Pity the GOP. On the one hand they have a party chairman who by any fair measure deserves to be fired. On the other hand the party badly needs to crawl out from under a reputation as antideluvian racists. And he’s black. What to do?
We are talking about Republicans, so we can rule out a discreet settlement that preserves the dignity of everyone involved. The best they can manage seems to be a very slow-moving train wreck.
Can’t say that I didn’t warn them.
sparky
Easy: he’s a Democrat Socia-ist! Like that Powell dude who was in the Army until he became a Demon-rat, too.
Ok, who’s next?
4tehlulz
Needs more waterboarding.
JGabriel
Tim F. @ Top:
No. Way. Nahgunhappn. Un unh. Never.
I am laughing my ass off at them. I may be mean, but I ain’t a hypocrite.
.
Joshua Norton
Soon he’ll be compelled to dress up like a minuteman, wave around a “NOBAMA IS A FASCIST” sign, cry, then teabag himself.
TenguPhule
The best part will be the explosion that sends body parts raining across the landscape.
JGabriel
Tim F.:
Umm, it’s possible I’m just cynical, but wouldn’t that be true of anyone who would take the job?
.
Ash Can
I don’t think there’s anything they can do about it. When Steele was elected RNC chair, out of a crowded field and on the umpteenth ballot, he was effectively in the position of being the head of a minority government. Ideally, his first move once installed would have been to schmooze the leaders of the different GOP factions behind the scenes, build a coalition for himself, and take it from there. And maybe he really did try to do that; I don’t know. Regardless, though, he’d be trying to do it with a bunch of factions that are all but shunning each other on the grounds of ideological impurity. It’s like trying to build a tower out of magnets that don’t attract, they just repel each other. Good luck with that.
Brian J
Actually, I think the solution is pretty simple: find someone else who isn’t from a racially insensitive background, either a black or Hispanic or even a white guy, make sure he’s acceptable to enough people so that he could get the votes, and then stage a coup. (I have no idea if this is possible under any rules of the RNC, mind you; then again, when have rules mattered to these people?) It’s probably not that hard to find someone for the position, particularly since there are far more Hispanic Republicans than black Republicans. And even if the person did little more than occupy the slot for a years flipping through copies of magazines, he couldn’t possibly be worse than Steele.
Jennifer
Given that the Republican enemies list has been steadily expanding for the past 3 decades, it was inevitable that eventually they’d run out of non-Republicans to add to it and have to start eating their own.
I love the smell of scorched-earth Republican party ideological purity battles in the morning. It smells like…well, really, really good.
passerby
Steele has really turned out to be such a clown with his lame “urban” sound bites and his whole “i’m playing chess” posturing. What an ass.
The GOP put him there as a token–yet another shallow act of desperation. Like rebranding the Dems.
One thing has become more clear these past few months: Newt, Cantor, Cheney, Pat, Rush and Boehner are the drumline for what’s left of the batshit insane GOP. Slo-mo train wreck indeed. These men cannot be reasoned with. Cantor and Boehner have it the worst because, as legislators, they are expected to produce alternatives to Obama’s policies and we’ve all seen how funny that sideshow was.
Obstructionism is not a winning political strategy, neither is idiocy.
NonyNony
No.
@Brian J:
In my dreams Rush Limbaugh decides that this is the right approach and begins pushing Ken Blackwell as the obvious choice to replace Michael Steele until Steele is forced out of the seat and J. Kenneth Blackwell is placed on the chair.
At this point the GOP isn’t fixing itself, so I’d really like to see someone whose tenure at the helm would ram it heartily into the ground so that no one but the dead-enders are willing to keep the hope alive and a new party can actually have some room to rise up out of its ashes. I can’t think of anyone who could drive the rotting corpse of the GOP into the ground quicker than Ken Blackwell could manage.
SpotWeld
I think the most likely thing we can expect is the GOP will demand a relaxation of the restrictive deinfitions that prevent Rush Limbaugh from being considered a black man.
JGabriel
@Jennifer:
Yep.
.
PhysicsFun
Antideluvian – hey I can understand it if you’re a Hutt
Antediluvian, now that’s another thing.
Fulcanelli
@PhysicsFun: That must have been what Rush’s surgery removed! Ewww.
TenguPhule
10 years after they’re dead and dumped out at sea and not a second before.
TenguPhule
They start judging by the color of the soul?
Zifnab
Please, can they just nominate Rush to be RNC Chairman and cut out all the hand waving? Just, you know, embrace their inner drug-addled pedo-fatty.
