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You are here: Home / Things a Journalist Should Never Say Ever Again, “Republicans of Conscience” Edition

Things a Journalist Should Never Say Ever Again, “Republicans of Conscience” Edition

by John Cole|  July 16, 20199:44 pm| 44 Comments

This post is in: Go Fuck Yourself, Our Failed Media Experiment

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Oh go fuck yourselves:

As Mistermix noted below, a grand total of four (4) Republicans voted to note that what the President said was racist as fuck and wholly inappropriate. Here’s what 187 Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to support:

This resolution states that immigrants and their descendants have made America stronger and naturalized citizens are just as American as those whose families have been in the United States for generations. It also expresses a commitment to keep America open to those who lawfully seek refuge from violence and oppression and those willing to work hard to achieve the American Dream, regardless of race, ethnicity, faith, or country of origin.

The resolution strongly condemns the President’s racist comments and states that they have legitimized hatred of new Americans and people of color, including his reference to immigrants and asylum seekers as “invaders.”

That’s about as fucking toothless as something in the house can get. It recommends no censure or other punishment, it does not call for impeachment, it doesn’t even call for the President to go without his Mickey D’s apple pie after his too well down double cheeses tonight.

And yet, no “Republicans of conscience” could be found anywhere to support it. If you are a reporter or journalist or pundit and find yourself thinking the phrase “Republicans of Conscience,” do us all a favor, submit your resignation, and go seek work more befitting your level of intellect and decency. Maybe as Steve Bannon’s hot tub scrubber.

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Reader Interactions

44Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    July 16, 2019 at 9:46 pm

    , it doesn’t even call for the President to go without his Mickey D’s apple pie after his too well down double cheeses tonight.

    It doesn’t even call for a beer summit.

  2. 2.

    mrmoshpotato

    July 16, 2019 at 9:48 pm

    Republicans with a conscience? These fuckers don’t believe in science, much less a conscience.

    Or does a Republican conscience tell them to do the most hateful, harmful thing currently possible?

  3. 3.

    randal m sexton

    July 16, 2019 at 9:52 pm

    4 out of 191 is 2%. 98% of Republicans are racists. Oh sure, maybe there is another 10 or 20 or whatever who would have voted for this if there were no consequences. So maybe there is some venn diagram intersection of cowardice and racism that actually makes racism and cowardice equivalent. There is no going back — All Dems would, should,shall, and must remember this time, and this behaviour should be the very first thing that is said in any debate with these guys for ever.

  4. 4.

    wmd

    July 16, 2019 at 9:53 pm

    It’s worth noting the sexism involved as well. These are women that do not worship the big daddy in the whitehouse.

  5. 5.

    Mary Michel Green

    July 16, 2019 at 9:53 pm

    Two of the four who voted yes are in districts Hillary won, so pandering more than principle.

  6. 6.

    C Stars

    July 16, 2019 at 10:01 pm

    I hope it’s OK if I share a little fanfic here. I wrote this in response to Charles Pierce’s tweet showing Rick Perry leading a GOP prayer circle.

    The Donald’s Prayer

    Our Pussygrabber
    Who art at the golf club
    Hallowed be thy base
    Thy corruption come
    Thy grift be done
    In the USA, as it is in Russia.
    Give us this news-cycle
    Our daily red meat
    And forgive us our independent judiciary
    As we forgive those who kidnap and abuse children.
    Lead us not into accessible healthcare
    But deliver us from secure elections
    For thine is the misogyny
    And the racism
    Forever and ever.
    Amen

  7. 7.

    jl

    July 16, 2019 at 10:01 pm

    @Baud: ” It doesn’t even call for a beer summit. ”

    The economic miracle of the Baud Beer Boom would sweep Baud 2020! into a second term in a landslide..

  8. 8.

    Mnemosyne

    July 16, 2019 at 10:07 pm

    I wasn’t able to follow the comment threads today, what with doing actual work at work and all. Have the ‘bots and trolls decided yet that the censure motion they were screaming for is actually weak tea that never should have been passed in the first place? It always amuses me to watch them do a 180 the instant they get what they claim they wanted.

  9. 9.

    guachi

    July 16, 2019 at 10:08 pm

    Wow, that is pretty milquetoast. And only four* Republicans could muster the courage to vote for it (*and Justin Amash).

  10. 10.

    opiejeanne

    July 16, 2019 at 10:12 pm

    @Mnemosyne: I missed that, but there are people here who are doing that now.

