Last I checked, the Senate seat in Georgia isn’t a slam-dunk no-brainer for Republicans, so it’s good to see that they’re mau-mauing the strongest candidate:
Things got started yesterday with Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), who, despite being very conservative, is probably the only Republican candidate for the Georgia Senate nomination who doesn’t make a habit of selling really crazy crap. Yesterday he said he doesn’t think it’s “the responsible thing to do” to simply let Obamacare collpase. Today he was attacked at Redstate.com for having “surrendered on Obamacare.”
Josh Marshall calls that McCarthyism. I call it another day at the office for the white men in charge of the Republican Party, and I have little doubt that Jack Kingston is going to try to appease the assholes at Red State.
In the same vein, the other day I was listening to the This American Life podcast, which had the story of a very earnest young Republican student who was appointed to the Wisconsin Board of Regents. His appointment was rescinded after conservative bloggers discovered he had signed Scott Walker’s recall petition. (There was also a well-regarded Republican Wisconsin judge who lost his election because he signed.) When they interviewed the student, he said he still supports Walker because of issues like entitlement reform.
As long as the victims of these drive-bys remain party loyalists, why do they deserve the label “moderate”? They can make as many reasonable and intelligent statements as they wish, but until those mouth noises are accompanied by action, they carry the same significance as the idiotic barking of my neighbor’s permanently caged pit bull.
One more thing: if some teahadi wins the Georgia Senate primary, at least voters will face an honest choice. Jack Kingston will certainly vote like a teaturd if he reaches the Senate, so voters deserve to have a real turd on the ballot, rather than a turd camoflauged by a nice suit, a friendly smile and some happy talk.
schrodinger's cat
Talking of moderate Republicans whatever happened to Olympia Snowe after she left the Senate.
tybee
old jack is my congress critter and he’s a first class ass hat.
Cassidy
Georgia needs another Sherman.
tybee
@Cassidy:
and old billy needs to be a bit more thorough with the burning of atlanta this time around.
tybee
the real turd on the republican ballot is paul broun. “doktor” paul broun.
raven
@tybee: And a fucking Athens native like that douche Barrow.
cmorenc
Yes indeed, Georgia needs a candidate whom the media won’t be complicit in camouflaging in the clothing of a purported “moderate” Republican, when all the flesh underneath will behave 97% of the time in precisely the same fashion as if dressed in the uniform of a far-right teahadist militant.
The Red Pen
Speaking of Teaturdism, I’ve been reading up on “the knockout game.” This seems to have started with a couple of instances in Saint Louis and became a MTD (Media Transmitted Disorder). Remember when the future of the world was gangs of “wilding” teens? Well, that national nightmare was ginned up from a single instance, that — over the years — turned out to have been the actual work of a lone psychopath and not the five teens who were arrested and charged.
So, is “the knockout game”:
1) A media-hyped non-trend?
2) A legitimate reason for wingnuts to go full-blown racist in public?
Gee, tough call.
P.S. The second link is to Free Republic and the comments will make you enraged.
Villago Delenda Est
These Leninist assholes are their own worst enemies, and they don’t even understand why.
Biscuits
I listened to that too. Lost all sympathy for the guy in the end. Basically he was “thank you sir, may I have another”. They all suffer from obstructive defiant disorder, the rest of us pay for it.
James Gary
Heads-up to commenters who might’ve missed it: The post title is from “Exhuming McCarthy,” a song by R.E.M. which pretty well encapsulates the modern conservative mindset:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2wET1OlK4Q
Frankensteinbeck
Because they’re not batshit insane. If they weren’t terrified of being primaried they would vote for legislation that merely slow-destroys the economy while making the rich richer than ever. The Teabaggers don’t even care about the rich, only burning down everything if they can’t be in charge. If they’re feeling completely comfortable, the ‘moderates’ are even willing to throw a crumb to the peasants once in awhile.
Now, read that description and understand that they’re still monsters who need to be destroyed as a political force, but there is a difference. It doesn’t show under these unusual circumstances, but it exists.
scav
@James Gary: Actually, substituting “Exhuming McCarthy” for my self-generated ”Stealing my car keys” does less violence to the overall meaning than it might. Much more learned though.
SiubhanDuinne
@tybee:
Yup, him and Gingrey, who said (back in September or thereabouts) “I’m stuck in this job making $178,000 a year.”
Know what, asshole? We can get you unstuck JustLikeThat.
I’ve started volunteering for Michelle Nunn. She has a decent chance, I think, depending on what the Republicans do to themselves.
Linda Featheringill
McCarthyism?
I think it is closer to Stalinism. McCarthy attacked the Other. Stalin conducted purges against those who should have been his allies.
