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Add comment April 10th, 2009

Flash! Rush Limbaugh no longer runs the Republican Party! Glenn Beck does!

5 comments April 10th, 2009

 

 As the hard-core base of the Republican Party grows ever smaller and goofier, the power of radio blabber Rush Limbaugh’s rhetoric seems to fade in comparison with the outlandish conspiracy theories and unhinged invective spewed by Glenn Beck, the emerging superstar at Fox News.

 This is BAD NEWS for the GOP, and it seems likely to send the party’s few remaining moderates and civilized conservatives heading for the exits. 

 The left went through something not entirely dissimilar to this  about 40 years ago when patriotic liberals were tarred with the image of bombthrowers and flagburners. It takes a while to repair the damage.

UPDATE: Steve Benen has a GOOD SLANT on the Beck phenomenon. Take special notice of the part where Benen mentions Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

A latter-day Joe McCarthy

5 comments April 10th, 2009

 

 Joe McCarthy, the infamous Republican senator from Wisconsin for whom a whole shameful era in America history was named, first gained fame by claiming to have lists of communist spies working in the U.S. State Department.

 The number of commies on McCarthy’s lists changed with almost every speech he delivered, and he never revealed the names on the lists. But he succeeded in launching paranoid witch hunts that ruined the lives of countless innocent people.

 And now we have a latter-day McCarthy in the person of Spencer Bachus (above), a Republican congressman from Alabama who SAID just yesterday that he knows of 17 “socialists” in the U.S. House of Representatives. He declined to name any of them.

 It’s one thing for an overwrought Republican to argue that Democrats in general are a bunch of socialists, but it’s quite another to specify that there are exactly 17 such people in the House.  Such quantification suggests that empirical evidence exists.

 Of course, the socialist label is tossed around with reckless abandon these days, almost to the point where it’s lost all meaning. But there’s still some residual ignominy to the term in some people’s minds, and it can take on the appearance of scandal when somebody says there’s a specific number of socialists in a certain political body.

 I’m tempted to say that Bachus proves there’s one nitwit in the U.S. House, but we all know there are many more than that.

 UPDATE: The ridiculous claim by Bachus is treated as fact in this headline on a Fox News Web site: “Surprised? 17 Members of Congress are Socialists.”

 No, I’m not surprised that Fox would use such a headline. Nor would I be surprised if Glenn Beck called for patriotic Americans to take up arms against these socialists.

Not to be outdone by Notre Dame, Arizona school has its own Obama controversy

9 comments April 10th, 2009

 

 While the University of Notre Dame has been making headlines of late regarding its invitation to President Obama to deliver a commencement address (see HERE), a somewhat different kind of controversy has arisen over the president’s scheduled appearance at graduation ceremonies at Arizona State University.

 The fuss in Arizona is over the school’s refusal to grant Obama an honorary degree, a departure from custom with respect to commencement speakers.

 Read all about it HERE and HERE and HERE.