LimpDick is about to bankrupt his radio empire anyway with that $400 mil salary. He’ll be needing a new job soon, and the GOP is nothing if not happy to piss away a fortune on shitty investments.
Rick Taylor
Fixed!
Anne Laurie
If the whitebread Republican god were a better novelist, Steele would respond to his immanent ouster by going to the media and announcing he’d been a tool of the Great Orange Satan all along. This would play directly to *both* parties’ greatest weaknesses — the Rethugs’ ideological paranoia, and the Demonrats’ inability to criticize anyone who claims (however duplicitiously) to be a supporter.
Brachiator
You haven’t been paying attention. The GOP leadership is eagerly slithering back under the rock of racism. For example, what had previously been limited to the nastier conservative pundits such as Michael Savage is now becoming the official Republican doctrine:
Namely that Obama isn’t simply a social ist, but that he has decided to become the president of the welfare state. In this vile GOP fantasy, there are only hard working white people who either are Republican or should be Republican. Against this remnant of the only true Americans ever stands a horde of black people who have never worked and an even larger horde of Latinos who sneak across the border to steal jobs, sell drugs and constantly impregnate their impossibly fertile wives.
Obama’s goal is to transfer all the wealth of the country from hardworking white people to never-working non-white people. Unless the Republicans stop him by getting the citizens to support their plan of permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and an end to all those pesky regulations which prevent banks and investment companies from creating permanent prosperity for all, trickle down style.
At some point, Steele will step down. I cannot imagine him having so little self-respect that he would ever allow himself to appear on one of the pundit shows and defend the noxious gas emanating from the Republicans.
Funkhauser
As you previously pointed out, this is not a group of people that should ever be trusted with planning. Anything.
Okie_Indie
A little worried that they can’t fire a black guy for fear of looking more racist.
Left Coast Tom
Steele was elected on the sixth ballot, by which time it was between him and someone from South Carolina who said he entered politics inspired to fight desegregation.
Non-crazy solutions seem beyond their reach.
Rosali
Mel Martinez already held the position and he and the RNC parted ways in mutual disgust over the GOP’s xenophobic immigration policy.
JR
Oh, just go ahead and fire the fool. Black people aren’t going to feel any worse about Republicans than we already do.
Wile E. Quixote
@Tim F.
@TenguPhule
I agree with Tenguphule, the only “pity” I’m going to have for the G.O.P is the way Dildo pitied Goddam in Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings
asiangrrlMN
I gotta agree with JR that if they want to get rid of him, the best thing would be for them to do so honestly and openly. Wait, we’re talking about the GOP. What was I thinking?
jibeaux
I confess to something of a soft spot for Michael Steele — he says idiotically candid off-talking-points-message things, seemed genuinely amused by Obama mocking him with that hizzou-what-up line in the correspondents’ dinner, and just generally falls more into the “headscratcher-weird” category than the “full-on, watch-for-sudden-movements-crazy” category. No wonder he’s deeply unpopular with Republicans!
At the end of the day, though, it will be amusement and not pity. They wanted a black guy, the highest profile one they had was the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, they said good enough, and now, huh. Didn’t really turn out to be what they wanted, after all. If anything happens to Ken Blackwell, the next black guy who could pass their purity test is going to be the assistant deputy undersecretary for foreign relations in Guam or something.
Thadeus Horne
Has anybody really looked at Rush lately?
Just leave him alone….the fat fool will eat
himself to death soon.
Sue
“Against this remnant of the only true Americans ever stands a horde of black people who have never worked and an even larger horde of Latinos who sneak across the border to steal jobs, sell drugs and constantly impregnate their impossibly fertile wives.”
Brachiator, you forgot about the horde of black people who are constantly impregnating their impossibly fertile multiple girlfriends.
Fulcanelli
These are the same cocky, overconfident idiots who just a few short years ago were confident they would maintain a “permanent majority” stranglehold on all branches of the federal government remember? So what did they do with their power?
They pulled every asshole parliamentary stunt in the book in congress, treated the “loyal opposition” party and anyone who disagreed with them like discount toilet paper, started an illegal war leaving over 100,000 people dead, hung a foreign head of state the US initially helped bring to power, tortured people, shit on the US constitution, ruined our international reputation, gave the US treasury away to multinational corporations and ran up a trillion or so dollars of debt the taxpayers have to pay off.
Pity them?
