House Teabaggers Don't Fear McCain's Pending Attack... Not Even A Little

No one in the House Republican caucus thinks the man who befriended Muammar Qaddafi and lolled away his evenings at the Qaddafi family ranch, is any kind of threat to their political careers.

Beltway Republicans expect McCain to blow any minute now-- and that the target of his wrath will be the far right of the House Republican caucus this time-- teabaggers, Know Nothings and the blatantly racist end of the party. But they're laughing at the 2008 presidential candidate. His opposition-- the louder and more vitriolic, the better-- makes them stronger with an electoral base that gets all its information from Hate Talk Radio and Fox News. He's mad because the right-wingers are blocking immigration reform again and letting their anti-Hispanic/anti-Asian freak flags fly one more time. McCain worries that they're leading the party into a ditch so deep they'll never recover-- sort of like what happened to the California Republican Party when it went off on a racist jihad against Hispanics and turned itself into a sad, toothless rump. Still, Molly Hooper at The Hill, perhaps looking for some political news during the long, sweltering July 4th weekend, predicts that McCain is "on a collision course with House conservatives" (although she means House reactionaries or House fascists. McCain is a conservative. John Barrow. Lindsey Graham, John Boehner and Walter Jones are conservatives. Steve King and Louie Gohmert and Steve Stockman and racists, fascists and, if you want to be polite, reactionaries).

Throughout his Senate career, McCain has clashed with House Republican lawmakers over high-profile issues, including campaign finance reform, detainee interrogation techniques, earmarks and tax cuts. This year, McCain has ripped Republicans in the lower chamber for not agreeing to enter into a budget conference with the Senate.

Some political observers believe it’s just a matter of time before McCain aggressively goes after House GOP members for not voting on the Senate-passed immigration measure.

The five-term senator has stopped short of criticizing Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) vow to move immigration reform only if a majority of House GOP lawmakers are on board. Yet, McCain made a pointed comment last weekend that suggested he would only bite his tongue for so long.

“I really don’t feel it's appropriate for me to tell [Boehner] exactly how he should handle this. But I think Republicans realize the implications for the future of the Republican Party in America if we don't get this issue behind us,” McCain said on Fox News Sunday.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who strongly opposes the Senate bill, took issue with McCain’s warning, but said he expects the 2008 GOP presidential nominee to continue challenging conservatives on the airwaves.

“Most of what [McCain] will do, in my anticipation is through the media. … He likes to drop a little bomb and watch how people will react, and he’ll do it again,” King said in an interview with The Hill.

King said McCain “should have learned his lesson” when he tried to pass immigration reform with the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.).

You can imagine how frustrating it is for a mainstream conservative like McCain when he finds himself on a team with people talking about, as Louie Gohmert recently did (video below) about people who have "a love for an animal" and want to get married-- a well known and long-standing problem in the east Texas district he represents.



Do you miss Michele Bachmann yet?

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Threats Of Primaries By GOP Racists Make It Harder For Non-Southerners To Back Popular Mainstream Positions

As soon as Jim DeMint took over the already right-wing Heritage Foundation, he made sure it would be even more extreme and, especially, more racist. Their first big effort under his regime was to put out a phony "study" claiming immigration would cost American taxpayers gazillions of dollars-- or, to be more "exact," 6 trillion dollars. No doubt, South Carolina's former KKK senator brought the figure with him and asked the propagandists at Heritage to write a justification of it. The KKK senator from Alabama, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was so sold on the Heritage nonsense, he demanded the professional and nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirm it. The report, as we mentioned yesterday, didn't go the way Beauregard expected. Instead of DeMint's $6 trillion deficit, it "estimates that in the first decade after the immigration bill is carried out, the net effect of adding millions of additional taxpayers would decrease the federal budget deficit by $197 billion. Over the next decade, the report found, the deficit reduction would be even greater-- an estimated $700 billion, from 2024 to 2033."

