“I think [Ted Cruz] fits in the tradition of Father Coughlin and McCarthy and of course, and maybe to a lesser extent, Pat Buchanan and of course, O’Reilly. These guys are hard right-wing guys. They look a lot alike. They have that — we call it the black Irish look to them. They don’t smile much. It’s quite a tradition here, but it does run to the right of the regular Republican Party.”
“Cruz is 42, the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate with his allegations of communist infiltration.”
“It used to be that the only way to get elected in the old Dixiecrat South was to be the farthest out there in backing segregation. Anyone who showed moderation was seen as soft. Anyone who talked compromise on Civil Rights was suspected of being on the other side.
Well, to win in today’s Republican Party, which began displacing the Dixiecrats a half century ago, you have to be the farthest out there backing guns. Show moderation, you get your NRA badge ripped off you. Agree to any rule on gun safety, and you’re marked as a traitor for life.
Well, it’s not just the back benchers. Today, some of the top people in the Republican Party, the people to watch — Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz — are right out there front in opposing President Obama on gun safety. So what happened? Why is the GOP the party of guns over people?”
“You want to have a new conspiracy? These [Tea Party Republican] people that want to do away with our government — how is that different that all these dictators? Osama bin Laden wanted to do away with our government. What’s wrong with us?”
“But what, if anything, does this bullying of bus monitor Karen Klein] say about society at large? Many things one could argue, but, for me, it is a remarkably apt metaphor for this moment in the American discourse in which hostility has been drawn out into the sunlight.
…Whether it is a Republican debate audience booing a gay soldier or Rush Limbaugh’s vicious attack on a female Georgetown law student or Newt Gingrich’s salvos at the poor, bullying has become boilerplate. Hiss and taunt. Tease and intimidate. Target your enemies and torture them mercilessly. Maintain primacy through predation.
…Women are under attack. Hispanics are under attack. Minority voting rights are under attack. The poor are under attack. Unsurprisingly, those doing the attacking in every case are from the right. “
“It seems like they act as though some wiping out of people, some of the right-wing, is all right. It’s not all right to do to any innocent people. If you had war and people that’s one thing, but to wipe out innocent people just because of who they are like what was done in Hitler’s Germany or what was done to Native Americans is not justifiable.”
“I’m glad [Andrew Breitbart]‘s dead!
There are very few people I can say that about. This guy, absolutely! I don’t have the slightest bit compunction of saying ‘good.’ The world is a better place today. Can you think of the last time you’ve been this happy that someone is dead? You want to make a comparison? I was thinking of Anwar al-Awlaki. No, now Sly you’ve gone too far.
No it’s not!
…To me Andrew Breitbart’s death is kinda similar to Kim Jung Il. Kind of a similar thing. Did Andrew Breitbart have starvation camps? No. But Andrew Breitbart is working on the forces of evil pushing for starvation camps.”
“[W]hen we last saw the Republican front-runner Rick Santorum speaking before a crowd yesterday, all we could think of was George Orwell’s novel 1984 about a society dominated by the most extreme form of totalitarianism…
If you listen carefully to Rick Santorum, he sounds more like Stalin than Pope Innocent III.”
