|
Edited on Wed Sep-02-09 12:20 PM by Turborama
Ted Kennedy booed six days after his death at a town hall in Illinois
Michele Bachmann offering to slit her wrists to sign a blood covenant in which she and those sympathetic to her all man up.
And yet in our fifth story tonight: As creeping subtext of insanity and religious delirium that animates so much of the Republican Party tries to stand up and take over, an older and more powerful Republican precept defendants its turf, Senators McConnell and McCain today conducting more THINOs, T-H-I-N-O, “town halls in name only.”
Supposed public forums about health care reform in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Hialeah, Florida, at which McCain and McConnell demanded the reform process start over, meetings at which only help employees and invited guests were admitted, which were, quote, “closed to the public.” Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.
Senator McConnell is dragging Senator McCain into the category of “too cowardly to face actual people.”
In the fight between biblical Republicans and cowardly Republicans, Senators McCain and McConnell happily leading the later, they joined Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina in Charlotte, for first of two THINOs. The forums were closed to the public just like yesterday‘s event in Kansas City—only hospital employees and other invited guests. And in this forum, you could hear a pin drop as the senators unloaded the new GOP message: start over on health care reform. The new theme disseminated today by the Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander.
Since THINOs do not include protesters, the pushback came in absentia from Senator McCaskill of Missouri, criticizing those invitation-only forums, particularly the one in her home state.
Meantime, Michele—Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, gleefully leading the biblical wing of the Republican Party, speaking to a cheering audience at Denver‘s conservative Independence Institute, quoting, “This—health care reform—cannot pass. What we have to do is make it covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn‘t pass.”
And a rhetorical nod to George W. Bush, “You‘re either for us or against us on this issue.”
Just last week it was that Bachmann told abortion opponents that the health care battle will be won on our knees in prayer and fasting.
But the truly sub-human behavior, you need only to hear the boos trying to drown out applause when Senator Kennedy‘s name was invoked just six days after his death by Congresswoman Janet Schakowsky after her town hall meeting in Niles, Illinois.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SCHAKOWSKY: You know, Ted Kennedy had said that this was the great issue of his life.
(BOOING)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
OLBERMANN: You people who booed, you are seriously F‘d up.
The result of the carefully-created town hall fiasco is beginning to trickle in. A new poll finding that most Americans of both parties are confused about health care reform, 67 percent overall, 58 percent among Democrats. And also, they‘re feeling that President Obama has not clearly explained his plans.
Let‘s start first on the Republican exploitation of religion and religious fervor. We‘ll bring in author and activist Dan Savage.
Dan, good evening.
DAN SAVAGE, AUTHOR AND ACTIVIST: Good evening, Keith.
OLBERMANN: Congresswoman Bachmann first, we might say she picked up where previous Republican zealots left off, except that some of her utterances seem exponentially more bizarre and even random. Is there some sort of machine generating these remarks or is there actually a person there?
SAVAGE: There‘s actually a person there and that person is a big problem for the Republican Party. And she‘s symbolic for an even bigger problem for the Republican Party. They began 20, 30 years ago pandering to the religious right and the religious right realized that it could just run its own candidates, elect its own people and put the nuts in charge—and that‘s what they‘ve done.
Michele Bachmann is a religious extremist and a nut, and she‘s the kind of person who, once upon a time, the Republicans could count on her vote and her support for saner, more middle-of-the-road Republican candidates who could work with Democrats and who weren‘t bat crap crazy.
And now, she‘s the one who‘s in there and they‘re stuck with her and her extremism.
OLBERMANN: So, she—she hears voices and wrestles snakes and that sort of end of the spectrum here, you know, because even in that area, I would think.
SAVAGE: And she sees every political dispute as this battle between good and evil, as some sort of apocalypse and just ratchets up the rhetoric. We‘ve seen her do it on—you know, during—in 2008 when she described, when she called for an investigation into the anti-American attitudes of members of Congress and all of her extreme remarks during the health care debate and the cap-and-trade debate.
The last time she was talking about letting blood into a political battle, it was the lock and load and armed and dangerous argument she was making about greenhouse gas emissions. She‘s nuts.
OLBERMANN: Well, yes. But you wonder how many people are going to follow her in this “let‘s all slit our wrists together” idea. And another thing, in a broader sense.
SAVAGE: I think if they want to show their commitment, they should start with their breasts (ph).
OLBERMANN: We‘ll just pass on that.
How do they twist the idea of say, just pick a figure out of the hat here, Jesus Christ and, you know, the golden rule and taking care—particularly of the sick—and turn this into opposition to health care? In a sense, if they‘re trying to emulate Christ, if they can‘t personally heal disease and passersby, should they not be willing to help doctors to do so?
SAVAGE: I‘m sure they want to hear this from me, because I‘m an avowed atheist. But my dad was Roman Catholic deacon and my mom was a lay minister, and I went to the seminary and I was confirmed in the Catholic Church.
I read the Bible backwards and forwards and a lot in there, a lot that Jesus had to say about taking care of the sick, housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, visiting—not executing the prisoner—and nothing about capital gains tax cuts, nothing about denying health care coverage to American families and American children, and nothing about this sort of insane opposition to a democratically-elected president.
They really have high jacked Christianity and are giving it a bad name. The reason we see spikes, I think, in more and more people who no longer associate themselves with any religious faith, I believe, is because now to say you‘re Christian in America means you‘re saying, I am in the same boat, the same “bat crap crazy” boat with Michele Bachmann—and a lot of even nominal Christians don‘t want to say that anymore, cultural Christians don‘t want to say that anymore.
