Wingnuts are still throwing temper tantrums over the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, and they are still acting out in ugly ways.
To wit, National Review Online’s John Nordlinger fears that Chief Justice John Roberts is careening headlong towards Socialist Town, and points out that, in the 80s, conservatives had the same fears about Ronald Reagan. Apparently, Ronald Reagan went too far in appeasing moderates and liberals by “raising taxes, spending like crazy, welcoming wetbacks, pursuing arms control.”
Oh, what’s that?
Oh.
Yes.
SatanicPanic
Clearly their purge of racist people at NRO was successful.
EconWatcher
I followed the links, and yep, he said it. WTF????
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
Damn. They’re really gearing up to say it, aren’t they? They want to say it soooooooo badly. They’re aching to say it. They’re all getting blue balls from wanting that sweet, sweet release and not having a socially acceptable way to spew it. We should begin laying bets on who comes out with a big, fat “Nigger!” first. I’m betting Limbaugh, but it could end up being somebody else. Sean Hannity; Steve King; Michelle Malkin; Michele Bachmann; some other asswipe from the National Review… It could be any one of these right-wing freaks wouldn’t shock me.
Villago Delenda Est
OK, National Review should just change its name to the more appropriate National Socialist American Workers’ Review and just get it over with.
BGinCHI
I think what he meant to say was “wet blahs.”
You know, those people who just took a shower but still don’t feel motivated.
Rch (in name only) in reno
Blasphemy! Nordlinger has cast aspersions on the memory of the Deified Reagan! Scripture says he must be driven naked and bound from the temple with whips and curses, and cast from the summit of Mount Rushmore so that his brains shall be dashed out upon Saint Washington’s nose, and his body become a feast for bald eagles.
Brachiator
Related, where have we seen this number before?
This is a reversal of the usual hard core of wingnut crazies, but still….
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
Damn. I fucked up my edit. I hope this doesn’t italicize everybody else’s comments, too. If so, then I’m sorry.
Raya
Meanwhile, in largely unrelated news, Mitt Romney’s campaign ad featuring Obama singing Al Green appears to have been pulled by YouTube for copyright violation…..
eyelessgame
“‘To grow,’ in the conservative lexicon, has meant to become more liberal and less conservative…”
… less racist …
But wait, I thought we had different lexicons. This is the same things liberals mean when they say “to grow [up]”…
Cris (without an H)
They are who we thought they were.
jwb
@Brachiator: If you assume that the GOP rump is 37% of the population, then 27% of that would be about 10%. That would be the non-crazy portion of the rump. The remainder then totals 27%, the crazifaction.
Chris
I give the racist fuck props for one thing only, namely, being aware of the discrepancy between Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States, and “Ronald Reagan,” whitewashed plaster saint onto whom the current conservative movement projects all their beliefs and values with no regard to what he actually did.
Yes, Ronald Reagan raised taxes. Yes, Ronald Reagan gave amnesty to illegal immigrants. Yes, Ronald Reagan sat down and talked with America’s enemies. Yes, Ronald Reagan cut arms. Yes, Ronald Reagan negotiated with terrorists. Yes, Ronald Reagan cut and run in the face of terrorist attacks. Heck, Reagan doesn’t have much more in common with the present-day conservative base than Romney does.
None of this, of course, invalidates the fact that the racist fuck is still a racist fuck who should go fuck himself. Though I suppose I should also thank him for coming out and saying it instead of equivocating and weasel-wording like so many of his brethren do.
gnomedad
Fisherian runaway … only pretty in peacocks.
CraigoMc
One of these guys is going to say it this campaign. They’re practically bleeding from every hole in their heads from the strain of keeping it in.
Lord Jesus Perm
Someone at NRO said something racist? Knock me over with a feather.
Calouste
OT, but my oh my:
The ad that the Romney campaign published this morning has been pulled from youtube due to a claim of copyright violation by BMG.
