In Case It Wasn’t Obvious - Bigots Run The GOP #p2 #tcot @gop #gop

http://firedoglake.com/2011/01/15/come-saturday-morning-in-case-it-wasnt-obvious/

Your white sheets are ready, Mr. Priebus!

So much racially-connected synchronicity going on over in Wingnutville lately.

Michael Steele, presiding over a midterm electoral romp by the Republicans in which the moderate GOP candidates that managed to survive the primaries outperformed the Tea Party endorsees by a three-to-one margin, was ousted as RNC chair by a teabagger-endorsed guy named Reince Priebus, the former head of the Wisconsin GOP, who got the gig ostensibly for actually managing to get a teabagger who wasn't the son of a famous congressman into the senate seat of the much-beloved Russ Feingold.

The Republicans decided Steele had to go for two reasons: 1) his (skin?) tone turned off ultra-conservatives like "Angry White Dude" who promptly switched to aiding individual candidates or conservative groups, and 2) he committed the unforgivable sin of saying out loud and in front of a microphone what everyone knows but conservatives try so hard to deny, that the corporate-bigot alliance called the "Southern Strategy" didn't end when Nixon took the chopper out of DC. They replaced him with someone whose state Republican Party unit is assiduously working to keep non-rich, non-white, non-rural Wisconsinites from voting.

In the "Special Interests is Conservative Code for Black People" Department, we have this: Tea Party Gov LePage (Maine) has issues with 'special interests' (aka the NAACP). Funnily enough, this is the same guy who employs his daughter, who has no administrative or clerical experience, as a $41,000-a-year "Executive Assistant to the Chief of Staff". Talk about your special interests! (But he adopted a kid from Jamaica, so that's supposed to mean he's incapable of race-baiting. Yeah, right.)

Meanwhile, Eric Fuller, a disabled veteran and former Gabrielle Giffords campaign worker who is one of the survivors of the Tucson shooting spree by a David Wynn Miller fan says he knows who is ultimately responsible:

I was in shock, and I just wandered out into the parking lot. And a woman was pushing a cart full of groceries out there. And I said to her, "I've been shot." And she just looked at me like I was crazy. I was taken to the hospital. And even though I was sedated and everything, I stayed up—I was staying up, stayed most of the night. And I didn't know how to calm myself down, so I wrote down the Declaration of Independence, which I memorized some time ago. And that did help to organize my thoughts. And the first thing that I wrote down and what my reaction was to it was: "How many other people? How many other demented people are out there? It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target. Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled—senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls." There was a little girl named Christina Green, nine years old, who is one of the deceased.

Mr. Fuller has grounds for his belief — as David Brock of Media Matters says, there are at least three known would-be assassins who were inspired by Glenn Beck — but that didn't stop prominent right-wing blogger Jammie Wearing Fool from following in the footsteps of Breitbart, Reynolds and Palin and dropping the B-L Bomb: "Tucson Shooting Survivor Blood Libels Palin, Boehner, Beck and Angle". Not to be outdone in the obscenity department, the conservative newspaper mainstay, the Washington Times — whose longtime former editor and tone-setter Robert Stacy McCain is about as blatant a bigot as can be imagined — has to triple down on the neo-Godwin's Law abuse: "A Washington Times editorial defends Sarah Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" in the wake of the Tucson shootings, by calling media criticism of Palin 'the latest round of an ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers.'"

Yes, folks, as David Wynn Miller says, words can mean whatever you want them to mean, so "pogrom" and "blood libel" now mean "anytime somebody picks on a poor innocent widdle conservative".

And that is that.