Example response of one of those over 65 rightwignnuts “how was I supposed to know John Lewis was actaully in the Civil Rights movement?  Those n* all look alike. And, they do it just to confuse me and so they can’t be identified in a lineup.”

It’s sarcasm, clarified for the rightwing trolls .

It seems like there’s something weirder going on than just cynical political strategizing.  I mean, is a progressive equivalent to conservative poaching of the civil rights movement?  Do any liberals claim to be the true inheritors of Joe McCarthy’s legacy?

No, because the conservative movement has no legacy worth inheriting. That’s what pisses them off. The Civil Rights movement is (rightly) remembered as a brave and noble movement for justice and freedom, and it was a movement of LIBERALS. Conservatives have no such history to offer because they’ve always been on the wrong side of liberation and progress. They’re angry that we get remembered with pride and they get remembered as obstructives. Even though that’s what they are.

This guy has no shame, if Beck was older back in 1968, he and not James Earl Ray would have pulled the trigger.  MLK in the 60s to conservatives was Michael Moore, George Soros, Cindy Sheehan, and Barrack Obama rolled into one “evil, politically correct, race baiting, socialist monster.”  For Beck to even compare himself to MLK should be criminal.

So we quarantine them (metaphorically) and let them die out.

Nobody wants to inherit Joe McCarthy, though a few try to claim he was right after all.

Republicans just love to claim to be the “Party of Lincoln” even though very few black people vote for them.  To make that claim, you have to ignore the Civil Rights movement entirely as well as the Southern Strategy and the ensuing flipflop of parties.

They don’t really like claiming to be the heirs of Nixon.

“Free markets” is another one of those racist code words.  I think it was either Prager or Medved (I get them mixed up) who a while ago opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act cause it was anti-free market.  In typical conservative speak, he never claimed he was a racist and didn’t support businesses turning blacks away, just that the business owners should have had the right to and only the boycotts were necessary.

“Color blind” is another racist code word.  I hear conservatives only use that when they want liberals and blacks to shut up about their racism.  Conservatives don’t like black people unless they are like Clarence Thomas or Alan Keyes who abandon their values and principles.

It’s interesting about McCarthy, conservatives love him until it’s time to resort to their persecution complexes and then liberals are the ones being like McCarthy.

If ignorance is bliss, Beck must be the happiest man on earth.

I have said since the first racist moment that conservatives realized Barack Obama could actually win that the people you see hollering the loudest today were also the ones hollering “two, four, six, eight—we don’t wanna integrate!” outside of their high schools. Those folks are now on Medicare and still pissed off and angry about what MLK, John Lewis and so many others did to “their America” 45+ years ago.

Yeah, what have the conservatives got that anybody who’s not Ann Coulter would want?!

  I remember Rush Limbaugh suddenly discovering womens’ rights during the Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky period. Yeah, women didn’t have rights during the Clarence Thomas hearings, but when the offender was a Dem president, it was totes different. For Beck to be actually arguing that the true heirs of the civil rights movement are conservos, though…..beyond shameless.

I guess there are lots of guilty conservatives out there. Who’d want to being somebody who, say, spat on the Little Rock students? Or all that? Seriously, who would find this a point of pride except for Baggers?

Progressives do point out how some prior conservative heroes are more liberal than modern day conservatives, but that’s the closest it gets.

So we quarantine them (metaphorically) and let them die out.

Not sure how to do that, but a good step is pointing out how old they are, over and over.  The mainstream media narrative is that this conservative tea bagger crap is some fresh new thing, when it’s not only the same old right wing shit, but it’s the same old people pulling it.  Drawing attention to this fact might help, but what else can we do?

Thank goodness for Youtube. As for attention, the only kind I’m interested in their having would come from the Southern Poverty Law Center or the FBI.

grolby #3, touche. That’s one of the thousands of reasons I could never in good conscience call myself “conservative” (and in fact confuses me about why anyone with a brain and a heart and an iota of historical knowledge would do so, today—and yet some do).

The people who are seen at teabagger rallies these days are the same people you would have seen jeering and throwing things at civil rights marchers in the 60’s.  They haven’t changed their minds about racial equality, they’re still the same hateful bigots that they’ve always been, they’ve just learned to speak in code.

John Lewis is one of the few things that Georgia has to be proud of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PweuQ1OqD3Y

“Progressives do point out how some prior conservative heroes are more liberal than modern day conservatives, but that’s the closest it gets.”

Yes. By any reasonable reckoning, Lincoln, Grant, and Teddy Roosevelt were “progressive”, even if they might not have recognized that label.

