Stupid Is As Stupid Does, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #311 | @MDWorld
At the meeting of the Republican National Committee a few days ago, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal uttered a statement in his keynote address that some find astonishing but others find offensive. Regarded by some as a 2016 presidential contender, Jindal told his fellow Republicans “We’ve got to stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults… We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. I’m here to say we’ve had enough of that.”
He didn’t define “we,” although a few other GOP voices have voiced the same view, albeit in less direct terms. Hopefully, somebody’s listening. For example… the next day Fox “News,” the Republicans’ version of Pravda, dumped their far-right-loony-tea-party commentator and ongoing national embarrassment Sarah Palin.
Yes, it’s being phrased as a contractual issue. Here’s the issue: Fox offered Palin a contract that was so cut back it actually bled out. For a fraction of the money, she’d get a fraction of her previous airtime. Not at all dissimilar to the deal Fox gave her fellow tighty-righties Karl Rove and Dick Morris after their election night calls about a Romney victory proved to be delusional.
Fox “News” executive vice-president of programming Bill Shine said “We wish her the best in her future endeavors.” This is corporate-speak for “fuck off.” They had already filled her spot the previous week when they hired former Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, a man who is so far to the left that he’s the anti-matter universe version of Sarah Palin.
For over a decade there’s been a debate among media types about Fox “News” and the Republican Party regarding who is the dog and who is the tail. So maybe, just maybe, the quiet chorus of Republican reform is reaching the ears of the Masters of the Elephant. Maybe. They’re rudderless without any real leadership, torn into factions representing the Tea Party, the Religious Right, the Business Right, and the very few unpurged Republican “moderates” – defining “moderate” as “still right-wing, but not as loony as Sarah Palin.”
Maybe there’s hope for the Republican Party yet. We’ll see if they can pull it together as we get closer to the 2014 elections. Thus far, their attempt to remove Hillary Clinton from the 2016 Presidential Race backfired bombastically.
Well, old habits die hard. And when it comes to the Republicans, old habits are akin to vampirism… and not the new twinkly sexy kind either. But still, maybe there’s cause for hope.
Maybe.
Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com , every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check the website above for times. Gold also joins Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.
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January 28th, 2013 at 7:04 am
Jindal would be more credible if he didn’t support teaching creationism in Louisiana’s schools.
January 28th, 2013 at 7:07 am
FOX reminds me of the old Chico Esquela routine, “Bad Stuff ’bout Obama.” When everything sucks, what is the point? I don’t think the GOP is going to go more to the center, I just think they’re going to hide it better to ‘trick those gullible people.’ The recent talk about changing the electoral college just seems to me if you can’t win the hearts, cheat to win.
January 28th, 2013 at 9:14 am
Martha, I think Jindal has great support for his position among your typical Republican reactionaries who believe science is a heresy that emanates from the fingertips of Doctor Strange.
Stephen Strange used to perform abortions, didn’t he?
January 28th, 2013 at 9:16 am
Also, this: http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/01/25/1495721/jindal-stupid-party/
January 28th, 2013 at 9:47 am
Yeah, Neil, I suspect the next election engineering stunt the Republicans try, after failing to bring Jim Crow back last year and this new electoral college packing bullshit, will be to interpret the Constitution “strictly” in “the manner our founding fathers intended” and once again restrict voting to white male property owners.
Add the word “paranoid” and the GOP will never lose again.
In addition to not being the point of the electoral college, packing it simply takes a bad situation and makes it worse. This is one nation, with one president. We should get rid of the electoral college completely.
But if the Republicans insist on packing the place, they should remember what the stupid Democrats just remembered: your party is not and will not be in a leadership position forever, and if you jettison the super-majority it will backfire on you sooner or later. The same thing is true with packing the electoral college. We redistrict every ten years with the party in power having the lead opportunity to gerrymander voting districts into a Tetris game designed by MC Esher… on bad acid. What goes around gives you a bad disease.
January 28th, 2013 at 10:34 am
States can assign electors any way they choose. A state legislature could, for example, decide to choose electors by random lottery. The current plan being floated in Virginia is slightly less arbitrary than the winner-take-all method currently used by 48 states — but only slightly because of the convolutions of gerrymandering, since states also get to determine their representative districts any way they choose.
