Craig is one of the good friends I made in New Orleans after THE THING He and his darling wife Kim made like Horace Greeley and went west young (?) man (?) a few months back. Craig is a renaissance man: chef, writer, reporter, blogger, sailor, chocolate fancier as well as a cantankerous recovering Texan. Kim and he ran the much loved restaurant J’anita’s, which became something of a hang out for Dr. A and me when they were located in NOLA no man’s land. Business was so slow that they weren’t embarrassed to be seen with the likes of me. Dr. A is, of course, welcome everywhere. End of rare nice passage.
Now where the hell was I? Oh yeah, Craig wrote a swell paragraph at his livejournal blog beerfoodude.The blog is not eponymous but it could be. The passage in question was posted on 2/3/2014, the day after the Super Beatdown:
Speaking of the far right — when is the GOP gonna tell it to sit the hell down and then tie it to the chair and put a ball gag in its mouth? Every country has and should have a lunatic fringe — but that doesn’t mean it gets to be in the Big Tent. Let it stand out in the rain until it realizes its own stupidity is what’s making it wet. You wanna come in here where it’s dry? Fine. Act like it. There are reactionaries and socialist groups in virtually every reasonably free society on this planet and these groups send elected representatives to the national assembly. But, pretty much everywhere else, they don’t have much influence because they are regarded as what they are: the outliers with foaming mouths yelling madly at the gate. “What are they shouting about?” “I dunno, man.” As it stands now, the GOP is handing these folks a microphone and cranking up pre-recorded crowd noise, much like some of the “live” record albums produced back in the ’60s.
Well…yeah. Except that — the loonies have never been disciplined or otherwise told to get with the program. They make for easy pickings at election time, and the leadership (allegedly) fears them.
The easy pickings part is, well…easy. It hit me the other day that pretty much everything they say about “big government” — and all of it is relentlessly negative — has been said about [insert your preferred racial or ethnic minority here]. Big government is bloated and inefficient (i.e., ugly and lazy) but also big and scary (steals your money and forces you to do things). Hmmm…Lee Atwater said something about that, as I guess you recall.
On the flip side, I’m assuming you saw the insane wingnut video of the week. Only watched a minute or so, but got the gist. An Oklahoma congressman (US, not State, if I remember) thought it was perfectly reasonable for an elderly constituent to suggest executing the socialist Muslim who’s not really president.
Until idiots like that tell…idiots like that…that the socialist Muslim is actually a Harvard-educated technocrat, the loons are going to be loons. And even when they get sent away — like when Buckley told the Birchers to take a hike — it seems like they’re more dormant than actually gone, just waiting for circumstances (like electing Ronaldus Magnus) to re-animate them. Sigh.