This is bad news for Republicans who prefer to keep their racism and bigotry under cover. It's not going to matter for the real crazies-- mostly in the South-- whose overt appeal is racism anyway, your Steve Southerlands (R-FL), Patrick McHenrys (R-NC), Louie Gohmerts (R-TX), Tom Prices (R-GA), Alan Nunnelees (R-MS), Steve Stockmen (R-TX), Virginia Foxxes (R-NC), Rob Pittengers (R-NC), Steve Scalises (R-LA), Tom Rices (R-SC), Trey Gowdys (R-SC), John Micas (R-FL), or Bob Goodlattes (R-VA). But what happens to the Republicans who were looking for a legitimate fiscal excuse to vote against comprehensive immigration reform-- the ones who want to maintain a veneer of not being pawns to the racist yahoos who run their party?

It puts "mainstream" Republicans like Chris Gibson (R-NY), Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ), Charlie Dent (R-PA), Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm (R-NY), Chris Smith (R-NJ), Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA), Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Pat Meehan (R-PA), Tom Petri (R-WI), Jon Runyan (R-NJ), Mike Turner (R-OH), Tom Reed (R-NY), Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), Richard Hanna (R-NY), David Joyce (R-OH), Leonard Lance (R-NJ), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Dan Benichek (R-MI), Dave Reichert (R-WA), Jim Gerlach (R-PA)... in a bind. The immigration bill turns out to be a gigantic deficit-reduction plan-- both in the short term and in the long term! Their constituents are different from the die-hard racists in the backward parts of Texas, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. The voters in these districts may not appreciate racism as a raison d'etre for refusing the solve a pressing national problem. Of course, on the other hand, there is an overt threat to these congressmen. Either vote NO on immigration reform, or face a well-financed primary.

And if you won't think primaries by radical extremists are real enough to scare the hell out of Republicans, look what's already happening to high profile Tea Party Senator Marco Rubio. During an interview the other night on WMAL, anti-Hispanic sociopath Allen West, who has the ability to raise millions of dollars from fellow extremists, said he will look into a primary challenge against Rubio.

"That's a pretty heavy lift, because you're talking about running against a sitting senator, and then, of course, that creates that schism that the other side would love to see happen," said West, who appeared as a guest co-host on WMAL's Mornings on the Mall Wednesday.  West was pressed further by WMAL's Larry O'Connor, who asked him directly if he would rule out a challenge against Rubio.

"Chirping... chirping... chirping...," replied West with a chuckle, before elaborating with a more direct response.

"If I see people that are not taking our country down the right path, if I see people that are not standing up for the right type of principles, and putting their own party politics before what is best for the United States of America," West indicated he might make a run.

Rubio, who rode a wave of Tea Party momentum to the Senate in 2010 in the same election that sent West to the House, has fallen out of favor with some Republicans because of his support for the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" immigration reform bill. West told WMAL he has a "lot of concerns" about the measure himself.

...But will he attempt to make that point as a Senate candidate against Rubio?

"We'll see what happens down the pike," said West. "God will set my feet on the right path."

And if you doubt Heritage and other far right extremist groups have the clout to mount effective primaries against mainstream Republicans you've probably never heard of Heritage's venal Conservative Action Project, which Lee Fang has exposed in his new book, The Machine.

The Heritage Foundation’s most audacious move to harness the conservative movement has been its role in crafting the Conservative Action Project-- a strategy committee that meets at the Wednesday morning breakfast hosted by the Family Research Council. This is the same meeting that rivals Norquist’s Wednesday morning planning meeting and is closely connected to the aggressively ideological Weyrich Lunch. The Conservative Action Project is actually part of a broader plan set forth by Heritage vice president Becky Norton Dunlop, a point person for Heritage’s sprawling external affairs program. Throughout her career, Dunlop had spun through the revolving door of working in various Republican administrations on both the state and federal level, a corporate PR firm, and multiple conservative nonprofits, including Heritage, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute, and the Virginia Institute for Public Policy. A committed conservative, Dunlop was once asked how to spread conservative ideas at a panel discussion hosted by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. “How do you maintain liberty?” Dunlop replied, “Well, at the end it’s at the cartridge box if you can’t win at the ballot box.” She then smiled and said that her response was probably too “extreme” for her audience of international right-of-center donors.