  11. 11.

    J R in WV

    July 16, 2019 at 10:19 pm

    Former Justice Stevens died today, he was 99. Sad.

    We will not see his like again soon.

  12. 12.

    Another Scott

    July 16, 2019 at 10:21 pm

    TheTweetofGod:

    God @TheTweetOfGod

    The greater the evil, the bigger the lie required to support it.

    2:12 PM – 23 Jul 2018

    Yup.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  13. 13.

    Villago Delenda Est

    July 16, 2019 at 10:21 pm

    I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again:

    The GOP needs to go the way of the NSDAP and the CPSU.

  14. 14.

    guachi

    July 16, 2019 at 10:22 pm

    Any BJer want to infiltrate Trump’s rally in Greenville, SC tomorrow at 7 pm?

  15. 15.

    Kay

    July 16, 2019 at 10:23 pm

    AOC has replaced Nancy Pelosi as their bizarre hate-object. I mean, it’s a badge of honor in a very real way, but she’s so new at this it is just wild how they smoothly transferred to the next generation of women.

  16. 16.

    SiubhanDuinne

    July 16, 2019 at 10:23 pm

    Haven’t seen anyone else comment on this: former USSC Justice John Paul Stephens has died, age 99.

    His birthday was September 17, the same day the U. S. Constitution came into effect. And he was a great champion of the Constitution, and he will be missed. IIRC, he chaired the Constitution’s Bicentennial Committee In 1987.

    A good man. May he rest in peace.

  17. 17.

    mad citizen

    July 16, 2019 at 10:24 pm

    @C Stars: I was planning to just pile on Cole’s comment and say to the ether and hope it gets to the republicans somehow, Yea, go phuck yourselves.

    Then I read this from C Stars–this is magnificent! I was at a wedding the other day and heard the original. I may have to carry this version around in my wallet. As good as the 10 Biblical Questions to ask a republican during the W years.

  18. 18.

    Plato

    July 16, 2019 at 10:28 pm

    A rabid base causes rabies.

  19. 19.

    Chetan Murthy

    July 16, 2019 at 10:28 pm

    Cribbed from LG&M:

    During William Rehnquist’s tenure as chief justice, a lawyer was arguing in the court for the first time. When asked a question by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the nervous lawyer started her response with, “Well, Judge — ”

    Chief Justice Rehnquist interrupted her. “That’s Justice Kennedy,” he said.

    Shaken, the lawyer continued. A few minutes later, she responded to Justice David Souter by saying, “Yes, Judge.” Chief Justice Rehnquist corrected her again: “That’s Justice Souter.” A couple of minutes later, she called Chief Justice Rehnquist himself a judge.

    The chief justice leaned forward, his deep voice now at its sternest, to say, “Counsel is admonished that this court is composed of justices, not judges.”

    Before the lawyer could say anything, Justice Stevens interjected: “It’s O.K., Counsel. The Constitution makes the same mistake.”

    Jeffrey L. Fisher, My Boss, Justice Stevens, 2010

  20. 20.

    Yutsano

    July 16, 2019 at 10:29 pm

    @SiubhanDuinne: I was about ready to shit myself then I remembered he retired years ago. I feel a bit less panicked but still mourn his passing.

  21. 21.

    Steve in the ATL

    July 16, 2019 at 10:29 pm

    @SiubhanDuinne: get over yourself. It’s been mentioned on at least three threads already. Sheesh.

  22. 22.

    C Stars

    July 16, 2019 at 10:32 pm

    @mad citizen: Thank you! please share if you feel so inclined.

  23. 23.

    hitchhiker

    July 16, 2019 at 10:32 pm

    I don’t get how trump is any different from one of those idiots on a viral video (or in a court case) demanding that their black or Hispanic neighbors explain themselves, stop napping in their university common area, stop grilling cheeseburgers at their local park, stop swimming in their apartment complex pool, stop speaking Spanish in Walmart, stop walking in the street, stop wearing hoodies on the way to the store, stop entering their own homes, stop having nappy hair, stop having foreign accents, stop driving while being non white, stop stop stop stop.

    I mean, he’s those people. Straight up, if a rando fat old dude said what he tweeted to any group of 4 young women of color, the video of that shit would be viral, and the dude would be shamed and maybe even fired if he held a job working for the public, even as a dogcatcher.

    I need this all to end.

  24. 24.