But for all intents and purposes the Republican Party they belonged to was dying if not already dead by the time they were gone.  After Hoover’s inability to confront the economic challenges of the Great Depression (which, let us not forget was already well on its way before the Crash of ‘29 and while Franklin Roosevelt was elected in November of 1932, he was not able to begin his term until March 4, 1933, because this was before the ratification of the 20th Amendment), the Republican Party was pretty much over by then.

Eisenhower was mostly a blip, and Goldwater was the wooden stake pounded into the Republican Party’s corpse.  When Nixon kicked off the Southern Strategy — which combined with conservative (Southern) Democrat’s anger over Civil Rights — that was basically the final puzzle piece needed finish the two party’s philosophical swap.

Whatever the Party of Lincoln was at one time, it hasn’t been that for over a century.  And having nothing else to be proud of, they’ve sought to steal heroes from the Democrats for the last 40+ years…

1) I imagine that a lot of the old-fart conservatives of today weren’t especially conservative during the civil rights movement, even if they were troubled by the chaos at the time.  Older people frequently become more conservative due to disillusionment and anxiety in a rapidly-changing world.

2) Many people won’t admit to themselves that they think the movement was a net minus, but insist that it also created a lot of problems liberals simply won’t acknowledge—this gives them both plausible deniability wrt racism & points for (misguided and/or imaginary) rational thought.

3) Conservatives live and die by media narratives, not harsh realities, so they simply cast themselves & their fellow travelers in the hero roles regardless.

This is the unfortunate result of the good guys winning. We struggle against a movement who’s purpose is to stall and stymie all positive progress and when we win one brief struggle, we defend it until eventually even those who fought us every step of the way are suddenly “for it all along”. We’re seeing the same thing with Jesse Helms suddenly being a friend of the gay community against AIDS. Why? Because now we’ve won enough that it’s no longer seemly to have supported worsening the AIDS crisis because it “was killing undesirables”.

Regarding that, thank Bob for Youtube. It’s been an ancient tactic of regressive activists to fight and fight and fight against something and then claim “real” ownership of what they fought against. Now, we can immediately search for and remind them of their initial claim and keep them from divorcing themselves from their pasts.

There are people alive who were adults in 1965.  I’m one of them.  One of my vivid memories is trying to explain to my five-year-old daughter why the mommies and daddies in the news photo were throwing things at little kids.  A difficult conversation, ending with “What can I say?  Some people are just wrong.”

Old as I am, I grew up in a place with completely integrated schools, lived as a child in an integrated neighborhood, so it was hard for me to understand it too.  Some people were just wrong.  And they still are.

Lincoln, Grant, and Teddy Roosevelt were “progressive”, even if they might not have recognized that label.

No, “progressive” was TR’s word.  Quit the Republicans; ran for president as a member of the Progressive Party.

I think that baby boomer conservatives have kinda forgotten what they did in the 1960s.  Since the narrative of that time period is the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, and hippies, they might somehow think that they were a part of at least one of those things.  Its like how way more people in France claim to have been part of the Resistance than could possibly have done anything.  Or like people claiming to have been at Woodstock when they weren’t.  Or hell, people claiming to have voted for Obama right after the election even though they actually either didn’t vote or voted for McCain.

I also assume that this forgetting helps them feel better about what actually happened during that time period.  A number of them are probably kind of ashamed about that they were actually like back then even thought they still hold the same beliefs.  How could you support the beatings and killings of civil rights activists and not feel bad about it later?  It is totally horrific.  Which is why they get all worked up by anything that reminds them of the civil rights movement.  They don’t want to be remind of what terrible people they are.

It bothers me more when democrats decide they are the heirs of Nixon.

Shorter conservative movement: Fucking ni**#$s are too stupid and lazy to understand that racism’s over.

“Free markets” is another one of those racist code words.

...

“Color blind” is another racist code word.

“Law and order.” Law is great; it’s written down, you can read it, you have your day in court if you’re accused of breaking it and there’s a clear (if difficult) procedure if you want to try to change it. What is “order”? Where can I find out what that is? Who decides what it is? How can I go about changing it? The answer to all three of those questions is “Shut the f^&* up, boy.”

People who are secure, and honest with themselves, don’t get more narrow-minded as they grow older. Let’s not make excuses for those who do. Indeed, some people are just wrong.

Also, John Lewis will always have an honored place in US history. Glenn Beck? He’ll be forgotten 5 minutes after he goes off the air.

In a few years Beck and his ilk will have convinced themselves they were at Woodstock.

Comment #6: Caren-Sun-blocking Creator of Animorphic Pancakes on 03/24 at 09:38 AM

Nobody wants to inherit Joe McCarthy, though a few try to claim he was right after all.

