Liberals Scream: ‘No Fair! Conservatives Are Infringing Our Monopoly on Gay-Baiting Republican Closet Cases!’

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As Professor Donald Douglas points out, that is the essence of liberal blogger Steve Benen’s concern-troll post at Washington Monthly:

I’m not generally in the habit of defending Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), but some of the abuse he’s been receiving from the right is ridiculous. . . .
For the record, I neither know nor care about Graham’s private life. His sexual orientation is irrelevant — and the attacks are pathetic in either case.

Without regard to whether the ALIPAC attack on Graham is “pathetic,” as Professor Douglas observes, lefty bloggers have been gay-baiting Graham for years without any complaint from Benen. This is all part of a very cynical pattern on the part of liberals, who know all the gossip about the GOP Closet Caucus, but reserve to themselves the privilege of running whisper campaigns, or occasionally “outing” gay Republicans at politically opportune moments.

However, let any conservative make public mention of what “everybody knows” — did somebody say, Charlie Crist? — and suddenly it’s all about “right-wing homophobia.”

Well, if I may be allowed to borrow the two most famous words of Rahm Emanuel: Fuck you.

As I’ve noted before, you can’t accuse the Democrats of having no standards. They’ve got two: One for them, and another for everybody else.

Until liberals are called out on this kind of double-standard crap — called out directly and repeatedly — they’ll continue to twist the narrative to their own advantage. This is all about liberals trying to control the cultural context of politics in ways that protect Democrats, and if conservative play along, the rules of discourse will be defined in such a way that conservatives can’t win.

So we’ll gossip about Republicans as much as we want, and gossip about Democrats, too. A couple of weeks ago, in fact, I heard some interesting rumors surrounding the rather recent divorce of a certain Blue Dog who’s having a tough re-election contest this year. They say he has a taste for “twinks,” and NTTAWWT, but who knows what might happen if the “value voters” in his conservative district start hearing this stuff?

Good luck with those mid-terms, Steve.

SIGTARP Report Confirms: Homeowner Bailout Program Won’t Fix Housing Crisis

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Connie Hair at Human Events reports:

A new report released yesterday (.pdf) by Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) warns that Obama administration efforts to bailout homeowners through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) are ineffective and will not stem the sweeping tide of foreclosures.
The $75 billion HAMP program was created with a promise to bailout 3 to 4 million homeowners in foreclosure, paying lenders to modify troubled mortgages. Foreclosures reached 2.8 million in 2009 and are on track to exceed that total with over 932,000 foreclosures filed in the first three months of 2010, the report found.
The inspector general found the program “has made very little progress in stemming this onslaught” in a year with only 230,000 loans permanently modified. . . .
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), top Republican on the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit put a fine point on the bailouts rewarding bad behavior.
“We must remember that 93.6% of households rent, own free and clear, or are current on their mortgages,” Hensarling stated. “Programs like HAMP that force the responsible majority to subsidize the irresponsible minority should be rejected. . . .
“Not only is this expensive program ineffective, it is completely unfair,” Hensarling said. “HAMP forces responsible taxpayers, struggling to make their own mortgage payments, to pay their neighbor’s mortgage. . . .”

Meanwhile, Hensarling is offering a bill that would repeal the Community Reinvestment Act, the Jimmy Carter-era legislation that helped spawn the mortgage meltdown.

Not only is the failure of HAMP the latest evidence that Obamanomics still isn’t working, but this SIGTARP report is yet further confirmation of my hunch last summer — when the “IG-Gate” scandal heated up — that Barofsky was “the IG most likely to get a Cabinet secretary sent to federal prison.” 

But we really don’t want to start talking about Tim Geithner and Goldman Sachs, do we?

If Marco Rubio Is Stalin, Who Is Crist? And What Does That Make John Cornyn?

