Unfortunately, it seems that whether it's on the Internet or in real life, Godwin's Law always finds a way to prove itself again. People manage to use Nazi and Holocaust references in the most poorly considered of ways, as if they're unaware of the true horror that was the slaughter of millions of innocent people.
That sort of thing has been happening all too frequently during protests against Democratic healthcare reform plans, and one of the more shocking examples was on display at the protest on Capitol Hill Thursday: A banner that featured a picture of naked, emaciated bodies stacked in a pile, with text reading, "National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany -- 1945."
Now, someone with credibility on the issue that's all too real has spoken out against these comparisons. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author, put out a statement through his foundation's Twitter account. It reads simply, "Elie Wiesel on the GOP Tea Party's anti-Semitism and Holocaust comparisons: 'This kind of political hatred is indecent and disgusting.'"
(Hat-tip to Wonkette.)
Republicans may have been working to co-opt the Tea Parties that have been so popular on the right, but fundamentally the movement always had soem anti-GOP feeling at its core. And while the protests may still end up helping Republicans next year, in part by getting conservative voters, to borrow a phrase, fired up and ready to go, there are some signs that the whole thing could still end up badly for the party.
One of those signs is contained in a poll out Monday from Rasmussen. The pollster asked respondents to imagine that "the Tea party organized itself as a political party," then had them choose between generic Democratic, Republican and Tea Party candidates in their district. Not too surprisingly, the Democratic candidate ended up benefitting from the split, with 36 percent of respondents -- a plurality -- saying they'd vote that way. But in a somewhat shocking result, 23 percent said they'd vote for the Tea Party candidate compared to 18 percent who chose the Republican and 22 percent who said they weren't sure.
When just unaffiliated voters are counted, things are worse for the Republicans: 33 percent chose the Tea Party candidate, 25 percent opted for the Democrat and only 12 percent picked the Republican.
Still, things probably aren't nearly as bad for the Republican Party as this poll would indicate. For one thing, it's hard -- impossible, really -- to imagine the Tea Parties organizing into a single political party in time for next year's midterms. (They can't even keep the protest movement from fracturing.) And polls that ask about third parties always find more support for the third party candidate than he or she ends up with come Election Day.
This is, however, another demonstration of how powerful the Tea Party movement could be in a situation where a moderate Republican's running in a swing district. Call it the Doug Hoffman effect, after the conservative candidate who ended up forcing out the GOP's choice in a Congressional special election held in upstate New York earlier this year.
You might assume that Texas politics would still be a wild and woolly business, full of eccentric candidates who’d pull all kinds of crazy stunts to squeak by each other. Like how Lyndon Johnson lost one stolen election for the Senate and, having learned his lesson, probably stole the next one himself. Or like Gov. Lee "Pass the biscuits, Pappy" O’Daniel, the flour-peddling model and namesake for the politician character in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" But modern Texas has settled into a situation of relatively quiet Republican dominance. Despite the best efforts of novelty-singer and 2006 independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman, there hasn’t been a genuinely close general election for a Senate seat or the governorship since the mid-1990s.
But this year, Texas looks like it’s getting back to its old self. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is going through with a long-anticipated run for governor, which sets her up for a major run-in with incumbent Gov. Rick Perry in the Republican primary. Hutchison has amassed a lot of support from the GOP establishment, but Perry is burnishing his right-wing credentials to a fine gleam. (In case you were wondering, he landed Sarah Palin’s coveted endorsement back in February.)
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine will run a piece by Robert Draper on the race. Frankly, Draper leaves Perry looking like something of a buffoon. This is the governor, after all, who started talking about Texas’ right to secede from the union earlier this year. Perry suggested that Lino Graglia, a conservative legal scholar, would back up his view, so Draper called Graglia. Said the law professor, "No, I don’t think there’s any basis to that claim." In the article, Perry also expresses a fantasy about Sam Houston running for president in 1860 and beating Abraham Lincoln. This would, Perry claims, have prevented the outbreak of Civil War. No word, of course, on slavery.
This guy has actual bizarre policy ideas, though, not just Confederate reenactment fantasies. Perry claims that last year’s economic panic was overblown, and the only necessary response to the financial meltdown was to "cut the spending, cut the taxes," instead of passing any emergency bailout. Judiciously, Draper comments, "Most economists might take issue with the governor’s sentiment. Then again, economists are unlikely to decide the outcome of the Texas primary."
Perry’s flirtation with the far right is the basic rationale for the candidacy of the comparatively moderate Hutchison. As she puts it, "I’m in it to save our party."
And that’s just the issue. Perry, with his talk of states’ 10th Amendment rights and his accusation that the president is “hell-bent on socialism,” is as prime a specimen as you can find of tea party influence on the GOP. He’s a politician who’s trying to go as far as possible into right-wing fantasy world while still actually running a state.
Of course, there are some repercussions for acting like that. Assuming that he survives Hutchison’s challenge, Perry will have to put in a real fight in the general election. His approval numbers are relatively weak, and he’s dragging the GOP one way while Texas’ demographics run the other. As Draper points out, Texas has recently become of the few so-called majority-minority -- that is, majority non-white -- states in the country.
