The saga of Rush Limbaugh and his failed attempt to acquire a piece of the St. Louis Rams may be the quintessential postmodern American racial incident. When word first leaked of Limbaugh's potential ownership, a couple of sportswriters, joined by a handful of cable news talking heads, repeated what turned out to be totally unsubstantiated quotes by Limbaugh praising slavery and James Earl Ray. (Documented outrageous Limbaugh-isms were available but generally ignored.)
Remember the period between the 2008 Republican Convention, but before the Katie Couric interview, when Sarah Palin was widely seen as a new politico dynamo who had breathed life into the McCain campaign? I wrote a column pointing out the the reaction to Palin eerily recalled the early reaction to Dan Quayle in 1988:
The more right-wing cronyism changes, it seems, the more it stays the same. Last night's episode of Nightline revealed that the DOJ's juvenile justice office has been awarding massive federal grants--meant to help seriously at-risk children--to a circus of right-wing groups with the "right" connections, abstinence campaigns, and the like. (Video here.)
Monday, October 9
Dear Damon,
What does Jerry Falwell have in common with Paul Wolfowitz and Howard Dean? What links columnist George Will with The New Republic? All, according to a recently issued "working paper," a shortened version of which appeared in the London Review of Books, are agents of an amorphous but incalculably powerful "Israel Lobby." That same inscrutable organization, the paper alleges, has dictated the decisions of politicians from George W. Bush to Jimmy Carter and determined the content of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The goal of the lobby?
CATHOLIC MATTERS: CONFUSION, CONTROVERSY, AND THE SPLENDOR OF TRUTH
By Richard John Neuhaus
(Basic Books, 272 pp., $25)
As activists on the right gather this week in Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), TNR has dipped into our archives to bring you a look back at some of the forces that have shaped the GOP. Before Thomas Schaller wrote his famous tract Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats Can Win Without the South, TNR contributor Michael Lind wrote an impressive account of the Southernization of the Republican Party. Pegged to the Republicans' Contract with America and electoral landslide in 1994, Lind compiled an impressive, comprehensive history of the decline of northern, Nelson Rockefeller-style Republicanism and the rise of a new crop of Southern GOP leaders. “Is there a way out of this?” asked Lind. “The construction of a national, political and social response to the Southern coup will require a long, and difficult, period of sustained effort. But it can only begin if Democrats--and those few principled Republicans who are left--actively contest the claim of the Southern-dominated GOP that it now speaks in any way for a new American majority.” With the conservative movement gaining momentum and some commentators predicting a Democratic walloping in 2010 akin to that of 1994, Lind’s piece is essential reading for those who want to understand the past, present, and future of the GOP.
When the new Republican Congress was sworn in last January, the South finally conquered Washington. The defeated Democratic leadership had been almost exclusively from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, with Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Majority Whip David Bonior of Michigan in the House, and, on the Senate side, Majority Leader George Mitchell from Maine. The only Southerner in the Democratic congressional leadership was Senate Majority Whip Wendell Ford of Kentucky. By contrast, all but one of the new leaders of the Republican Congress hail from a former state of the Confederacy: Speaker Newt Gingrich is a Georgian, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Whip Tom DeLay are both Texans and Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott is from Mississippi. Only Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas remains as a fossil of the era in which the GOP was a party of the Midwest and the Northeast that seldom received a Southern vote. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 presidential candidateof the segregationist States' Rights Party, the so-called Dixiecrats, is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--a grim irony, inasmuch as the integration of the armed forces was one of the reforms that inspired Thurmond to bolt from Harry Truman's Democratic Party in the first place.