The GOP candidates might have been a clown car, but the Romney campaign team is a whole school bus fleet full of clowns.
redshirt
Anyone waded through the McCain oppo file on Romeny yet? Lots of stuff about abortion – eyes glazed. Gave up. Don’t care.
NancyDarling
Nordlinger also concedes that liberals are the “cool kids”. Now we know what drives all that conservative angst—they couldn’t get laid in college. If only some pretty coed had slept with them, they might not be torturing the whole country with their revenge fantasies.
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
This was my thought exactly. It’s only a question of when.
Ash Can
Will the last racist to get fired from NRO please turn out the lights?
@Calouste: I still think DNC moles are running Romney’s campaign.
CaptainHaddock
Has Katherine LOPEZ said anything about this yet?
Chris
@NancyDarling:
Conservatives are the Syndromes of the real world, it appears.
Karen
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
If they said that word, wouldn’t that be enough to get their show pulled according to broadcasting standards and policies?
But you’re right, one of them or all of them will say it. Then when nothing happens to them more will say it. After all, repealing the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts is a big TO-DO on their bucket lists…
Steve in DC
@SatanicPanic:
Shut it gringo!
In a way I find polite racist conservatives funny. Largely because the terms they use are so wildly out of date they just sound bizarre. I mean, if I was going to trash talk with Latino’s “wet back” is just so out of date and goofy, it’s rather like when they go off about “coloreds”.
It really seems like they are stuck in some lost generation and are about to follow up with “now bring me my mint julep and then got off my lawn”.
I love trash talk and doofy behavior as much as the next person, but leave it to the GOP, managing to sound racist, old, and have never heard of the internet at the same damn time.
I mean common, at least google-fu your ass some proper racial trash talk.
Mark B.
Wetbacks and ragheads, oh my! Back in the 70s, Archie Bunker was an object of ridicule, nowadays he’d pass for an intellectual in right wing politics.
Richard
Did Ron Paul just become editor?
jwb
@redshirt: I liked the bit about Romney never having taken out a hunting license. It’s boring to us, I think, primarily because it was assembled for a primary campaign, and so focused on trying to paint Romney as moderate to liberal. There’s some stuff on Bain—he is listed as having left the firm in 1999. But presuming that Romney is really trying to move to the center for this election, I have yet to see anything of much concern to him. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of document that a competent campaign trying to position its candidate in the center would go about leaking.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@NancyDarling: Okay, so why am I not a Republican?
The Moar You Know
He did. Hell, the “wetback” amnesty thing was his idea. Suck on it until you choke, wingnuts.
Roger Moore
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Hear, hear. Some of us were capable of making it through college without getting laid by coeds and without wanting to take it out on the rest of the world. Of course, those of us who went to schools with 5:1 gender ratios had at least some idea of what we were getting into…
The Moar You Know
@Brachiator: The word professionals use to describe Democrats like these is “suckers”.
dr. bloor
@jwb: Disagree. It’s a 200 page crash course in aprincipled political expedience. He comes across like the human wind sock that he is.
MikeBoyScout
He said wetback, but he meant WOP.
Liberty60
@NancyDarling:
I’ve actually heard it said that the current political divide isn’t between the Boomers and their parents; its between the Boomers who were hippies and the Boomers who were straights, Bluto versus Niedermeier.
BGinCHI
@Liberty60: At least what happened to those two characters in the future (at the end of the movie) was poetic justice, and right on in terms of neo-cons and slackers.
RSA
@Raya:
Just… Wow.
KXB
@Roger Moore:
Uh, it can happen at school that is close to 50-50. I just happened to go to a college that was filled with class after class of ugly children.
Lord Jesus Perm
@Richard: If Paul were editor, he wouldn’t have known anything about what Nordlinger wrote.
/sarcasm
maya
NRO is issuing a statement that Nordlinger actually is guilty of only committing a typo: He meant to type “setbacks” but , as se knos, the ‘w’ and the ‘s’ are located very near each other on the keyboard.
