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thatcrazycajunYesterday's edition of my local fish-wrapper brought with it the news that two of the Republican Party's most-touted new faces won their primaries on Monday in the state next door to mine. South Carolina's GOP has a shot at electing the second Republican of Indian descent to sit in a US governor's chair (the first being my home state's Piyush "Bobby" Jindal) when Nikki Haley won her party's nomination to try and succeed scandal-slammed incumbent Mark Sanford (also an R). And the son of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, name of Paul, got his clock cleaned by a young brother named Tim Scott, who will run for the old man's Senate seat. Should Scott win, he'd become the first black Republican in Congress since the retirement of Oklahoma's J. C. Watts. And of course, in California Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina won the right to face off against Democrats Sen. Barbara Boxer and Jerry "Gov. Moonbeam" Brown this fall.
But after reading the kind of positions today's Republican party is taking in Texas (see yesterday's entry), and knowing that both states are Southern and not all that far apart politically, I for one cannot hear GOPsock puppet national chair Michael Steele crowing about how his party is "growing beyond race and gender" without thinking of 2008's brouhaha over the characterization by Democrats of Sarah Palin's being tapped as the GOP veep nominee as "putting lipstick on a pig." From this Washington Post story, which our paper here reprinted:
"Tonight, to me, is one of those pages you turn with a smile on your face," said...Steele, who is black. "But it's also part of a longer narrative that the party has struggled to tell over the past 20 to 25 years. Within our ranks, among our grass-roots, are a number of very exciting and very engaging candidates who don't look like or sound like what people have come to expect to be typical Republicans. I'm very proud of that." The flip side of that upbeat assessment is the reality that the GOP is still not the party of choice for minorities, despite years of effort and outreach.
That last sentence comprises an understatement somewhere on the order of saying, "Antarctica's climate is a tad nippy." I would add "for women, gays and lesbians, non-Judeo-Christian religious and just about anyone who isn't a rich, white, straight Anglo male" to it. There's a very good reason for that: the plain fact, borne out by decades of history and the party's own current statements and actions, is that GOP policies are inherently—and often deliberately—designed to anally penetrate with a spiral-grooved cylinder members of all these groups socially, economically and legally. One need look no further than Texas to see that the GOP is just dressing up the same old demagoguery in the trappings of diversity...and the sad likelihood is that their unsurpassed skill at pushing the general electorate's various cultural/ethnic buttons will insure that vast numbers continue to vote for them against their (and our) best interests.
But after reading the kind of positions today's Republican party is taking in Texas (see yesterday's entry), and knowing that both states are Southern and not all that far apart politically, I for one cannot hear GOP
"Tonight, to me, is one of those pages you turn with a smile on your face," said...Steele, who is black. "But it's also part of a longer narrative that the party has struggled to tell over the past 20 to 25 years. Within our ranks, among our grass-roots, are a number of very exciting and very engaging candidates who don't look like or sound like what people have come to expect to be typical Republicans. I'm very proud of that." The flip side of that upbeat assessment is the reality that the GOP is still not the party of choice for minorities, despite years of effort and outreach.
That last sentence comprises an understatement somewhere on the order of saying, "Antarctica's climate is a tad nippy." I would add "for women, gays and lesbians, non-Judeo-Christian religious and just about anyone who isn't a rich, white, straight Anglo male" to it. There's a very good reason for that: the plain fact, borne out by decades of history and the party's own current statements and actions, is that GOP policies are inherently—and often deliberately—designed to anally penetrate with a spiral-grooved cylinder members of all these groups socially, economically and legally. One need look no further than Texas to see that the GOP is just dressing up the same old demagoguery in the trappings of diversity...and the sad likelihood is that their unsurpassed skill at pushing the general electorate's various cultural/ethnic buttons will insure that vast numbers continue to vote for them against their (and our) best interests.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-24 03:37 am (UTC)"...despite years of effort and outreach."
Note that the Republican party is not hostile to minorities; it's the other way around. Those intolerant people *still* refuse to vote Republican! Wonder why....
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Date: 2010-06-24 08:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-29 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-09 09:36 pm (UTC)