The GOP caucuses in Virginia have yielded a slate of candidates unrivaled in virulence against progress since Post Reconstruction…indeed matching the Reconstruction paradigm where candidates of the same party tried to out-extreme each other. It is indicative of sickness: fear, and the loss of MY country, MY state, MY perceived hegemony of ways. No more complicated than that. The Lt. governor candidate is Bishop EW Jackson, who’s nasty homophobe appeal is supposed to pull in blackfolk, likely a few blackfolk who can’t or won’t see the veiled reality. He is the driver, who was charged with keeping slaves in line. The coon, who would cut transportation, the rudiments of the social safety net— and its basic investment, education—while cutting taxes for the rich, erasing protection for employees from wage/hour to workplace safety. Even the food they feed their children wouldn’t be safe. This is a man who says he opposes desegregation, and would have retrospectively. He opposes extension of the Voting Rights Act. He “hates government” yet wants to run it, and enriched himself from Uncle Sam’s faith-based handouts. And feels that Planned Parenthood was worse than the Klan?

I thought we needed disturbed Sgt. Watters to come back and deal with Allan West. Allan West is buffoon, a bomb thrower. Mia Love—shown to be a loser and puppet (from who ran her campaign to her own financial pandering). But they are Roy Wilkins and Fannie Lou Hamer compared to the Bishop. The extremists in the GOP have truly found, from Adolphe Ceasar’s troubling soliloquy in A Soldiers Story, their “Moonshine, King of the Monkeys” in EW Jackson.

“And do you know that fool asked us what he’d done wrong…even when we cut his throat.”

Ignorance doesn’t always mean uneducated or stupid. It can also mean something nefarious…

Jesus, we hardly know you

Rubio = rube. Agua…agua…so I can take my Naproxen…

Poor thirsty Marco, jammed into the spot light to reluctantly spout the SOS. Was better off just letting Rand Paul do the “Tea Party response” and sat next to him sighing, eye-rolling, throat-clearing like an annoyed uncomfortable spouse. That’s the metaphor for the GOP now.

—CAC

South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a product of the Tea Party, is resigning from the US Senate. Sources say he took Obama’s victory hard, the way the South took Appomattox. He will be running the heretofore erudit yet partisan Heritage Foundation. All I can say is—in the words of Bo Dietl to Ray Liotta in “Goodfellas”— “Ba Bye, dickhead!”

Though there are even bigger racist rightwing assholes roaming the august halls of the SC statehouse, or in the US House. So my vote is for Mark Sanford and his wise Latina. In any event, somewhere, Fritz Hollings is laughing his ass off. I know I am, as the analytical cred of Heritage—which I once respected—will be in up country outhouse…

D.N. has allowed me to comment today as he says he’s unfamiliar with this “comely and astute mulatress” Ms. O’Brien. He’s been dead 150 years. Cut him a break on the nomenclature, please…

This is a pattern now with Soledad O’Brien and her morning show Starting Point on limp, flaccid CNN. Shutting down or picking apart avowed wingnuts and getting cheered for it. Sometimes I wonder if her producers and bookers aren’t doing a Hannity/O’Reilley analog: booking the bigger dullards on the Right (an oxymoron wrapped in an oxymoron) just so she can look courageous and sharp picking them apart. (smiling). Does this enhance her brand? Sure. Is it good journalism? Well…yes. It’s engaging and motivating, and the context was the spotlight for the Mayor of San Antonio, Texas at the Democratic National Convention. Still, it pricks up my bullshit antenna…

CAC

RNC cuts Todd Akin’s campaign funds. GOP at war with a creature of its own creation. Hey even Adolph Hitler had to get rid of Ernst Rohm…

Representative Trey Gowdy, a Draco Malfoy lookalike and Republican, South Carolina, during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on leaks to the press about subjects such as US cyber warfare preparation, the killing of Osama Bin Laden and US kill lists. Los Angeles Times, House Republicans consider prosecuting reporters over leaks.

Evidently, Gowdy isn’t a fan of Shield Laws.

Another Tea Party clown who show’s his statesman & legislative IQ is around zero

We were patriots. We still are. Yet, ironically, the descendants of those who wore the gray and made war on the flag, and on our citizenship—indeed humanity—seem to say we never were patriots. They say they are the true Americans. They warbled then and now about state sovereignty and private property, yet when they controlled the federal government until 1860, it was about federal paramountcy. They were hypocrites then; they are fools now. We were patriots. We still are.