Oh, some folks sure do want to inherit Joe McCarthy, and they don’t content themselves with just claiming he was right; they revise high school history textbooks to say so.

Damn, and here I went and joined the Student Non-coordinated Violence Committee.

That and Students for Violent Non-action.

My theory is that the conservative movement provides a home for terminal losers.  They see themselves as an embattled minority, fighting the good fight against the inevitable march of social progress. They are most happy and comfortable in a role where they can portray themselves as victims.  Their behavior during the healthcare debate provides plenty of evidence for the fact that the regressives are in their glory when they are marginalized, standing on the sidelines and whimpering.  It’s truly pathetic.

“Oh, some folks sure do want to inherit Joe McCarthy, and they don’t content themselves with just claiming he was right; they revise high school history textbooks to say so.”

“Looking for a challenge?  Want to work in a job where your Future, and your Past, are unlimited?  Come join the Information Professionals at the Ministry of Truth!  We’re looking for a few good Americans who know their way around a Memory Hole.  Join us and make history!

The Ministry of Truth:  Where Truthiness Reigns Supreme!...”

“In a few years Beck and his ilk will have convinced themselves they were at Woodstock.”

Didn’t he call himself Wavy Gravy?  Or was that Limbaugh?...

I haven’t read the comments yet. 
My fundie Mom was not a fundie in the 60s.  She took us to anti-war rallies, peace marches of other sorts, anti segregation events, etc in CA between 1966 and 1970, a young mother with small children and babies.  She has been known, in recent times, to watch Fox.  She forwards e-mail that makes me cringe and write back to ask if she even realized what she sent and usually add a remark hoping she did not send it to my mixed-racial younger brother.
The people who watch Fox weren’t all on the racist side in the 60s; she’s the proof.

Do any liberals claim to be the true inheritors of Joe McCarthy’s legacy?

A bully and fraud who drank himself to death after the Senate finally stood up to him? No thanks. (It’s instructive that Ann Coulter still thinks he’s a hero.)

I’m sure the stalwarts of the civil rights movement sleep sounder knowing that Glenn Beck is there to defend their legacy.

Chiming in with others: if my family is any indication, a sizable number of these people weren’t that conservative back in the ‘60s.  There are a lot of middle-class white guys (also women, but especially guys) who have gotten more conservative with age and feel kind of guilty about it.  This particular right-wing line is for their benefit.  It’s probably very reassuring for them to be told they’re still champions of freedom even as they oppose equality for women and minorities.

“How dare they!” say conservatives, often implying that they’re the real inheritors of the legacy, because free markets and color blindness and shit.

This all fits in with their trotting out the phrase “Party of Lincoln”, as Lincoln was the first GOP President in American history.  In the past 150 years, there have been precisely three Republican presidents who could be considered progressive to some degree, and they’ve all been dead for generations - Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower.

When the issue of the Civil Rights movement gets brought up, they point to the Southern Democrats and the younger version of Robert Byrd to try to make their case that we’re “the real racists.”

The only problem with that argument is that following passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, most of the Southen Democrats stopped being Democrats and switched to the GOP - most notably Strom Thurmond.  In the case of Robert Byrd, his views shifted over time, and he has long since expressed regret over his intolerance in his younger years.  As recently as 1994, a high-profile Southern U.S. Senator switched parties, ostensibly because the Democrats had no room left for the racists - Richard Shelby of Alabama, who is still in the Senate today.

Nixon’s healthcare plan was actually pretty good:

Of course, Nixon was also the last president to spend more on social programmes than the military.  Nixon was a good president, probably none have been better since (maybe Clinton).  People get all confused because it seems he was a bad person, but that’s mostly a different question.

And of course there is always the revision of the cause being fought over: The South didn’t secede on account of slavery, oh, no.  And the Wehrmacht rolled into Ukraine to save them from Commie barbarism.

Whenever people try to give credit to Nixon for being “progressive”, remember he had a Democratic congress to work with, so they should get most the credit.

With your very own eyes, you’ve seen how the conservative movement grew out of opposition to the civil rights legislation passed by LBJ, and how the progressive movement grew out of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the time.

Interestingly enough, immediately after the HCR bill was passed, Newt Gingrich made the claim that this would “destroy the Democratic Party for decades just as LBJ’s support of Civil Rights legislation destroyed the Democratic Party for 40 years.”

Now, as I understand it, the official GOP line is that HCR is the worst legislation evah, it will bring about Armageddon, and that America died on March 22, 2010.  They think it’s bad, bad, bad.