Ronald Reagan always believed that “setbacks” should be part of any plan to build the American Dream House. Thus, he “welcomed setbacks” – usually 25′ from any cut-bank of the Rio Grande, for example.
Steve in DC
@RSA:
That’s part of a trend. The GOP keeps getting sued for this sort of nonsense, see the entire “born in the USA” fiasco.
Their are conservative rockers, though most of them tend to be the libertarian style of “more sex, more drugs” which doesn’t fly, that or crap ass Christian Rock bands.
I’m still waiting for them to fuck up and appropriate South Park because of the entire “South Park Republican” issue and for that to blow up in their face.
chuck butcher
The amnesty coupled with “zero” enforcement on illegal employment had the result of encouraging illegal immigration. Now you can argue about what to do about those present, but you cannot argue that creating an illegal second class citizenry has good outcomes for the nation or those second class folks.
Yes, that is exactly what St Ronnie did and the plutocrats welcomed it. You can look at what happened to construction (and other) industries’ wages and hiring post St Ronnie if you care to.
Sly
What’s the over/under on when the usage of “wetback” is defended as ironic, demonstrating both NRO’s racism and cluelessness on the definition of irony?
Steve in DC
@Liberty60:
So fat nice guy losers vs athletic assholes?
Besides there are tons of “hippyish” Republicans. Keep in mind Wall Street and most big wigs are famous for partying and such things as snorting coke of hookers.
I mean the GOP in DC is gay as can be and massive party animals.
HyperIon
I recently saw John Nordlinger on C-SPAN talking about his new book on the Nobel Peace Prize. He was not completely wacko. I was surprised.
Gex
@Brachiator: Just think of the 27% of that 27%. Wingnuttery is like fractals.
the Conster
I’ve had a couple of wingnut friends experience total blue screen meltdown when I told them that Reagan raised taxes 11 times – which is 11 more than Obama. They’re just incapable of processing facts that in any way contradict what they “know” and the less they actually know the stronger their opinion about it. It’s the most ridiculous and frustrating thing ever.
Rob in CT
@Liberty60:
This seems to be rather obvious to me. I wasn’t there (born in ’76), but damn it sure sounds like much of the wingnut fury is about “straights” being angry at the hippies (for, like, having fun and breaking rules and, like, getting away with it and stuff).
daveNYC
I’m more surprised that they think that the arms control efforts were a bad thing.
Calouste
Even better, Romney was linking directly from his campaign homepage to that ad that is now replaced with a black screen with a copyright message. Well, only in Amercia, right?
Steve in DC
@Rob in CT:
Eh, a lot of it has to do with working class kids being sent off to die while elite kids didn’t have to and then spent the entire time mocking those who went off to die. That’s a wound that still stings in a lot of the armed services and why you get a “fuck liberals” attitude from a fair amount of the brass.
I’m of the opinion that as soon as all the boomers die off the rest of us can get around to fixing things. So if they want to vote their asses out of social security and medicare oh well, people starving in the streets certainly don’t vote when they can’t drive their rascal scooter to the pools because it got repo’d.
Redshift
@Steve in DC:
You really don’t know what a hippie is, do you?
(“They did drugs, right?”)
Roger Moore
@KXB:
If you believe Tim Tebow, it can even happen to a big-time football star at a major party school. Big if.
Haydnseek
@chuck butcher: Which is why to this day E-Verify is DOA. The cons all pay lip service to it, but it never quite happens, because the same ultra con business types that love to shit all over “illegals” on FuxNews want a cheap, easily exploitable, fearful labor force. They have a million excuses why E-Verify sucks, and will do anything to make sure it never goes into effect.
WereBear
@the Conster: In a harsher world they wouldn’t have the leeway to just make up how they think everything works; but being completely clueless about history, economics, and politics doesn’t keep them from getting to work in the morning, doing their jobs, and coming home to screech at the TV.
Steve in DC
@Redshift:
The definition has changed. You can cling to the old version if you want, I’m not a boomer though, it has changed.