    Cheryl Rofer

    July 16, 2019 at 10:32 pm

    This is good news. We are going to need more of this sort of action.

    More than a thousand Jews, immigrants, and allies shut down DHS/ICE headquarters for hours today. Dozens were arrested.

    This is a more significant development in the history of this administration than the House censure resolution.

    — Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) July 17, 2019


    The thread has a live-action thread embedded in it. Very worth reading.

  25. 25.

    Another Scott

    July 16, 2019 at 10:36 pm

    Adam Serwer in TheAtlantic from 2017:

    […]

    Sitting in his cell at Fort Warren years later, the rebels defeated and the Confederacy vanquished, [Confederate VP Alexander] Stephens had second thoughts. He insisted in his diary, “The reporter’s notes, which were very imperfect, were hastily corrected by me; and were published without further revision and with several glaring errors.” In fact, Stephens wrote, he didn’t like slavery at all.

    “My own opinion of slavery, as often expressed, was that if the institution was not the best, or could not be made the best, for both races, looking to the advancement and progress of both, physically and morally, it ought to be abolished,” Stephens wrote. “Great improvements were, however, going on in the condition of blacks in the South … Much greater would have been made, I verily believe, but for outside agitation.”

    Stephens had become first in line to the presidency of the Confederacy, an entity founded to defend white people’s right to own black people as chattel. But that didn’t mean he possessed any hostility toward black people, for whom he truly wanted only the best. The real problem was the crooked media, which had taken him out of context.

    The same was true of the rest of the South, he wrote, which had no love for the institution of slavery. “They were ready to sacrifice property, life, everything, for the Cause, which was then simply the right of self-government,” Stephens insisted. “The slavery question had but little influence with the masses.” Again, the problem, as he saw it, was a media that deliberately lied about the cause of disunion. He singled out Horace Greeley, the founder of the New York Tribune, saying that Greeley’s description of the South as seeking to overthrow the Constitution in order to establish a “slave oligarchy” was “utterly unfounded.”

    Stephens’s rewriting of his own views on race and slavery, the causes of the Civil War, and the founding principles of the Confederacy laid a different cornerstone. It served as a crucial text in the emerging alternate history of the Lost Cause, the mythology that the South had fought a principled battle for its own liberty and sovereignty and not, in President Ulysses S. Grant’s words, an ideal that was among “the worst for which a people ever fought.” The Lost Cause provided white Southerners—and white Americans in general—with a misunderstanding of the Civil War that allowed them to spare themselves the shame of their own history.

    Stephens’s denial of what the Confederacy fought for—a purpose he himself had articulated for the eternity of human memory—is a manifestation of a delusion essential to nationalism in almost all of its American permutations: American history as glorious idealism unpolluted by base tribalism. If a man who helped lead a nation founded to preserve the right to own black people as slaves could believe this lie, it is folly to think that anyone who has done anything short of that would have difficulty doing the same.

    […]

    [T]rumpism emerged from a haze of delusion, denial, pride, and cruelty—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profoundly American phenomenon. This explains both how tens of millions of white Americans could pull the lever for a candidate running on a racist platform and justify doing so, and why a predominantly white political class would search so desperately for an alternative explanation for what it had just seen. To acknowledge the centrality of racial inequality to American democracy is to question its legitimacy—so it must be denied.

    I don’t mean to suggest that Trump’s nationalism is impervious to politics. It is not invincible. Its earlier iterations have been defeated before, and can be defeated now. Abraham Lincoln began the Civil War believing that former slaves would have to be transported to West Africa. Lyndon Johnson began his political career as a segregationist. Both came to realize that the question of black rights in America is not mere identity politics—not a peripheral matter, but the central, existential question of the republic. Nothing is inevitable, people can change. No one is irredeemable. But recognition precedes enlightenment.

    Nevertheless, a majority of white voters backed a candidate who assured them that they will never have to share this country with people of color as equals. That is the reality that all Americans will have to deal with, and one that most of the country has yet to confront.

    Yet at its core, white nationalism has and always will be a hustle, a con, a fraud that cannot deliver the broad-based prosperity it promises, not even to most white people. Perhaps the most persuasive argument against Trumpist nationalism is not one its opponents can make in a way that his supporters will believe. But the failure of Trump’s promises to white America may yet show that both the fruit and the tree are poison.

    Well said.

    (via LOLGOP)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  26. 26.

