You've Hate A Long Way, Baby: Tea Party Ladies Break The Glass Ceiling of Xenophobia
This morning my wife and I were having one of those conversations married people often have when they haven't had much of a chance to talk for a while. All the stuff each of you have been saving up for days about politics, TV and that weird picture you saw on the web, everything comes rushing out all at once. Somewhere near the end of this marital info-dump we started talking about the silliness related to the Tea Party. We were both coming around to the idea that much of this stuff has been bubbling up for years due to the loss of manufacturing jobs and the country's dramatic demographic shifts. In that sense, the headwaters of the Tea Party's river of crazy lie in the fear of marginalization among a group of people who had been at the center of the country's economy and culture for most of the period we commonly refer to as "forever." In the process, she casually offered up the notion that this fear and vitriol was coming from a specific group of people: not just white folks but white males in particular. I took umbrage to this, not only because she said it in a way that suggested that it was a settled, established fact but also because as a guy I feel the need to disagree with her on matters of gender.
Hours later, I realized that I may have been accidentally right after all.
Currently, many of the extreme right's biggest stars are women: Michele Bachmann, Sharron Angle, Sarah Palin, and Jan Brewer. And those are just the ones actively involved in electoral politics. The most powerful ones spit their firebrand bull-pucky from the safety of the sidelines on talk radio and Fox News: Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingram, and Ann Coulter. Certainly, hate-speech-as-entertainment is a field traditionally dominated by men such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but if you judge influence based on screen time on cable news the women are making dramatic strides. That's right. Women may still be underrepresented on corporate boards and demonstrably underpaid for equal work but when it comes to the art and science of politically motivated race baiting they've smashed the glass ceiling like a German jewelry shop window in 1938.
No doubt about it. Women have arrived. If 2009 was The Year of The Sign-Carrying Unmedicated Nutjob Enabling An Obstructionist GOP To Shit In The Nation's Hand And Call It Hamburger then 2010 must be the Year of The Amiably Racist Woman.
There isn't any hard science to support this (and even if there were it would be a combination of sociology and psychology which are soft sciences, anyway) but it looks like women might be better at this because they take a slightly softer approach. Whatever the reason, women seem to get away with this sort of thing much better than guys can. When a male politician asserts that the President is a foreign-born secret Muslim with ties to terrorist groups, reporters begin asking tough questions like "how do you know this?" and "do you realize your fly is undone?" Meanwhile, ladies like Palin and Bachmann say this stuff all the time and sail by with no significant push-back from the press. Why? How? First of all, laying out your crazy ideas plainly for all to see will only invite unwelcome scrutiny. These ladies don't say things outright, they imply them strongly. And they do so with that delicate balance of smugness and urgency that gives people the impression that these incendiary accusations are not only hard facts but facts that have been established long ago. Besides, they're girls. Reporters, even female ones, don't take them all that seriously.
So, it turns out that the same sort of dismissive sexism that has held honest women back for centuries now allows the less-than-honest ones to succeed beyond their wildest dreams. I'd call that ironic, but these days using a word like that is dangerous because it reminds folks of that awful Alanis Morissette song. Too late. Sorry.
You've hate a long way, baby!
Though, it might be more accurate to say "you've hate a long time." The key to this phenomenon appears to lie in biology. Men are born with a Y chromosome, commonly known as the "bro chromosome", which allows them to expel stored anger through physical activity or willful forgetfulness. We've all seen it. Two guys can get into a fist fight, run each other over with their cars and brutally abuse each other with flatware but the next day all is forgiven as if it never happened. That's the bro gene at work. Meanwhile, two women can grow up together like sisters then one day one of them makes a snide comment about the other woman's hair and they never speak again.
Sadly, women lack this bro chromosome and thus have no means of dispelling these feelings. So, year after year tension and resentment build up in the bloodstream in much the same way salmon gather mercury from polluted seawater. And just like mercury in salmon, this contamination does not kill them but rather it renders them poisonous to others. Sometimes the hatred leaks out in strange ways: drowning your children in the bath or promoting laws that force brown people to carry papers proving their citizenship. If you can see a difference between those two, it's probably because you want to see one.
Regardless, there can be no doubt that women are making their mark in the field of hate, America's last remaining growth industry. There may come a day when women's studies classes teach a unit on Sarah Palin portraying her as the pioneer she seems to think she already is. With any luck that day will come a week after I'm very, very dead.