Roger Moore
@Steve in DC:
I’m less confident of that. It seems like more Boomer hyping of how important they are: “We’re the most disfunctional generation ever. Yeah, number one again!” I think the other generations have their own disfunctions that will show up and cause all kinds of problems once enough of the Boomers die off to let us mess things up instead of them. Maybe we’ll fix the Boomers’ problems, but we’ll create a whole bunch of new ones.
shortstop
@Roger Moore: I have no trouble believing that people (I refuse to use the almost-century-out-of-date word “coed”) would decline to fuck Tim Tebow.
Richard
A screenshot of the copyright violation notice on the Romney campaign site…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zennas/7586032250/lightbox/
Roger Moore
@Haydnseek:
At least partly by making sure it continues to suck. It’s the classic NRA approach of making sure the gun laws are never enforced and then preventing any new ones from being passed because we aren’t even enforcing the existing laws.
shortstop
@Steve in DC: It hasn’t changed to now mean Wall Streeters snorting coke off hookers, except perhaps in your universe of one.
Steve in DC
@Roger Moore:
I don’t doubt that at all. Generation X is consumerism to the extreme and the melenials are pretty much “generation me, all me, all me”.
That said, we do lack some of the problems of the boomers. Racism, homophobia, and sexism are far less problematic. Let’s get real for a second, birtherism, gay marriage, and birth control are not really fights those of us in GenX onward are on the wrong side on or give a shit about. Most of us consider all of that the insane rambling of old people trying to relive their culture clashes of the 60s.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re far more vapid and idiotic in our own ways, but we sure as hell are not fighting battles over “abortion and gays oh my”, I know the birth control fight is “important” but at 31 I find all of it just fucking bizarre. The vast majority of you over 50 fuckers sound like Abe Fucking Simpson braying at the moon.
I don’t think older people get how unreal some of this is to us. It’s like watching the Twilight Zone on way too much acid.
Steve in DC
@shortstop:
To the under 40 crowd hippy = druggy, slacker, the unwashed, or some sort of mix of that.
The last sort of classic hippy counter culture we had was the rave culture which was all about PLUR, peace love unity respect, and even that was heavily fueled by massive amount of X and ketamine… though it was a fun time.
And yes, the same slacker, unwashed, drugged up sort of insults were thrown at it, and yes it was rather true. Good intentions doesn’t absolve you of your screwball factors. And since that movement died raver stands less for PLUR and more for popping pills and glow sticks.
Yutsano
@shortstop: Gordon Gekko was a hippie. Who knew?
Brian R.
I just assumed this was a verbal slip, a gaffe he made speaking off the cuff.
But he fucking wrote this out? And published it? And then left it there?
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, are they trying to lose this election?
C.S.
@Steve in DC: I can’t be alone in thinking that if conservatives drank more mint juleps, the world would be a much better place. In fact, the world would be a much better place — and far more civilized — if everyone drank more mint juleps.
stratplayer
Bill Buckley might have spoken like this in private but he would be absolutely appalled at the complete absence of self-control at the National Review these days. This is some seriously unseemly shit. Very bad public form.
Btw, I have saved the webpage, made a pdf out of it and taken a full-page screenshot in case it disappears.
shortstop
@Yutsano: You just have to free your mind of cognitive assonance. Words mean whatever you want them to mean at that particular moment, as long as you speak with an abiding and wholly unearned confidence. I trust you learned something today, codger.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yutsano: You are under 40; you should know this. Don’t try to excuse yourself by saying you have an old soul either.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@jwb: A competent campaign manger would leak the point their Republican candidate was a registered Independent until 1995 and dissed St Ronald the Maximus? Really?
shortstop
@stratplayer: Bill Buckley was an unrepentant fucking racist. I’m not sure why his successors being less guarded about sharing his opinions is regarded as a viler state of affairs. Seems to me it’s the holding of the view that’s problematic, not the “unseemliness” of verbalizing it in mixed company.
Steve in DC
@C.S.:
I prefer mojito’s if I’m going to bother with properly mulled drinks. Never liked mint + whiskey myself… though, then again, I might have never had one made the right way.
