JABbering Stooge

This time, the hypocrites are piling on DNC Chairman Howard Dean. Dean’s recent comments that "a lot of [Republicans] have not made an honest living in their lives" and that the Republican party is "pretty much a white Christian party" got the more-righteous-than-thou blowhards in an uproar of manufactured outrage.

For instance, on Wednesday, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) said the following:

"This kind of hate speech really doesn’t have a productive place in our political discourse in this country."

Hate speech, Senator? Hate speech? Have you not heard anything your side has been saying for the last twenty years about Democrats?

• Dick Cheney told Sen. Leahy to "go fuck himself" - on the floor of the Senate, no less.

• Rush Limbaugh regularly refers to feminists as "feminazis."

• Self-professed Libertarian Neal Boortz regularly refers to Hillary Clinton as "Hitlery" and "The Hildabeast."

• Just about anything out of the mouth of, or penned by, Ann Coulter. Of particular note are her statements that "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times Building" and "What I didn’t like about How to Talk to a Liberal is that I really think the best way to talk to one is to hit them in the head with a baseball bat. So I threw in the parenthetical If You Must."

• Just about anything out of the mouth of Michael Savage, especially his comment that "When you hear ‘human rights,’ think gays. When you hear ‘human rights,’ think only one thing: someone who wants to rape your son. … When you hear ‘human rights,’ think only someone who wants to molest your son, and send you to jail if you defend him. Write that down, make a note of it."

• Let’s not forget Sean Hannity’s off-air spittle-flecked rant about Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA) during the Terri Schiavo debacle.

• Pat "Let’s Nuke the State Department" Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed Americans first for 9/11.

• Fresno city councilman Jerry Duncan put this gem in an e-mail to staffers: "If I had one dirty bomb…I could eliminate all the liberals in Fresno at once."

But I guess Mr. Smith (Bloviates From Oregon) doesn’t consider all of that hate speech because it comes from good, upstanding Republicans, right?

Oh, and by the way, Howard Dean wasn’t the only one to notice that today’s GOP is nothing more than the political arm of the American Inquisition. As John Aravosis of AMERICAblog points out, former Republican Senator John Danforth had an op-ed in the New York Times decrying the GOP’s push towards theocracy. Of particular interest is the following quote:

By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians….

The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement….

But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda [described by Danforth as limited government, a strong private sector, "non-activist" judges and an "engaged foreign policy" backed by a strong national defense] to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives.

Oh, and by the way, there was this bit in the Duluth News-Tribune:

Note: The Duluth News-Tribune link has also gone dead, as have most of the other links containing this story. I had to find the Google cache of the Knight-Ridder copy.

Some analysts said Dean is correct, but only to a point.

According to CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll data, 82 percent of self-described Republicans are white Christians - but so are 57 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of all Americans.

"He’s not wrong," CNN analyst Bill Schneider said. "It’s just stupid."

In other words, Dean said it "in an inartful way," to borrow a phrase from Tom "I AM the federal government" DeLay.

I have to say, though, that I thought the way the Dems handled the presstitutes at that photo-op yesterday was rather masterful. If only we could get this sort of representation on a regular basis…

UPDATE: AMERICAblog does it again. John Aravosis just posted a study by Fenton Communications that suggests that Dean was right after all in calling Republicans a "white Christian party."

(See original post on the old blog here - originally posted Jun. 10, 2005 11:44 AM)