On top of all that, on Friday the Democrats landed their ideal challenger. In Houston Mayor Bill White, who confirmed that he will enter the race, Democrats have easily their strongest gubernatorial candidate since Ann Richards. Hutchison might be the voice of relative sanity in the Republican Party, but it's hard not to wonder what a Perry-White contest would be like.
WASHINGTON -- Considering it celebrated a movie about a movement that prides itself on its rough edges, surly resistance to government and populist spirit, the D.C. premiere Wednesday night of "Tea Party: The Documentary Film" made for kind of a strange affair.
To begin with, the event was held in a federal building. Yes, it was the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center, so it was sort of on message. But still, it was the most expensive federal building ever erected at the time the place was finished, with a total cost of $768 million. (Then again, Reagan did more to bloat Washington's budgets than his loyal followers tend to remember.) Waiters paid by whatever government contractor manages the center circulated after the movie ended, serving little trays of government contract-purchased hors d'oeuvres to people who had just cheered lustily for a couple hours of anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric. The contradictions didn't end there. The crowd that gathered to watch a movie about people shouting at Congress began the night by listening politely to a panel discussion featuring Sen. Jim DeMint, three sitting members of the House and ex-House Majority Leader Dick Armey. The film celebrates the grass-roots spirit that tea party organizers say drives what they do, but the premiere was thrown by FreedomWorks, a conservative lobbying and policy outfit funded heavily by big corporate donors and right-wing foundations. FreedomWorks, which Armey chairs. At least the group had a sense of humor about that last bit; instead of a red carpet, the movie's producers and other bigwigs entered the auditorium on a swatch of AstroTurf, complete with football and soccer line marks.
All that is sort of in the nature of the tea parties, though. The Republican establishment knows it likes what it sees in the movement, yet GOP operatives admit they aren't really sure where it's all going. Big conservative interest groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity lend financial and organizational support to tea party rallies. But walking through the crowd at any gathering, it's easy to find people who are clearly just so stirred up by what they hear on Fox News Channel and read on right-wing blogs that they decided to show up and yell about it for a while.
And it was mostly that spirit -- "Doggone it, let's yell about what's going on in our country for a while" -- that animated the movie. A lengthy look at six activists from Georgia (near where the filmmakers live) who came to the Sept. 12 anti-government march on Washington, the documentary swings between their stories and why they got involved and red-meat rhetoric, mostly shot at the rally. There are plenty of ominous fades and scary music thrown in, as well. It mostly looks very professional. A video producer from outside Atlanta, Luke Livingston, put it together, working with a young crew of politically like-minded types, on a budget of about $30,000 that he told me he's hoping to recoup by selling DVDs online. He attended an April 15 Tax Day protest, then got caught up in the whole thing when his neighbor, Jenny Beth Martin (who is also profiled in the movie), founded Tea Party Patriots
The narratives about the characters are sympathetic, even if they're a little quirky. One, an ex-graphic designer for the Secret Service, spends most of the movie dressed up in 18th century garb from his Revolutionary War reenactment hobby and speaking in a British-esque accent that slips off occasionally. Another man, Nate, is a young African-American conservative, who voted for President Obama but realized, not long afterward, the error of his ways. "They're taking your money right out your pocket," he tells a friend at a barbecue in the movie. The movie tries to paint the tea party people as just regular folks who got angry. It downplays any racial element to the backlash against Obama, most plainly with Nate. "I don't see racism" at the rallies, Livingston told me. "Is everybody white? Yeah, but you know, there are a lot of black people, too." A whole disc of outtakes focusing on black conservatives is in the works, he said.
But the tone of the movie is also bombastic and paranoid, much like the tea parties themselves. "They are scared," one character says of his fellow marchers, and after watching the film, it wasn't hard to see why. The country, in the filmmaker's hands, appears to be lurching out of control, careening wildly away from decent American values and toward a corporate/socialist hybrid that you don't have to understand politically to know you don't like it. Healthcare reform is only the next step in the conspiracy. Take a look at the film's trailer here, and you get a good sense of what the long version is like:
All that scary stuff is happening even though most people didn't want it to, the movie argues. "The silent majority is going to be heard loud and clear," a woman at the Sept. 12 march says in the film. Considering Obama got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, won the widest majority in years and helped spark the highest voter turnout in decades, it's hard to imagine she's anywhere near right.
Then again, the tea party crowd often has a problem with math. On Wednesday night, there were about 300 people at the screening. And all of them cheered wildly when the movie showed time-lapse video of the Sept. 12 march, in an attempt to buttress the right-wing myth that more than 1 million people showed up there. (Most sane people say the rally drew about 70,000.) So let's round up a bit from that 300 estimate and say, oh, 4,000 hardy patriots crammed themselves into the auditorium. (Never mind that it only seats about 500.)
