The GOP hasn’t been Lincolnite since Teddy Roosevelt left the White House.

oh my. i did not realize david duke was still an influential man.

and yeah, i cant believe the republican party honestly thinks it’s the party of lincoln. in nothing more than name! silly people.

“I’ve told (Dinerstein) I’m not a white supremacist; that’s an insult. I would describe myself as a white person who is concerned about discrimination against white people.”

...

Duke said the historic election has helped galvanize support for the causes he believes in: “Obama enables people to see more clearly. It makes it clear we’re losing control of our country.”

He said he does not condone violence and wants a “peaceful revolution” that ends racial preferences for minorities and promotes the civil liberties of whites.

Echoing what Duke and his father say about themselves, Derek Black says he never uses the term “white supremacist.”

^ AND YET.

i fail to understand how white civil liberties are in danger.

I dunno, maybe they should take a look into why folks like Black get elected by other republicans.  Maybe Mr. Dinerstein should take a good look at his party to see if he fits in

“It makes it clear we’re losing control of our country.”

What “we”, asshole?

Rather than trying to convince white supremacists not to run, wouldn’t it be more effective to convince your rank-and-file members not to vote for them?

The new big tent: now young racists are welcome!!!!

The modern GOP…  Speaking to youth!

Ben D, I prefer the original. “Who’s ‘we,’ white man?”

As an interesting side note, there’s a nasty history of white supremacist groups attempting virus-like takeovers of unrelated organizations in the hope of using the legitimacy of the unrelated organization to introduce their ideas into the mainstream discourse.  The Sierra Club, for example, has been targeted by nativist groups more than once. http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=47.

Which is not to say that this is directly parallel, of course.  The Republican Party explicitly has a problem with Derek Black’s white supremacist activities (except for being a member of the Republican party, one presumes) as the Sierra Club objected to those of the nativist takeover. But the nativist takeover strained to fit its anti-immigration platform into the Sierra Club’s charter.  Black reads straight from the Republican libretto on affirmative action: “I would describe myself as a white person who is concerned about discrimination against white people.”

“Or are you simply worried that somebody might figure out that while not all current Republicans are racists, virtually all racists are currently Republicans?… “

Haven’t spent a lot of time in urban America have you. Plenty of Democrats—registered, voting, running, and being elected Democrats—are as racist as any southern Republican. They may even have voted for Obama, considering they hate Republicans or are at least as distrustful of them as they do and are of blacks. But believe me, they exist in liberal (excuse the expression) numbers.

shorter bo: “i know you are, but what am I?” any evidence that this is a widespread epidemic and not just, you know, random individuals being random individuals?

and hey guess what, ‘democrat’ doesn’t mean you’re perfect. nor does calling yourself a democrat even mean you actually have liberal beliefs. do you not get this whole human thing? like, nobody is actually perfect? so some democrats may be racist assholes too? Well fuck them along with the racist assholes who call themselves republican. maybe we can get the dem assholes to break off and join the republicans again, dixiecrat style.

However, when faced with the prospect of a white supremacist having a guiding voice in your party, it would be a great start if rather than using a technicality to get them to go away, you set it up so that white supremacists don’t feel comfortable running for seats in the first place.

I’m not being flip about this: Republicans can’t afford to make racists uncomfortable with the GOP. They’ve spent the last three decades pandering to those people, inviting them in. They’ve done so even as they pointedly sent everyone in their party leadership who found the policy objectionable packing, telling them they weren’t “real” Republicans.  They put racists in office. They spent the last 36 years looking for ways to appeal to racists, and to values that accompany racism—religiosity, anti-intellectualism, prudery, sexism, paranoia—which is impossible to do over that period of time without internalizing those values.  In the last election, the Republican base supported their candidates primarily by coming up with endless, lie-based euphemisms (“Muslim,” “Kenyan birth certificate,” “Communist,” etc.) for pointing out that the Democratic nominee was black.

If Republican lose the racists, they have no one. May as well sell the office furniture, throw themselves a big bash and retire.

I think this is great. I personally have no problem at all with the GOP being the party of fundies, racists, and tinfoil hat wearing vaccination conspiratorialists.

Convenient having them all in one place, really.

Fuck, Andrew, you beat me to it.

Please, crazies, go right on ahead and join the Republicans.  I mean, really, it makes it easier for the sane people to take a second look at their allies and go, “Oh, shit!”  We will then have a lot more of Us.

This is nothing but good for us.

However, letting these assholes influence any kind of policy, on the other hand…

I’ve lived in Texas almost my whole life - never (to my knowledge) met a clansman. I just don’t understand how anyone could be in the KKK. My last boyfriend was from Arkansas and regaled me with stories of full-costumed KKK members trying to collect donations in traffic. I was horrified. He laughed and said that the national pastime was throwing stuff (cans, newspapers, etc.) out your car at the clansmen as you drove past. He said everyone did that. I marvelled that they could still find members, with all that social disapproval - maybe it increases the victim-mentality that they lap up?