As the Heritage Foundation’s “chief ambassador” to the movement, Dunlop helps the American Conservative Union plan its annual CPAC convention, the largest annual gathering of conservatives. Philanthropy Roundtable, Dunlop and her external affairs team also organize multiple events to bring corporate donors and conservative foundations together, and she organizes regional and President’s Club events. Dunlop sits on the boards of over half a dozen other organizations, from the Phillips Foundation, which disburses grants to young right-wing journalists, to the Family Foundation of Virginia, a religious right powerhouse in the state, to the American Conservative Union itself.

Despite Dunlop’s impressive set of official responsibilities, her most important duty is not revealed on her profile page on the Heritage Foundation website. Behind the scenes, Dunlop serves as the president of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive right-wing committee that has brought together key Republican officials, Christian right eaders, and wealthy right-wing donors to set the conservative agenda since 1981. Although she had been a director for the CNP for many years, according to tax disclosures filed with the IRS, Dunlop appeared to take the reins of the organization in 2008. Called the “most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of” by ABC News, the CNP is still critical to the conservative movement, and deeply entwined with Heritage and other prime players of the conservative movement.

Initially organized by fundamentalist preacher Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind Rapture-genre series, the CNP is credited with cementing the role of the religious right within the modern Republican Party. The CNP initially hosted Pat Robertson, the televangelist owner of a network of different Christian media companies, Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell, LaHaye, and theologian Cleon Skousen, an influential thinker within the religious right who wrote that white slave masters were the real victims in the antebellum South. Some of the first wealthy businessmen included in CNP were Amway’s Richard DeVos and oilman Charles koch. Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese eagerly embraced the group and served as a direct link between the CNP and the Reagan White House. In addition to Republican Party officials, the religious right, and wealthy donors, CNP members include representatives from the conservative media infrastructure, libertarians, and many neoconservatives. Although the CNP has never allowed the press access to its events, it is widely known that the group hosts several meetings a year to allow Republican leaders to consult with movement conservative types. According to Bob Barr, the Republican lawmaker who spearheaded the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, Barr met with the CNP to hone “our message and focus” around the impeachment effort at a CNP meeting in 1997, well before Clinton made his claim that he did not have “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky. In his memoirs, Barr said the CNP members were in “near universal agreement” that impeachment was necessary because of Clinton’s “abuses of power” concerning “national security.” However, CNP continued to support the impeachment when it transformed into a crusade against Clinton’s claims about his sexual improprieties.

In 1999, George W. Bush reportedly gave a speech to the CNP promising to only appoint pro-life judges, which in turn helped guarantee the support of CNP members and solidify Bush’s nomination in the Republican primaries. Although little is known about the activities of CNP events, many have speculated about the degree to which CNP used its influence within the Bush administration. Salon’s Ben Van Heuvelen has noted that the rise of the private military contractor Blackwater, now known as Academi, might have stemmed from the fact that Blackwater CEO Erik Prince’s parents Edgar and Elsa Prince were prominent donors to the CNP and its affiliates, especially the Family Research Council. Prince family members met regularly with prominent Bush administration war planners, like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer, through the CNP.