The audience was a mix of young conservatives in suits and pearls and, well, old conservatives in suits and pearls. There was a cash bar at the reception after the screening, doing brisk business in whiskey and lite beer. Almost as soon as the movie was over, I was cornered by two of its fans, who began interrogating me about who I wrote for and whether I share their zeal for limited government, low taxes and all things decent -- and their terror at what they saw happening in Washington. "It's one thing coming down the pike after another," one of them, Gail Volm, from Falls Church, Va., said. "You can only take a fire hose in the face for so long and then you have to say, 'Stop, it is enough.'"
The mood at the screening, like in the movie, alternated between festive and feisty. Livingston, the man behind the movie, said his mission was partly to tell the story of some of the activists who headed to Washington for that 9/12 march, and partly to have fun. "Make it entertaining," was one of his guiding principles in making the film. (Another? "Honor God.") But reminders that the business of tea parties is quite serious were never far away. "This is not a movement that's trying to pull the Republican Party to the right," DeMint said before the movie started. "It's a movement that's trying to pull the Republican Party back to where America is today." Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said she didn't understand why taxes had to be so high: "If 10 percent is good enough for God on Sunday, it's for damn sure good enough for the government on Monday." The newest conservative hero, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., showed up to pander a bit, too.
But it was the movie, not the elected officials, that really roused the crowd. As the film ended, the cameras focused on a speech from the Sept. 12 rally by one of the few black speakers there. "Patriots, stand up!" he exhorts the audience, both at the march and in the theater. An American flag waves, and rock guitar riffs start getting louder. "Stand up! Stand up!" As the credits rolled, everyone in the auditorium was on their feet, cheering wildly, ready to go take back the country.
If you're going to hold something you're billing as the "First National Tea Party Convention," there are a couple things you really have to do. The first is to invite former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; the second is to invite Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.
That's what Tea Party Nation, which is organizing this convention, did. And according to CNN's Political Ticker blog, the group has announced that both women will be speaking, and that Palin will be giving the keynote.
Now, Palin's people haven't yet confirmed her appearance, which -- given her history with announced speaking appearances -- may be a sign that she won't end up going. But we can hope.
Say this for Glenn Beck: When the guy goes on the road, he doesn’t hold out on his fans. The Fox News host put on a show this weekend in the Villages, Fla., and he played all his classics:
You get the drift. There are vast, sinister and -- most important -- vaguely specified forces out there, about which you should feel massive unease. But don’t fear, America. Beck has a plan. In fact, he has The Plan. He’s assembling a team of advisors (not to run for president, he makes clear), and he’s reading up. Explains Beck:
Here’s how it’s going to work: I’ve done a lot of reading on history in the last few years. And I was amazed to find that what we’re experiencing now is really a ticking time bomb that they designed about a hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Progressive Movement. And they thought, if we just do this, and this, and this and this, over time, if we do it in both the Republican and Democratic parties, we will have our socialist utopia. Well, I say again, two can play at that game. I am drafting plans now to bring us back to an America that our founders would understand … We need to start thinking like the Chinese. I am developing a 100-year plan for America. We will plant this idea and it will sprout roots.
Apparently, Beck is going to hold seven rallies around the country, where he’ll impart the lessons he’s learned about history and policy. “You’re going to learn about history, you’re going to learn about finance, you’re going to learn about community organizing … And then, come August 28 -- I would like you to make your plans now, to join me at the feet of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, DC… We’re going to Washington together, where I will outline the steps that we need to take.”
OK, so it seems like Beck did hold out on his fans in one big way. I’ve now watched the speech all the way through, and it’s not at all clear what The Plan is. Keep listening to Beck until next summer apparently, and then there’s a new Plan.
This is pretty basic out-of-power movement stuff. MoveOn.org and Democracy for America spent the Bush years holding activist training meetings and rallies also. What’s interesting here is how badly Beck wants to think in continents and feel in centuries, rather than the grubby, day-to-day, unexciting facts of real-world politics. He’s identified a purely imaginary, epic-scale villain, and is pitching his otherwise kind of run-of-the-mill activist exercise as correspondingly high drama. Beck sees a dictator and his unthinking followers on the left, and wants to respond with an instructional national meeting where he can “outline the steps that we need to take.”
Also, just to be clear: If you're the person who told Beck about the 100-year socialist takeover plan, President Obama is very upset with you. Way to ruin it for everyone.
It's been an odd day for political videos, and on both sides of divide, no less.
On the right, there's a preview for a movie about the Tea Parties floating around. And yes, it's just as corny, melodromatic and self-important as you'd think.
Then there's a public service announcement, scheduled to air over Thanksgiving, that features NFL players tossing a football around with kids and, um, President Obama. That one, too, is just plain weird -- you don't often expect to see New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees on the White House lawn. Plus, the shot in that commercial that involves Obama slowly appearing on screen in order to catch Brees' pass is so forced that it just looks like unintentional self-parody. (Also, Obama, who's almost 50 years old, can apparently burn an All-Pro safety. Who knew?)
Both videos are below.
What Pisses Me off about Gay Marriage
Irony #1: billionaire-subsidized "populists"
Crashing the Tea Party