But then I frequently think that the Righties remind me of Stalin.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@tybee: Isn’t Broun the MD who owns a handful of Subway shops and tries to pass himself off as a “small business owner and job creator”
@schrodinger’s cat: She went on Colbert to hawk her book on the Lost and Glorious Middle, citing campaign finance reform as one of her centrist issues, and when Colbert came pretty close to breaking character by pointing out she had filibustered all post-CU attempts at reform, she chucklingly ignored him with a blithe arrogance that made me understand her a lot better.
lol
@The Red Pen:
I love how one of the instances of the knockout game was a teen who tried to use a taser to rob a guy. Teen ended up getting shot for his trouble so it’s a two-fer for the wingnuts but no one’s explained how the knockout game could involve a taser.
kindness
Isn’t it nice watching a circular firing squad from outside the circle? For so long that was something only Democrats and liberals did to their own.
Moar popcorn anyone?
@The Red Pen: Free Republic? You might as well be linking to Storm Front.
Eric U.
I can’t believe people used to complain about newsmax headlines, they are comedy gold. “IRS to shutdown conservative non-profits” — if only
tybee
@SiubhanDuinne:
i know very little about michelle’s platform but you can tell her she has voters in the coastal empire.
tybee
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
dunno if broun owns any sammich shops but he’s the “doktor” who said that embryology and evolution were lies straight from the pit of hell.
i pity the fool who campaigns in my hood for that dipshit.
Shana
@James Gary: FWIW I got it immediately.
cmorenc
@Linda Featheringill:
There was a time not so very long ago (the 2009-2010 period before the Nov 2010 election) when a substantial portion of the progressive community was all-for primarying any democrat who was insufficiently supportive of their herd of purity pony issues. Not that a few might-as-well-have-been-republican democratic blue dogs and asshats (e.g. Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman) didn’t deserve the sort of scorn traitors deserve, but OTOH it’s fair to say some of us got a little carried away with the notion of purifying our own herd.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I tend to agree. I see someone opened Mary Matalin’s sarcophagus (I wonder if Carville is crawling around at night reducing DC’s rat population), and Alec Baldwin’s rage issues remain untreated.
MattF
Wingerdom is apparently still locked into a ‘no enemies to my Right’ death spiral, despite the post-Romney happy-talk about messaging. They haven’t quite breached the ‘worse is better’ line, but they’re getting there.
MattF
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yeah, as if quoting Halperin, Matalin, and Donald Fucking Trump improves their credibility.
Frankensteinbeck
@cmorenc:
Were there ever really that many purity trolls? Sure, they love screaming on online forums, but how much of an electoral force were they? The frothing rabies crowd OWN the GOP primaries.
FlipYrWhig
@Frankensteinbeck: The “purity” people long for the influence the wingnuts have, but there just aren’t the sheer numbers to make that possible. So they then have to re-theorize why they don’t have the numbers, and, naturally, the answer is “because corporatists” or some such thing.
GregB
I saw Jon Huntsman speak in NH this week. He really is an impressive politician. He speaks to the crowd like they are adults who can understand multiple topics and subjects and nuance. His lecture was also completely devoid of any of the boilerplate GOP rhetoric and buzzwords.
I approached him after and thanked him for being a decent man and for his willingness to work as President Obama’s Ambassador to China and he said he’d do it again.
It is too bad for him that the party he still identifies with has long purged almost every last decent person and sent them off into the cornfield.
hitchhiker
I heard the Wisconsin kid story, too. At first I was surprised by the ending — he didn’t carry a grudge for having lost a really great gig, of course not! — but then I realized that TAL had kind of set me up.
They took pains to describe him as this very reasonable, ambitious, hard-working person . .. but clearly if he was so determined to get a job in the Walker administration in the first place, he was also a titch on the loony side from the get-go.
hoodie
Kingston isn’t as stupid or wacko as Broun and Gingrey, so he likely said that for a reason and I’m not sure he’s going to rush to appease Redstate. He’s running against a bunch of die-hard wingnuts. He may be trying to position himself as the anti-TP candidate if the business types actually come through and start targeting races. Atlanta is an expensive TV market and probably has more “moderate” GOP voters. Broun, Gingrey and Handel may split the far right vote and put him in a position to win the GOP nomination.
catclub
@hoodie: “Broun, Gingrey and Handel may split the far right vote and put him in a position to win the GOP nomination. ”
If he gets 50% before a runoff, yes. Then again, in the primary they could split the far right vote 30% each way and leave him with 10.
flukebucket
@tybee: ABSOLUTELY! I am pushing the hell out of Dr. Paul Broun. That is the craziest fucker to ever hold political office. There is nothing that will stop Georgia from electing a Teahadist and I want it to be the god damnedest Teahadist the country has ever seen and Dr. Paul “evolution is from the pit of hell” Broun is that guy. He once said that soldiers should not be able to purchase Playboy books because that was spending taxpayer money on pornography. Dildos and wetsuits for everybody!!
hoodie
@catclub: You can’t win if you don’t make the runoff. Odds are, too, that the wingnut in the runoff against Kingston will be the wingnuttiest one (e.g., Broun), whom Kingston might be able to beat. It’s a longshot, but it’s Kingston’s only chance.
