in his never-ending fight against hypermasculine homosexual stormtrooopers.

“They are jack-booted homofascist thugs,” Fischer said of the law’s opponents, “who want to use the tyrannical and totalitarian power of the state to send men of faith to jail. That sounds far more like Nazi Germany than the United States of America.”

Two days later, Fischer offered a slightly more articulate version of Gohmert’s argument.

“Yeah, Jim Crow is back,” Fischer said of the law’s opponents, “but it’s because of the work of Big Gay and their allies, including the NFL.”

With regards to the NFL’s threat to move the Super Bowl from Arizona if the law passes, Fischer raged “What the NFL is saying to Arizona [is that] if you don’t bow the knee to the God of Gayness, you cannot sit at our lunch counter.”

If you’re cringing at Fischer’s awful lunch counter analogy, cut the guy some slack. After all, he loves black males!

2. Lawrence Lockman

Lockman
Image via Maine.gov

Last year, the right-wing Susan B. Anthony list began training Republicans to stop terrifying voters by sharing their theories on “legitimate rape” and abortion with the public.

Unfortunately, they came far too late to help Maine state representative Lawrence Lockman.

Lockman, a Tea Party-backed ally of Maine’s equally absurd Governor Paul LePage, has a long history of erratic behavior. A report from Bangor Daily News’ Mike Tipping, published Tuesday, reveals that Lockman has uttered a shocking number of offensive statements throughout his three decades in politics. But this statement from 1995 stands out as especially crazy:

If a woman has (the right to abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.

You read that correctly: According to Lockman, if abortion is legal, then rape — excuse me, “pursuit of sexual freedom” — should be too. After all, it’s a victimless crime (unless someone dies.)

Even Todd Akin probably thinks that Lockman should have kept that one to himself.

The revelation of Lockman’s remarks has prompted loud calls for his resignation, and a half-hearted apology from the first-term legislator (“I have always been passionate about my beliefs, and years ago I said things that I regret,” he explained).

If Maine’s legislature does use its superior strength to force him out of office, Lockman shouldn’t fret; after all, the Virginia Republicans would probably welcome him with open arms.

1. Tea Party Nation

judson phillips

This week’s “winner” is Tea Party Nation president Judson Phillips, who somehow managed to one-up Gohmert and Fischer with an even more ridiculous response to Arizona’s S.B. 1062.

Writing on the Tea Party Nation website, Phillips laments that “the left and the homosexual lobby are both pushing slavery using the Orwellian concepts of ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusiveness.'”

After slamming Governor Jan Brewer for giving in to the leftist gay slavemasters — “She has an honored place in the ranks of the French Republicans,” Phillips writes — the hate group leader gets to the meat of his crazy argument:

Should a devote [sic] baker be required to create a cake for a homosexual wedding that has a giant phallic symbol on it or should a baker be required to create pastries for a homosexual wedding in the shape of genitallia [sic]? Or should a photographer be required to photograph a homosexual wedding where the participants decide they want to be nude or engage in sexual behavior? Would they force a Jewish photographer to work a Klan or Nazi event? How about forcing a Muslim caterer to work a pork barbeque dinner?

That’s right: One day you’re being prevented from refusing service to LGBT customers, the next you’re being forced to bake penis pastries and photograph the ensuing orgy.

Clearly, Arizona’s anti-gay bill inspired an abundance of startlingly crazy responses. But with apologies to Gohmert, Fischer, and many, many others, Judson Phillips once again takes the (non-phallic) cake.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!