Harold Monteau: Republican Party getting in bed with far right

Tuesday, February 15, 2011  

"Republican ersatz presidential candidate Sarah Palin, puts Representative Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, “in the crosshairs” in television commercials supporting a Republican candidate for Giffords’s seat in the U.S. House. Palin goes on TV in full camo with a loaded assault rifle firing it into the air and inviting others to “take aim” at Giffords. Both disavow any connection between what they did and said and the attempted political assassination of a member of the U.S. House. Both deny that their hate speech inspired the killing of six people and the wounding of 14. A 9-year-old girl died because she has already developed a passion for politics and a compassion for the people whom Giffords champions. The little girl died alongside a federal judge who dared rule against Arizona’s hate-filled law legalizing racial profiling under the guise of stopping illegal immigration. Palin calls the newspaper reports connecting her and others’ vitriolic speech against the Democrats and other liberals a “blood libel,” not aware she just insulted every Jew in the country.

Months earlier, Republican Representative John Boehner (now Speaker of the House) whips up what he knows is a very volatile branch of the Republican Party in the wake of the passage of health care reform. Republican members of Congress line the outdoor balcony of the House and incite an already angry crowd of Tea Party supporters. People in the crowd spit upon members of the House and shout “fag” and “nigger.” Some of these same representatives being spat upon had marched, were arrested, and beaten by white opposition during the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Some were witness to the political assassinations of the 1960s, when a U.S. president, a U.S. senator and a pantheon of Civil Rights leaders were gunned down for their “liberal” political beliefs. The Republican far right, to this day, insists that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and is an “illegitimate” president. They perpetuate the myth that “Obama is going to take away our guns” just as they perpetuate the lie that he is Muslim, as if that disqualifies him from being president. A Republican member of the U.S. House, in complete and utter disrespect for his office and the office of the President of the United States, screamed “you lie” as the president was making a speech on health care. The Republicans would like the American public to believe in their characterization of all this as a backlash against health care reform and other facets of Obama’s “liberal agenda” or “socialist agenda.”"

Get the Story:
Harold Monteau: Republicans Must Take Back Their Party (Indian Country Today 2/14)