AWL
Honestly, I’m not too surprised that Nordlinger would use such a term, considering that he thought this was one of his fondest memories with William Buckley.
Litlebritdifrnt
Romney outsourced the 2002 Olympics uniforms to Burma. And when called on it they said “no we outsourced them to Myanmar which is not Burma” this guys help have been incompetent for decades.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/mitt-romney-olympics-outsourced-uniforms-burma_n_1677791.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
Martin
Anyone know how that GOP Latino outreach is coming along?
Geoduck
@Sly:
One of the commentators on the original article did it. Tho, to people’s credit, everyone else is slamming Nordlinger for using the word.
quannlace
What, the more acceptable ‘beaner’ wasn’t available?
shortstop
@Martin: They’re a natural GOP constituency, what with their Catholicism and love of family. We’ll start seeing some movement rightward any day now.
Yutsano
@shortstop: I love the Humpty Dumpty defence.
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m under 40 just barely. A 5awg reminds me of this often. I’m gonna end up kicking him I just know it. :)
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Steve in DC: It’s spelled “hippie”. Is this a sign you don’t know what you’re talking about?
Raven
The long road home.
jwb
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Sure at this point in the campaign it all gives the impression that Romney is really a moderate. That’s the only way Romney wins the election: by appealing to the clueless independents. These documents are only toxic to the base, and at this point they are stuck. This only becomes a real problem if Romney’s candidacy actually does meltdown, because in essence things like this liquify the floor. It might in fact be possible to push him below 45%., though I doubt Obama will be able to get above 55%, probably only 52-53%.
Ash Can
@Liberty60: Bluto was not a hippie.
@Steve in DC: Neither are Republicans, Wall Street, and the vast majority of bigwigs. And no, the meaning has not changed. Although you might be able to make a case that the under-40s have coined an entirely new term, spelled with a “y” and based loosely on the concept of the hippie, that fits your explanation. I have yet to see it take hold in general discourse, though, or emerge as an entity separate from the concept of “hippie.”
jwb
@Ash Can: Actually there are some real conservative hippies within the traditional definition of the term. You find a number of them in the musician set, and we have a fair number hanging around Austin.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@shortstop: I can’t remember which magazine ran an excerpt of Christopher Buckley’s memoir of his parents, but even skimming it was enough to know that Bill and Pat were a pair of angry, racist drunks– especially her. I despised Buckley, and I think I would’ve hated his wife, but the younger Buckley should’ve burned that manuscript.
JPL
@Raven: Have a good trip. We have had a week of showers so your plants should be happy. Be prepared for the kisses you get when you arrive home.
shecky
Is this a signal that the Ronald Reagan legacy is no longer a central unifying myth among conservatives? If so, hold on to your hats, folks. We’re in for a massive ideological meltdown in the months ahead.
Raven
@JPL: That’s what we’ve been hearing! We’ve gotten a few goo-goo pix from the sitter.
Aaron Baker
Well, it’s Jay Nordlinger, not John–but otherwise a good catch.
If you’re familiar at all with Nordlinger’s oeuvre, you’ll know he routinely complains about racism (black vs. white racism). Thought I’d agree there are bigoted blacks out there–to listen to Nordlinger, you’d think the white variety had pretty much disappeared.
After Katrina, I’d meant to search Nordlinger’s columns for indignant comments about the Algiers Point shootings and other New Orleans atrocities–but never got around to it.
I suspect that for him, they’ll always be trumped by the black woman who was rude in line the other day at Kroger’s.
Brandt Hardin
Reagan has a legacy so distorted by the Conservative idolization of him that we may never have a clear picture of the real man behind the television set beyond the elaborate myth now concocted around him. Did he really rid the world of commie scum? Did destroy or save our economy? Check out my portrait of The Gipper and help me figure it out on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/02/happy-100th-gipper.html with some Cold War Hollywood!
Chris
@shecky:
Impossible.