Over the past decade, the video game industry has seen another huge successful production of games that has come out. However it's very difficult to match the gaming capabilities of Red Dead Redemption. With game physics like the one in this particular game, it's no wonder the game is selling at an incredible rate. The game imitates the western world in a fabulous way , with just about everything western added. From Mexican stand-offs, to having a good old fashioned game of casino style poker to hunting outlaws. The game has scored well with almost all the well known online video game magazines. Developed by Rock star Games, the people who made the Grand Theft Auto series, it's quite possible that the reason they developed a western game was to try something new and not just be known as "people who only made Grand Theft Auto." A full thumbs up to Red Dead Redemption.
SB1070 Held Up -Or- The Constitution Ruins Everything
On Wednesday a judge held up major portions of Arizona's controversial SB1070 immigration law just hours before they were to go into effect. Though not the final word on the issue by any means, the ruling does constitute a major setback for Arizona's effort to further the immensely popular "I'm not racist but..." approach to immigration reform. All of this puts Republicans in a rather difficult spot. After spending more than a year ginning up a phony crisis, they now have to pretend to be upset about not being able to resolve the aforementioned nonexistent crisis. That can be exhausting, not to mention confusing.
Still, Republicans have been preparing for a challenge like this for some time. Just take a look at any of the myriad of recent talk show appearances explaining how a tax cuts for the nation's top 1% will benefit their throngs of unemployed followers. Just when you think they can't possibly say it with a straight face, they prove you wrong again. It's almost unnerving.
Worst of all, the GOP will have to find a new way to distract people from their own inadiquacies leading up to the November elections. Already, pesky reporters are starting to ask uncomfortable questions like "assuming you guys take control, what do you stand for, by the way?" and "can you rephrase that answer without quite so many vagaries and cliches?" It's awful. Sooner or later some Republican candidate is going to be caught on the record being in favor of something specific- and we all know that will just lead to criticism, disillusionment in the base, and subsequent back-pedaling by everyone involved.
This year Republicans are on a mission to avoid saying anything substantive until at least the second week in November. Now that SB1070 is off the table for a while, their tried-and-true "hey, look over there!" mantra isn't going to cut it. With that in mind, the RNC has hastily requisitioned hundreds of shiny pocket watches for all their high-level operatives. "Our platform? Specific budget cuts? You are getting sleepy. Very Sleepy..."
Meanwhile, the folks at Fox want everyone to know that this ruling has dealt a terrible blow to Freedom and Liberty. And by "Freedom and Liberty" they're talking about two guys they know named Freedom and Liberty, a pair of super-patriotic Tea Party activists who have been waiting all summer for live deportation coverage on FNC. You have to feel bad for those two. They were really looking forward to this. It's tome to smash the "O-Pre-SHUN!" button again and again until ratings improve. Just keep saying "activist judge" until people take you seriously.
"Activist judge," said Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. "Clearly, this is the ruling of a judicial activist. I don't even know the judge's name. I don't have to. Just looking at the headline I can see the effect of judicial activism. Viewers at home, please understand that I share your knee-jerk outrage over all of this. Do you respect me now?"
All along critics have been arguing that Arizona overstepped its bounds by assuming powers assigned exclusively to the federal government. For people who hate the federal government (Boo! Hiss!!) but love the Constitution (Hell yeah! Fireworks!) this was a particularly troubling development. Few bothered to look it up, but it turns out that kill-joys on the left are probably right. Apparently this sort of thing is frowned upon by the very document the law's proponents so fervently worship.
"The Constitution, feh," said one disappointed anti-immigration protester, kicking an empty soda can down the lonely road in front of the Arizona statehouse. "The damn thing takes the fun out of everything! Come on, let's go home."
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer will probably suffer the most if SB1070 goes down in flames. Once you take away the "if racism is inevitable lay back and enjoy it" aspect of her administration, there really doesn't seem to be anything left. Without SB1070 she is nothing, a ghostly wisp on the wind that is made of other, slightly smaller, wisps.
"People have said repeatedly that our law is racist, but how is that possible if the law is so popular?" said Brewer. "It's not racism if enough people agree with it. That's a rule or something as far as I know. You see, racism is a lot like drunkenness. It's all relative, and if you're not the most obnoxious person in the room you have nothing to worry about."
Glenn Beck wants to start his own university. Well, good on him. It's high time somebody stood up to all those mainstream colleges for trafficking in historical records and facts, which we all know carry a very heavy liberal bias. Now is the time for Beck to turn the tables and present some facts of his own, and if they aren't available (hint: they aren't) he can just make them up. The best part is that nobody will complain. They people who are predisposed to apply to Glenn Beck U, well, they sort of expect him to do that. If he didn't, then what's the point, right? Exactly. Give yourself fifty points. You just passed your first quiz and GBU.
