Conceding Donald Trump's "love of Vladimir Putin is a big berak with the GOP orthodoxy," Steve M. observes the President is "just the modern GOP on rage-induced drugs."
Republicans favor torture and have "an obsession with torture," he points out. Their support for the President's eagerness for deficit spending comports neatly with their passion for blowing up the deficit whenever the President is a Republican..
And of course, immigration, regarding which Steve M. cites questions those who doubt
the largely Republican-driven shutdowns of immigration reform efforts in both the Bush and Obama years? Or anti-immigration anger so vociferous that it led John McCain, once a supporter of reform, to demand that the government "complete the danged fence."
Were he blogging primarily about the GOP's immigration policy, rather than the failure to understand that Trump is a creationof the Republican Party, he would have noticed another similarity between Trump's immigration policy and GOP orthodoxy which has gone under the radar. This is the ten-point immigration plan on the Trump-Pence campaign website:
1. Begin working on an impenetrable physical wall on the southern border, on day one. Mexico will pay for the wall. 2. End catch-and-release. Under a Trump administration, anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed out of our country. 3. Move criminal aliens out day one, in joint operations with local, state, and federal law enforcement. We will terminate the Obama administration’s deadly, non-enforcement policies that allow thousands of criminal aliens to freely roam our streets. 4. End sanctuary cities. 5. Immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties. All immigration laws will be enforced - we will triple the number of ICE agents. Anyone who enters the U.S. illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws and to have a country. 6. Suspend the issuance of visas to any place where adequate screening cannot occur, until proven and effective vetting mechanisms can be put into place. 7. Ensure that other countries take their people back when we order them deported. 8. Ensure that a biometric entry-exit visa tracking system is fully implemented at all land, air, and sea ports. 9. Turn off the jobs and benefits magnet. Many immigrants come to the U.S. illegally in search of jobs, even though federal law prohibits the employment of illegal immigrants. 10. Reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers, keeping immigration levels within historic norms.
For all of Donald Trump's bluster, there is one key item missing from the list. Chris Matthews asked guest Haley Barbour Thursday evenig "why does Trump never mention illegal hiring?" Here he is, the Mr. Populist who broke through that supposed "blue wall" in the Rust Belt by winning the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and there is no talk of illegal hiring or the workplace raids.
Trump does promise to "triple the number of ICE agents," but that is followed by "anyone who enters the U.S. illegally" because the focus is on people who haven't yet crossed the border. If the immigrants already are here- illegally- employed at a job a native-born individual or legal immigrant otherwise would have, Trump doesn't want to hear about it.
There has been little support over the past few decades for deporting individuals who ae in the country illegally and employed, and President Trump has given little indication he will challenge that. Building a wall to keep out individuals not yet here goes down much easier, like a little sugar with medication. Viewing video of men, women, and children already in the USA being kicked out would be much more discomfiting.
Business interests are not to be offended. We wouldn't want to cut into the profit in hiring cheap, non-union, vulnerable labor, would we? In this and in other ways Donald Trump is, as characterized by Steve M., "a Republican evolution, not an aberration."
Haley Barbour is not living on another planet. He's a very slick politician, possibly ill-informed. The online edition of New Jersey's most widely circulated newspaper, TheStar-Ledger of Newark, reported the former Mississippi governor
defended Gov. Chris Christie in a lengthy interview for “taking the bull by the horns” after a week of explosive revelations that top Christie aides knew about plans to cause a massive traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge last year. Barbour also went on the attack, scolding Christie’s Democratic critics and the “liberal media elite” for sensationalizing the traffic jam to imperil the New Jersey governor’s political future... “First of all, he stepped up to the plate and took responsibility,” Barbour told The Star-Ledger on Friday night. “The American people are dying for that after five years of President Obama always saying it's someone else's fault. “He stepped up to the plate and said what a great Democratic president once said: ‘The buck stops here. I take responsibility’ He didn't say, like Secretary Clinton, ‘what difference does it make?’”
Announcing that one is taking responsibility is not taking responsibility, unless Barbour wants to concede full responsibility for the deadly attack on the compound in Benghazi was assumed by Secretary Clinton, who testified before Congress "As I have said many times, I take responsibility, and nobody is more committed to getting this right." Chris Christie said he took responsibility- and then assigned blame to the individuals he fired while claiming he knew nothing.