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Chris Matthews gets another thrill up his leg:

Republican purge. Arlen Specter is out. John McCain, Charlie Crist and Robert Bennett are all being threatened on the right. Is this anyway to run a party or run it into the ground? . . .
[W]hat happens to Republicans who don’t march to the right wing tune? Well they’re getting purged. This is Stalinesque, this stuff. . . .
Going around and saying, “Well we really don’t like Arlen Specter. You go find something else to do. Go be a Democrat.” We see this with Charlie Crist perhaps being given the boot. . . .
[I]t seems like one of the reasons that the Democrats got 90 percent of the Jewish vote, for example, last time around for Barack Obama is not so much love of him or knowledge of him. It was fear of this theocratic, gun-toting party that begins to look more and more right wing, more and more Sarah Palin than it did two years ago. If this party, the Republicans, keep going over to Palin-ism and gun-toters and 2nd Amendment types, I think a lot of people in the suburbs, sophisticated people of all backgrounds, are gonna say, “That’s not my party.”

Exactly what gun-toting theocrats, Sarah Palin and “90 percent of the Jewish vote” have to do with the GOP Senate primary in Florida, Mr. Tingles forgot to tell us, but why bother with details? (Allahpundit gives the “purge” meme a thorough fisking.)

As founder of the Not One Red Cent blog — created last May in response to the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s unwarranted interference in the Florida primary — I can attest that the grassroots conservative uprising had nothing to do with any of the stuff Chris Matthews was babbling about so idiotically. (Does he ever babble any other way?)

The attempt of NRSC Chairman John Cornyn and Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer to fix the Senate primary for their buddy, Charlie Crist, was the last straw in a long series of similar moves by the Republican establishment, which had been meddling in the primary process for years, although never so blatantly as in this Florida Senate race. When GOP insiders think they can hand-pick the Republican candidate 15 months before the primary, something has gone seriously awry in the party machinery.

The fact that Crist had (literally) embraced Obama and the stimulus plan was part of the problem, but only part. Marco Rubio — the kind of young, dynamic candidate that the GOP needs to revitalize its image — was already in the Senate race, raising money, when all of a sudden here comes the Republic establishment big-footing into the primary on behalf of Crist. If Crist was such a hands-down favorite for the Senate, then he could have easily won re-election as governor, and yet Cornyn and Greer decided Crist should stomp all over Rubio’s dream.

Did conservatives know what Marco Rubio’s positions were on all the issues when this grassroots revolution started? Not only did we not know, we didn’t even care. The point was that Rubio was getting screwed over by the GOP establishment — “Those treacherous bastards!” — and we meant to put a stop to this political equivalent of insider trading.

As it happens, Rubio’s positions are conservative (including his stance on immigration, which had been questioned by some) but he’s sufficiently mainstream to earn the endorsements of non-wingnut Republicans as Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Eric Cantor. (And if Chris Matthews is worried about “90 percent of the Jewish vote,” let’s see Kendrick Meek try to outdo Rubio’s pro-Israel bona fides.)

As Doug Hagin points out, the handpicking of Crist was about “pragmatists like Mr. Cornyn who insist that uncompromising conservatives aren’t good bets to win swing states.” As everyone who follows Republican politics knows, Cornyn and the NRSC have tried to fix several other primaries in favor of “safe” vanilla-bland GOP establishment candidates like Sue Lowden in Nevada and Jane Norton in Colorado. This makes Sharron Angle the Marco Rubio of Nevada and Ken Buck the Marco Rubio of Colorado, you see.

Nothing against Lowden or Norton, really, but the principle is the same. And now, Cornyn’s unprecedented meddling is blowing up in his face:

Once the champion of Charlie Crist’s Senate campaign, Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, can no longer get a phone call returned by the embattled Florida governor. . . .
That is a sign of how the relationship between Cornyn and Crist has changed. Cornyn initially picked Crist for the Republican ticket in part because the governor was such a sure bet that he didn’t need extra financial support. That allowed Cornyn and the NRSC to focus time and money on other races.

Heh. That worked out really smooth, didn’t it, Senator?

NOT ONE RED CENT!

