Tuesday 6 April 2010

The Republicans as terrorists

This was originally posted elsewhere a couple of weeks ago.


It is the day after health reform became law…and how have the Republicans behaved?

All I can say is…Wow.

How long do we put up with this, before we declare the conservative movement a domestic terrorist group, with the Republican party acting as their Sinn-Fein-like front men? They tried to blow up four children who are relatives of one Congressman, smashed windows, made endless gun threats, and threatened to assassinate the children of Congress members. The teabaggers have promised to go “protest” at the home of a Democratic Congressman and his wife and children – his kids can’t walk down the street anymore. While their front-line troops were trying to intimidate members of Congress by spitting on them and calling them “nigger” and “faggot”, their most likely presidential candidate posted a “hit list” using gun-target imagery to intimidate health reform supporters. Boehner calls a Democratic colleague “a dead man”. Steele wants to “get Nancy read for the firing line”, and the official GOP website shows Pelosi on fire. Beck, like Michelle Bachmann before him, calls for guns and “revolution”. Security is being beefed up for members of Congress, in light of this wave of terrorist threats.

Their intimidation tactics run right into the halls of Congress itself. In addition to screaming “baby killer” on the floor of the House, they are trying to frighten the Democrats by…

…threatening to lie about the Nelson language (trying to prevent it from being removed from the bill, and then claiming it was the Democrats who wanted it),
…threatening to embarrass the Democrats with poison-pill amendments (imagine the ad: “Those damn Democrats WANT to give Viagra to child molesters!!”),
…threatening to block all legislation and nominations in the Senate,
…threatening to slow down reform by challenging every punctuation mark in the health bill,
…threatening to smear the Senate parliamentarian as a tool of the Democrats (he was appointed by Trent Lott because his predecessor didn’t show a sufficiently pro-Republican bias),
…and now threatening to slow down all processes in the Senate, even committee hearings.

As a result of this, a bunch of generals and admirals who travelled halfway around the world to testify before the Senate were bounced out; another hearing on security in Afghanistan was blown away too, and another on helping homeless veterans – so much for protecting our troops.

Lies: in addition to the endless stream of lies they’ve spewed about health reform – the government takeover plan that will decide when you get to live and die, and take care away from white folks and give it to blacks and gays and illegals etc etc – they are now screeching that Obama bought the vote of a Congressman by giving his brother a judgeship. The problem? The Congressman was a “no” vote. And they are still caterwauling that the Democrats will pay for ramming through this “unpopular” bill – while polls show that America likes the bill, and polls also show that many who don’t like it wish it was even more liberal, and Democratic fundraising is skyrocketing, and a new NDN poll shows that when voters who lean either Democratic or Republican are added up, the Democrats are ahead by a whopping 13 points, 47-34.

Once they wash out in the Senate, their options become more desperate – but desperate measures are all they have left. In addition to attempting constitutional challenges and state-level nullification, all of which will be shot down in flames in court, and promising a Congressional repeal which is wildly improbable, they are gearing up for…

The Hypocrisy Olympics!

Chuck Grassley, who did as much as anyone to slow-roll the health reform bill practically to extinction, is now bragging about the bill, as though it was all his idea; this is quite similar to the Republicans who bragged about getting stimulus money for their states after fighting to kill the stimulus package. Mitt Romney is claiming that the health plan he enacted in Massachusetts is very very good while the Obama plan is very very bad, neatly ignoring the rather astounding similarities between the two (they are also similar to the health plan proposed by the Gingrich gang as a counter-proposal to Hillarycare, and the plan advocated by that known socialist, Richard Nixon). The Republicans are also trying to figure out how to campaign on a platform of repealing the health bill, while also campaigning in favor of the provisions that people like. John Cornyn has flipflopped on the health bill so much, so fast, that even ultra-conservative RedState is ridiculing him, and one of the rightwing Attorneys General threatening to sue because of scary provisions like the insurance mandate…previously supported insurance mandates. Senate Republicans have changed their sheet music from “repeal” to “repeal and replace” – they figured out pretty quickly that the American people actually want health reform.

Terror attacks, threatening children, attempted intimidation, bringing all of Congress to a screeching halt in a fit of pique, spewing endless lies, threatening doomed legal challenges, trying to take credit for reform right after trying to kill it….These are the people who demand the right to lead this country, because it’s the Democrats who are unfit to lead…? And this nonsense includes their two most likely standard-bearers for 2012, Romney and Palin.

The only thing standing between these maniacs and the levers of power, which they flagrantly abused during the Bush era as they destroyed our army, our economy, our reputation, our Constitution…The only thing preventing the Nazis from returning to power is the Democratic party.


In a few weeks the teabag wingnuts have promised a “Second Amendment march” on Washington. On the anniversary of the Oklahoma bombing.

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