Conservatives Target Their Own Fringe

[Joanne98]

by Kenneth P. Vogel

After months of struggling to harness the energy of newly engaged tea party activists, the conservative establishment - with critical midterm congressional elections on the horizon - is taking aim for the first time at the movement's extremist elements.

The move has been cast by some conservatives as a modern version of the marginalization of the far-right anti-communist John Birch Society during the reorganization of the conservative movement spearheaded in the 1960s and 1970s by William F. Buckley Jr.

"A similar effort will be required today of conservative political and intellectual leaders," former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in his column in the Washington Post . "It will not be easy. Sometimes it takes courage to stand before a large crowd and proclaim that two plus two equals four."

But for Gerson and other conservatives, this is not just an intellectual exercise. They have a very specific political goal - to deprive Democrats and their allies a potentially potent weapon to use against the GOP in November.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/27-1

[Cirque du So-What]

1. Eat shit, brownshirts!

Exploitation of your 'movement' - to which I always try to invoke the scatological meaning of the word - as a pack of useful idiots is at an end. We're down to the nut-cuttin' in Congress on healthcare reform, so Dick's Armey has folded their tents and left you to twist in the wind. Feel the burn as the long knives come out of their sheaths? That's pride fuckin' wit' ya! Yeah, I went there, so go ahead and accuse me of proving Godwin's Law or somesuch. I believe the analogy is just as apt as Buckley throwing the Birchers under the bus, seeing that the teabagger 'movement' was an unholy marriage of corporation & state - one of the hallmark indicators of fascism. Fuck off, teabaggers, and do it quickly & quietly; we've heard enough of your bloviating pieholes back during the 'town-hall' meetings.

[GrantDem]

2. This was inevitable.

The purpose of the recent meeting between Steele and the Teabag leaders was an attempt to find common ground and try to encourage the teabaggers to tone it down. It was unsuccessful which leaves the GOP with the dilemma written in this article. However, they will not be able to do so by November without electoral disaster for repubs because the teabaggers are the GOP base.

[pscot]

3. This will go nowhere

It was Wm.F.Buckley who single handedly marginalized the Birchers back in the day. There is no conservative intellectul (an oxymoron if there ever was one) today who has Buckley's chops or his courage. The modern GOP is a party of crazies, hacks and corporate sycophants. They believe in nothing. They stand for nothing. In Naked Lunch Burroughs tells a parable about a man whose asshole starts to talk. Pretty soon it's doing all his talking and all his thinking. That's the Republicons.

[tanyev]

4. Gerson's a few years too late.

Most GOP leaders sound like they have already rolled over in submission to the alpha teabaggers, who think Gerson is a RINO of the highest order.

[applegrove]

5. America independants dilike the right wing fringe and the gop has no control over it.

Serves them right. Good luck with that.

[Alcibiades]

6. Once against liberal ideas, conservatives now against ideas

You cannot, through reason, convince someone that their position is wrong if it is one that they did not arrive at through the use of reason in the first place. They have been useful to the Republicans, but are now more useful to us. The teabaggers are disproportionately old, white, angry, intolerant, rude, disrespectful people.

If you want to alienate the middle class soccer mom Republican voter, then you need to get her to see these folks for what they are: they are simply not people with whom any sensible, respectable citizen would want to associate. While she believes in education, in sending her kids to good schools and good universities, these folks are ignorant:



They cannot spell:



They don't know geography:



While she's rejected overt racism, they have not:



As I have said many times, this is the old Wallace wing of the Democratic Party, but they are all Republicans now. These folks would scare the shit out of the typical aspirational soccer mom Republican if they moved next door. To the extent that the Republican Party has embraced these nutjobs, and it has been great, they make it impossible for middle class citizens who value good sense to support them. The GOP has lain down with these dogs, and we need to make sure they cannot ditch the fleas.