Former Governor Mitt Romney is losing the support of GOP elites, who are finally realizing what we've known all along: unelectable due to his Massachusetts health care reform success (yes, that's how crazy his party is) as well as his appearance of either phoniness or the aloofness of wealth.
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is the next Mitt Romney and the pre-John Huntsman, except that he's acting like Hamlet (or Mario Cuomo) about making a decision, possibly due to issues with his wife, which is also (x3) an issue for Newt Gingrich.
Donald Trump...is a contingency over at NBC, which would probably like to replace him in his own series anyway.
And former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's "heart says no" (as in I just bought a really huge new house and love doing my TV show platform to pay for it). I assumed that as he bought the multi-million dollar home and has been putting weight back on again (business meals?) he wasn't running.
My father used to say that you have to be slightly crazy to want to be President. It's that kind of job. Does this make Mike Huckabee now the most sane of the top tier viable Republican Presidential candidates?
And what does that say about the 2011 Republican Party?
On Sunday, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss) defended Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's omission of slavery from his "Confederate History Month" proclamation.
Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," Barber said that the firestorm of controversy raised by McDonnell's proclamation is "just a nit". "It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly," Barbour claimed.
What's the matter with this element of the South that has convinced itself that the Confederacy was about States Rights rather than preserving the abominable institution of slavery? Ask Newsweek editor/historian Jon Meacham:
Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.
If neo-Confederates are interested in history, let’s talk history. Since Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration. In the 1880s and 1890s, after fighting Reconstruction with terrorism and after the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, states began to legalize segregation. For white supremacists, iconography of the “Lost Cause” was central to their fight; Mississippi even grafted the Confederate battle emblem onto its state flag.
But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.
In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.
Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.
As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.
Meanwhile, I would note that apart from contemporary racial issues, something that links the mentality of today’s right to the mentality of the slaveowners and segregation proponents is the white southern political tradition’s very partial and selective embrace of majoritarian democracy. As long as national institutions are substantially controlled by white southerners, the white south is a hotbed of patriotism. But as soon as an non-southern political coalition manages to win an election—as we saw in 1860 and in 2008—then suddenly the symbols of national authority become symbols of tyranny and the constitution is construed as granting conservative areas all kinds of alleged abilities to opt out of national political decisions. Even if you think opposition to the Affordable Care Act has nothing whatsoever to do with race, the underlying political philosophy by which a George W Bush or James Buchanan is a national president but an Abraham Lincoln or a Barack Obama merely a sectional one remains incoherent and pernicious.
The hell with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) calling Obama "un-American" and the likes of Newt Gingrich calling him "radical." That's all about dehumanizing our President for their own base and anyone they may be able to suck into their know-nothing vortex.
Poor Confederacy. They lost the battle to continue to the subjugation of a kidnapped race.
How galling it must be for the recidivists to have someone from that race running the country, let alone doing it so well.
There's no two ways about it. The War Between the States was called The War of Northern Aggression by some Southerners because they didn't want to give up their enslavement of African peoples. The Southern system of plantations and cotton growing was built around the ownership of human beings, making their labor wage-less, essentially free, depending how low you could keep their standards of living. By the time of the Civil War it was illegal even to educate a slave. America was and continues to be an imperfect Union constantly striving to be "more perfect" but with the exception of the genocide against the Native American population that roamed free in this country before the European settlers took over, there is no other abomination so widespread, so much of an infrastructure, as the institution of slavery. And no matter what other issues may have existed, that is the one that could not be brokered.
Cue Republican Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, supposedly some sort of new-style Republican who might even be Presidential timber. Aside from his ridiculous counter to President Obama's State of the Union Address this year, held in the Virginia legislative chambers as if to give him the heft of the Presidency, where he simply recycled previously failed GOP talking points (W. II?), he has made perhaps the gaffe of the year, all the more flagrant for having actually been planned.