John McCain kowtowed to the CNP in a speech shortly after locking up the GOP nomination in 2008, but still struggled to gain their trust. “I want to look you in the eye and tell you that I won’t let you down,” pledged McCain to the group of evangelicals and donors in his March 2008 address to the group. According to the New York Times' David Kirkpatrick, several audience members in the CNP crowd said that McCain made “little impression” despite his pandering. James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and many social conservatives simply did not trust McCain, and viewed his acclaimed “maverick” streak as a liability to the movement. According to the New York Times and The Nation’s Max Blumenthal, CNP officials finally pledged their support to the McCain campaign-- and in turn the support of tens of thousands of evangelical churches organized by CNP members, various right-wing front groups owned by CNP members, and other conservative organizations-- only after McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Heritage can put a lot of resources behind targeting mainstream Republicans who are looking towards independent swing voters. The GOP base is still predominantly racist, bigoted and unable to think beyond the latest rants on Hate Talk Radio. But in many districts outside of the South, that's not enough to win elections. Look at the report from the new Iowa Poll for example. Steve King, one of the most viciously anti-Hispanic xenophobes in Congress spent Wednesday lying about immigrants and about the reform bill. The picture up top is from his rally yesterday. And King is backed by Iowa's increasingly senile Senator Chuck Grassley. But 54% of their state's voters approve of the Senate bill with a path to citizenship. 68% of Democrats approve and 54% of independents approve. True, just 44% of Republicans approve but only 48% of Republicans are opposed. The only demographic group that is against immigration reform are the elderly-- 65 years or older-- and even in that case, 48% approve but only 40% oppose. The rest are unsure.

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What To Do About A GOP That Has Devolved Into Intransigent Extremism?

Joe Conason takes on the moronic Beltway adage that "everyone is equally at fault" for the nation's problems by pointing out that the most salient fact in American political life is (and for some time has been) the intransigent extremism of the Republican Party.

Whatever the punditocracy may imagine, there is no way for Obama to force his agenda on the Republicans in the House and the Senate, who range from scheming partisans like Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor to Tea Party zealots like Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann. Unlike Abraham Lincoln or Lyndon Johnson, the two brilliant manipulators with whom he is sometimes compared and found wanting, the president is not equipped to bribe, blackmail, or herd in the style of those Machiavellian chief executives. If he were so equipped-- and indeed used his power as ruthlessly as Lincoln or Johnson-- the same pundits who now complain that he isn’t controlling the agenda would shriek about his misuse of power.

...What Obama evidently doesn’t understand, despite years of bitter experience, is the significance of that right-wing extremism for someone like him, whose nature is to accept differences and seek compromise. Unable to negotiate with a reasonable counterpart on either side of the Hill, he too frequently negotiates with himself-- whether over Obamacare, the debt ceiling, the budget, deficit reduction, taxes, or “reforming” Social Security.

Yet whenever he discards a progressive position, such as the public option in health care, or adopts a conservative position, such as reducing Social Security cost-of-living increases, he only succeeds in demoralizing his base. Meanwhile, rejection by the Republicans is preordained.

So what is left for President Obama to do if he wishes to see any of his second-term agenda enacted? By now he ought to have noticed that when he speaks out firmly on behalf of progressive principles, in support of working families, his polling numbers improve and his power increases. (And whenever he vacillates, his numbers diminish and his authority weakens.)

Yesterday we saw a resurgent fascist party in England, UKIP, make huge headway against the political Establishment, primarily by capitalizing on crude nationalism and rabid anti-immigrant sentiment. When David Cameron, whose Conservative Party lost big, was asked by a journalist if he regrets referring to the fruitcakes and clowns who ran on the UKIP ticket as fruitcakes and clowns, he responded, “It’s no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for. Of course they should be subject, and they will be subject, to proper scrutiny of their policies and their plans. But we need to show respect for people who've taken the choice to support this party. And we're going to work really hard to win them back." Cameron finds himself in a situation not unlike the hapless John Boehner. When you start feeding the beast of hatred and bigotry some red meat, the beast is never satiated. The beast will inevitably eat you as well. And that brings us to Timothy Eagan's OpEd in yesterday's NY Times, about how the crazies-- the U.S. version of the UKIP-- have taken over the House of Representatives. Appropriately enough, he starts with Gohmert, certainly one of the craziest of the lot, right up there with Broun, King, Bachmann and Stockman.