Like I said a few days ago – they need an Idol-President, and they have literally nowhere else to turn. George W. Bush was a failure, Eisenhower was a liberal, Nixon was a failure AND a liberal, George H. W. Bush they look at kind of the way they do Mitt Romney. Reagan’s the only one who fits the picture.
No, I expect they’ll just chastise the shit out of this person and if he doesn’t retract what he said, they’ll excommunicate him like they have various conservatives in the past.
MikeJ
@Ash Can:
Actually, no. The kids are much smarter than our resident troll. Check urban dictionary. Users of hookers and coke is not the definition in use by anybody in the real world, unless they’re trolls or morons.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hippy
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hippie
Jay
National Review is crap these days, and maybe I’m overthinking Nordlinger, but…
Is he saying what he thinks, or relaying what hard-right Republicans thought Reagan was doing at the time? (counterexample: a critic of Trump’s might mock him for using the phrase, “the blacks” without even naming Trump, but we’d know he was talking about Trump). Since he’d consider himself a “serious” figure writing for a major publication, that’s for him to clear up, and until he does, critics have a right to call bullshit.
Chris
@Brandt Hardin:
Doubtful. The whole notion that “Reagan won the Cold War” is premised on the idea that “he outspent them on defense with SDI because our economy was better than theirs.” Except it really doesn’t add up. Reagan didn’t invent the goddamn arms race, it had been going on in some form or other for over three decades before he came into office. Republicans want you to believe that the space race wasn’t enough to bankrupt the Soviet Union, but laser satellite which neither side actually built were? That makes no sense.
jon
Well, there’s always Rush to come along and use another ironic term about another minority group to take one for the team:
Charming.
JPL
Why isn’t an ad made of Romney’s statements about Teresa Kerry’s tax returns yet? Gosh, darn I’m running for first lady.
whoops first man
NancyDarling
@stratplayer: No, Buckley said some pretty disgusting things in his mag. It was a long time ago, but I recall him writing about the ordinary anti-Semitism he heard around the dinner table when he was a child. He also recounted an incident when older cousins were going to burn a cross on a Jewish neighbor’s lawn and he was sooo forlorn because they wouldn’t let him tag along because he was 10 at the time.
Mark B.
@Chris: Reagan got lucky in both economics and politics. The stagflation of the 70s slowly creaked to an end near the start of his term and the CCCP collapsed of its own weight just after the end of his term. He had very little to do with either event.
Nobody remembers the incredible increases in unemployment during the Reagan years, the collapse of basic human services and infrastructure, and the horrible atrocities in Central America which he had a direct hand in.
Lordwhorfin
@Steve in DC:
It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son!
jl
@Chris:
” Reagan’s the only one who fits the picture. ”
Except, Reagan doesn’t fit their bill, because the Reagan that fits their bill is a myth.
So, if they freak out enough get scared and outraged and panicked enough, and get enough cognitive dissonance going, anything can happen.
It’s hard for me to believe that a significant part of the wingnuts and genteel reactionaries would take down Reagan only because they are not strong on history or facts.
Reagan believed in, and did, disastrous things. But, IMHO, he did some good big things, just a very few of them, but critical things, that saved his administration of abysmal disaster similar to Bush II. So you got, dealing with Gorbachev ans Soviet Union, pushing ahead with arms control, raising taxes when he saw that they had to be raised, immigration reform. A more ambiguous accomplishment was social security reform, which set it up for raiding.
Too bad all of those things contradict current reactionary holy writ.
Only those things, in my mind, rescue Reagan’s administration from total disaster and evil. But all of those things, if looked at clearly, make Reagan completely unfit and unqualified, a traitor in fact, in the contemporary, insane, GOP.
I hope a good chunk of these people go completely self destructive and start screaming about Roberts being the new Earl Warren, and start talk about the GOP commie conspiracy that stretched from Yikes Eisenheffer through the commie crook Nixon, and the sweep up Reagan in their fever dreams as well.