So one must deduce that if Gingrich is comparing HCR to the Civil Rights Act, he is therefore directly implying that he believes the Civil Rights Act was a horrible mistake for America.

I only have question for Mr. Gingrich - why won’t you just wear your pointy white hat openly in public?  You seem almost proud of your racism, why don’t you just own that shit, you coward?

Nobody wants to inherit Joe McCarthy, though a few try to claim he was right after all.

Notably Ann Coulter, who used her column after her father’s death to say that she’s had precisely two heroes in her lifetime - her recently passed father and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.  She genuinely believes that McCarthy’s legacy was tarnished in a smear campaign, and claims that history has vindicated him and shown him to be a great patriot.

Like others have pointed out, lots of wingnuts weren’t wingnuts back in the 60s, and may have actually fought for civil rights (or at least supported the struggle from in front of their TVs).  I suspect part of what’s going on is that people aren’t seeing themselves as having switched sides on these issues, even though they have, because it was such a gradual process.  To them, their political ideologies have undergone a logical progression over the years, and of course they never stopped thinking of themselves as “the good guys,” so clearly everyone opposed to how they feel now must be against freedom and the American Way, right?

“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.” - Mark Twain

“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.” - Mark Twain

Bingo, again. When we look back at what conservatives stood for (well, more like “against”) in 18th- and 19th-century Europe (and Canada/US)... Don’t these middle-class wasp male teabaggers know that their forefathers never wanted them to have, for instance, a goddamned vote? A piece of property? A reasonable workday? They need to get on their knees and thank the sky-mouse for the libruls and radikals who fought for what so-called human rights these sons were born with and take for granted every breathing minute.

The mind boggles over the degree of freaktitude.

“Chiming in with others: if my family is any indication, a sizable number of these people weren’t that conservative back in the ‘60s.”

...and then there’s my family, where people like my dad are just about as conservative now as they were back then.  Dammit.

I’m sure my dad was as alarmed by the Civil Rights marchers and MLK as Teabaggers are alarmed by Obama today.  And I don’t he’s learned much since then either, judging by his current race/gender/orientation views…

...okay, I guess he’s a little better…

...just a little…

I question how liberal these guys actually were, though. If they were still saying they were liberal after they got their clothes back on and, say, actually called the girl the next day, maybe they were. Or maybe they were young.  Maybe it was easier to give a shit about other people when it was the cool thing to do, the rebellious thing to do. Maybe it’s easier today to be the supposedly rebellious anti-PC crusader, as so many of them seem to be. Yeah, fight on against….fighting racism. Ahem.

DTG,  it’s stuff like that that makes me wonder if she has something wrong with her. Christ only knows what her father was like, but McCarthy’s record is well, a matter of record. Oh, wait, I forget—-it’s a commie conspiracy. If you don’t have the proof, the commies took it.

@47 I wonder about this as well; in any sufficiently numerous group, a small but substantive portion will join for no other reason than that the group is sufficiently numerous.

Could this be the unifying field theory of Nice Guys and feudeo-Christians?  People acted like identifying as a feminist would get them laid, it didn’t, and now they’re pushing hard in the opposite direction?

Well, it’s not going to work for them now, is it? Probably nothing will make anybody want to fuck them and they know it. But also they still probably view women who don’t have to be talked into sex as sluts anyway, and while they don’t want ‘damaged goods’ they also know that those women wouldn’t take them on a platter. So it’s a kind of ‘I’m rejecting you so you can’t reject me’ kind of thing. Of course, those women aren’t human beings to them. A limited number of possessions—-er, women—-are human beings to these guys, and even then they can be tossed aside, too, if they do something heinous. In my own family, my oldest sister was disowned by our mom once, for example. For the wingnuts, if you listen to them talk about women, they yearn for more severe punishments, for the ability to inflict worse.

  All of this makes these guys rage inside. And outside. Voila—-Glenn Beck.

And of course there is always the revision of the cause being fought over: The South didn’t secede on account of slavery, oh, no.

To be fair, very few people actually claim this, because it’s so easily refuted. Just read the secession resolutions.

Confederate apologists usually put forth a much more slippery argument, along the lines of “The average Union soldier wasn’t fighting for the end of slavery.” This has the advantage of sounding like it means something while actually being utterly irrelevant. How many of the men who stormed the beaches of France on June 4, 1944, were saying to themselves, “I’m going to save the Jews from being murdered by Hitler”? Probably some, but I daresay the great majority were there because of a combination of circumstances and patriotism unconnected to specific aspects of Nazi abuse.