Seems like the KKK “new” members (they all seem pretty old) are using the “family heritage” crap excuse that the confederate flag wavers use.

You people are crazy.  There is plenty to disagree with Republicans about without calling them all racists and somehow questioning the sincerity of their desire not to be associated with, you know, Klan Grand Wizards or whatever.  I mean, Michael Steel will be running the Republican party while Senator Byrd is still the most senior Democrat in the Senate.  I’ll admit this doesn’t mean much, unless, of course, you start calling the Republican Party fundamentally racist like you just did.

It will take the Jim Crow Party a couple of generations of complete cleansing before any sensible amount of minorities would even piss on them.

Senator Byrd

has apologized for his past deeds, while Haley Barbour, Tom Delay and Trent Lott have all associated with the Conservative Citizens Council.

Michael Steele is a liar:

After a September 26, 2002 gubernatorial debate, which had occurred without reported incident, Paul Schurick, Ehrlich’s communications manager, claimed that the Townsend campaign handed out Oreo cookies to the audience.[24] Five days after the debate, Steele said that one or more Oreo cookies had rolled to his feet during the debate suggesting a racist statement against him. “Maybe it was just someone having their snack, but it was there,” Steele said. “If it happened, shame on them if they are that immature and that threatened by me.” At the time of the debate, Schurick had not mentioned any such incident, but in November 2005 he claimed “It was raining Oreos… They were thick in the air like locusts. I was there. It was very real. It wasn’t subtle.”[25] In a November 2005 Hannity and Colmes appearance, Steele agreed with Hannity that cookies were thrown at him.[26] Neil Duke of the Baltimore NAACP, who moderated the debate, praised the “passionate audience” and noted their “derisive behavior”[24] but did not see such behavior. “Were there some goofballs sitting in [the] right-hand corner section tossing cookies amongst themselves and acting like sophomores, as the legend has it?” Duke said. “I have no reason to doubt those sources; I just didn’t see it.”[25][27][28] The operations manager of the building where the debate was held, interviewed three years after the event by the Baltimore Sun, disputed Steele’s claim and said “I was in on the cleanup, and we found no cookies or anything else abnormal. There were no Oreo cookies thrown.”[25] Some eyewitnesses including AP reporter Tom Stuckey who was at the event have said cookies were handed out.[29][30][31] Other eyewitnesses could not corroborate Steele and Schurick’s claim.[32][33]

Party of Lincoln?——Proudly!

from GOP 2004 Platform:  “In 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois carried the Republican banner in the
Presidential election and was elected the Party’s first President. He became our nation’s
greatest leader and one of our Party’s greatest heroes. “

Byrd has a 100% rating from the NAACP and has since the mid 1970s. Give the man a break, he was born during fucking World War I, is white, from the South, and saw the light. You can’t say the same for Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond.

The latter two became Republicans, to top it all off. If Byrd really still believed like he did in the 50s, he would have switched over to the GOP in the 70s rather than reversing himself on every single civil rights issue and staying that way for 30+ years.

All I want to know is how do they keep their heads from exploding when they call themselves the “party of Lincoln” while waving the Confederate flag?

You people are crazy.  There is plenty to disagree with Republicans about without calling them all racists and somehow questioning the sincerity of their desire not to be associated with, you know, Klan Grand Wizards or whatever.  I mean, Michael Steel will be running the Republican party while Senator Byrd is still the most senior Democrat in the Senate.

Funny how the only Democrat you can come up with is Sen. Byrd, who repudiated the Klan 30 years ago. 

Meanwhile, you have yet to repudiate Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond.  You are known by the company you keep.

(And Michael Steele hasn’t been elected RNC chair yet.  Come talk to us when he is.)

Party of Lincoln? Someone should tell Lindsey Graham. He said something about South Carolinians not being over Lincoln.

If you’re a right-wing extremist who wants to get involved in mainstream electoral politics in a two-party country, the rational thing to do is to work within the right-of-center party.  It doesn’t really say that much about how right-of-center the Republican party is that someone decided to do this.  This is really a pretty low-level position; I don’t have any examples but I suspect that you could probably dig up some similar examples of far-left activists who’ve won positions like this in the Democratic party.

Here’s an example:

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-young-communist-league-infiltrates.html
http://www.smartvoter.org/2008/11/04/ca/hm/vote/brinton_s/

Shane Brinton, at 20 years old is the youngest voting member of the Humboldt County (Northern California) Democratic Party Central Committee. He is also the local contact for Progressive Democrats of America and serves on the National Council of the Young Communist League.

The fact that this person exists doesn’t show that the Democratic Party needs to “set it up so that Communists don’t feel comfortable running for seats in the first place.”  Communist activists who want to take part in major party politics are going to do it through the left-of-center party, even if that party is very centrist objectively.

I think they are pretty equivalent, but either way it doesn’t alter my point at all.

dCRkDx zzgidvbvojhv, biefyaezxoqg, [link=http://bgvkzuiogcqr.com/]bgvkzuiogcqr[/link], http://augjctpftqai.com/