The "Tyranny" of Christine O'Donnell, et al.

Michael Scherer of Time, like everyone interested in the 2010 election, tries to read the tea leaves at the tea party.

Scherer begins with Christine O'Donnell's misattributing a remark about tyranny to Thomas Jefferson, a "citation" the recent college grad apparently lifted from the Internets. Scherer only notes that O'Donnell erroneously cited Jefferson. According to the scholars who wrote The Jefferson Encyclopaedia,

We have not found any evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote, `when governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.'... [T]he most likely source of this quotation appears to be a series of debates on socialism published in 1914. -- The Jefferson Encyclopaedia, via Monticello.org

On the morning he bombed the Murrah Federal Building, Timothy McVeigh carried some shibboleths with him, including a bumper sticker that read, "When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." The citation was there attributed to Samuel Adams. Underneath, McVeigh had scrawled, "Maybe now, there will be liberty!" (See footnotes 24 & 54.)

We should be alarmed that a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate inaugurates her campaign with a quotation cited by Timothy McVeigh as a reason to kill Americans & do violence against the government. Two days ago, the Republicans gave O'Donnell short shrift. Yesterday, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who holds the NRSC purse strings, heartily embraced O'Donnell & sent her a $42,000 check.

This, then, is what the Republican party has come to: an organization with a prominent member who allies herself with violent, anti-American terrorists. There is a difference, of course. Timothy McVeign shoveled real fertilizer to commit his murders; so far the fertilizer O'Donnell is spreading is strictly rhetorical.

Then there's this from another Republican candidate for Senate:

Our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. In fact, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies. -- Sharron Angle, January 2010, via the Las Vegas Sun

And let us not forget these ladies' popular mentor Sarah Palin, the most recent Republican nominee for Vice President, whose husband Todd belonged for years to a secessionist organization called the Alaskan Independence Party. Sarah Palin attended the secessionist party's convention in 1994, when she was a Wasilla city councilwoman, & in 2006 when she was a candidate for governor. In 2007, as governor, she delivered a taped welcome message for the party's convention.

These are dangerous women leading a dangerous anti-American movement. Both O'Donnell & Angle have adopted the language of revolution, invoking -- correctly or incorrectly -- the imprimatur of the founding fathers & the Constitution. Palin has aligned herself with a revolutionary party. Together, these women have a formidable following. We ignore them, & their infiltration of the Republican party, at our peril. -- Constant Weader

The Commentariat -- September 16

Note: Internal links have been removed.

** Michael Moore, with a true history lesson on the lead-up to the Iraq War: "We invaded Iraq because most Americans -- including good liberals like Al Franken, Nicholas Kristof & Bill Keller of the New York Times, David Remnick of the New Yorker, the editors of the Atlantic and the New Republic, Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and John Kerry -- wanted to."

Random Reflections from the Mouse Brain of O'Donnell:

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment. -- Christine O'Donnell, 2007

And then there's also the issue of murder with Vincent Foster. That's a much more serious charge than failing to seek legal advice, and yet we're all just blowing that off, and everybody's trying to focus on Newt Gingrich like a witch hunt, to bring him to the stake and burn him, because they don't like the policy that he's behind. -- Christine O'Donnell, 1996

... Let's agree on this: "the Republican party has kicked out the moderates":

Christine O'Donnell is a sideshow freak.... O'Donnell is a creature of an age in which politics have no meaning beyond performance art.... Her résumé is so thin as to be opaque, and a lot of it seems to be a lie. She seems to be something of a deadbeat, and 'U.S. Senator' seems to be her idea of an entry-level position. This morning, she stands one step away from the job. She is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government.... She is what politics produces when you turn it into a game show and the coverage of it over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. -- Charles Pierce, Esquire

... The Starfish Eats the Spider, Creepy Metaphors for Creeps:

When you can't compete on ideas..., you try to delegitimize the other guy.... They're attempting to delegitimize one of the most talented men to enter politics in three generations. They did the same thing with Bill Clinton. -- Joe Biden, on the "Republican playbook"

... Rachel Maddow talks to Joe Biden about the upcoming election, and the "garbage" Newt Gingrich repeats:

... AND about the candidates for his Senatorial seat:

... Kate Zirnicke of the New York Times tries to figure out what the relationship between Republicans & the tea party is. She identifies South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint as a likely "bridge" between the two. ...

... John Dickerson in Slate: "Democrats now believe they have a body of evidence -- eight Senate races in which Tea Party candidates won the Republican nomination -- that allows them to argue that the Republican Party has gone nuts." ...

