Header of South Carolina GOP fundraising letter, via
BuzzFeed
My faith in the basic competence of our political leaders has already bottomed out, so there's not much left that the South Carolina GOP junior clown college and rodent rodeo
can do to it:
The South Carolina GOP on Tuesday responded to backlash it received after sending out a fundraising email that compared the Internal Revenue Service to the Gestapo.
“The State Party sent out a fundraising email earlier with a subject line meant to grab the attention of those receiving it," Alex Stroman, executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party said in a statement to TPM. "If anyone was upset, we certainly regret it. Our goal was to highlight the IRS's questionable tactics and their decision to selectively scrutinize and target certain groups, including those in South Carolina.”
All right, I'm gonna break this down. First: the image in question was the IRS logo with "Obama's Gestapo"
emblazoned upon it. I'm not sure why Nazi Germany still holds such great fundraising opportunities for the South Carolina GOP, but screw it—I don't care. Alex Stroman is the Jeffrey Dahmer of South Carolina politics and probably is personally responsible for killing and eating your mom, and I base that on absolutely nothing since I've never met the guy or know anything about him, but apparently this sort of thing is all the rage so I'm sure some half-literate simpleton somewhere will send me "
$25, 50 or $100" for saying so. It's a goddamn business plan. (I am reminded here of the language teacher I once had whose family was taken by that same Gestapo, and the circumstances in which the class learned this and learned how no, she was nowhere near done being "upset" by it, but that is neither here nor there.)
You know what? You go ahead and call anyone you want the Gestapo, I really just do not give a professional shit. It is the laziest possible political epithet, the mark of a hack so dull-minded as to embarrass all the other hacks in the proximity, but there is at no point anyone who thinks of the South Carolina Republican Party as anything more than a political pig wallow; there's no further reputation to be lost, there. Enjoy whatever it is you're soaking in, fellas.
No, I'm more impressed that the actual debunking of the IRS "scandal"—the bit where we found out that the scrutiny faced by "conservative groups" was, in fact, faced by "liberal groups" and other political-leaning groups as well—continues to make not a damn bit of difference in the fundraising letters. Doesn't matter that we now know it isn't true. Doesn't matter that the "scandal" seemed to be manufactured by a crack investigative team that massaged it into being only by carefully omitting all reference to non-conservative groups undergoing identical scrutiny. Doesn't matter that Darrell Issa, in particular, has come off the thing looking like an absolute crook, a man whose coddling of the scandal was based on lying outright to the public. Nope, it's still a scandal in redneck-land. Still a scandal among people who were pretty sure the IRS was "Obama's Gestapo" long before they had even the barest hint of something to justify the label with, the same people who thought "ACORN" were Obama's secret Gestapo before that and that the Treasury Department is preparing to wage war on Americans just as soon as the FEMA camps get their final logos designed. There hasn't been a single "scandal" yet, in the Scary Black President years, that has been harmed in the slightest by being either easily disproved or so obviously falsified that only a paint-licking moron could be taken in by it.
It really is the golden age for propagandists. You can say whatever you want, and people will still send you checks. I'm reminded of the time a mask-wearing South Carolina Republican chair Matt Moore murdered six teenagers while they were at the old abandoned summer camp, only to quietly skulk back into the lake and show up the next day to write three separate fundraising pitches in suspicious-colored ink. A damn remarkable thing, that, and if you send me $25, $50 or $100 I'll let you in on where I think that ink came from.