Conservatives aren’t great on governing, but they’re always available when it’s time to lecture the citizenry:
McCrory said he has come out to hear what protesters are not happy about on the Moral Monday protests.
“I go out in the crowd all of the time,” McCrory said. “Frankly, yesterday I went out and talked to several of them and they were not very respectful. They did not represent the majority of those who call themselves moral by cussing me out. But that’s the way things go some times.”
Rob Schofield, of N.C. Watch Policy, said if McCrory has been coming to Moral Mondays he has done it in disguise and has avoided all media attention.
The Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, said he has yet to see McCrory at any of the events either.
McCrory said he can identify with protesters because when he was mayor he also came to Raleigh at one point to protest. He said on the occasion he protested he did not break the law as some Moral Monday protesters do. “But I welcome, I welcome protesters,” McCrory said. “What I don’t accept is when they break the law. I don’t agree with them breaking the law and taking up valuable resources in that area to have to take them to jail,” McCrory said.
Schofield said he invites McCrory to come talk with them on Mondays.
“If he really wants to interact with this growing movement and its many legitimate concerns, he should come up to the podium and speak,” Schofield said. “Better yet, he should sit down and engage with its leaders in real and meaningful dialogue and condemn conservative groups – one funded by his budget director – that have printed scurrilous attacks accusing the Moral Monday leaders of corruption and theft.”
Barber said it is the governor who is disrespectful to the growing number of protesters assembled each Monday to have their voices heard.
“It seems that the governor is saying I’m hurting the poor and sick and disabled by denying Medicaid, but I’m doing it politely,” Barber said in a statement to the Times. “I’m snatching the only money unemployed people have away from them, but I’m doing it politely. I’m raising taxes on the working poor politely. I’m signing a bill that will hurt public education and allow racism in the court system, but since I’m doing it politely you should only criticize me politely.”
This is how conservatives in North Carolina responded to the Moral Monday protestors at first, before Governor McCrory had this miraculous (and completely not political) change of heart where he “welcomes” protests:
Organizers of the “Moral Monday” protests at the General Assembly are now firing back at Gov. Pat McCrory and other critics. The NAACP says the overwhelming majority of the arrests are North Carolinians, not out-of-staters as some have suggested.
“These protests are just prefabricated direct partisan attacks,” said Republican Party Chairman Claude Pope. The new head of the state GOP thinks they are outside agitators as Republicans push back hard. In an op-ed piece in the Chatham Journal, New Hanover County Republican Senator Thom Goolsby calls the protests, “Moron Monday,” and last weekend, McCrory called protestors “outsiders.”
“All they’re left to do is try to bring in outside group, whether they’re from Pennsylvania or from other parts of the state, union protestors, basically professional agitators,” said Pope.
ABC11 went looking for evidence of protestors from out-of-state, and didn’t find much.
In the court records from the 84 arrests Monday, four protesters were from out of state — two were from Georgia, one from Tennessee, and another from Colorado.
Organizers say of the 400 people arrested in total less than 10 have lived outside of North Carolina. They accuse Republicans of trying to delegitimize their movement.
“This is a common for the ultra-right and extreme,” said N.C. NAACP President William Barber. “They can’t defend their policies. So when you can’t do that, then you attempt to deflect and distort the records.”
McCrory’s smear campaign didn’t work, so it’s now time to “welcome” protestors.
Mnemosyne
Ah, yes, the good old “outside agitators” who get the local nigras all stirred up.
Mike E
Douchepocalypse.
Just Some Fuckhead
Someday Mississippi will be able to point at North Carolina and say “Even we aren’t that fucking backwards.”
dr. bloor
Meh. Call me when he stops lying to and about the protestors. It’s all optics until then.
IowaOldLady
Texas police confiscated tampons and maxi pads from women entering the capitol for today’s debate:
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Tampongate&src=hash
JWL
At least Nixon actually did mingle with Vietnam War protestors, shortly after the Ohio National Guard had slaughtered their fellow protestors at Kent State.
Granted, it was after midnight, Nixon was drunk, and he just wanted to talk about college football.
But even he never stooped to bullshit about being at the Lincoln Memorial that night, because he WAS there.
You can look it up.
danimal
@IowaOldLady: OMFG, the TX GOP is going to absorb a load of punishment for that one.
Mike E
@Just Some Fuckhead: Yep, North Mississippi. Your TEA party skull fuckery in action. Weep for me, my college-bound daughter, and my adopted state for the last 25 years.
IowaOldLady
@danimal: Goes to show you that Mississippi and NC have competition in the point-and-laugh stupid race.
natthedem
The governor shows up at a protest…gets, according to him, a “good cussing”…and, in the times we’re in, takes a picture or video with their phone?
He’s lying.
Or, maybe not: @patwasthere.
Mike E
@natthedem: Maddow Show, plz pick this up!
