←
→

Today’s GOP: Come for the Misogyny, Stay for the Racism

Posted: October 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, just because | Tags: , , |57 Comments »

Okay, H/T to Lawyers Guns and Money…This entry on Andy Borowitz blog is exactly what the GOP final push needs. A new slogan!

G.O.P. Split Over Whether to Emphasize Misogyny or Racism : The New Yorker

With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, there is a deep divide among Republican leaders over whether to emphasize misogyny or racism as the campaign’s closing theme.

In one camp is the Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who says that his view that God is sometimes O.K. with rape is “gaining real traction with a key demographic: men who don’t like women very much.”

“I can’t tell you how many misogynists have come up to me at my rallies and said, ‘Thank you for saying what you said,’ ” he told reporters today. “I think they’re like, finally, someone’s taking a more nuanced position on rape.”

With the realization that 31 states allow rapist to take their victims to court to gain visitation or custody of those “gifts from god”  i.e. babies they produce, I think that Borowitz is on the right track.

But in the other camp is the former New Hampshire governor John Sununu, who worries that the Republican Party’s emphasis on misogyny is threatening to drown out its “winning message of racism.”

“I understand the appeal of Mourdock’s anti-woman theme, but I worry that it’s going to overshadow our core value of racism, which is still our best shot at winning this thing,” he said. “In politics, you’ve got to dance with the one who brung you.”

You know, that’s true, a recent poll from the AP is supporting Sununu’s stance.

Hoping to heal a possible rift with so little time left until Election Day, the R.N.C. chairman Reince Priebus said today that there is room for both views in today’s Republican Party: “Our ‘big tent’ message to voters should be this: come for the misogyny, stay for the racism.”

That is the perfect solution!

The GOP: Come for the Misogyny, stay for the racism.

About these ads

57 Comments on “Today’s GOP: Come for the Misogyny, Stay for the Racism”

  1. JJ Lopez Minkoff says:
    October 27, 2012 at 3:28 pm

    All this crap about rape and Gawd has given me a migraine. Y’all enjoy the rest of your evening!

    • dakinikat says:
      October 27, 2012 at 4:24 pm

      Des Moines Register with a great editorial! This was the newspaper I grew up reading since the Council Bluffs Nonpareil was such a little town thing.

      The Register editorial: We don’t need more extremists in Washington
      ‘Legitimate rape’ and ‘a gift from God’ pander to people outside the mainstream of American society

      Abortion is a legal procedure in the United States. Like every other medical decision women make, from whether to get a mammogram to having a mole removed, it is personal. Lawmakers say nothing about whether men should undergo vasectomies or whether insurers should cover the cost of Viagra prescriptions. Instead, they talk about birth control pills and abortion. They couch their statements in comments about the giving insurance companies choice and “protecting life” instead of what they are really about: controlling women.

      No one likes abortion, but it should remain legal and be accessible. It doesn’t matter how a woman got pregnant. In a country that is supposed to revere freedom and abhor government intrusion into our personal lives, there is no justification for the government forcing a woman to carry the fetus of a rapist to term and give birth.

      It is troubling when those seeking public office do not understand this. It is terrifying when those people are so ill-informed they think that rape cannot result in a pregnancy or that God had a plan for it to happen when it does.

      Those who share a political party with such candidates should denounce these comments, and they should have the courage to say these people have no place in Washington.

    • bostonboomer says:
      October 27, 2012 at 4:31 pm

      Great post, JJ! Feel better soon.

  2. JJ Lopez Minkoff says:
    October 27, 2012 at 3:56 pm

    All of you in Sandy’s path, take care: Map of Hurricane Sandy’s Path – Interactive Map – NYTimes.com

  3. dakinikat says:
    October 27, 2012 at 4:04 pm

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/27/melissa-harris-perry-deli_n_2030834.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

    Letter To Richard Mourdock On Rape (VIDEO)

    Offered as an open letter to Mourdock, who has been roundly criticized for saying that pregnancies resulting from rape are “something that God intended to happen,” Harris-Perry discussed her own experience as a sexual assault survivor.

  4. dakinikat says:
    October 27, 2012 at 4:13 pm

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2224004/Shocking-documentary-lifts-lid-Ku-Klux-Klan-strong-Mississippi.html

    A series of documentaries has laid bare the shocking truth about the Ku Klux Klan which remains very much in existence.
    In them members of the Klan shed light on their rituals and beliefs and their frightening pledge to achieve racial segregation at any cost.
    Shrouded in secrecy, the Klan rarely opens its doors to outsiders, enacting centuries-old rituals in remote rural locations.

    http://abcnews.go.com/US/miss-grand-wizard-heralds-rise-kkk-calls-segregation/story?id=17572788#.UIxOHcXR7p0

    Over the past four months, “Nightline” has been granted rare access to the Klan — its rituals, its members, its message of racial segregation, which it spreads with a new urgency.

    “We have to protect ourselves, or they will kill us!” Steven Howard, a Grand Wizard, said.