Cacti
The fundamentals of the upcoming election favor the GOP, but I don’t think they can stop the far right from shooting them in the foot again.
Look for the teabaggers to serve up more Christine O’Donnells and Todd Akins in otherwise winnable races.
tybee
@flukebucket:
yeah, i’ll probably vote for broun in the primary just to see what happens.
aimai
@Biscuits: I listened to part of that broadcast (came in late) and I was fascinated but not surprised to hear the guy’s extremely pacifist response to his mau mauing. But thats what makes a midwestern authoritarian follower: inability to get angry, submissiveness to authority. He sounded like a wonderful young man but instead of having what happened to him serve as a cautionary tale about how totally evil his own party is and specifically Walker and his minions he seems to have taken an “If the Czar only knew!” approach.
Turgidson
All I really know about Jack Kingston is that he was all over MSNBC’s shows for a while during the 2008 election and he managed to fit “Barack HUSSEIN Obama” (emphasis supplied by him) into every goddamn sentence he said.
If he’s the least-nutty candidate they have….oh, it’s a Georgia GOP primary. Where Saxby “multiple-amputee war hero Max Cleland is an Al Qaeda sympathizer” retired because HE is too reasonable.
Well, if we could hold Missouri and win Indiana senate seats running against nutbags, Michelle Nunn should have a chance. The state as a whole isn’t that far from being purple when the Dem base turns out.
Greg
I don’t understand why politicians care about Red State. They have a miniscule readership (their FB page only has 65,000 likes), the comments come from only about 20 people who just write the same thing over and over. How did they come to be hailed as some sort of “influential” website. In the last election I was living in a die-hard red area (CA Southern Central Valley), and just for fun I kept asking people if they had read the latest article at Red State or NRO. Not one person had ever heard of them. All they knew was Hannity, Limbaugh et al. These people DO NOT READ. So how can a website like Red State possibly have any influence on how they vote? Also, the guy with the string of subways claiming to be a small business owner was John Fleming of LA, who owns 33 subways, and some UPS franchises and was complaining that high taxes and regulation left him, the poor small business owner, with “only” 400,000 a year to live on.
C.V. Danes
I believe a more appropriate label would be “gimp”
Lee
Democrats should probably donate to RedState.com just to keep the ratfucking is ongoing.
SiubhanDuinne
@tybee: Well, I know going in she is substantially more conservative than I am, although I don’t think it’s fair to refer to her as a Blue Dog. But I am a realist — she is far and away the best Dem candidate in the race both in terms of organization and statewide name recognition. And in addition to being Sam’s daughter, she has a fine C.V. on her own. I think with decent GOTV efforts she can be the next Senator from Georgia.
SiubhanDuinne
@tybee:
Here’s the list of candidates so far (filing deadline isn’t until March, primary’s in May, so it’ll probably change some):
U.S. SENATOR:
[ Saxby Chambliss (R)* – Retiring in 2014. ]
Paul Broun (R) – Congressman & Physician
Art Gardner (R) – Attorney & Mechanical Engineer
Phil Gingrey (R) – Congressman, Ex-State Sen. & Physician
Derrick Grayson (R) – Minister, Network Engineer & Navy Veteran
Karen Handel (R) – Ex-Secretary of State, Ex-Fulton County Commission Chair & ’10 Gov. Candidate
Brian Kemp (R) – Secretary of State, Ex-State Sen. & Businessman
Jack Kingston (R) – Congressman, Ex-State Rep. & Ex-Insurance Broker
David Perdue (R) – Businessman
Ross Tolleson (R) – State Sen., Banker & Financial Advisor
Eugene Yu (R) – Businessman, Ex-Police Officer & Army Veteran
Thurbert Baker (D) – Ex-Attorney General, Ex-State Rep. & ’10 Gov. Candidate
Gerald Beckum (D) – Oglethorpe Mayor & Landscaping Contractor
Scott Holcomb (D) – State Rep., Attorney & Army Veteran
Steen Miles (D) – Ex-State Sen. & Retired TV News Reporter
Michelle Nunn (D) – Non-Profit Group Founder & Daughter of Ex-US Sen. Sam Nunn
DuBose Porter (D) – Ex-State House Minority Leader, Newspaper Editor, Attorney & ’10 Gov. Candidate
Branko Radulovacki (D) – Psychiatrist
Todd Robinson (D) – Firefighter & Retired Army NCO
Mike Thurmond (D) – Ex-State Labor Commissioner, Ex-State Rep. & Attorney & ’10 US Sen. Nominee
Source
tybee
Jack Kingston (R) – Congressman, Ex-State Rep. & Ex-Insurance Broker
ah, yes. the old Palmer & Cay Insurance Broker days.
met him several times down on johnson square and on the southside at computerland.
he seemed such a nice young man back then.
what a twit he turned into.