Beck's aim is to create an institution with the highest intellectual standards, a place so infused with conservative smarts that it has those smarts coming right out of its ass. That might explain the fountain Beck plans to install in the central courtyard portraying him as a Greek philosopher with a stream of very intelligent bilge water sprouting from his bronze backside.
Only with such a commitment to quality and reputation for excellence can GBU attract the best and brightest the extreme right has to offer (who didn't happen to gain acceptance at a legitimate, accredited school). With any luck, a place like this just might produce the next Sarah Palin. That's right. Another one.
But as a brand-spanking new university, Glenn Beck U is going to need some help building up that cache and institutional culture that exist in abundance at more established schools like Harvard and The Hellen P. Willis Cosmetology Academy. First off, they're going to need a fight song. Strike that. First they need a mascot. Even if they never manage to assemble an athletic program of any kind (other than competitive patriotism which apparently is as much a real sport as Glenn Beck University is a real college) coming up with the right mascot or team name is key.
They could call themselves the Patriots or the Minute Men but that would become confusing with other pro and college teams with the same names. As a matter of fact, due to the staggering proliferation of higher-education brands in the last half century, nearly every combination of letters under 15 characters has already been taken. So, it comes down to "the GBU Semi-literates" or "the Fightin' Xenophobes." Your choice, Glenn. The Xenophobes would probably look better on sweatshirts, though.
Next you'll need a fight song, something hummable that the student body can really get behind. Here's a first stab at it:
Threats! Threats are everywhere! Even though the press doesn't seem to care.
But here at GBU, we say no! To all the evil stuff that we don't want to know!
We came here to learn and conceive- To confirm all the stuff that we already believe!
The M-S-M says that we're all wrong- Just because we make it up / as we go along!
And here're some buzzwords for gramps: Acorn, Obama and FEMA death camps!
Hail, Hail to good ol' GBU! It's dumb enough for me- and smug enough for you!
The rest writes itself, and I have no time to trifle with details. I'm a consultant, after all. Glenn, if you're reading this (who am I kidding? Of course you are. Word has it that you Google yourself ten times a day- but maybe that's just a euphemism for something you probably shouldn't be doing at work) just to let you know that a second verse will cost you another fifty grand.
After that, GBU is going to need a slick admissions recruitment video. Normally this sort of thing would feature romantic shots of the campus and graduates talking about how much their degree helped them in their careers and in life. Without access to those things, Beck and his people will have to make do with interview clips from incoming students along the lines of "why did you choose GBU?" I'm sure they'll get loads of great responses:
"There are so many great degree programs here. I can't decide between Advanced Paranoia, Glenn Studies or Character Assassination."
"Other universities put chemicals in the water supply to aid in liberal indoctrination. Me, I chose Glenn Beck University so I could be indoctrinated on my own terms."
"I'm here because Oral Roberts University is just too integrated for my tastes."
Lots of luck, Glenn. Just don't expect those credits to transfer to another school.
Posted by Klem Johansen, Monday July 26, 2010 (1 Votes) | 1 Comments | Permalink
Sharron Angle Seeks Restraining Order Against "The Press"
Senate Candidate Sharron Angle can't catch a break when it comes to the press. It seems like whenever she opens her mouth to say something bizarre or embarrassing, there they are with their cameras and pencils ready to record it all. Worse still, her tormentors spend days on end repeating her words out of context- or worse, in context. It's so unfair.
On Thursday Angle held a press conference and who should happen to show up but (you guessed it) the press. Typical. She said very bluntly that she didn't want them there and that they weren't welcome but they just wouldn't leave her alone. She refused to answer their annoying questions but that wasn't enough to shake the horde of stalkers. So, she did what any rational person would do when faced with a dozen or so invited guests. She ran from them. But even as she fled for her life, they pursued her, eager for one more combustable quote or perhaps a lock of her hair.
By now it's clear to anyone with a brain that the press is out to get Sharron Angle, and it's only a matter of time before their undeniable obsession with her ends in violence.
But rather than sit around and wait for the threat to come to her, this plucky candidate is doing something about it. Sharron Angle filed paperwork this week to officially petition a court to award her a restraining order against every member of the mainstream press. When she dropped the thing off in Reno, it was quite a document, some fifteen inches thick. Her staff was up all night copying and pasting names from the staff pages of every newspaper and cable news network in the country.