    Plato

    July 16, 2019 at 10:37 pm

    Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen has been narrowly elected president of the EU Commission following a secret ballot among MEPs.

    The centre-right defence minister will replace Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on 1 November.

    She secured the backing of more than half of the members of the European parliament on Tuesday evening.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49010801

  27. 27.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    July 16, 2019 at 10:37 pm

    @Chetan Murthy: oh, that’s wonderful– I hope Rehnquist was enraged

  28. 28.

    mrmoshpotato

    July 16, 2019 at 10:39 pm

    @J R in WV: RIP

  29. 29.

    Another Scott

    July 16, 2019 at 10:41 pm

    @SiubhanDuinne: I thought Burger resigned as Chief Justice to run the Constitution Bicentennial. (A very weird thing to do, I thought at the time.)

    Stevens was a good man, a good Justice, and will be missed.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  30. 30.

    Mnemosyne

    July 16, 2019 at 10:45 pm

    @opiejeanne:

    At this point, I feel like the best thing I can do is point and laugh at people who are enraged at getting what they asked for.

  31. 31.

    AliceBlue

    July 16, 2019 at 10:47 pm

    @C Stars: OMG that is perfect.

  32. 32.

    tokyokie

    July 16, 2019 at 10:49 pm

    Gerald Ford, who was a lawyer, nominated Stevens for the Supreme Court not because Stevens was ideological ally, but because Stevens was the highest rated appellate court judge by the American Bar Association. And that might have been the last significant decent action by a Republican president.

  33. 33.

    Frankensteinbeck

    July 16, 2019 at 10:50 pm

    @Mnemosyne:

    Have the ‘bots and trolls decided yet that the censure motion they were screaming for is actually weak tea that never should have been passed in the first place?

    Last I saw, the argument is that Nancy Pelosi was not physically standing with the 4 Representatives at their press conference, therefor she is on Trump’s side. They throw around ‘complicit’ a lot.

  34. 34.

    TS (the original)

    July 16, 2019 at 11:12 pm

    @Baud:

    It doesn’t even call for a beer summit.

    And I had forgotten that – President Obama was attacked by the GOP and the media for suggesting the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

    Obama called someone stupid and was criticised for months. trump is blatantly racist & the GOP congress think that is fine.

  35. 35.

    James E Powell

    July 16, 2019 at 11:45 pm

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Who are “they”? I haven’t read anyone here saying anything like that, nor anyone screaming for a censure motion.

    Is this acrimony really necessary? Is no criticism of the Speaker or the Democratic leadership permitted?

  36. 36.

    Ocotillo

    July 16, 2019 at 11:47 pm

    @C Stars: Brilliant!

  37. 37.

    Captain C

    July 16, 2019 at 11:53 pm

    @Mnemosyne: “You said ‘yes’ to me, that is unacceptable!

  38. 38.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    July 16, 2019 at 11:56 pm

    The Party of Lincoln is dead, the South has risen again and in the ultimate act of revenge they have taken over the Republican party, and now they want to take over the country.

    Pretty much this…

  39. 39.

    sdhays

    July 16, 2019 at 11:57 pm

    @tokyokie: Poppy Bush accidentally nominated Souter. The Right never forgave him for that.

  40. 40.

    Frankensteinbeck

    July 17, 2019 at 12:20 am

    @James E Powell:
    The Twitter bots and trolls.

  41. 41.

    Mnemosyne

    July 17, 2019 at 1:00 am

    @James E Powell:

    Criticize away. Just don’t whine when people point out that your criticisms lack substance.

    As I said, the same people on Twitter who were demanding that the House censure Trump are now screeching that it was a terrible idea and never should have been done. Consistency is never a problem when there are Democrats to bash.

  42. 42.

    JoeyJoeJoe

    July 17, 2019 at 1:14 am

    @TS (the original): And he didn’t even do that, really. Obama prefaced the comments by saying that if the story was correct as he heard it, then he thought the police acted stupidly. The media always leaves that first part out

  43. 43.

    Ruckus

    July 17, 2019 at 3:09 am

    @TS (the original):

    Obama called someone stupid and was criticized for months. trump is blatantly racist & the GOP congress think that is fine.

    I think the only conclusion is that the majority of the GOP in congress are also blatantly racist. We know for sure that a number of them are, and I am pretty sure the rest of them outed themselves with this vote.

  44. 44.

    Betty

    July 17, 2019 at 8:45 am

    @C Stars: Very good! That about covers it.

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