Pity this lot at your own peril. Crush them like insects.
grumpy realist
Steele, self-respect? I remember the uproar in the blogosphere when Steve Gillard (sadly R.I.P.) came out with the picture of Steele in minstrel blackface. Over the top? Perhaps. But Gillard, as a black man himself, felt no reason to withhold his criticism of someone he saw as a clueless nitwit willing to remove all self-respect for the sake of power in the Republican party. And the more I see Steele act, the more I feel that Gillard got the substance of that man bang on.
One reason I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for Watts is that he knew when he was being used by the Republican Party as their Talking Negro, said “I’m not playing this game,” and quit his seat altogether.
Cyrus
@Brian J:
I know just the guy! He’s half-Hispanic but has a plain whitebread last name, and to tie it in to another recent thread, he’s criticized Charlie Crist for accepting stimulus money, so he’s reliably conservative.
Michael
Alan Keyes – he’s rested, he’s ready, he’s nuts….AND willing to launder the white robes and clean up the picnic area after the post-cross burning potluck.
Zifnab
@Thadeus Horne:
You’ll need a wider-angle lens for that.
If we’re lucky, he’ll live to a ripe old age and continue to wave the banner of the GOP to his dying day. It’s not like Limbaugh can’t be replaced by a long line of wingnut hero wanna-bes, and he’s already done such a great job of asshatting himself across the camera at every opportunity, why trade the devil you know for the devil you don’t know?
jibeaux
@Michael: and myself
D’oh! I forgot about Alan Keyes. Like the old Nixon t-shirts used to say, he’s tanned, rested, and ready…
TR
The best part is that if they ditch him, they’d likely go with the man he narrowly edged out as his replacement — South Carolina’s Katon Dawson, who used to belong to a whites-only country club.
flukebucket
First Candy and now Rush? Ohhhh the humanity!
demkat620
@jibeaux: Oh, that is a whole other level of crazy.
Can you imagine the entertainment value of Alan Keyes with an actual vehicle to sell Alan Keyes?
Man, that would be hilarious.
I like it. I like it alot.
demkat620
@flukebucket: Go listen to Cheney’s latest interviews. Listen, don’t watch. His breathing is almost Darth Vader like.
anticontrarian
what i want to know is which non-straight-white-male segment of the population they will spectacularly fail to pander to next. after michael steele and sarah palin it seems like the bar is set pretty high.
maybe they could nominate the taco bell dog for something so as to shore up their numbers with hispanics.
Brachiator
@Sue:
Right. Them, too.
Oh Hell, yes. Keyes is definitely the go-to guy when you gotta have the wingnut crazy.
asiangrrlMN
@Cyrus: I hate you. Just kidding. However, the thought of another George Bush in office is enough to make me wanna hurl.
Ash Can
@jibeaux: I have to agree with you — I too think he’s basically a decent person, and that his main problem is that he’s allowed himself to get stuck in a perfectly awful position. One can only hope that he lives and learns, for his sake.
Rainboskies
1. Rep. party freed the slaves….Democrats just keep the institution going. Free cheese and Section 8 for everyone!!!
2. Obama kept out the white journalists during the award ceremony of the Black Journ. Assoc. Whose racist?
3. Obama literally looked like he was going down on that ‘ol Prince from Arabay. You’ll be next.
4. Obama–the first Kenyan U.S. President. Priceless!!
Little Dreamer
@jibeaux:
Interesting, I thought of him right away, he and Obama have a history, dontchaknow?
IndieTarheel
@Sue:
Fixed. If you’re going to feed into the paranoid delusion, better to go ALL IN.
Comrade Baron Elmo
1. Rep. party freed the slaves….Democrats just keep the institution going. Free cheese and Section 8 for everyone
2. Obama kept out the white journalists during the award ceremony of the Black Journ. Assoc. Whose racist?
3. Obama literally looked like he was going down on that ‘ol Prince from Arabay. You’ll be next.
4. Obama—the first Kenyan U.S. President. Priceless!!
I know one troll who’s been overdoing it on the magic mushrooms a-growing beneath his bridge…
Ash Can
@Rainboskies: Is it too much to ask that you at least use some actual FACTS when you post/speak/think? I mean, really — WTF are you trying to do? Present an opinion? Persuade us to adopt your point of view? Insult us? I can’t even tell, because YOU’RE NOT MAKING ANY DAMNED SENSE.