    To get to the heart of it, we headed south to meet Howard, the Grand Wizard of the Mississippi White Nights of the Ku Klux Klan. This is the klavern made famous in the film “Mississippi Burning.” The area is scarred by the battles — the lynchings and church bombings — of the civil rights era. A jail was named after Martin Luther King Jr.

    The area is also home to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is in Montgomery, Ala. Senior Fellow Mark Potok and his SPLC colleagues have been fighting the KKK in courtrooms and classrooms for decades.

    Potok agreed with some Klan members’ view that President Obama had been the Klan’s most effective recruiting tool in the past four or five years.

    “I think there’s some truth to that,” Potok told “Nightline” co-anchor Cynthia McFadden. “Immediately after Obama was elected, we saw two of the largest hate websites in the country crash.”

    • NW Luna says:
      October 27, 2012 at 4:29 pm

      “We have to protect ourselves, or they will kill us!”

      In reality, it’s the other way around. I’d say they were insane, but they don’t have a neurobiological illness. They choose to embrace hatred.

  5. JJ Lopez Minkoff says:
    October 27, 2012 at 4:37 pm

    So cute:

    yes, I was just looking through facebook.

  6. dakinikat says:
    October 27, 2012 at 4:47 pm

    AlterNet ‏@AlterNet
    Why ‘Voting Your Conscience’ in Blue or Red States Is a Terrible Idea For Those Who Don’t Want a Romney Presidency http://bit.ly/RY23iM

  7. dakinikat says:
    October 27, 2012 at 5:00 pm

    GOP Rep. Roscoe Bartlett Laments Working Mothers

    http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/gop-rep-roscoe-bartlett-laments-working-mothers

    The Washington Post reports that despite his newfound Democratic constituents, Rep. Bartlett is is still willing to speak his mind – in front of reporters. “This isn’t the politically correct thing to say, but when we drove the mother out of the home into the workplace and replaced her with the television set, that was not a good thing,” said Rep. Bartlett, speaking at a campaign stop with the owner of the Winkler Automotive Service Center.

    • dakinikat says:
      October 27, 2012 at 5:01 pm

      This is the same guy that compared student loans to the holocaust, btw

    • ecocatwoman says:
      October 27, 2012 at 5:18 pm

      I get so pissed off when working mothers & single mothers are “called out”. My father died at the age of 50, just before my 15th birthday. My mother always worked because, although my father was wonderful in my eyes, he liked to play the ponies. If my mother didn’t work, we would have lost our home, we wouldn’t have had food on the table. So she was both a working & single mother. After his death, she had to learn how to grocery shop & write checks to pay the bills. She took care of me & when she became disabled & was no longer able to work, then I took care of her. Some people have to do what they have to do just to survive – through NO fault of their own. STFU Bartlett. It’s not about being politically correct, it’s about understanding & compassion.

  8. RalphB says:
    October 27, 2012 at 5:17 pm

    While talking about Romney’s record in MA, Obama makes a birth certificate joke in New Hampshire. :-)

    CNN: Obama’s birth certificate quip

    Among the increases, Obama said, were “higher fees to be a barber, higher fees to become a nurse. There were higher fees for gas, higher fees for milk.”

    “He raised fees to get a birth certificate,” Obama continued, “which would have been expensive for me.”

    His audience laughing, Obama cracked a smile.

    • bostonboomer says:
      October 27, 2012 at 5:34 pm

      That’s funny. And that is exactly what Romney did. I told you guys back in 2011. We used to have a slightly progressive income tax and Romney made it a flat tax and then raised fees on everything but the kitchen sink. I didn’t know about the 278 families who benefited, but that makes sense. He’d probably do the same thing at the federal level if he had the chance.

      • dakinikat says:
        October 27, 2012 at 5:48 pm

        Hey can you find this study and see if it’s legit?

        http://rt.com/usa/news/conservative-ideologies-science-group-477/

        Study says racists and conservatives are dumb

        Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology and primary author of the findings, explains to Live Science that the, well, science of the issue is rather simple.
        “Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order,” explains Dr. Hodson. Structure and order, of course, are much easier to make sense of than, say, disarray and chaos. Given that, the less intelligent will gravitate towards more manageable ideals and, as he says, “Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice.”
        The study in its entirely was published this week in the journal Psychological Science, and there Dr. Hodson and Michael A Busseri write that after studying a data set of 15,874 persons from the UK, “we found that lower general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology.”
        “A secondary analysis of a US data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact,” add the researchers.
        In summation, they write, “right-wing ideologies, which are socially conservative and authoritarian, represent a mechanism through which cognitive ability is linked with prejudice.
        “For example,” add the doctors, “research has revealed that individuals who more strongly endorse social conservatism have greater cognitive rigidity, less cognitive flexibility and lower integrative complexity. Socially conservative individuals also perform less well than liberals on standardized ability tests.”

      • bostonboomer says:
        October 27, 2012 at 6:50 pm

        I lost my access to psych databases, unfortunately. Alums can only use them on campus. I’ll see what I can find though.

        They used a very large sample and they found a statistically significant correlation, so it seems legit. There have to be lots of other predictors though. There was a study like this reported at Alternet awhile back. I wonder if it’s the same one?