But the closure by the Republican regime in Trenton of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge for purely partisan political purposes did give the GOP yet another opportunity to blame the "liberal media," as it does upon any factual report of Republican wrongdoing. “The liberal media elite," Barber imagined, "continues to treat this like the Lincoln assassination.”
The meanies in the liberal media have just been so unkind to Chris Christie. That's why Barbara Walters named him one of the ten most fascinating people of the year. In an adoring profile (video, below) from shortly before his re-election, Walters termed him "a bear of a man," who is "frank" and "fearless." He was focused on his re-election, she stated, "and on New Jersey's recovery."
Not focused sufficiently, it appears. He awarded a $150 million no-bid contract to a Florida-based company to assist in recovery from Hurricane Sandy, even though three other firms would have done the cleanup more cheaply. A firm willing to produce an ad campaign touting the Jersey shore was bypassed in favor of an outfit charging $2 million more- but which included the governor's family in the "Stronger than the Storm" campaign commercial masquerading as a tourism spot. The bid evaluation process was led by a woman who resigned as an aide to the governor amid controversy over a $46,000 loan she received from Christie when he was U.S. Attorney.
And then there is the little matter of the $1.8 billion the Christie administration received from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 60% of which the governor promised to apply to low and moderate income housing. Nearly two-thirds of that money has gone missing, according to Chris Hayes.
Soon after the governor won re-election, Time magazine, no doubt part of that "liberal media," maintained Chris Christie
has run the Garden State with combustible passion, blunt talk and the kind of bipartisan dealmaking that no one seems to do anymore. He doesn't claim to be an ideas man or a visionary. He's a workhorse with a temper and a tongue, the guy who loves his mother and gets it done.
That's because, hey, all other politicians absolutely hate their mother. And the "workhorse" (who) "gets it done" learned (as Josh Barro points out) 117 days after the story broke that one of his Deputy Chiefs of Staff (Bridget Kelly) had ordered closure of lanes to the most-heavily used bridge in the world. Quite a way to "take the bull by the horns," though both Barbour and Christie should know bull when they see it.
Robert Reich looks at the far-right Republicans, citing Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Ken Buck in Colorado, and Sharron Angle in Nevada who have won state primaries. He argues
Some Democrats think all this is wonderful because it boosts the odds of Democratic wins, not only in the midterms but also in 2012 when the Republicans put up Palin, Gingrich, or someone equally bizarre. Even voters who are are unenthusiastic about Democrats will be motivated to turn out if they fear that crackpots will otherwise take over our government.
I’m not as sanguine about what’s happening. Political discourse in America is important. What candidates say can legitimize hateful or divisive views that would otherwise never see the light of day.
A further problem is that these are merely a few of the wingers who are outside of the political mainstream but which the GOP is attempting to foist (as U.S. Senators) on the country. Reich even omits Joe Miller (video, from Crooks and Liars, below) in Alaska, who believes unemployment compensation, Medicare, and Social Security are unconstitutional. (For good measure, he lies about the latter, claiming "its trust fund is empty.")
But there is an even bigger problem. These characters drag the conversation to the right, wherein viewpoints slightly to the left of theirs are considered the norm. Sometimes, opinions of the far right are considered the norm, if uttered by individuals who seem to be sane and sober.
If Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint are the patron saints of hard-right anti-establishment types, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is their counterpart in the center. The wily head of the Republican Governors Association, a possible contender for president in 2012, preaches a big-tent philosophy that contrasts sharply with the ideological purification drive on the right.
Things have moved so far to the right that Haley Barbour is a centrist now.
It's true that he's a "Big Tent" Republican, at least to extent that he can get away with it. But it's not because he wants a bunch of lily-livered moderates in the party, but because he knows there aren't enough hardcore nuts in the country (yet) to sustain a far right majority. But that doesn't make someone a "centrist." It makes him a practical power broker.
Haley Barbour is hardcore conservative and a corporate whore. Unless you define Joe Lieberman as the far left, he most certainly is not a centrist.
This is the same Governor Barbour who, in a recent interview (video of part 1, here) with the conservative magazine and website Human Events, tried to lay the blame for Southern segregation on the Democratic Party and the credit for its elimination on "my generation," which led the South to embrace the Republican Party. His faulty recollection (oh, sure) was eviscerated by syndicated columnist Eugene Robinson, who explained
Not a word of this is true.