OLBERMANN: Well, strip the religion out of it and stick to the ethics of religion, which is often very useful even to people who even don‘t believe. And we don‘t know of anybody who booed the late Senator Kennedy at the Schakowsky town hall belonged to the religious far right. But—I mean, I got heat for saying that Ronald Reagan is dead and he was a lousy president, and I waited four, five years until he died to say it that bluntly, just out of respect for the dead.
Are—haven‘t the ethics of these folks, the religious and nonreligious alike, in this opposition just been all over the map?
SAVAGE: Well, when you have a party that claims to speak for God or claims that God is on its side, the rhetoric heats up and the anger heats up. Because it‘s not just a battle about ideas and positions and what‘s good for the country and bad for the country; it‘s a battle about what God wants and what God doesn‘t want. And you‘re—it‘s easier to demagogue about your enemies and to despise them and to dehumanize them in this really personal and vicious way. And the religious right is fomenting this kind of hatred in this country—and at our peril.
I really do think that the Michele Bachmanns of the world and the Glenn Becks of the world are actively and consciously or subconsciously trying to get—I‘m just going to say it—trying to get the president killed. That‘s why they are setting this up, as “killer be killed” argument. He‘s going to kill your grandpa, pull the plug on grandma, death panels that little children have to go in front of.
This kind of rhetoric—this paranoid style on the religious right from, you know, Birchers to Birthers doesn‘t usually end well. And we—somebody‘s got to put the brakes on it. Unfortunately, the Republican Party, there are no adults left in the room. There are only the Michele Bachmanns and Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs running the show.
OLBERMANN: The overall picture, help me out on this overall picture, and I‘m not going—I‘m only going to moderate your remarks to this degree that I think some of them who oppose this are not of that thinking that you just expressed. But unfortunately, a lot of who you‘re talking about, you nailed them perfectly.
But this political strategy here which is—you polluted the waters here in this debate, the Republicans have, and now, OK, good, that‘s done. Let‘s have a start over, let‘s have a do-over on the entire debate? What is the political linear thinking in that? Where—I see a disconnect in between August and September.
SAVAGE: I think the Republicans are trying to use Obama‘s rope-a-dope strategy from the primaries where they are trying to lure him with his desire to be bipartisan and to seem like he‘s crafting a consensus solution to the health care problem, trying to lure him back into a whole fresh round of this that will not end well with him—will not end well for him and for the Democrats. The Democrats need to call their bluff and go it alone and not be suckered into another whole debate with the Republicans about what to do, because the Republicans are not debating this in good faith.
OLBERMANN: And if do-over is this new meme as we‘re hearing from Mr. Alexander, Senator Alexander, these phony town halls, the THINOs, this is the new form of choice, Democrats have to get astroturfed by health industry employees shipped in buses and Republicans can only handle invited guests and family? I mean, is Mitch McConnell that much of a mollycoddle and wise, John McCain participating in something that might as well be scripted?
SAVAGE: Well, that‘s the Republican M.O. coming out of the Bush years, that you only put your folks up in front of an invited crowd and a friendly crowd and then you put the video out and hope the video out and make it look like there‘s some sort of national consensus or national worship for your guy, for your candidate, for your position. And, you know, clearly, they‘re going to send their thugs and their screamers into Democratic events to make Democratic positions look controversial when they are not.
The majority of the country wants health insurance reform but they‘re sending the Birchers and Birthers into these meetings to scream and create the appearance of controversy. And the media, which is cowed by its allegiance to always describing every debate as a 50/50 either/or, they create the impression that there‘s a deadlock when there is not. And it‘s a very conscious working-the-rep strategy on the part of Republican strategists.
OLBERMANN: Where does it go from here? Because we heard the Republicans threatening to continue, Congressman Kingston of Georgia, who‘s another whack job, said he‘s going to continue the nightmare of the town halls into September. There aren‘t any town halls in September. Everybody has to get back to work.
And Senator Gregg has talked about holding things up with endless procedural motions in the Senate.
Do we have any idea what—how—what they‘re trying to do, where they‘re going to go next with this?
SAVAGE: Well, I don‘t know where the R‘s are going to go next. I know where the Dems need to go next.
OLBERMANN: OK.
SAVAGE: They need to man up themselves. They need to call the bluff.
We need to end the filibuster.
We have majorities in the House and Senate. We have the White House. And the American people sent Barack Obama to the White House and handed majorities in the House and Senate to the Democrats because they wanted health insurance reform, because they wanted a solution.
And the Democrats have to get up off their knees and push it through. And then they can take all of the credit or all of the blame. I think once it‘s passed, it‘s going to be very popular, just as Medicare has been and still is.
There‘s a reason why the—you have Michael Steele out there insisting that he‘s opposed to government-run health care programs, but he‘s going to protect Medicare, which is a government-run health care program. It‘s because once it‘s enacted and once Americans see that the government can run this and run this well and provide health care and health insurance in a way that private insurance have proved that they cannot, it‘s going to be popular and it‘s going to go down to the political benefit of the Democrats. They just have to have the courage to do it and go it alone.
OLBERMANN: And incidentally, Dan, Mr. Steele changed his mind on that subject again, which we‘ll get to in a moment.
The columnist and author Dan Savage—great thanks for your time tonight.
SAVAGE: Thank you, Keith.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