Elimination of the electoral college in favor of direct election of the president should have been included in the 17th amendment, for basically the same reasons that senators are now directly elected instead of selected by the whims of the state legislature. They are both quaint relics that remind us that the founders really didn’t have a great deal of faith in the general electorate.
January 28th, 2013 at 10:53 am
Yep. Next time you hear the phrase “benevolent dictatorship,” ask ‘em to define “benevolent.”
January 28th, 2013 at 1:36 pm
On another side FOX note, when I see John Bolton, I want to do the SCTV throw my television out the window, even though I’m on a treadmill at the gym. What a bitter chickenhawk that guy is.
January 28th, 2013 at 1:43 pm
Yup. A recess appointment. Get the guy who hates the United Nations and had publicly called for its dissolution or, at least, for getting the U.S. out of the U.N. and…. hey! Appoint him our diplomatic ambassador to the United Nations!
As I recall, recess was a rather childish experience that involved falling off of death machines like the teeter-touter and the monkey bars. Perfect casting.
January 29th, 2013 at 11:37 am
The GOP has had 30 years to become more and more radicalized. They’re not gonna undo it overnight. There has been a whole generation of GOPers born during the process of crazyfication. And to make things worse, the GOP is like the Soviet Union, getting all their information from like-minded people, they’re an empire built on self-delusion.
It’s gonna take a bigger electoral disaster to make them change direction.
And despite what Russ may say, the Dems are not the same. If anything, the Left has the opposite problem in the US: Lack of conviction, lack of loyalty, lack of balls.
January 29th, 2013 at 11:44 am
The old school Dems still have that loyalty thing, except for here in New York where they’ve been bumping into each other since Tammany Hall finally gurgled its last in 1965 (I met Robert Wagner, but that was after he split with Tammany and besides, he didn’t like hippies).
Loyalty in general is a thing of the past. I blame Ayn Rand for this as well: loyalty, to an Objectivist, should not stand in the way of one’s personal gain. An Objectivist can be loyal to Objectivism, but not to others.
January 30th, 2013 at 7:44 am
Was just watching Jon Stewart’s report about Glenn Beck’s idea to build a ‘Utopian’ city. Don’t conservatives realized they are more socialist than actually socialists, wanting people to conform to the ideas that they want? So much for loving ‘freedom.’ And I need to stop using ‘quotes’ like I’m a Jack Kirby character!
January 30th, 2013 at 8:39 am
Mike and Neil,
Do you remember those studies that said Liberals and Conservatives have different brain structures or whatever? Basically, Liberals are reckless, messy, relaxed, and hedonistical. Conservatives are judgmental, control freaks, uptight, and paranoid.
As far as I’m concerned, they got it exactly right. That’s why soldiers and businessmen usually are Republicans, and artists usually are Democrats.
The only thing they got wrong was that they were too USA-centric. If you expand the concept to other societies, I wouldn’t call the two types “Republican” and “Democrat”, or “Conservative” and “Liberal”. I’d call them the guys that like order, hierarchy and organization; and the guys that like to keep it loose and messy. So in the Soviet Union the “order” types were the socialists, and the cool/loose guys were the dissidents.
Passionate loyalty to your own side is a trait of the “order/hierarchy” guys. In the US, those happen to be the Republicans. That is why Dems are a disorganized mess. That is why Republicans claim to love freedom while getting a hard on for telling people what to do.
January 30th, 2013 at 9:38 am
Neil — You’re lucky we don’t have boldface.
(Isn’t that John Byrne’s new villain? Boldface?)
Funny thing — just before watching yesterday’s Jon Stewart (of which you spoke), I saw the PBS documentary on Henry Ford and, specifically relevant here, his Brazilian pre-fab industrial community Fordlandia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia). A massive, massive failure. I mean, the cocksucker deserved worse than the failure of just this horribly fascist (literally), but this was pretty bad. He got further than Beck will get. I think the Ann Taylor thing is a deal-killer.
January 30th, 2013 at 9:54 am
“Reckless, messy, relaxed, and hedonistical”
Hmmm. Maybe I’m more of a liberal than I thought.
Good analysis, Rene.