McDonnell decided to declare April "Confederate History Month," which is something like proclaiming "National Socialism History Month" in present-day Germany. And just in case we don't know where McDonnell and the Virginia GOP's sympathies lie, he somehow neglected to mention slavery in his proclamation statement.
"I must condemn Governor McDonnell's Proclamation honoring 'Confederate History Month,' and its insensitive disregard of Virginia's complicated and painful history, the remnants of which many Virginians still wrestle with today,'' Johnson wrote in a statement. "The complete omission of slavery from an official government document, which purports to be a call for Virginians to 'understand' and 'study' their history, is both academically flawed and personally offensive. If Virginians are to celebrate their 'shared history,' as this proclamation suggests, then the whole truth of this history must be recognized and not evaded."
Johnson, a Democrat, was one of McDonnell's biggest supporters last year on the campaign trail. She even came to his defense when some questioned his commitment to women's rights after the publication of his 1989 graduation school thesis in which he wrote that working women were a detriment to a society. She argued as a working woman that she trusted McDonnell to be helpful in boosting the economy.
I'm guessing it will be tough for Bob to get Ms. Johnson's support for any future political office. His statement (that comes with the addendum to the declaration):
"The failure to include any reference to slavery was a mistake, and for that I apologize to any fellow Virginian who has been offended or disappointed," McDonnell wrote in a statement. "The abomination of slavery divided our nation, deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights, and led to the Civil War. Slavery was an evil, vicious and inhumane practice which degraded human beings to property, and it has left a stain on the soul of this state and nation."
He also added a clause to the proclamation that declares slavery "led to this war."
It turns out that McDonnell's been just as insensitive on this issue in the past. Per Virginia's Not Larry Sabato:
After the 2001 election where Republicans took 66 of 100 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, then-Delegate Bob McDonnell had a motion on the opening day of the 2002 session. He wanted the House of Delegates to begin reciting a "salute to the flag of the Commonwealth of Virginia". The words to the Salute had been passed in 1954 and didn't raise a red flag on their own: "I salute the flag of Virginia, with reverence and patriotic devotion to the "Mother of States and Statesmen" which it represents - the "Old Dominion," where liberty and independence were born."
Delegate Robert F. McDonnell (R-Virginia Beach), who suggested that the salute be revived, claimed ignorance of its origins but told the Times-Dispatch last week he hoped they would not detract from the sentiments it expresses. "The words are good," he said. "I don't think we should malign that great salute based on any links to the Confederacy, and I hope people will understand this."
The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus then asked that the House stop with this UDC pledge. McDonnell led the fight on the floor to keep it. The motion to do away with the pledge failed on a 50-48 vote. Having ignored the pain he was causing- McDonnell continued to lead the House in the pledge for another two years until after the 2003 elections. For those two years, members of the Black Caucus refused to participate in this "pledge".
So is Bob clueless or a Confederacy sympathizer? Ah, for the good old days, Bob. It again brings to mind this past Presidential electoral map, and it's similarity to the map of the slave/non-slave states, albeit with Virginia and North Carolina in the right in 2008.
And it looks like his apology/addendum is not sitting well with his constituency, again per TPM:
In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Brandon Dorsey, of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, called McDonnell's move "an insult," and charged that the governor had undermined the purpose of the resolution," and damaged himself with his core supporters. But another member of the group disagreed, saying he supported the apology "one hundred percent."
...
Contacted this afternoon by TPMmuckraker, Dorsey said he was unaware of McDonnell's apology. After it was read to him, Dorsey said the apology "comes as a shock," and accused the governor of "pandering to people who never would have voted for him nor supported any of his policies."
Making clear that he was speaking only for himself, Dorsey said that the apology "completely undermined the purpose of the resolution." He added: "We would probably have rather not had a proclamation whatsoever, than for him to add a clause that says that everything that we support and everything we hold dear has to do with slavery."
My father once said you have to be a little bit crazy to want to be President. You surely need a strong enough ego. And since Presidents all too often make targets (and not just for criticism, you do need some degree of courage.
But President Barack Obama must be the bravest President of all.