Well, there was the draft back then, but there was also the feeling of avenging a great wrong. I seem to recall reading that the death camps didn’t cause as much horror as you might think when Allied troops discovered them.  Without Pearl Harbor, the US might have stayed out of the war entirely.

I think the Obama administration should quietly institute a “fuck with Glenn Beck” week, where Obama declares on Monday that All Americans need to take their guns to church with them to stay safe, then on Tuesday, he declares that every teenage girl will be required to have one abortion to graduate, on Wednesday we discover that a statue of John Maynard Keynes will be erected in front of the IRS, and then on Thursday he will announce his plans to put Ronald Regan on the $50 bill, and on Friday, he will declare that he will be opening up the Ronald Regan Museum of Homosexual History…

And of course there is always the revision of the cause being fought over: The South didn’t secede on account of slavery, oh, no.  And the Wehrmacht rolled into Ukraine to save them from Commie barbarism.

You’re forgetting that in Wingnut land, the Wehrmacht were the forces of liberalism.  It’s “National SOCIALISM” after all…

It’s “National SOCIALISM” after all…

And it’s “Liberal FASCISM” after all…

Is it the contention of this site and its followers that every conservative is racist by default?

A lot of people keep mentioning that people get more conservative as they get older, or a lot of these people were liberal back in the 60’s.

That’s fundamentally untrue.  The baby boomers are, and have always been, the most conservative generation.

A very small portion of them redefined liberalism and were the vanguard of Civil Rights and the anti-war movement.

But the vast majority were the people throwing bricks at Martin Luther King, Jr and showing up at rallies for Governor Wallace. 

The anti-war movement gained a lot of speed and strength when the so-called “Greatest Generation” signed on.  The people who came before the boomers and after the boomers are much more liberal on average than the boomers themselves. 

Remember, before fighting World War II, the “greatest generation” fought the Great Depression.  Read the literature of that era, the stories of that era.  People pulled together to overcome.  They elected the most liberal President we’ve ever had 3 times in a row.  And probably would have elected him a 4th time if he ran again, had he not passed away. 

And the people who came after are growing more and more liberal.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some old folks who are pretty conservative, but they’ve got nothing on their kids.

The masses of resentful, angry young people were the core of George Wallace’s support nationwide.  They hated civil rights protestors, anti-war protestors, hippies, whatever.  They were the straight-laced kids who thought that Reagan was pretty swell (and now think of him as a Saint). 

I think it had something to do with the flight to suburbia.  People lost a sense of community, of helping each other out.  I’m not saying the cities were great places - ethnic enclaves tend to be very insular.  But within that insulated community, people trust one another and help one another out.  When those communities broke down, first with the post-WWII prosperity and the highways being built and the opportunity to escape the nastier side of the city, then with blockbusting and all-out white flight, people stopped trusting.  Your family didn’t have that strong bond with the neighbors anymore.  Add in the prosperity, and the loss of the feeling of struggle that resulted in the solidarity of the various political movements of the late 19th and pre-war 20th Century, and the liberal impulse that drove people together broke down.

Instead of kids growing up in a strong community, they grew up in a much more isolated suburb, unaware of struggle.  They grew up entitled.  And then these black people started showing up and demanding rights.  And they saw it as an attack on their entitlement.  Add in anti-communist witch-hunts and the fear of nuclear annihilation, and these kids grew up full of fear and anxiety.

As a result, most of them became conservatives. 

I think.  This is far from a fully thought out thesis.

Is it the contention of this site and its followers that every conservative is racist by default?

No.  Only apparantly most of those loudly claiming to speak for “conservatism” in America.

I’m sure there are still reasonable and thoughtful conservatives left in the States.  They’re just damned quiet about it, probably because they don’t want to be associated with the wingnuts.

Just a brief test for conservative “racism” - do they support the detention and interrogation of anyone possibly associated with Muslim bombers attacking US soldiers?  Do they support the detention and interrogation of anyone possibly associated with right-wing domestic terrorism?  If the answer to those two questions is different, there’s grounds to suspect that they consider brown people with funny names to have less rights than white people with Christian names.

Somehow, the main audience for right wing punditry has managed to suppress their own memories of the era, feeling now like they supported anti-racism initiatives that they probably didn’t

Wow. This is just like how in 1947 120% of France turns out to have been in the Resistance, and 200% of Germany were in the underground.

As far as demographics goes, I have it on the highest authority that print-and-ink newspaper readers
are older, less educated, more set in their ways—socially, culturally and tech-wise, and not getting any richer (insert fancy term here) compared to non-readers or web-news-consumers. Plus the former are extra concerned with the presence of youths on their lawns.