... "The Daily Show" panel of political experts discusses how the Democrats will fuck up the November elections:

Bloomberg: "The U.S. poverty rate rose to the highest level in 15 years in 2009, government data show, underscoring the toll the recession took on household incomes and adding fuel to an election-year debate over the Obama administration's economic poliies."

Fred Kaplan in Slate: the war on corruption in Afghanistan is as important as the war against the Taliban.

President Jimmy Carter in a New York Times op-ed: "During my recent travels to North Korea and China, I received clear, strong signals that Pyongyang wants to restart negotiations on a comprehensive peace treaty with the United States and South Korea and on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

Jeff Israely of Time has some background on Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the British Isles. For one thing, he won't be arrested.

ABC News: Justice Stephen Breyer ... said he wasn't convinced the First Amendment protected the burning of the Koran:

     ... NEW. Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate: maybe Stephen Breyer should stop talking on the teevee; it sure got the history of jurisprudence wrong in his musings with Stephanopoulos.

Steven Chu: How to Save the World. Really!

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy ride on one of the firstdesegregated buses. Montgomery, Alabama, December 21, 1956. Photo by Ernest C. Withers.

Whitney Johnson of The New Yorker publishes more photos by Ernest C. Withers, whom the Memphis Commercial Appeal exposed last week as an F.B.I. informant.

The Newt Embraces Social Darwinism and Reincarnation

Art by Barbara Broido.(For more great doodles, go to Broido's site, Barbara's Doodle Blog.)

Maureen Dowd uses her bully pulpit wisely today to excoriate former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for "shamelessly embracing his party's lunacy." She notes that Newt is "claiming not only that the president is a socialist but that he suffers from a socialism gene." The Newt's muse, an "Ann Coulter-in-pants" named Dinesh D'Souza, argues that Barack Obama's father "is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son."

The Constant Weader comments:

Oh boy! Social Darwinism and reincarnation!

In fairness, it's quite possible Newt has a mental disease and we should be more understanding. But as long as the media give him a microphone & introduce him as "the former Speaker," we must treat him as if he knows what he's saying.

Barack Obama barely ever saw his father after the younger Obama was two years old. The President's mother & maternal grandparents reared him. If he has any "intellectual heritage," it comes from Kansas (and I'm not talking about The Wizard of Oz, Newt).

How was it exactly that Papa Obama infiltrated the mind of the future President? Is a man really genetically engineered to take on his father's political beliefs? Nature beats nurture? Or is it that reincarnation thing? Let's have a seance!

It's fairly hilarious that Gingrich is busy rewriting President Obama's childhood inasmuch as Gingrich -- according to an Esquire profile -- has completely rewritten his own. Writer John Richardson details how Newt makes his childhood "sound ideal," yet,

His mother married his father when she was sixteen, left him a few days later, and struggled with manic depression most of her life. His stepfather [who reared Newt & moved the family to a series of Army bases] was an infantry officer who viewed his plump, nearsighted, flat-footed son as unfit for the Army.

Whatever Newt's actual family history, he appears to be the reincarnation of a cruel, mendacious, opportunistic lowlife -- a newt with a personality disorder. It is one of the tragedies of American history that this man once held a powerful position. He was never a leader, always a follower, & now he is following his party over a cliff of right-wing extremism that knows no boundaries and is trying to break its fall by holding tight to an umbrella of fear-mongering, prejudice and outright lies.

Update: Commenter Jim F. of Los Altos (#3) points to Paul Krugman's blogpost on the Gingrich/D'Souza "madness." Krugman remarks that the whole basis of the "Kenyan" plot theory is an Export-Import Bank loan to Brazil. Says Krugman,

Except, you know, the Ex-Im bank’s job is to promote US exports — and this was a loan for the specific purpose of buying US-made oilfield equipment. And the board approving the loan was … a board appointed by George W. Bush. In other words, aside from being ignorant, this is complete the-Commies-are-putting flouride in the water to steal our vital bodily fluids stuff.

Update: without actually employing the terms "racial prejudice" or "ethnic stereotyping" or "lying through their yellow teeth," Matt Bai of the New York Times postulates that Republican lowlifes (another term he doesn't use) are trying to cast President Obama as "The Other" in order to motivate their base of stupid, racist yahoos (okay, Bai doesn't describe the base as "yahoos," either, but you know that's what he would write in a less hoity-toity publication).

Update. Brendan Patrick Keane in Irish Central: the real scandal in Newt's outrageous rant is this: "Newt Gingrich embraces British colonialism."