This is kind of funny: State Senator Chris McDaniel of Mississippi – you remember, the racist anti-Semite who lost to Thad Cochran in his attempt to become a U.S. senator, when Cochran pointed out to everybody that McDaniel is a racist anti-Semite?
McDaniel refused to concede, insisting, with his pal Sarah Palin – who seized the opportunity to display her ignorance on yet another subject – that only some serious hanky panky could have led to his defeat – you know, because how could you not vote for a racist anti-Semite?
And then Glenn Beck said that saying McDaniel is a racist anti-Semite (which is true) is like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which is not true) though of course, the two have nothing in common outside of Glenn Beck’s warped head.
And now McDaniel is whining that Cochran “abandoned social values. Christian values.” Apparently, it’s not Christian to remind people that somebody is a racist anti-Semite, even when it is true. Let’s face it: what Cochran did was appeal to black voters. This, McDaniel is saying, is abandoning Christian values.
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And this is kind of funny too: Republicans are so un-hinged in their claims that McDaniel was falsely accused of being a racist that they’re getting all racist in response. I’m not sure how this strategy is supposed to pay off.
Because all real Christians are racist anti-Semites, I guess. I can’t find that in the New Testament anywhere but then you won’t find a lot of what the Religious Right insists is true anywhere in the Bible.
Well, at least McDaniel didn’t accuse Cochran of being a clone, which, when you think about it, seems like a more fruitful strategy than the one McDaniel has chosen.
McDaniel told a sympathetic Sandy Rios, who herself is still selling the lie that President Obama is a Marxist-Muslim, yesterday,
The Republican Party has a platform. It always has had a platform. You don’t try to grow the party by violating the platform. You don’t try to grow the base of your party by talking about issues that are clearly contradictory to everything that conservatives believe. For example, you don’t go out to any community and talk about how limited government is a bad thing, you don’t go out to any community and abandon social values or your Christian values, you don’t go out there and talk about race baiting…You don’t grow the party by abandoning the party’s base, which is conservatism, and that is exactly what Cochran and Barbour did Tuesday evening.
So McDaniel is a racist and anti-Semite, but Cochran is somehow the race-baiter. I guess that’s sorta how “religious freedom” works in this guy’s mind too.
And of course, McDaniel continues to insist on hanky panky, saying that “This election was stolen from conservatives, stolen from Republicans.”
No, you grow the party by alienating blacks and Jews, apparently.
The blacks McDaniels hates figured prominently in this election, unsurprisingly voting for McDaniel’s opponent, Cochran. And McDaniel doesn’t get it.
He doesn’t get how he could possibly lose by being a racist anti-Semite. He knows what sells to the angry white guys who make up the GOP base. Black people (like Jews), except to the extent they annoy him, are largely invisible on his radar.
And he talks about “growing the party.” I don’t know how you grow the party at all by focusing on the base. With whom will he grow the party if he alienates everybody who isn’t white? Even Lindsey Graham, not the sharpest nail, realized a couple of years ago that “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
Increasingly, you have to wonder if Republicans even think about what they’re saying, or if not making sense is what passes for thinking these days in conservative ranks.
In the end, as Jennifer Rubin writes at the Washington Post, the whole imbroglio just leaves the Tea Party looking like a bunch of crybabies. Thank all that’s good that the guys in the original Tea Party didn’t respond to adversity by stomping their feet in a tantrum. We’d still all be singing “God Save the King.”
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