All these issues are seen as a problem for the papers, while magically are not a weakness for Fox News.

Of course, Nixon was also the last president to spend more on social programmes than the military.  Nixon was a good president, probably none have been better since (maybe Clinton).  People get all confused because it seems he was a bad person, but that’s mostly a different question.

This is way wrong.  Nixon was NOT a good President.  The man was a paranoid with delusions of grandeur.  He was; however, a genius as a political tactician.

He had little interest in domestic matters, and any interest in domestic matters went no further than determine the path that maximized his political gain and weakened his enemies the most.

He was also a traitor, which inherently (I think) makes him a bad President.  He had Kissinger blow up the peace negotiations in France prior to the 1968 election in order to ensure that the war remained a political issue.  The negotiations were drawing to a close, and would have resulted in an end to the war and a withdrawal of American soldiers in 1969 (if memory serves), but Kissinger killed it.  Why Kissinger was working in such a high capacity for the Johnson administration, I don’t know.  But it was Nixon’s call. 

He created the EPA as part of a plan to eradicate any number of independent agencies (career bureaucrats tended to vote Democratic) and replace them with agencies under the White House’s authority (with the President hiring and firing the top staff at those agencies at will).  The EPA was created to ensure that an independent Environmental Commission wouldn’t be enacted.  He wanted to eliminate the FCC, the NLRB, the SEC, the FEC, so on and so forth.  They would be moved over to the White House and placed under his control.

If the EPA was an independent commission, a la the SEC, with an independent Chair and an independent Board, and an independent budget, it would be much more effective at setting environmental policy, and somewhat (at least) insulated from political interference. 

He wanted to destroy the Brookings Institute, which he considered (according to Rick Perlstein) a government-in-exile (due to the number of former Kennedy officials working there) and a threat.

He pushed for the 18-year-old vote in order to split the Democratic Party in two, and to accelerate his Southern Strategy.

He IMPLEMENTED THE FUCKING SOUTHERN STRATEGY.  He also supported eliminating the Electoral College.  The effort failed, but he supported it to ensure that the racist vote would vote Republican.  He feared that George Wallace could win enough states to prevent him from gaining a pluralty of the electoral vote in 1972. 

He saw enemies everywhere.  Watergate wasn’t the first, only, or most egregious violation of rights conducted under the Nixon administration. 

He was a genius when it came to the political game, but the man was not a good President.

I’m sure there are still reasonable and thoughtful conservatives left in the States.  They’re just damned quiet about it, probably because they don’t want to be associated with the wingnuts.

Just a brief test for conservative “racism” - do they support the detention and interrogation of anyone possibly associated with Muslim bombers attacking US soldiers?  Do they support the detention and interrogation of anyone possibly associated with right-wing domestic terrorism?  If the answer to those two questions is different, there’s grounds to suspect that they consider brown people with funny names to have less rights than white people with Christian names.

As a conservative I appreciate your answer.  The answer to both questions you proposed should be an unequivocal yes on both counts.  Except the answer to your first question is problematic in that answering yes gives support to an unjustifiable war started by the neocon machine that was the Bush administration. 

Here’s the thing about true conservativism and its followers, the type not steeped in religious dogma and neocon interventionism…most oppose the Iraq war, support women’s reproductive autonomy, support same-sex marriage, and favor green industry.  Unfortunately the Glenn Becks of the world have hijacked the movement and sent it spiraling into the abyss of public discourse.  I’m here to tell you the GOP is niether conservative nor even remotely credible at this point.  So here I stand on an island while neocons say they’re conservatives and support an unwinnable war and give a surreptitious wink to the Constitution, while liberals understandably dismiss the right as a bunch of nuts toting guns willing to shoot on sight.

Well, there’s no where else to put it: Sarah Palin’s new slogan is “Don’t retreat, reload” and George Bush was videoed shaking a Haitian’s hand—-then wiping it off on Bill Clinton’s shirt after making an “EW” face.

Stay classy, conservos.

So here I stand on an island while neocons say they’re conservatives and support an unwinnable war and give a surreptitious wink to the Constitution, while liberals understandably dismiss the right as a bunch of nuts toting guns willing to shoot on sight.

whelp, if you support a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, you sure can’t call yourself a Republican.  Unless you live in Illinois.  Illinois will elect pro-choice Republicans to statewide/federal office.  It won’t elect forced gestationists.  Same for your other stated beliefs: they aren’t conservative.  They are progressive and liberal positions.

The conservative position is the traditional position and hates change.

