Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

(Yes, Blogger ate another Happy Hour. If this keeps up, Wordpress and I are going to have an affair, damn it.)

This just could be the jump-the-couch moment for the Republicon National Committee:

In any party or political movement, there’s bound to be a mainstream and a fringe. As a rule, the fringe looks to the mainstream for validation, and the mainstream looks at the fringe as kind of icky.

Things get interesting, of course, when the line between the mainstream and the fringe blurs. Take the Republican National Committee, for example.

The RNC is a fairly predictable, far-right animal. It’s run by lobbyists and business interests who divide their time between raising money and lying about Democrats. The RNC likes to exploit the ignorance of its base, and stoke the culture-war fires from time to time, but generally steer clear of the kind of insanity one might find in, say, a thread at the Free Republic. It’s the whole mainstream/fringe dynamic in practice.

At least, that’s usually the case. This morning, RNC Chairman Mike Duncan sent out this email to Republican donors.

During his recent speech in Berlin, Barack Obama tried to ingratiate himself to the foreign crowd by claiming loudly that he was “a citizen of the world.”

The problem is Obama’s self-proclaimed global “citizenship” appears to go well beyond just a rhetorical device to gain favor with a European throng full of pie-in-the-sky utopians.

[snip]

And now he’s putting your money where his mouth is.

A bill he has sponsored in the U.S. Senate, the so-called Global Poverty Act(S. 433), would raise the amount of American tax dollars allocated to United Nations’ redistribution efforts to $845 billion.

[snip]

You can check Google and find literally thousands of right-wing activists who are just livid about Obama’s “plan” to give the United Nations $845 billion of our money. And they can’t imagine why the media refuses to tell the public about this nefarious scheme, but they’re
pretty sure news outlets are in on some kind of conspiracy to keep this dastardly plan under wraps.

The problem, of course, is that there is no such plan. It’s a right-wing myth that has been making the rounds for months, and to which the Republican National Committee has finally given its imprimatur.

At issue here is a U.N. initiative to implement its Millennium Goals on global poverty, which would, in fact, total $845 billion over 13 years — from industrialized nations across the globe.

The Congressional Budget Office did a cost-estimate analysis of Obama’s legislation, co-sponsored by Joe Biden, and found that U.S. responsibilities “would cost less than $1 million per year.”

First, the leadership of the RNC is falling for pure myths. Secondly, the leadership of the RNC is apparently worse at math than Dr. Evil. Thirdy - but no, we already knew these stupid fucks have no concept of reality whatsoever. At least this shows us just how empty their bucket of ideas is - they have to fill it with imagination.

It's getting so bad for them that they're viciously turning on their hero, Captain Codpiece:

A House Republican leader is lambasting President Bush on his decision not to call Congress back into session to deal with the energy crisis.

In a legislative update sent to GOP members and staff on Tuesday, Republican House Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) accused "Beijing George" Bush of throwing House Republicans "under the bone-dry bus" on his way to the Olympics in China.

House GOP leaders last week called on Bush to convene an emergency session ofCongress, but the White House said such a move would not make a difference because Democrats would not call for an up-or-down vote on offshore drilling legislation.

McCotter, known for his frank and sometimes unusual political opinions, was not pleased with that decision. His memo stated, "Today, in his final term, the wildly unpopular President George W. Bush boarded Air Force One bound for the Beijing Olympics and a meeting with his chum Hu Jintao, the dapper ruler of a nuclear armed, communist dictatorship. ... Perhaps our Compassionate Conservative-in-Chief will bring our absent Democrat Congress some 'Made in (communist) China' souvenir t-shirts: 'Bush went to Beijing and all I got was this lousy five week, paid vacation.' "

The memo ends, "Bon Voyage, Mr. Bush! House Republicans will fight on for America!"

I need a thesaurus. The usual words expressing how lame, insane, and outrageously histrionic the Republicons are just fail here. The snide, sniping, lying, full-of-bullshit-and-belligerence party is now reduced to eating their own. And their attacks on their own former Glorious Leader don't scan any better than the ones they launch against Dems.

And while the Republicons bray for the Dems to return to Washington and debate energy policy, where are the leaders crying most loudly? Oh, you know. Not fucking there:

Since last Friday, House Republicans have been engaged in a political stunt on Capitol Hill, staging fake sessions on gas prices while Congress adjourned for recess. Over the weekend, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) urged Members to return to the Capitol, “although they themselves didn’t show up“:

“It’s not a request we make lightly. But the American people are suffering,” Boehner and Blunt said. “We’ve called on the Speaker to call Congress back into an emergency session this month and schedule a vote on the American Energy Act. We must continue to make a stand until the Speaker complies.”

Riiight. Where are you while the American people suffer, John? Ah:

But what has Boehner been doing while his comrades are fighting the good fight? Golfing.

Republicons: because the crazy, evil fuckwits need a political party, too.