The Sunshine Empire

Aside from Jay Leno stabbing a second person in the back to get the Tonight Show back for a second time, the big news this weekend was the revelations from Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. The book is filled with juicy secrets but the most hay is being made over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s comments regarding then Senator Barack Obama. Reid privately commented that the country was ready for a black President because Obama was “light skinned” and had “no negro dialect” unless he wanted to have one, like Oprah or something. Now Republicans have seized on this small matter and are struggling to make it the equivalent to former Senator Trent Lott’s claim in 2002 that if the country had elected a segregationist President the country would not be suffering as many problems. Now any sane political animal would see a heavy amount of difference in saying that you feel the country is ready for a black president, however dated and inappropriate your way of doing so is, and saying that the country’s ills are attributable to the doctrine of separate but equal. Yet this is just more of the sad pattern that Republicans and the radical right have followed over the first year of the Obama administration. This year has never been about principle for Republicans, it’s all been about payback.

The sad process of imitation that the Republicans have decided is the path to return to political power started in February when the nation was introduced to the tea party movement. After seeing the hope and change crowd fill up gigantic stadium after gigantic stadium the previous year, the earl gray ingrates took the few of the angry Bush 30 percenters that were not doing anything on a work day and put them on the mall to try to match the millions that showed up for Mr. Obama for his inauguration. They then proceeded to bitch on Fox News and ask why the liberal media did not see 3000 as exactly the same as 1 million. They even stooped to trying to pass off an aerial shot of the Million Man March from the 1990′s as their rally. All in an awkward effort to give off the grass roots mob vibe.

The mob, as they like to be called (#iamthemob) also showed their urge for payback to the establishment for their perceived mistreatment during the Bush administration with their constant desperation for the United States to be attacked by terrorists. A common refrain on the radical right is that America has forgotten the lessons of 9/11. Those lessons in their mind have nothing to do with intelligence sharing, or a review of the foreign policy of the nation. The lesson that Americans have lost is the tendency to vote Republican out of blind fear. Why do you think Glenn Beck has such a 9/11 fetish? The blind need for payback was evident during the coverage of the Christmas Day pantie bomber. The radical tea people all screamed for people to be fired over the failed attack, and that the President showed weakness in not speaking to the country for 3 days. Not one of them then could answer why it was alright for Bush to take 6 days after the exact same plot in 2001. Put simply, the radical right seems to long for a terrorist attack as a form of payback against voters naive enough to vote against the Republican candidate.

Yet now the head of the RNC, in the same week he faced criticism over using the term “honest injun,” is demanding the resignation of Harry Reid for his transgressions of saying that he felt the country was ready for a black president. It’s nothing more than payback for Lott pure and simple. They realize Reid is facing a daunting climb in his reelection bid in Nevada, and that he himself was the source of the quote in the book. Every move, from the tea parties, to the terrorism fetish to the awkward attempt to give the Trent Lott treatment to Harry Reid, has never been rooted in reality and is nothing more than an attempt to imitate and exact payback pure and simple.