The Republi-CON War On the Poor, the Middle Class, and 'Lazy Blacks'

UPDATE IV:  The best defense is a good offense.

Read USA Today, Congressman charges Democrats with 'war on whites'.

Of course, Republi-cons never let reality spoil a good delusion.

Read the Washington Post, White people are winning the war on whites. 

 

UPDATE III:  "So who can blame poor Sean Hannity for looking like a right-wing blockhead for promoting the cause of a guy who turned around and said crazy, racist things? Well, I can.

Let me tell Sean about the Racist: The Racist hates federal subsidies. Not the subsidies that provide grassland to Nevada ranchers at below-market values. Nor the subsidies that bring water to the desert by, say, building Hoover Dam. Nor the subsidies that benefit mining operations in the Silver State. No, the Racist hates subsidies that sap the human soul: like food stamps for moms with hungry children. Especially if those moms happen to be, well, differently pigmented from him.

That's what's so interesting, not about this racist moron but about the Republicans who supported him until he revealed his views on slavery.

Bundy was plainly a nutcase, and the right-wing pundits and politicians should have seen that. He should never have been portrayed as a hero or a victim or anything other than a lawbreaker, a freeloader, a moocher. A taker.

For two decades, he grazed his cattle on land that did not belong to him and refused to pay the landowner. Right-wingers, one would think, would hate that. He refused to respect law enforcement, in fact threatened to take up arms against the peace officers whom Republicans usually trip over themselves to honor. I thought conservatives believed in law and order.

What if, instead of being a right-wing rancher who flouted the law, Bundy was the leader of a left-wing group of college radicals who occupied a government building? Ronald Reagan notoriously said of Berkeley protestors, "If there is to be a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement!"

Or what if Bundy had been the leader of the New Black Panther Party? What if he and his followers had, for 20 years, brazenly stolen from the federal government, refused to obey court orders and threatened police with guns? Would Hannity have been duped into defending him? Fat chance.

Or, umm, what if Bundy had been a Muslim, declaring a tiny caliphate on that dusty piece of Nevada? Does anyone really think Fox News would have made a hero of him then?

Bundy's status as a deadbeat welfare queen should have been sufficient for the likes of Hannity to know better than to support him. His threats of violence against American law enforcement personnel should have had Hannity up in arms.

Instead, the right-wing noise machine once more looks like a bunch of dupes and dopes, blindsided when their newest hero turns out to be a racist. It won't be the last time this happens."

Read CNN, Conservative hero is racist rancher? Didn't see that one coming.

UPDATE II:  It's all Martin Luther King Jr.'s fault says Cliven Bundy:  "If I say Negro or black boy or slave, if those people cannot take those kind of words and not be (offended), then Martin Luther King hasn't got his job done yet."

Read CNN, Rancher says he's not racist, still defiant over grazing battle.  

UPDATE:  The newest Republi-con hero -- Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.

"Since 1993, the feds say the Nevada rancher has been illegally grazing his herd on federal land. So, acting on a court order, the Bureau of Land Management tried to seize some of Bundy’s herd. Next thing you know, he’s a Fox News-enabled hero of the put-upon right wing with a platform to pop off about government overreach and whatever else is rattling around upstairs. And when that happens to some conservative heroes, they always seem compelled to expound on the plight of the Negro."

Read WP, Cliven Bundy's outrageous comments about 'the Negro'.

I've talked about the Republi-con war on the middle class, now an observation by "a Republican in good standing (although maybe not anymore), indeed someone who used to be known as a conservative firebrand, is telling. Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else. . .

One reason, the sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. 'It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,' declared Paul Ryan in 2009.

But there’s also, as Mr. Little says, the stain that won’t go away: race.

In a much-cited recent memo, Democracy Corps, a Democratic-leaning public opinion research organization, reported on the results of focus groups held with members of various Republican factions. They found the Republican base 'very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority' — and seeing the social safety net both as something that helps Those People, not people like themselves, and binds the rising nonwhite population to the Democratic Party. And, yes, the Medicaid expansion many states are rejecting would disproportionately have helped poor blacks."

Read The New York Times, A War on the Poor.

Also this week, a senior Republi-con party official admitted that strict new voter ID laws were intended to prevent the poor and "a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything" from voting.

The next day, he told "the Mountain Xpress in a follow-up interview that 'the comments that were made, that I said, I stand behind them. I believe them.'"

The official was asked to resign by party officials, in part, because he "did not seek approval from party officials before speaking with 'The Daily Show.'"

Read the Los Angeles Times, GOP official ousted for 'lazy blacks' comment on 'The Daily Show'.