If granted, the legal order would require any journalist not affiliated with Fox News to remain at least 500 feet away from Angle at all times. Hey, you might be thinking, she's moving around all the time, how can they possibly avoid her? Well, they have it all figured out. Angle's crack campaign staff have will be providing everyone with a detailed itinerary of her campaign stops so they know precisely where not to be and when not to be there. Problem solved.
"Without the prying eyes of the press around I can breathe a sigh of releif," Angle said to an empty hotel ballroom. "Now I can get back to the serious business of serving the people- and by 'the people' I mean the voices in my head."
A few hours later, Angle's office received a mysterious envelope. After having the document fumigated and checked chemical and biological weapons (Angle is well known for her deep distrust of the written word) she had her designated test reader to decipher the message. It turned out to be a hand-written thank you letter from Harry Reid, now the second-most reviled person running for Senate in Arizona. They all had a good laugh over the incident.
Realizing that the moment would have made for a good column had any reporters had been around to cover it, Angle's staff then called every reporter they could find to tell them to run a story but apparently it doesn't work that way.
Rubio: Pay for Tax Cuts with Magic *Waves Hands* And Illusion!
Florida GOP Senate Candidate Marco Rubio can't quite explain how he would pay for extending billions of dollars in tax cuts for the nation's wealthiest people. Reporters and pundits have spent much of this week making fun of him for that, but it's really not his fault. He won't say where the money will come from because he's not supposed to. In fact, sources close to the candidate say privately that he knows exactly how he'll fill the budget hole, but he has made and oath not to tell. So, in that respect, Rubio is doing the honorable thing by allowing himself to look foolish in this way.
The truth is that Rubio plans to pay for the cuts with magic, an ancient and dark sort of magic used by conservatives throughout the ages to perform otherwise impossible feats such as dissolving the Berlin Wall and pretending not to look down on minorities. And as everybody knows, you aren't supposed to divulge magical secrets. For that sort of infraction, Rubio would surely be kicked out of The Guild.
Critics dismiss Rubio's "plan" just because he refuses to back it up with details and because I out sarcastic quotes around it just now. They argue that he's just barfing up recycled talking points from the age of parachute pants. But they have no idea.
People talk about him like he's an idiot when, in reality, he is the furthest thing from it. He's educated himself on the leading edge of political thought using some of the finest blog posts and Conservapedia entries available. He's done his research, too, bringing in experts from all over to sit down with him and eventually agree with the conclusion he made years ago. For the past several months, Rubio has been consulting with the ghost of noted economist Doug Henning, whose seminal text on the need for a Laissez-faire approach to Wall Street regulation "Magic is illusion, and illusion is magic!" deeply affected Rubio's thinking on these matters.
Henning appeared at a presser on Tuesday, dressed in his trademark spandex unitard covered in rainbows and unicorns, and defended Rubio's non-answer on the tax cuts issue.
"People say we shouldn't bankrupt the country to subsidize a free ride for the wealthiest people, but ... but rich people are the source of jobs," said Henning with his eyes wet and bolbus, red foam balls appearing between his splayed fingers. "Jobs pop up everywhere like dandilions when very rich people are fat and happy. It's a macroeconomic process full of wonder and amazement!" Then he pulled a coin from behind a reporter's ear and declared "... is this your job?"
As for how he'll actually pay for the tax cuts, no one on his staff will provide any verifiable details, though sources close to the candidate's undocumented nanny
say it has something to do with a voodoo ceremony involving chicken bones and a life-sized cardboard cutout of former President Ronald Reagan. Chances are good that there will probably be some kind of ritualistic sex, but our source wishes reassure everyone that it will more than likely be of the heterosexual variety. So, it's OK.
"These people don't seem to understand trickle down economics," said Rubio. "Anyone who's attended a party at R. Kelly's house knows what I'm talking about. Trickle down is the best. Some people say it's weird. Even my wife feels that way, which is heartbreaking to be sure. That's why I have to leave the house at odd hours to get trickled on."
Posted by Klem Johansen, Wednesday July 21, 2010 (2 Votes) | 1 Comments | Permalink
"Tea Party" and "Racism" Appear In The Same Sentence, Riots Ensue
Last week the NAACP issued a carefully worded letter calling on Tea Party leaders to address racism in their own ranks. The reaction from the extreme right was immediate and vitriolic: "How dare those dirty n- I mean, how dare they?!" Within a few hours, Tea Party supporters flooded the Internet with posts using different variations on the argument that calling someone else racist is itself a racist act. There is, it would seem, a bevy of legal precedent for this, including the famous case of Smelt It v. Dealt It.