Listen up, genius. We posters here tend to think right-wingers are idiots. Why? BECAUSE OF YOU. If you want to try again, fine. But for crap’s sake, can’t you bring some game?
Xenos
@Zifnab:
I will be very amused if Clear Channel goes to Chapter 11 and gets out from under that unsecured employment contract, while secured first priority bondholders squeeze that sucker dry.
Rainboskies
Hey,AshCan…
Now what points 1-4 were a lie??
Ash Can
@Rainboskies: I’ll spell it out for you.
Explain how today’s GOP is the same as the GOP of 1865, and explain how the Dems are propagating slavery. And do it in detail in such a way that it doesn’t sound thoroughly ignorant. Equating social welfare programs with slave ownership doesn’t come close to cutting it.
Prove this by providing at least one FACT-BASED link supporting this. I shouldn’t have to emphasize this, but I know I do: You are NOT allowed to simply make shit up.
I’ll start you off by spotting you a correction — it was the Saudi king, not the prince. Now, explain exactly how Obama’s bow breached protocol. (I’ll be particularly impressed if you can furnish a detailed explanation, because I wasn’t able to determine the correct protocol from my own Internet search.) Bonus points for telling us how George W kissing the king similarly irritated you. And if you can rework your “you’ll be next” into something sensible, your bonus points are doubled.
Explain the significance of this, why you mentioned it, whether it differs from presidents of Western European exctraction, how it differs, and why anyone should care. And if the term “birth certificate” or any similar term is used anywhere in your answer, your answer will automatically be disqualified.
Now go on — show us what you’ve got.
Rainboskies
AshCan…
Item #2…www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2211082/posts – 49k
Rainboskies
AshCan…
Item #1……www.workers.org/ww/1998/workfare0212.php – 14k
Rainboskies
AshCan……
Item #3
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/04/obama_bows_down_to_saudi_king.html – 18k – Cached – Similar pages
Item #3…..
Rainboskies
AshCan….
Item #4…..www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2096113/posts – 56k
Why would Obama spend close to $1M to have lawyers fight the release of any records, ummmmmm
gwangung
Not impressive.
Rainboskies
AshCan……Look, I voted Independent…Chuck Baldwin. I dont like most CongressCritters at the moment. And, unfortunately, I dont like the President. People on blogs really dont like the truth or want to hear it. If you dont want to discuss the Birth Certificate, fine. Lets just look at Obamas 100 days in office and you tell me if this country is better off.
grumpy realist
Well, if your references are to posts on Free Republic, that puts the kibosh on the argument right there.
There’s references-we-believe-in and references-which-show-you’re-a-nitwit.
And, oh god, the Birth-Certificate-and-he-spent-$1M-to-keep-it-from-coming-out! Sorry, I’m supposed to believe in a conspiracy between the newspaper containing the original birth announcement, the hospital, the State of Hawaii, Hillary Clinton and her entire staff, and who knows who else? And any of us who don’t believe in this are just showing that we’re part of the conspiracy as well, right? In the end, we’ll have the mutha-of-all-conspiracies, where *everyone in the world* who doesn’t believe in this happens to be in the conspiracy, against which the poor, valiant Birth Certificate believers are fighting, right?
A classic example of the paranoid brain in action.
Fulcanelli
@Rainboskies: After 28 years of Republican dominance in American politics including 5 terms with a Republican president having driven the American and world economy into the ditch, thousands of soldiers and innocents dead, taxpayers saddled with trillions in debt you’re having an aneurysm over Obama and the Dems not having the world fixed in just over 100 days?
And I bet you don’t understand why progressives and liberals mock and insult you either. Tool.
Rainboskies
@Fulcanelli……a tool because I think the way that I do? Im not saying that Obama should/could “fix” this country. What I was asking, within the last 100 days, from his and Congress’ actions, has the country improved? The money we have spent is unprecented!!
Ash Can
@gwangung:
@grumpy realist:
@Fulcanelli:
Thanks, guys. I’m grouchy and tired from running errands all morning after a solid bout of insomnia last night, and I really don’t feel like slogging through any more crap right now. Arguing with birthers is a fool’s errand, I know, but I’m just so fed up with the bullshit I had to hit back.
Rainboskies, I appreciate your supplying URLs, but they lead nowhere. What good would it do you, for example, if I were to link to places like Daily Kos and Firedoglake to prove my points to you? Sites with obvious agendas don’t do a very good job of supplying evidence; they only supply more polemics. That’s why I don’t usually link to such sources, I link instead to the sources they cite.