My Congresstool Shames Me

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by Smitty

From RetireJimMoran.com:

In October 2008, during a debate with 2008 GOP candidate Mark Ellmore at an Indian-American forum, Jim Moran “freaked out” at the notion that both parties are to blame for the Wall Street mess that contributed to the recession and caused the bailouts.

A lady at the forum asked Moran, “Wouldn’t you agree that both parties along with Wall Street [got] us in this mess? All three together?”

Moran, outraged, rudely screams, “Absolutely not! That’s nonsense! Ha! No! No! It didn’t! Because we didn’t have this situation before the Republican Party came in.”

I’m truly ashamed and apologize to the rest of the country that I have not done enough in the past decade I’ve lived in VA-8 to give this colossal piece of work more time with his family.

The subprime crisis has its roots in the asinine 10th Amendment violation known as the Community Re-investment Act. That my Congresstool is so dishonest as to blame the problem solely on the GOP underscores the need to vote his corrupt corpse out.

Wasting Too Many Words

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Daniel Larison titles a post “McCain’s Integrity” — meaning Cousin John — and then expends more than 900 words analyzing something that doesn’t exist.

John McCain has no integrity. Period.

Update: (Smitty) Your attention is drawn to American Freedom’s “John McCain’s Whimsical World of Conservatism 2005-2007” for a fumble-by-fumble description of why we need fewer tools and more Americans on the November ballot.

J.D. HAYWORTH for U.S. SENATE

Somebody Really Ought to Make a ‘Downfall’ Parody Video About This

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Except of course, you can’t do that anymore:

‘Hitler Reacts to…’ — that patron saint of YouTube memes — seems to be on its way out. The clips, which dub a scene from the 2004 German-language film ‘Downfall,’ are being rapidly pulled by Constantin Films, which is claiming copyright infringement.
The film features Hitler (portrayed by Bruno Ganz), ensconced in his bunker, learning he cannot win the war. The viral video versions tweak the subtitles to have Hitler reacting explosively to current events . . .
“Earlier today, someone attempted to upload a new version surrounding the massive iPhone 4G news. Unfortunately, as you can see on YouTube, that video has already been removed,” TechCrunch reported yesterday. The New York Times covered the phenomenon in 2008, estimating more than 100 instances of the Hitler meme.
“We as a corporation have a bit of an ambivalent view of it,” Martin Moszkowicz, an executive at Constantin Film, told the BBC. “On the one hand, we are proud the picture has such a huge fan base and that people are using it for parody. On the other hand, we are trying to protect the artists.”

No more “Downfall” parodies? The Blogosphere, 2001-2010, R.I.P.

Filibuster Financial Reform? What Kind of Senator Would Dare to Do Such a Thing?

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Five years ago, it was a certain freshman Senator from Illinois and his fellow Democrats:

[I]n July 2005 . . . the Senate Banking Committee, then controlled by the Republicans, adopted tough regulatory legislation for the GSEs [government-sponsored entities, i.e., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] on a party-line vote — all Republicans in favor, all Democrats opposed. . . .
If legislation along the lines of the Senate committee’s bill had been enacted in that year, many if not all the losses that Fannie and Freddie have suffered, and will suffer in the future, might have been avoided.
Why was there no action in the full Senate? As most Americans know today, it takes 60 votes to cut off debate in the Senate, and the Republicans had only 55. To close debate and proceed to the enactment of the committee-passed bill, the Republicans needed five Democrats to vote with them. But in a 45 member Democratic caucus that included Barack Obama and the current Senate Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), these votes could not be found.

Yup, that’s right. The same Barack Obama who now excoriates Republicans for opposing “reform” joined his Democratic Senate colleagues — including current “reform” advocate Joe Biden — five years ago in filibustering GOP-backed legislation which could have prevented the Fannie/Freddie collapse that helped produce the 2008 meltdown.

Don’t ever accuse Democrats of having no standards. They’ve got two standards: One for them, and one for everybody else.

BTW, this might be a good time to start talking about Goldman Sachs giving $1 million for Obama’s 2008 campaign, don’t you think?

(Hat-tip: Cassy Fiano in the Greenroom.)