Our second political Quote of Day comes from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Michele Bachmann’s breathtaking-to-all-but-ideologues statement at last night’s GOP Presidential hopeful debate in Iowa:
“Michele Bachmann’s first answer was, I wish the federal government had defaulted,” Scarborough recalled Bachmann saying during Thursday night’s Republican debate. “Had defaulted! A week after Americans lost — some of them perhaps lost half of their pensions. Lost half of their 401ks. When trillions of dollars went down the drain with Americans suffering, she said that and got applause.”
“If anybody thinks that guys like my dad are going to be voting that way… they are out of their mind and they are too stupid not only to prognosticate, they are too stupid to run Slurpee machines in Des Moines… Michele Bachmann is a joke. She is a joke. Her answer is a joke. Her candidacy is a joke… Iowa, if you let her win, you prove your irrelevance once again.”
What is really jarring to those of us who were once Republicans and considered both parties had something to offer Americans is the total demise of the concept of “compassionate conservatism.” It now seems as if there is a race in the Republican Party to show who is the least compassionate, the hardest, the most brutal. It isn’t tough love since it sometimes is coupled with demonizing rhetoric about other segments of America. It’s not quite Tough Hate but it is a turn off to many — and I predict that in a year when GOPers have good shot at the White House this could grab defeat from the jaws of victory.
People may diss Scarborough but, in fact, he zig zags enough politically so that he is indicative of independent voters, or not quite Tea Party Republicans and may even reflect the view of Democrats who aren’t fans of their own party’s liberal base.
As I’ve said before: some of the Republican rhetoric we now hear would have been relegated to tiny UHF TV stations in the 1960s on shows hosted by extreme right Republicans who wouldn’t get the time of day from Barry Goldwater or William F. Buckley or Ronald Reagan, let alone from the party’s more moderate Republican leadership at the time.
And I will say it again: most of the unfeeling talk about it’s no big deal to default, or cut Social Security or privatize Medicare come from people with big, fat bank accounts who don’t have to worry, or talk show hosts who fly around the country on their private jets in between shows when they talk about cutting benefits to the poor, or from politicians on the federal or state levels who blast healthcare reform but themselves get health care from the governmnent…and when called on it claim it’s a private matter.
For instance, like this guy in Florida.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.