One Free Republic poster exemplified the Tea Party's new-found maturity in his reply to the civil rights group's statement: "I know you are, NAACP, but what am I?"
Moreover, the NAACP has no right to make such a claim because it is a racist organization. Not only does the group's name contain an antiquated slur for African Americans, it exists specifically to benefit one race!
Self-described Tea Party leader Mark Williams says that it's "impossible" for there to be racism in the Tea Party. According to Williams, those who look at the last eighteen months of Tea Party activity and see evidence of bigotry are like UFO enthusiasts, deliberately misinterpreting the world around them so that they can see what they wish to see. Apparently, all the epithet-hurling and symbolic lynching we've seen at Tea Party events are nothing more than a trick of the light bouncing off the upper atmosphere or perhaps weather balloons.
As Williams and others on the right assert, there is no such thing as Tea Party racism because the New Black Panther Party exists. Sure, we're talking about a group of about a dozen or so painfully disorganized people, but that doesn't do anything to alter the undeniable kinda-sorta equivalency. After all, they both have the word "party" in their names. Racism on one end, cancels out racism on the other end. It's simple mathematics. Only a moron (or in conservative protest sign parlance, a "moran") would argue with air-tight logic such as this.
As if that wasn't enough to convince you that the NAACP is dead wrong, consider the work of intellectual counterfeiter Andrew Breitbart. With just a mild exaggeration here and there, changing words like "some" to "all" and "occasionally" to "always," he can render the NAACP's carefully-worded statement easily refutable. The next step is to reverse the logic and repeat it until a critical mass of people believe it: the Tea Party isn't racist at all because the Tea Party is obviously not entirely racist. QED. It's as easy as shooting incredibly gullible fish in a blogosphere barrel.
Your heavily-medicated racist aunt doesn't think the Tea Party is racist. How can you disagree?
Members of the Tea Party have a deep reverence for the Constitution- but not the version we have today, apparently. In interviews, talk radio calls, and in misspelled messages written in feces on the walls of post office bathrooms, party activists talk about "getting back" to the Constitution, implying that we need to go back to the original unamended document (at least before the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments) back to a simpler time when the nation's founding document valuated black people at three fifths as much as whites.
In summary. Tea Party members are not racist. They're just bitterly complaining about illegal immigration during its lowest period in decades, about taxes while they are at their lowest rates for middle class families in half a century, about deficit spending after eight years of conservative splurging.
So, whom are you going to believe? The Tea Party Patriots or a bunch of people whose opinions only count for three-fifths as much?
Gibson Roars Back to the Limelight with Hilarious and Misunderstood Sit-Com
A few years ago, it looked like affable Aussie Mel Gibson's career in comedy might be over. Two of his most notable films of the past decade, a Christian-themed remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a mad-cap road movie filmed entirely in the Mayan language, failed to get any laughs at all.
Where was the loose-cannon cop of Lethal Weapon who jumped off a building with a random civilian to make a point? And where was the off-kilter detective of Lethal Weapon II who did something similarly impulsive to make a different point? When he tried to make it up to everyone recently with a zany revenge farce, it was too late. Audiences wanted to see the old Mel but somehow understood that he was gone and that they would probably be suck with new Mel, a man who took himself far too seriously to be an effective comedian.
Well, all that may be about to change thanks to the surprising success of this year's runaway hit The Mel Gibson Tapes. In this innovative new web show modelled loosely after similar cringe-inducing comedies such as Extras and Curb Your Enthusiasm, we see Gibson running through various banal daily activities- but with hilariously awkward results.
In one episode, he and his girlfriend Oksana get ready for a night out but Gibson is bothered by something and he can't seem to let it go. Her breasts, he complains, are too nice. They look fake. The whole set-up is an obvious homage to the strikingly similar Seinfeld episode. Apparently, Oksana had a finishing line for that scene ("they're real and they're spectacular") but as the executive producer Gibson felt that it made the joke too obvious and they cut it.
That's too bad, too, because it's just the sort of wink that the show really needs now and then to remind you that it isn't real. Perhaps its greatest weakness is its complete believability. In fact, most people who hear the show (most of the episodes are only available in audio form in order to generate demand for the DVDs when they come out this fall) fail to grasp the fact that it's a show at all and truly believe that Mel Gibson is the character he plays, a filthy, racist, abusive bastardly bastard.