  9. bostonboomer says:
    October 27, 2012 at 5:48 pm

    The Mass. ballot has questions on physician-assisted suicide and medical marijuana. There are also two non-binding questions:

    1. U.S. Representatives must propose an amendment to the Constitution stating that corporations do not have the same rights as human beings. In addition, both Congress and the states may put limitations on campaign spending.

    2. U.S. Reps must vote against any resolution that cuts social security, medicare, medicaid, and Veterans benefits and must vote to (among other things) create jobs, end offshore tax havens, raise taxes on the rich, and bring troops home now and redirect savings from ending wars toward domestic needs.

    • RalphB says:
      October 27, 2012 at 6:04 pm

      Wish I could vote for those! Sound good to me.

      • pdgrey says:
        October 27, 2012 at 6:15 pm

        Me too, They are voting as fast as they can in Florida to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And saying stupid shit like people voting for Obama just want free stuff and their tired of paying for it. Government is evil, I can’t remember all of it. If I could just get Mr. Loaf to sing to me i would feel better. :)

      • RalphB says:
        October 27, 2012 at 6:25 pm

        :-) Mr Loaf should get into rehab.

    • ecocatwoman says:
      October 27, 2012 at 6:19 pm

      Plain English, how novel. You should see how our constitutional amendments appear on the ballot. Do you think either of those stand a chance of winning, considering that Brown seems to have a sizable “following?”

      • bostonboomer says:
        October 27, 2012 at 6:49 pm

        Brown is going down. Warren was ahead by 6 in the last poll. I haven’t seen any polls on the ballot questions, but I’m going to vote for them. We already have decriminalized pot (it’s a misdemeanor and barely prosecuted), so I don’t know why the medical marijuana one wouldn’t pass.

  10. pdgrey says:
    October 27, 2012 at 6:22 pm

    JJ , thanks for the links, I am so going to steal your last line.
    The GOP: Come for the Misogyny, stay for the racism.

  11. RalphB says:
    October 27, 2012 at 6:24 pm

    Romney’s campaign has paid $134.2 million to political firms with ties to his senior staff, for consulting and other services. Obama is a cheap skate by comparison.

    LA Times: Romney spends big on firms tied to aides

    WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney’s campaign has directed $134.2 million to political firms with business ties to his senior staff, spotlighting the tightknit nature of his second presidential bid and the staggering sums being spent in this election.

    Nine firms that are run by, or recently employed, top Romney aides have received almost a third of the $435.8 million that Romney’s campaign and a related fundraising committee have spent on operating expenses through Oct. 17, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of federal election finance reports.

    President Obama’s reelection campaign and a joint fundraising committee have paid about $5.8 million in consulting fees to companies with business ties to senior strategists, according to the finance reports.

  12. RalphB says:
    October 27, 2012 at 6:34 pm

    New York Times endorses Obama. Not unexpected but still nice.

    Barack Obama for Re-Election

  13. RalphB says:
    October 27, 2012 at 6:51 pm

    Somebody got scammed. Either the PAC or, more likely, the donors got taken for a ride.

    TPM: Pro Same-Sex-Marriage PAC Backs Candidate Who Equates Gay Marriage With Bigamy, Polygamy

    American Unity PAC, a Republican super PAC aimed at expanding support for same-sex marriage, was announced with great fanfare in June. But it may not be living up to the hype: one of the congressional candidates it’s supporting with hundreds of thousands in TV ads is not only publicly opposed to same-sex marriage, she also just equated the practice with polygamy and bigamy.

    Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL) may not be what the establishment who fawned over American Unity PAC had in mind when the group was announced.

    At a press conference after a debate Wednesday night, Biggert explained that she’s “close” to supporting same-sex marriage rights, but is “not there yet.” Then she said the issue is best left to the states, equating same-sex marriage laws with the universally-accepted illegal acts of bigamy and polygamy.

    “It is a state issue,” Biggert said. “We don’t have polygamy and bigamy and all of these things in the federal government. It’s the states that take care of that.”

  14. bostonboomer says:
    October 27, 2012 at 6:54 pm

    This is interesting.

    Paul McCartney: Yoko Ono did not break up the Beatles: After 50 years, the singer tells David Frost that Brian Epstein’s successor was to blame for rock’n'roll’s most famous split.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/oct/27/paul-mccartney-yoko-ono-beatles-david-frost

  15. pdgrey says:
    October 27, 2012 at 7:16 pm

    http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/10/27/1100781/anti-black-prejudice-increased-since-2008-poll-finds/
    To keep my self sane after seeing this I thought of Richard Prior does “To kill a Mockingbird”

  16. pdgrey says:
    October 27, 2012 at 7:25 pm

    Well this reporting is to late to help Obama, and I don’t think the media is going to rush out Monday morning and report it.
    http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/10/26/1094901/republican-housing-appointees-sabotaged-mortgage-assistance-programs-to-stop-backdoor-economic-stimulus/

  17. ericjbaker says:
    October 28, 2012 at 1:13 am

    Bravo on the blog title today. It cracked me up (we have to laugh at this so we don’t cry).

←
→