Note: this doesn’t include the means, i.e. legal (racist legislatures) or extralegal (intimidation, media rants, murder & terrorism)

1812: “Huh? I can’t even vote, and they aren’t even human beings, but I’ll be damned if they ever will be!”

1912: “Mongrelization, rape, anarchy”

2012: “‘Rampant’ voter fraud!”

2112: “Hey Esteban!”

        “Si, Malcolm XXVII?”

        “Remember when white people would trip about loosing ‘their’ country and     going nuts about that cat Obama, all these other things that don’t mean anything anymore, and the rich ones would get the dumbasses all riled up and say there was voter fraud by people like us, blah, blah?”

       “No estés chingando, dude! What are ‘white people?’ Better have Qiang mind-link the Cloud data ‘cause I never heard of nothing called ‘white people,’ dude.”

Please check out the piece by Joan Walsh in Salon, which links to Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine about the current state of the GOP in 2012, then pop back to Dangerfield Newby’s place.

I love the image in the article. Compare it to the one above from Gangs of NewYork. The interesting contrast rather than comparison, however, is not between the images but rather her Custer analogy in the piece. I think she misapplied it. Custer wasn’t some mindless bulwark sacrificing himself to protect a way of life and power (cue the John Wayne version of “The Alamo”). He was an arrogant self promoter recklessly thrusting himself into danger, confident his way, his power, would win the day. It always did. It always would. Just as the British wiped out at at Isandlwana in South Africa, when their repeating rifles, rockets, breach loading cannons still couldn’t stop Zulu warriors carrying spears and shields, unafraid to die. (Better still, ask the British in Malaya/Singapore in 1942. Nice metaphor for underestimating Asians).

Apologies for the Custer digression. Recall, Dangerfied joined up with John Brown because a system that broke up his family benefitted not only the plutocrats, but the folks who found meaning in their lives solely because they believed there was always one or two segments below them on the totem pole. Dangerfield Newby even gave contemporary life to historian Eric Foner’s thesis that these big sprawling issues like slavery—and the incidiary, acidic politics and fractured polity of 2012—were and are based in ethno-cultural clashes. Back then it was buried under fights over Catholic versus Protestant, native over immigrant (Gangs of New York had a point, folks), temperance over booze. Even arguments over the role of government tend to get cloaked and pinned up in white tribal politics. It is an axiom tested within Joan Walsh’s piece who much white people deride “dependency,” yet curtain off their own: billion dollar government contracts, welfare, WIC, Medicare, HCD grants to developers, military bases, the military itself as employer and educator (ask the diploma mills, nee, “for profit colleges”) of last resort—before meth lab employee prison guard guarding daddy in prison for meth. Couple that with the perfidy and hypocrisy of Nell Paynter’s honorary whites like Irish, Italians, Jews when they speak of their own bootstraps, or organized crime, or the complicity of the Catholic Church therein, or shady business practices all designed to enrich a tribe and its members. Finally there is the perfidy and hypocrisy of the whites who consider themselves powerful, elite, and thus this is by divine right: not simply the 1% but those who perceive themselves more worthy. Middle managers who listen to Rush Limbaugh during their lunch break, soccer moms feeding off of Fox & Friends in the a.m. and regular network TV at night. They talk about bootstraps, too, and divine right. So let us talk about how their dads and granddads, without government GI Bills, astronomical military/aerospace/security spending, health care research and direct aid to institutions, housing (building and finance) and transportation endeavors, infrastructure investments, student loan aid—even Social Security— would have had nothing. How their air, water and food would be toxic. How the very cars they cherished would have exploded from right under them. The New Deal saved the middle class, not the poor; it’s DNA grew the middle class into the behemouth it was, and protected the health, welfare and safety of its children, before those very children, not black or brown orphans, began murdering it in 2006-07-08. Not just on Wall Street, but in board rooms, in deal meetings, in plain vanilla white papers. Downsize, degrade, de-fund, outsource. Maximize shareholder value, ROI. Replace our storied main streets with Walmarts, full of cheap and cheezy stuff made in sweatshops…

…that’s just the beginning…

…and when I think of Dangerfield Newby, laying in a muddy rut, face devoured by pigs I wonder what these people are so angry about. But who says anger is rational?

Tomorrow I will explore the flipside of this universe. I will tell you a story about some idle, cursing, spitting, angry, ignorant young black men, a toddler, and a petite white woman pushing a stroller—all sharing space on 14th St NW in Washington, D.C., capital of an ever less-white America…

Christopher Chambers