The GOP Is Acting Like a Guy Who Got Dumped

Bill Maher
April 25, 2009 - Los Angeles Times

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If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments.

It's been a week now, and I still don't know what those "tea bag" protests were about. I saw signs protesting abortion, illegal immigrants, the bank bailout and that gay guy who's going to win "American Idol." But it wasn't tax day that made them crazy; it was election day. Because that's when Republicans became what they fear most: a minority.

The conservative base is absolutely apoplectic because, because ... well, nobody knows. They're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore. Even though they're not quite sure what "it" is. But they know they're fed up with "it," and that "it" has got to stop.

Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law.

And here's the list of Republican obsessions since President Obama took office: that his birth certificate is supposedly fake, he uses a teleprompter too much, he bowed to a Saudi guy, Europeans like him, he gives inappropriate gifts, his wife shamelessly flaunts her upper arms, and he shook hands with Hugo Chavez and slipped him the nuclear launch codes.

Do these sound like the concerns of a healthy, vibrant political party?

It's sad what's happened to the Republicans. They used to be the party of the big tent; now they're the party of the sideshow attraction, a socially awkward group of mostly white people who speak a language only they understand. Like Trekkies, but paranoid.

The GOP base is convinced that Obama is going to raise their taxes, which he just lowered. But, you say, "Bill, that's just the fringe of the Republican Party." No, it's not. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is not afraid to say publicly that thinking out loud about Texas seceding from the Union is appropriate considering that ... Obama wants to raise taxes 3% on 5% of the people? I'm not sure exactly what Perry's independent nation would look like, but I'm pretty sure it would be free of taxes and Planned Parenthood. And I would have to totally rethink my position on a border fence.

I know. It's not about what Obama's done. It's what he's planning. But you can't be sick and tired of something someone might do.

Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota recently said she fears that Obama will build "reeducation" camps to indoctrinate young people. But Obama hasn't made any moves toward taking anyone's guns, and with money as tight as it is, the last thing the president wants to do is run a camp where he has to shelter and feed a bunch of fat, angry white people.

Look, I get it, "real America." After an eight-year run of controlling the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, this latest election has you feeling like a rejected husband. You've come home to find your things out on the front lawn -- or at least more things than you usually keep out on the front lawn. You're not ready to let go, but the country you love is moving on. And now you want to call it a whore and key its car.

That's what you are, the bitter divorced guy whose country has left him -- obsessing over it, haranguing it, blubbering one minute about how much you love it and vowing the next that if you cannot have it, nobody will.

But it's been almost 100 days, and your country is not coming back to you. She's found somebody new. And it's a black guy.

The healthy thing to do is to just get past it and learn to cherish the memories. You'll always have New Orleans and Abu Ghraib.

And if today's conservatives are insulted by this, because they feel they're better than the people who have the microphone in their party, then I say to them what I would say to moderate Muslims: Denounce your radicals. To paraphrase George W. Bush, either you're with them or you're embarrassed by them.

The thing that you people out of power have to remember is that the people in power are not secretly plotting against you. They don't need to. They already beat you in public.

Questions I'd like 'Teabaggers' to answer

Questions I'd like 'Teabaggers' to answer

Matt Taibbi
April 20, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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So as could be expected I was deluged with mail this weekend, most of it
from outraged Michelle Malkin readers, and nearly all of whom sounded the
same basic theme: that I was a bad, bad person for issuing ad hominem
attacks and should be discredited for "not having my facts straight" and for
being too much of a coward to "debate the real issues."

Which is interesting, except that no one actually found an incorrect fact in
anything I wrote, and no one seemed very interesting in debating any issues.
Instead, about 99% of the mail I got focused on the name-calling and the
"childish" sexual innuendoes. I would say that is my fault, that I should
have known that once you start dropping sack onto another columnist's face
in public you can pretty much forgo any expectation of being taken seriously
-- except that when dealing with teabagger types, you know in advance you're
not going to be taken seriously anyway. So the incentive to be restrained in
one's response (particularly when the people you're arguing with are running
around screaming about the fascist threat with tea bags dangling absurdly
from their hat-brims) is not particularly strong.

But the real reason nobody takes the teabaggers seriously is that they have
no answers to several enormous holes in the parody of a protest argument
they tried to make last week. I got nearly two hundred letters this weekend
and not one of them had an answer for any of the following:

1. If you're so horrified by debt and spending, where were your tea parties
when George Bush was adding $4 trillion to the federal deficit?
2. If you're so outraged by the bailouts, where were your tea parties when
the bailouts were first instituted by Henry Paulson and George Bush last
fall?

3. If you're so troubled by pork, where were your tea parties when the
number and cost of congressional earmarks rose spectacularly in each year of
Republican congressional rule between 1996 and the end of the Republican
majority in 2006?

A number of people wrote in to me and complained that the only reason I'm
not seeing eye to eye with them is that I have no children and therefore
don't care about the debt burden in the future. Oh, please. There's only one
reason we're talking about "the children" in this debate at all: because 95%
of the people protesting the tax outrage will actually be getting a tax
break. Until you can plausibly answer the question of why future government
debt burdens didn't bother you during the last eight years or massive
deficit spending, that whole "O the children!" bullshit has to be put back
on the shelf.

Anyway, I'd really be curious to hear some answers to these questions.
Because if the spending argument is moot, if the bailout argument is moot,
if the pork argument is moot, and the tax argument is moot, then what you're
left with is arguing that it's not waste when we spend billions handing out
soccer balls in the Anbar province, but it is waste when we build bridges in
Peoria and Tulsa.

The only thing even remotely resembling a logical justification for any of
this was the argument, made by several letter-writers, that the fact that
the teabaggers are hypocrites doesn't necessarily make them wrong about the
Obama budget. If that point is conceded at the top, I think most Americans
would be willing to discuss the rest of it, because that's a discussion
worth having. The problem is that once you admit that you sat on your hands
during a period of unprecedented waste for eight years, it makes it very
hard to take when you start calling yourselves victims of fascism and
tyranny and threatening to secede in year nine, which just happens to be the
first year of a new regime you oppose politically. In other words if you
concede the hypocrisy, the hysteria automatically becomes obnoxious and
wrong. So I don't think the "My hypocrisy is irrelevant" line holds water,
not unless you can answer one more question:

4. Would you be protesting any of this bullshit if this had been George W.
Bush's budget?

.....

I'm a political reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, a sports columnist for
Men's Journal, and I also write books for a Random House imprint called
Spiegel and Grau. My main ambition in life is to someday strangle that chick
in the Progressive Insurance commercials who is always waving her hands back
and forth and screaming, "Discount!!!" Anyone who has suggestions for how to
dump her body without being caught is welcome to write to me. I already have
plenty of plastic and a staple-gun.