The fact that Gibson plays himself on the show is nothing new, nor that he makes himself into a villain. Olivia Newton John played a less than nice version of herself on Glee this year, and a while back Neal Patrick Harris allowed himself to be portrayed as a car thief, a straight one at that. What makes The Mel Gibson Tapes so brave is just how low-down, scummy and generally vile he allows himself to appear on the show.
And his courage goes farther than that. Rather than taking the traditional route, Gibson is distributing his series through gossip sites like Radar online and TMZ. In a way, it makes sense in the context of the show that he would avoid the major networks in this endeavor because, as Mel Gibson's on-screen character repeatedly insists, they're all run by "the Jews."
This week brings us the fourth episode in which the titular star demands oral sex and threatens to burn down his house. Let's see Larry David do that.
In The Mel Gibson Tapes we see a comedian at the peak of his craft. His comic timing is pitch-perfect. All those who feared that Gibson may have lost some of that sparkle that made his early work so special now have nothing to worry about. Mel Gibson, the funny one, is back.
Posted by Mark Arenz, Thursday July 15, 2010 (1 Votes) | 0 Comments | Permalink
Following Latest Tirade, Tea Party Mounts Aggressive "Draft Mel Gibson" Campaign
If we had an organized way of quantifying and scoring racist rants (seriously, why don't we have this?), the back of Mel Gibson's crazed xenophobia baseball card would carry an impressive array of statistics. No matter the skin color, country of origin, or religious affiliation, Mel has been caught disparaging you in the last few years. The N-word, the C-Word, or epithets assigned to any other letter of the alphabet, it doesn't matter. Mel is batting a thousand.
For Gibson, the results of this streak have been something of a mixed bag. On one hand, audiences no longer find him likable now that they see just how unhinged and racist he really is. On the other, unhinged and racist people now love him more than ever. Concentrating on the bright side, the whole thing has opened up some new opportunities for the soon-to-be-out-of-work actor, specifically as the new spiritual leader of the Tea Party.
Since its zenith last summer, the Tea Party has dissolved into a series of petty tribal disputes over the same old stuff that caused many of them to dump the two major parties in the first place, pissing matches over money and power. Rank and file Tea Partiers are finding that being manipulated by a new group of people isn't a whole lot better than being manipulated by the old one. Though they've had an electoral success or two, much of that has turned sour in recent months, and now it looks like the party may be on its way to becoming a one-hit wonder on the Billboard Hot 100 of history.
But now that may be changing. Mel Gibson adds new life to the mix, not to mention undeniable star power for people who haven't watched a movie in the theater since 1988. Already, Gibson's energy coursing through the party's tired veins.
"He thinks like I think," said Nevada Tea Party chairman Raymond Cist. "He says things everyone else is too afraid to say. Other than the voices in my head, he's probably the bravest voice in American politics today."
In his heated and strangely worded orations, Gibson gives voice to the unstated concerns of Tea Party activists everywhere: the desire to prevent one's significant other from leaving the house, a distrust of the government agency assigned to deal with "wetbacks," and the fear of being raped by imaginary gangs of African Americans. Has Sarah Palin done anything even approaching that? Hardly. These days she can barely keep up with the level of crazy among her own staff, let alone the Tea Party at large.
Some in the party say they're holding their support until Gibson mixes in an anti-tax rant or two, but others deftly point out that his distrust of "the Jews" is well known, and apparently the Tea Party rulebook values anti-Semitism at twice the point value as deficit hawk rhetoric. And, as much as they complain about Democrats having all the celebrities on their side, conservatives have a thing for actors. Gibson is in.
Still, there is a strict limit to how far Gibson can go with this. As a one-time Australian, his may not be Constitutionally permitted to hold the nation's highest office. Mel's new boosters don't see that as an obstacle, though. They're confident that they can find a way to bend that particular clause to their whim when the time comes. After all, Tea Partiers are the ones known for being sticklers for the Constitution. If they say it's OK, it must be OK. Besides, strict adherence of the Constitution only counts when dealing with foreigners from funny-sounding, non-English speaking countries.
By the way, hats off to the press for being more offended by the racist nature of his most recent tirade than by the fact that he was punching a woman (who was holding their baby) in the face at the time. Stay classy.
Posted by Klem Johansen, Monday July 12, 2010 (0 votes) | 9 Comments | Permalink
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