The ginning up of violence is well underway. Not that the most virulently racist element of American society, borne of slave owning, trading and abusing four hundred years ago, needs all that much prodding. They call it being anti-health reform, they call it fear of socialism, but when hysterical white folks are crying that the America they once knew is disappearing, that's simply code for non-white, non-straight, and even non-Christian, per Andrew Sullivan:
But the vicious anger from the far right, which is to say what is currently the right, seems totally out of proportion to these reforms.
Where does that come from? It comes from the same place as the tea-party protests. It's partisan, of course - most Republicans, including Glenn Reynolds, ignored the deficit under Bush, blamed Obama for it within minutes of his election, and never refer to the impact of the recession on deficits. But it is also surely cultural - an expression of the rage some in white America feel at the new social make-up of their country. I just sat through a PJTV segment on Sarah Palin, in which the host blithely referred to the heartland as "real America."
If that is what you really believe - that people in cities or suburbs, that minorities, that gays, that blacks and Hispanics are not part of "real America" - then of course, you are angry. You believe a fake America has taken over. You cannot understand this. So you start believing that we have a fascist/communist dictatorship, that there was some fraud allowing a non-citizen to become president, that the government is about to "take over" all healthcare provision ... and on and on. And no one is left in the GOP to challenge this, to calm it down, to present practical alternatives to the obvious crushing problems the country and the private sector have in paying for increasingly costly healthcare.
To me, this is a triumph of ideology. And conservatism is now an abstract anti-government ideology, fueled by cultural, racial and sexual resentment. This is a recipe for more violence, and more marginalization.
Even ABC News is noting the threat to the very first African American President -- and his family:
Experts who track hate groups across the U.S. are growing increasingly concerned over violent rhetoric targeted at President Obama, especially as the debate over health care intensifies and a pattern of threats emerges.
The Secret Service is investigating a Maryland man who held a sign reading "Death to Obama" and "Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids" outside a town hall meeting this week. And in New Hampshire, another man stood across the street from a Presidential town hall with his gun on full display.
Los Angeles police officers apprehended a man Thursday after a standoff with him inside a red Volkswagen Bug car in Westwood, CA [outside the Federal Building] – the latest disturbing case even though officials said the man had mental problems.
Ginned up by the usual suspects, including the most influential Republican:
Garrett said statements like one recently made by controversial radio host Rush Limbaugh comparing a logo for the White House plan to a Nazi symbol "legitimizes people who are on the edge to go do something or say something."
"And if you go and take a look at this, you will find that the Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo," Limbaugh said.
Later, someone painted a swastika outside the office of Congressman David Scott of Georgia, one of Obama's supporters.
The Secret Service is investigating a man who authorities said held a sign reading "Death to Obama" outside a town hall meeting on health-care reform in western Maryland.
The sign also read, "Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids," referring to the first name of President Barack Obama's wife, said Washington County Sheriff's Capt. Peter Lazich.
Lazich said deputies detained the unidentified, 51-year-old man near the entrance to Hagerstown Community College about 1 p.m. Wednesday after getting calls from a number of people attending the meeting held by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. Obama was not at the meeting.
The sheriff's office turned the man over to the Secret Service, Lazich said.
Paul Krugman calls the current GOP alliance with the reactionary crazies over "death panels" lies a Republican Death Trip, and he's right. Just like the Nazi's they claim to hate and try to pin on a pro-health insurance reform left, they use fearsome imagery of death, essentially more classic KKK-style hate porn, to roil the blood and make reality recede through fiery eyes.
While there's a prairie fire of racist violence always ready to spark in America, hopefully burning out by the end of our lifetimes, those with the matches feign innocence when they're earning off the very target lists they create. Just ask mass murderer -- in a Knoxville church -- Jim David Adkisson:
This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.
Rachel Maddow exposed it all last night, and everyone needs to watch, listen, and beware:
Lest we forget, the very first U.S. President to be felled by assassination was killed by a Confederate racist.