Edit: and yeah, the idea that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union is a myth. It was going anyway. I think there was a time that their Politburo was so old and decrepit, they all died off a few months after getting leadership. The younger generation of leaders, like Gorbachev, had decided the Soviet model was on life support, and they were not going to keep the life support machines running.
Patricia Kayden
@Raya: Ha!!
And who here is REALLY surprised that a Senior NRO Editor used a slur? Somehow this is not evidence that conservatives are racist.
But in Rightwing World, President Obama hates White people, according to the Beckster and the whole NAACP membership booed The Bot just because he’s White, according to Limpbag.
Keith G
Who is John?
I thought his name was Jay.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Mark B.: Reagan got lucky with oil, too. Both Alaska and the North Sea came on during his term and oil prices crashed, fueling the economic boom at $10 a barrel, and wrecking any need for energy conservation.
Chris
@jl:
Sure. Let me rephrase: Reagan is the only president available who was conservative enough for them, uncontroversial enough for the public, and recent enough to have serious emotional resonance, to be deified and whitewashed into a saint like he was.
As for that other thing you said about his not being as disastrous as Bush – true, but IMO due mostly to political realities. Reagan didn’t control both houses and the political spectrum was farther left back then. The Gingrich revolution changed that and paved the way for an even more radical presidency.
GxB
[Kent Brockman with jet black Grecian Formula(tm) hair and Morticia white face pancake]
“I, for one, welcome our new wetback overlords…”
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.): They’ve been trying to say it for 4 years but the damn church bells…
El Cid
Reagan in part pursued the 1986 amnesty in order to protect his Salvadoran death squad buddies, because at the time 1/3rd of the Salvadoran economy consisted of remittances from refugees in the US sending money back.
There was also the small matter of keeping his friends in California service industries such as restaurants profitable by allowing them a cheap work force.
Bunch of assholes.
A fucking maneuver to help indirectly fund his shitty, death-squad economies is seen as somehow cowardly liberalism / soshullism.
A mean, bloody-hearted, beaming proud eater of broken babies’ heads’ brain matter is now some sort of Demoncrat wuss.
Dr. Loveless
@Mark B.:
Not to mention the callous and inhuman disregard of victims of the AIDS epidemic. People who remember Reagan as some kind of nicer, gentler conservative weren’t paying attention back then.
Chris
@jl:
Soviet Union: yeah, that was the early eighties. First Brezhnev, who’d been holding back reform for twenty years, died. Then KGB chairman Andropov, more of a reformer, takes over. Then he dies within a couple years. Cheryenko, another conservative, takes over, stops the reforms, but dies within a year. And then, Gorbachev.
Reagan got lucky in that none of his Soviet counterparts had the ability to lead before Gorbachev, who wasn’t interested in leading anyone against America.
redshirt
I think everyone should make a point to Wingnuts that Lord Reagan raised taxes 11 times. Enough cognitive dissonance might be able to break the hive mind.
El Cid
@redshirt: Also, Reagan is the reason for the lowest income earners not having to pay federal income taxes.
Reagan.
And the Heritage Foundation.
Not Demoncrap soshullists. Not Bill Clinton.
Ronald Reagan. Ronald Wilson Reagan. Ronald Fucking Wilson Fucking Reagan.
Him. He is why the lowest earners pay no federal income taxes. He & the Heritage Foundation thought it was evil that the oppressive and super-villainous federal income tax fell upon those least able to pay and therefore made it harder for them to work themselves up and out of poverty.
So when the right wingers now whine about how too many Americans pay no income taxes, remind them: when Saint God Reagan was alive, the income tax was seen as evil, and even more evil when imposed upon those least able to pay.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@redshirt: The problem is they won’t believe you. They’ll just double down; you can’t fix stupid.
Recall
@Ash Can:
That’s because you’re old.
The Other Chuck
@Dr. Loveless:
Compared to today’s GOP, he’s Mahatma Gandhi.
nastybrutishntall
@Raya: Those darned Republicans with their lack of respect for private property!