Frank Rich: The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down
freeisbest
Op-Ed Columnist
The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 7, 2009
FOR all cable news’s efforts to inflate Election 2009 into a
cliffhanger as riveting as Balloon Boy, ratings at MSNBC and CNN were
flat Tuesday night. But not at Fox News, where the audience nearly
doubled its usual prime-time average. That’s what happens when you
have a thrilling story to tell, and what could be more thrilling than
a revolution playing out in real time?
As Fox kept insisting, all eyes were glued on Doug Hoffman, the
insurgent tea party candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional
District. A “tidal wave” was on its way, said Sean Hannity, and the
right would soon “take back the Republican Party.” The race was not
“even close,” Bill O’Reilly suggested to the pollster Scott Rasmussen,
who didn’t disagree. When returns showed Hoffman trailing, the
network’s resident genius, Karl Rove, knowingly reassured viewers that
victory was in the bag, even if we’d have to stay up all night waiting
for some slacker towns to tally their votes.
Alas, the Dewey-beats-Truman reveries died shortly after midnight,
when even Fox had to concede that the Democrat, Bill Owens, had
triumphed in what had been Republican country since before Edison
introduced the light bulb. For the far right, the thriller in
Watertown was over except for the ludicrous morning-after spin that
Hoffman’s loss was really a victory.....
But first let’s make a farewell accounting of the farce upstate. The
reason why the Democratic victory in New York’s 23rd is a mixed
blessing is simple: it increases the odds that the Republicans will
not do Democrats the great favor of committing suicide between now and
the next Election Day.
This race was a damaging setback for the hard right. Hoffman had the
energetic support of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox as
well as big bucks from their political auxiliaries. Furthermore,
Hoffman was running not only in a district that Rove himself described
as “very Republican” but one that fits the demographics of the
incredibly shrinking G.O.P. The 23rd is far whiter than America as a
whole — 93 percent versus 74 — with tiny sprinklings of blacks,
Hispanics and Asians. It has few immigrants. It’s rural. Its income
and education levels are below the norm. Only if the district were
situated in Dixie — or Utah — could it be a more perfect fit for the
narrow American demographic where the McCain-Palin ticket had its sole
romps last year.
If the tea party right can’t win there, imagine how it might fare in
the nation where most Americans live. Some G.O.P. leaders have started
to notice.
[...]
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GLOBALIST
describe themselves as liberals, never refer to themselves as
partiotic, and are not obsessed with the flag or the pledge of
alligiance and never 'use' the bible and/or constitution to explain
their present beliefs. It's as if we know that the founding fathers
were real people and prized free thought and not rigid rules and
religiousity.
It's as if the Republicans have enshrined or mummified the past and
being an American as some kind of secret cult that only the few and
the chosen can be invited into.
Their nuttiness about 'aliens' is easy for us to relate to
though, because there is nothing more alien that a Republican. That
is why genuine 'conservatives' want to escape having their sincere
values mixed into to their insanity.
freeisbest
> Have you ever noticed that the folks , not just in this group, that
> describe themselves as liberals, never refer to themselves as
> partiotic, and are not obsessed with the flag or the pledge of
> alligiance and never 'use' the bible and/or constitution to explain
> their present beliefs. It's as if we know that the founding fathers
> were real people and prized free thought and not rigid rules and
> religiousity.
That is one of my mainstays, that we really are living the life
that the founding fathers envisioned - not in detail and certainly not
in modern detail - but in the concept that reasonably intelligent,
reasonably moral people c ould and would live a good life,
voluntarily. I think many of us in this newsgroup have done exactly
that. We have benefitted from living with freedom of conscience for a
very long time. The love that we have for the country that gave us
this chance is too deep to be used as a bumpersticker or flaunted in
other peoples' faces as a threat, as I have often seen the fearful and
angry people of Bush's base do.
We're liberals. We *believe* that the Bill of Rights is a living
code of behavior for us, and for our government. All we have to do is
insist on it. Sometimes I feel so sorry for the rightwingers,
cringing in fear of imaginary attacks *by our own government*. What
kind of upbringing must they have had if they willingly believe insane
propagandists like Beck and Limbaugh, that all there is in the world
is hate and viciousness. I think our liberal insistence on honest
contracts between ourselves and our own government makes them afraid
of retaliation... from a nightmare of ruthless power that they
encourage by cringing before that power.
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> It's as if the Republicans have enshrined or mummified the past and
> being an American as some kind of secret cult that only the few and
> the chosen can be invited into.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, if you take out the "as if" I think that's a fair
statement. Repubs and repubs wannabes grabbed off the resources of a
continent. That is, their current power and wealth started with theft
and murder.
I carefully remember also that (nearly) any group of people will
contain those who try to amass personal power or personal prestige.
They do it the same way they breathe, reflexively, and apparently for
the same reason - they need to.
Remember the early days of the net? Soon after the newsgroups
were up and running there were those who used email (plus their high-
school social manipulation skills) to put together little cadres
inside larger groups, and (at least among a certain few women's
groups) forthrightly used the threat of *exclusion* and *social
disapproval*, to force their personal opinions to prevail (!) The
threat of exclusion, in a group of untold thousands of unrelated
strangers! Mama mia! Can you imagine what those b*tches were like in
person? In these latter years, of course I now realize those puppies
were proto-Palins. Palin is just a specific kind of high-school
nightmare, blown up to the size of King Kong by the media... She had
to put McCain down, and she was successfully tumbled off the Empire
State Building, but ye gads, election night was a scary thing!
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> Their nuttiness about 'aliens' is easy for us to relate to
> though, because there is nothing more alien that a Republican.
> That is why genuine 'conservatives' want to escape having their
> sincere values mixed into to their insanity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
True. As they lost market share during the early years of this
century repubs began to go for niche markets, to indulge the Boob
Base with more and more footage of sloppy crazy people, and ever-
loonier ideas. The motivation couldn't be simpler - everybody knows
that all the repub/corporation cabal needs is a certain number of
votes. Those votes don't have to intend to benefit the nation, or to
promote the general welfare, and the voting doesn't have to be done by
sane people*, so if bizarre lies catch the boobs' attention, that is
what is supplied. If hate is the drug of choice, they have plenty of
script writers to gin that up.
The reason I said that at length is that you're absolutely
right. The invisible movers-and-shakers who actually own and operate
repub congresscritters have gone so far into 'alien' that real
conservatives are walking away from them; the Limbaugh/Beck/Hannity
bunch are becoming a kind of political lepers. *Nobody* wants to
catch what they have.
* Yet.
sr
movement to conservatism
He should talk about something he is familiar with, his own crowd. And he
has a jealousy streak, too boot
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"freeisbest" <demeter...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:de7796c7-3104-4b04...@g23g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...
sr
You just named the most popular 3 with the highest ratings, (the no body is
you)
sr
"sr" <sol...@uninets.net> wrote in message
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>