Crossposted from Hillilly Report.
From the "Man, it sure took long enough" category, it appears as if maybe finally some Republicans are tiring of the looney-tune reactions of their own party. It took some guy making a fool of himself on national T.V. and in front of millions of people but the outburst by Joe Wilson during Obama's speech, when he of course shouted out a lie about Obama lying may have finally caused enough of a shudder up the spines of Republicans that some of them may say enough is enough.
Some of them may actually be developing a conscience and are beginning to worry that their party is becoming known as the blathering, frothing at the mouth party:
"Neither party has an exclusive on whack jobs," says Republican media consultant Mark McKinnon. "Unfortunately, right now the Democrats generally get defined by President Obama, and Republicans, who have no clear leadership, get defined by crackpots — and then they begin to define the Republican Party in the mind of the general public."
http://www.politico.com/...
Did it really take some of them this long to realize that they have a pretty long list of insane, paranoid, and completely idiotic things to be ashamed of??:
Here’s Orly Taitz, insisting that the commander in chief was born in Kenya. There’s a flock of town hall protesters, waving photos of the president in a Hitler moustache. Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin warns darkly that Obama is planning "death panels" for senior citizens. Georgia Rep. Paul Broun equates the president’s plans with "Nazi" policies. Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt — last heard calling John Murtha a "coward" — tells a birther: "I agree with you, but the courts don’t."
And then, in the midst of all the catcalls, hand-held signs and "I’m not listening" BlackBerrying, Wilson interrupts Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress by shouting, "You lie!"
Some of them are now fearing that their party is rightfully looking like a narrow band of lunatics all suffering from "little man syndrome":
"The president was helped more by the optics of House Republicans than by his own speech," says former Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn.). "It’s not likely to do any long-term damage, but they need to be very careful how they oppose this president."
One veteran GOP official puts it bluntly: "The image of a bunch of white guys booing an African-American president is about as bad as it gets."
Some Republican leaders were quick to seperate themselves from the madnes and try and differentiate their party from lunacy, or were they??:
Republican leaders were quick to distance themselves from Wilson’s outburst. John McCain said Wilson should apologize, and he did — although he also insisted that he was right about Obama’s lack of candor.
But Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the chairman of the Republicans’ campaign arm in the Senate, suggests that it’s not fair to tar the GOP with its fringier elements — and that it won’t last anyway.
"I think that it’s a free country," he says. "Anybody can say what they want, they can identify themselves as a Democrat, independent, a Republican, a socialist or whatever they want to call themselves. That doesn’t mean they were representative of a political party or the mainstream of a political party."
The Wilson incident was "certainly unfortunate," said Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), but "I don’t see it as any definition of our party," he said.
And while House Minority Leader John Boehner said Thursday that he was glad Wilson had apologized for his outburst, he seemed to forgive the impulse behind the outburst, noting that passions over the health care debate are running high: "Don’t underestimate the amount of emotion that people are feeling," he warned at a Capitol news conference.
While Wilson’s outburst was "the kind of thing that should never happen," Bass says, it captured "this enormous pent-up frustration" among conservatives and Republicans over the issue of health care.
"I did not view him as some fringe crazy person at all," Bass says. "He reflected the temperature of the public, at least the opponents of this plan, and I think there are enough of them that there isn’t a sense that the Republicans are out of their minds for opposing this plan."
Indeed, both Cantor and Boehner behaved Thursday like parents who know they must reprimand a child whose misbehavior has secretly delighted them — later in the day, both could be found praising the efforts of hundreds of conservative activists assembled outside the Capitol, who several times chanted "You lie!" en masse, openly rallying around the very incident their leadership had supposedly disavowed/
I mean, in the past the Democrats have had their lunatic fringe too after all:
Nor are Democrats strangers to having their crazy uncles take center stage. During the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and David Bonior (D-Mich.) famously flew to Baghdad, where McDermott asserted that he believed the president would "mislead the American public" to justify the war. The trip made it a cakewalk for critics to describe the Democratic Party as chock-a-block with traitorous radicals.
Former Rep. Charlie Bass (R-N.H.) notes that hot tempers and high spirits are not uncommon when the stakes are high:
"I remember after [President George W. Bush] announced his Social Security plan, I had 15 town meetings, and they were nasty. But I didn’t call them unruly mobs. The fact is this is a very, very contentious issue, and it’s a do-or-die issue for a lot of people," he says.
Oh, wait. The President DID mislead the American public to justify the War in Iraq and if President Bush would have gotten his way and been able to privitize Social Security it would have all went down the tubes with Wall St. when he finally managed to completely crash the economy. I guess those Democrats weren't quite so looney after all.
Still it is encouraging to see that at least a few Republicans are tiring of watching their party make fools of themselves:
Brian Jones, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, finds it frustrating when lawmakers like Wilson hijack the party’s public persona.
"You have a little bit of tyranny of the minority with these people," he says. "It may raise their profile, it may make them more attractive in their district — but does it really help the image of the party in the midst of an important debate? I think no. Obviously, there are some who will be cheering this, but I think the cake is baked with them in terms of how they feel about Obama and health care."
"As someone who is center-right, it does make you cringe," says Jones. For example, he says, "the notion of certain parents not sending their kids to school because they don’t want their kids being exposed to the propaganda of the president — to me that’s absurd. And parents have right to do that, I guess, but that’s representative of the same mind-set, I think."
Which is a very good thing because we may need these guys to help us defeat mandates without a public option.