On to happier thoughts, Sarah Palin has facebooked again.  She’s whining about this illegal takeover that most Americans didn’t want.  She says it’s time to act and to take back the 20 districts that she and McCain won that have Dems that voted for healthcare.

That’s only slightly crazy, but here’s the kicker: she has a graphic up of the USA with puts crosshairs on every representatives hometown.

If you facebook, go to her notes, report the photo as graphic and violent.  This shit has to stop.

Beck may not remember the sixties, but he probably has some vivid recollections of the year 1990…

Oops.  I’ve said too much.

and on Friday, he will declare that he will be opening up the Ronald Regan Museum of Homosexual History…

OMG, that would be better than the George W. Bush sewage treatment plant.  Maybe when Nancy passes on, we can get Ron Jr. to work on that.

Of course, it seems a shame to sully something as useful as a sewage treatment plant or as interesting as a Museum of Homosexual History with the names of these bozos.

“Is it the contention of this site and its followers that every conservative is racist by default?”

Of course not.  Just because nearly every hardcore, unrepentant racist is a conservative doesn’t mean that every conservative is racist…

And probably would have elected him a 4th time if he ran again, had he not passed away.

FDR did run a 4th time, and he won.

He died on April 12, 1945, less than three months into his fourth term (and 18 days before Adolf Hitler committed suicide).  His presidency lasted 12 years, 1 month, and 13 days.  The 20th Amendment, passed in 1933, revised the presidential inauguration date from March 4th to January 20th, and FDR was the last president to begin his presidency in March following his first election.

Beck may not remember the sixties, but he probably has some vivid recollections of the year 1990…

Oh, are you talking about the year that Mr. Beck raped and murdered that young woman?

I think the Baby Boom generation (my own) was seen as a lot more “liberal” than it actually was because of its opposition to the Vietnam War. A lot of that opposition had less to do with outrage that the U.S. was in a silly, pointless war, than that the U.S. in a silly, pointless war that we could get drafted into.

It’s instructive that opposition to the war melted away when the draft ended (which happened, IIRC, shortly before the U.S. actually pulled out of Vietnam). Nixon made a bargain with the American people (specifically young American men), which every president since has renewed implicitly: Give me the power to start wars without involving Congress, and I won’t make you fight in them.

(Full disclosure, if anyone cares: I was 16 when the draft ended and so didn’t have to make any hard choices.)

This is way wrong.  Nixon was NOT a good President.  The man was a paranoid with delusions of grandeur.  He was; however, a genius as a political tactician.

Correct.  Not a good man, not a good president, but indisputably one of the shrewdest political minds in Washington in the last century.  He was a fucking monster, but he was also one of the smartest monsters to ever occupy the Oval Office.

That said, it is valid to point out that the domestic policy enacted during his tenure would likely be considered a socialist Armageddon by wingnuts if put forth under a Democratic administration today.  I haven’t studied it, so I can’t verify the veracity of the claim, but I have heard it claimed that Nixon’s proposal for healthcare reform was actually a little more progressive than the proposal we just passed.

It’s instructive that opposition to the war melted away when the draft ended

Well that’s a conservative(*) position then - “It’s only terrible if it affects me”.

(*) With respect to Prankaplegic, defined as Real Conservatism.

The opposition to the war is far from over.  There are protests on a weekly basis somewhere in America many of which draw hundreds or thousands of people.  They aren’t being reported on by corporate media because it wouldn’t help to divide people and sell them GOP talking points.  Instead we get massive coverage of a couple di.ck.hea.d Teabaggers holding signs, as if that’s news.

Beck is the conservative cheerleader and he’s a moron, literally a complete moron.  How much of a future do you think Beck or the Conservative movement has?

Confederate apologists usually put forth a much more slippery argument, along the lines of “The average Union soldier wasn’t fighting for the end of slavery.” This has the advantage of sounding like it means something while actually being utterly irrelevant. How many of the men who stormed the beaches of France on June 4, 1944, were saying to themselves, “I’m going to save the Jews from being murdered by Hitler”? Probably some, but I daresay the great majority were there because of a combination of circumstances and patriotism unconnected to specific aspects of Nazi abuse.

Which (this may have been what you were getting at) is an attempt to obscure the cause of the war by focusing on the North’s motivations. The North got into the war to preserve the union. The South got into the war to keep their slaves.

He was also a traitor, which inherently (I think) makes him a bad President.  He had Kissinger blow up the peace negotiations in France prior to the 1968 election in order to ensure that the war remained a political issue.  The negotiations were drawing to a close, and would have resulted in an end to the war and a withdrawal of American soldiers in 1969 (if memory serves), but Kissinger killed it.  Why Kissinger was working in such a high capacity for the Johnson administration, I don’t know.  But it was Nixon’s call.