Barbour did not attend “integrated schools,” if he’s referring to his primary and secondary education. Mississippi ignored the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that was meant to end separate-but-unequal school systems. Eventually, officials implemented a “freedom of choice” desegregation plan—but black parents who tried to send their children to white schools were threatened and intimidated, including by cross-burnings. Finally, in 1969, the Supreme Court ordered Mississippi to integrate its schools immediately. The long-stalled change took place in 1970.
That was long after Barbour had graduated from high school in Yazoo City and gone on to attend the University of Mississippi—the “integrated college” he mentioned in the interview. The federal government had forced Ole Miss to admit its first black student, James Meredith, in 1962; he had to be escorted onto the campus by U.S. marshals as white students rioted in protest.
The following year, a second black student was admitted. In the mid-1960s, when Barbour was attending Ole Miss, it’s no wonder that he “never thought twice” about integration. There were only a handful of black students, and by all accounts—except Barbour’s—they were isolated and ostracized by their white peers.
The governor’s assertion that segregation was a relic of the past “by my time” is ludicrous. He was 16, certainly old enough to pay attention, during the Freedom Summer of 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Miss. He was a young adult, on his way to becoming a lawyer, when the public schools were forced to integrate. I’ll bet Barbour could remember those days if he tried a little harder.
Equally wrong—and perhaps deliberately disingenuous—is his made-up narrative of how the South turned Republican. Let me correct the record.
As he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, Lyndon Johnson is supposed to have said that the Democratic Party had “lost the South for a generation.” Among those who voted against the landmark legislation was Sen. Barry Goldwater, who became Johnson’s opponent in the presidential race that fall.
Johnson scored a landslide victory. Goldwater took his home state of Arizona and just five others: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. It was the first time those Deep South states had voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Reconstruction—and marked the moment when, for many Southern voters, the GOP became the party of white racial grievance. It wasn’t “a different generation from those who fought integration” that made the switch. Integration was the whole reason for the switch.
And then there is the case of Verna Ann Bailey, the first black female to attend the University of Mississippi and who sat next to Barbour, who describes having established a rapport with her. McClatchy picks up the story:
Bailey, reached by phone, reacted to Barbour's story with surprise that bordered on confusion.
"I don't remember him at all, no, because during that time that certainly wasn't a pleasant experience for me," she said. "My interactions with white people were very, very limited. Very, very few reached out at all."
Bailey is now the principal of an elementary school in Beaverton, Ore. While she may have seemed like just another student to Barbour, history hasn't viewed her that way. For her role in the civil rights movement, she was inducted into the Ole Miss Alumni Hall of Fame and has a scholarship named after her.
She's sometimes asked to speak to groups about her experience. Her recollections are filled with details of pain, humiliation, isolation and courage.
She left Mississippi at 24, following her brother to the more liberal Pacific Northwest. It seemed beautiful and welcoming. She worked in Seattle, and eventually was recruited to Oregon. She got a master's degree, began a doctoral program.
She'd go back to Mississippi to visit her parents. Her father was a prominent local civil rights leader who didn't share Barbour's view of Republicans as enlightened on the issue. Both her parents are deceased.
Barbour left Ole Miss before he finished his bachelor's degree to work for the Nixon campaign, then came back to earn his law degree. Bailey said she finished her undergraduate degree in three years, not because she was a great student, but because she wanted to get out of Oxford, Miss., as fast as she could.
She recalled dancing in Oxford Square once with another black student at a school celebration when a crowd of whites began pelting them with coins and beer. "It was just an awful experience. I just saw this mass of anger; anger and hostility. I thought my life was going to end."
A campus minister, one of the only whites she remembers showing her kindness, took her by the hand and led her to safety. She said the minister was ostracized.
During her undergraduate days, she was inundated with intimidating phone calls to her dorm from white men. "The calls were so constant," she said. "Vulgar, all sexual connotations, saying nigger bitches needed to go back to the cotton field and things of that nature." She'd complain, have the phone number changed. Then the calls would start again. Funeral wreaths with what appeared to be animal blood on them were found outside her dorm.
In one science class in a lecture hall, no one would sit near her. The only class in which she remembers alphabetized seating was a Spanish class where the teacher seemed empathetic to her. Bailey figured that was because the teacher was from South America, not Mississippi.