Not long ago, the congressman from northeast Texas, Louie Gohmert, was talking about how the trans-Alaska oil pipeline improved the sex lives of certain wild animals-- in his mind, the big tube was an industrial-strength aphrodisiac. “When the caribou want to go on a date,” he told a House hearing, “they invite each other to head over to the pipeline.”

Gohmert, consistently on the short list for the most off-plumb member of Congress, has said so many crazy things that this assertion passed with little comment. Last year, he blamed a breakdown of Judeo-Christian values for the gun slaughter at a cinema in Colorado. Last week, he claimed the Muslim Brotherhood had deep influence in the Obama administration, and that the attorney general-- the nation’s highest law enforcer-- sympathized with terrorists.

You may wonder how he gets away with this. You may also wonder how Gohmert can run virtually unopposed in recent elections. The answer explains why we have an insular, aggressively ignorant House of Representatives that is not at all representative of the public will, let alone the makeup of the country.

Much has been said about how the great gerrymander of the people’s House-- part of a brilliant, $30 million Republican action plan at the state level-- has now produced a clot of retrograde politicians who are comically out of step with a majority of Americans. It’s not just that they oppose things like immigration reform and simple gun background checks for violent felons, while huge majorities support them.

Or that, in the aggregate, Democrats got 1.4 million more votes for all House positions in 2012 but Republicans still won control with a cushion of 33 seats.

Or that they won despite having the lowest approval rating in modern polling, around 10 percent in some surveys. Richard Nixon during Watergate and B.P.’s initial handling of a catastrophic oil spill had higher approval ratings.

But just look at how different this Republican House is from the country they are supposed to represent. It’s almost like a parallel government, sitting in for some fantasy nation created in talk-radio land.

As a whole, Congress has never been more diverse, except the House majority. There are 41 black members of the House, but all of them are Democrats. There are 10 Asian-Americans, but all of them are Democrats. There are 34 Latinos, a record-- and all but 7 are Democrats. There are 7 openly gay or lesbian members, all of them Democrats.

Only 63 percent of the United States population is white. But in the House Republican majority, it’s 96 percent white. Women are 51 percent of the nation, but among the ruling members of the House, they make up just 8 percent. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side.)

It’s a stretch, by any means, to call the current House an example of representative democracy. Now let’s look at how the members govern:

To date, seven bills have been enacted. Let’s see, there was the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship act-- “ensuring the stability of the helium market.” The Violence Against Women Act was renewed, but only after a majority of Republicans voted against it, a rare instance of letting the full House decide on something that the public favors. Just recently, they rushed through a change to help frequent air travelers-- i.e., themselves-- by fixing a small part of the blunt budget cuts that are the result of their inability to compromise. Meal assistance to the elderly, Head Start for kids and other programs will continue to fall under the knife of sequestration.

On the economy, the Republican majority has been consciously trying to derail a fragile recovery. Their first big salvo was the debt ceiling debacle, which resulted in the lowering of the credit rating for the United States. With sequestration-- which President Obama foolishly agreed to, thinking Congress would never go this far-- the government has put a wheel-lock on a car that keeps trying to get some traction.

Meanwhile, not a day passes without some member of this ruling majority saying something outrageous. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, for example, has endorsed the far-side-of-the-moon conspiracy theory that the government is buying up all the bullets to keep gun owners from stocking their home arms depots. As for Gohmert, earlier this year he nominated Allen West, a man who isn’t even a member of Congress (he lost in November) to be Speaker of the House. Harvey, the invisible rabbit, was not available.

Gohmert, like others in the House crazy caucus, has benefited from a gerrymandered district. He can do anything short of denouncing Jesus and get re-elected.

The Beltway chorus of the moment blames President Obama for his inability to move his proposals through a dunderheaded Congress. They wonder how Republicans would be treating a silken-tongued charmer like Bill Clinton if he were still in the White House. We already know: not a single Republican voted for Clinton’s tax-raising budget, the one that led to our last federal surplus. Plus, they impeached him; his presidency was saved only in the Senate.

Listen to how conservative Republican Senator Pat Toomey explained it:

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