Nixon was not the president prior to the 1968 election; he was sworn in in January 1969.

This has been your historical fact of the day!

Here’s the thing about true conservativism and its followers, the type not steeped in religious dogma and neocon interventionism…most oppose the Iraq war, support women’s reproductive autonomy, support same-sex marriage, and favor green industry.  Unfortunately the Glenn Becks of the world have hijacked the movement and sent it spiraling into the abyss of public discourse.

Er, have you heard of the No True Scotsman fallacy?

Well, isn’t this lovely news I just caught…

It appear that Mr. Jim Hoft - better known to most here as Gateway Pundit - decided it would be real clever to show up at the private home of my Congressman, Rep. Russ Carnahan, and leave a coffin on his front lawn.

Throwing bricks through Democratic Party office windows, cutting the gas line at the home of a Democratic Congressman’s brother, spitting and screaming racist and homophobic epithets at Democratic Representatives?  Sarah Palin creating a website with gun target symbols on Congressional districts where she wants to “take out” the sitting Democratic Congressperson?  Hell, they’ve even turned on their own - Rep. Stupak has been getting numerous harrassing phone calls, including a few death threats.

So, seriously, how long until these degenerate subhuman pieces of shit start burning crosses again?

Seriously, fuck these people.  Part of me thinks we should start posting THEIR home phone numbers here so we can fire it right back at them.  I’m not being serious, but damn these fucksticks are pushing it bigtime.

Sorry about the threadjack, but the temptation to jump into DTG and Ginmar’s conversation about Ann Coulter is too strong. Her column after her father’s death convinced me of how badly she needs professional help. Non-exhaustive list of examples below:

- She worships her dad for, among other things, threatening his brother if he ever took a sociology course. Imagine Christina Crawford writing “Mommy Dearest” as a paean to Joan Crawford instead of an expose, and you get a pretty good idea of Coulter’s take on her dad (who’s never “dad” but always “father”, by the way).

- Her account of her parents’ courtship and marriage would make a Victorian seem comparably open-minded and casual. It reads like David Lynch’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”. Really creepy.

Though I continue to dislike Coulter, I have to admit that, after reading that particular column, I found it impossible not to feel sorry for her as well. I only read her column once, years ago, yet I still shiver when I remember it.

cutting the gas line at the home of a Democratic Congressman’s brother

What really gets me mad about this one, it that the guy who posted it basically said, “Well, oops, but until I get the real address, I’m just going to leave it as is”.  Oh, and that “Who could have ever thought that posting the Congressman’s address would lead to violence!  I sure didn’t mean for that to happen…that’s crazy!” spiel that he also said (and, of course, I’m paraphrasing greatly - the actual words made me far too angry).

Malkin does the same thing too - “Oh, heavens! Who would think that there would be violence and threats if I post this address?  Not I!”  I hate these people with the intensity of intenseness…vile assholes, the lot of them, trying to distance themselves from the consequences of their hateful and violent rhetoric.

They won’t get to the cross burning point - they’ll get to the shooting/bombing point.  They’re dangerous thugs.

That’s SOP for these assholes: What he actually said about the wrong address was chilingly cold and indifferent: “Whoops, collateral damage.” They’ve basically dehumanized everybody who disagrees with them, just like….terrorists.

  SporkeyO, they’re already at the shooting/bombing point. Remember the abortion wars? They’re just expanding the battlefield. Maybe people will start giving a shit if they have to face some facsimile of the terror women and those who do give a shit about women have been facing for forty years.

  Ann Coulter’s….thing…..about her dad reminds me of the way when you talk about child abuse, people always go…“Oh, I was spanked when I was a kid and I turned out great!”

No to minimize it at all, but I believe it was a propane tank; they have nifty safe guards.

I believe the family smelled something or felt bad or something. Those safeguards, though—-are they against mechanical failure of whatever sort, or against human malice?

Natural gas or propane has had an odor added to it after a catastrophic explosion that took place in the 1930s, ginmar:

In any form, a minute amount of odorant such as t-butyl mercaptan, with a rotting-cabbage-like smell, is added to the otherwise colorless and almost odorless gas, so that leaks can be detected before a fire or explosion occurs. Sometimes a related compound, thiophane is used, with a rotten-egg smell. Adding odorant to natural gas began in the United States after the 1937 New London School explosion. The buildup of gas in the school went unnoticed, killing three hundred students and faculty when it ignited. Odorants are considered non-toxic in the extremely low concentrations occurring in natural gas delivered to the end user.