Dolly Llama
@natthedem: Damn right that sorry motherfucker is lying. The News & Observer had a piece in today’s paper calling that motherfucker out for it. They talked with everybody imaginable – including the chief of the capitol police, who you’d presume would know, just from a security standpoint, if the governor was going out to rub elbows with the hoi polloi – and nobody has seen the governor. Nobody. Not one picture, not one video. And his spokesperson “wasn’t available for comment” on it.
Why would the dumbass cocksucker tell such an easily disprovable lie?
Mike E
@IowaOldLady: The joke about SC’s state motto being, “Thank God for Mississippi!” now hits a little too close for comfort for a growing number of states, sadly.
MikeJ
@danimal:
I wonder who’s pulling their strings.
raven
@JWL: Yea, he “mingled” with us too.
Mike E
@MikeJ: What you did, I am seeing.
The Other Chuck
@Dolly Llama: Asking him which one he’s been at then checking his calendar ought to be interesting. But hey bald-faced lies are just part of the package, it’ll probably increase his cred among the teatards.
Teddy's Person
@IowaOldLady: But guns, as always, are welcome.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Teddy’s Person:
The thing that galls me most is that….of course they consider tampons and pads only for their throwing capacity, and not…you know, the fact that the women that bring them might actually need and use them for their intended purposes. A morbid part of me wonders if someone shot a gun in the midst of the proceedings whether someone would ponder in earnest ‘at least they didn’t throw anything, god forbid!’
RaflW
@Dolly Llama:
Because it’s actually unusual for news outlets to go and research wether it happend or not.
Good for the News & Observer.
BTW, you might want to rethink using cocksucker as an insult. OK? Really, it might piss off a few gay BJ fans. By that, I mean Balloon Juice.
IowaOldLady
I have to admit it never would have occured to me to throw tampons or pads, but I kind of like the image.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@IowaOldLady:
I wonder how many of the protesters didn’t even have the idea themselves until they were told WHY their tampons and pads were being confiscated. It might be a telling thing as far as picking the brains of the Texas Leg. and what they’re really thinking sometimes.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Mike E: Coming up on 20 years myself, and yes, the embarrassment is off the scale.
Also, McCrory is a douchebarge.
Violet
@Dolly Llama:
Because he’s stupid. And because he’s too old to be familiar with everyone having a phone with a camera on it. He thinks he can say whatever and people will just believe him, or at least no one can disprove him. See: stupid.
Dolly Llama
@RaflW:
Point well taken. Inadvertently insulting someone (other than McCrory) that way is about the last thing I’d want to do. Noted for the future. Can I keep “motherfucker,” though? I’m not that sensitive about the feelings of people who literally engage in that behavior.
Chris
@Violet:
That and he and his kind are used to having the media and other Very Serious People go along with absolutely anything they say no matter how outrageous.
Kay
@Mike E:
Can you make an issue out of Art Pope pulling the governor’s strings?
People GENERALLY don’t like corruption.
It really IS as if Scott Walker had appointed David Koch. It just reeks.
Dolly Llama
@RaflW: The N&O, I must say, is doing a damn good job through all this. Makes me proud to be an old-school subscriber who picks his copy up in the driveway every morning. It also assuages my guilt for the dead trees involved. They’re having the same hard times every other daily newspaper is having, but they’re fighting the good fight with what they have.
Patricia Kayden
I’m sure the good Governor had to hold himself back from calling the protesters carpetbaggers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetbagger
At least he didn’t order to police to beat them down.
Dolly Llama
@Kay: True that. As soon as he named Pope his budget director, I knew McCrory was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, though that expression doesn’t do justice to just how big a difference there’s been between how McCrory campaigned versus how he’s governed so far.
WereBear
Isn’t he a Republican?
Q.E.Fn’.D.
J.D. Rhoades
NC: We’re bad. We’re nationwide.
Kay
@Dolly Llama:
Citizens United polls really poorly, and these two are getting ready to buy some judges, with Pope’s libertarian jihad against publicly funded elections.
I would think they are or will be vulnerable to attacks on corruption.
When they privatize, the crony contracts will go out.
Dolly Llama
@Kay: Does that mean we North Carolinians can look forward to more classic TV commercials for judges’ races in future elections? If so, that is such a thin silver lining that it’s practically invisible.
Kay
@Dolly Llama:
It won’t play for me!
We have judicial elections. We had a good judge win on “no money from nobody” last cycle.
His is the only campaign website I’ve ever seen w/ out a donate button.
Mike in NC
Our wonderful scumbag Gov. McCrory plans to address the 5th worst unemployment rate in the nation by shutting down 40 NC ESC unemployment offices and firing those state employees.
SiubhanDuinne
@Dolly Llama: I’m sorry Joby Warrick went to the WaPo a number of years ago. This story would have been right up his street.
rikyrah
@Mnemosyne:
because, of course, the Nigras are just happy as pigs in slop, don’t ya know.
Ramalama
What the Ayche? I thought it was ‘Meat-free Mondays’ not Moral Mondays.