Barbour said they had a literature class together. Bailey remembers taking a literature class, but nothing about it. "It wouldn't surprise me if I allowed someone to copy my notes because that's just someone I am," she said. "I did that as an undergraduate student, as a graduate student."
Robinson believes Barbour is trying "to shake its image as hostile to African-Americans and other minorities. It would be consistent with this attempted makeover to pretend that the party never sought, and won, the votes of die-hard segregationists." Barbour's is a severely dishonest account, one intended to appeal to moderates and mainstream journalists, but merely putting a different package on the same product Palin, Angle, O'Donnell and the less discreet radicals are pushing.
If Chris Matthews displays a marked preference for Republicans over Democrats- and he does- he still is, at times, the best poltical interviewer on television. The following is from the transcript of Hardball on November 29, 2009 (video) as they were discussing The Quitting Governor:
MATTHEWS: Is she qualified to be president?
BARBOUR: Well, constitutionally, she sure is.
I will tell you, now, Chris, she‘s a lot brighter than she gets credit for. I served as governor with her for several years. I mentioned earlier, when it came to energy policy, she is very well informed, very experienced.
I mean, she was in Alaska and I was in Mississippi, and I would just see her at meetings, but I never had anything but a very positive impression of her. Still do.
MATTHEWS: The latest “Washington”—The latest “Washington Post”/ABC poll has it that 60 percent of the people say that she‘s not qualified to be president.
Are you with the 60 percent or with the 38 percent who say she is?
BARBOUR: Well, I have been in the minority a lot in my life. You know, I was...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: I mean, if I were polling you, if I were polling you on the phone right now, and I called you up on the phone, Governor, and I managed to get through to your mansion down there on—in Jackson, and I managed to get you on the phone, and I said, you‘re just a regular person. Is this woman qualified to be president or not? And you would have to be one of the people who would respond. Or you could hang up on me.
Are you going to hang up on me, Governor?
(LAUGHTER)
BARBOUR: I‘m not going to hang up on you. I was a Republican in Mississippi in 1968, Chris, so I‘m not unused—unaccustomed to being in the minority. I don‘t know anything that disqualifies her for being president. Do I think she is the best presidential candidate that we might have? Well, let‘s see who all runs. But right now, the good news is I don‘t have to make that decision. What I have to make a decision is how can I best help elect more Republican governors in 2010.
MATTHEWS: So you‘re going to dodge that one, right? You‘re not going to tell me whether she‘s qualified or not tonight on HARDBALL here. We ask questions like this, Governor. That‘s why we like having you on so we can ask you these questions. Is Governor Palin qualified to be president? And I won‘t ask it again. This is the last time.
BARBOUR: And the last time I answer it will be this, I don‘t know of anything that disqualifies her from being president. I think that‘s what I told you a while ago, and you wouldn‘t take that for an answer.
MATTHEWS: Well, I have to take it now.
Haley Barbour, for his own reason(s), doesn't want to be quoted acknowledging Sarah Palin is not qualified for the presidency or conceding that she is qualified. It's highly unlikely that Barbour reads The New Republic, but his strategy seems grounded in a cautionary tale in the article "Running Against Sarah" appearing fourteen months ago. One of the individuals Seyward Darby spoke to was Loren Leman, who had been a State Senator in Alaska but would only narrowly defeat in a primary the mayor of Wasilla. Leman said
she was savvy in creating “gotcha” moments. In a private conversation months before the primary for lieutenant governor, Leman said he told Palin she would be good for the job. (He was considering running for governor and broached the possibility of her running as his second-in-command.) After both Leman and Palin decided to run for the same position, Palin asked him in a public debate if he had ever said she would make a good lieutenant governor. “I’m sure it was all calculated out to get me to admit that I said it or to deny that I said it, which would catch me in a political fib,” Leman said. “She was going to come out of that exchange with a little plus, which she was looking for. She needed credibility.”
There is little chance that Barbour, a highly shrewd politician, was blindsided by any question posed about the qualifications of the former Republican vice-presidential nominee. And so Matthews got it right when he observed on the following day's episode of Hardball:
Smart guy, Haley Barbour. There‘s a reason why he didn‘t say she is qualified. And we are going to find that out someday.
T
Next: Not for the first time, Matthews gets it right- exactly- about abortion.
