Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Solid Waste from Iowa

Tags:

On Saturday, the best and brightest of the Republican Party met in Iowa to plumb the depths of their descent into madness*.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) invited the 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls to strut their stuff (sorry for the visual!) at the Iowa Freedom Summit. King is most recently “famous” for calling young Latino college students, who were sitting with the First Lady at the State of Union, “deportables”.

The Iowa Freedom Summit was a Very Important Event: one can tell because it has “freedom” in it and it is a “summit”. And IOWA!! The place of the first nominating contest because nothing says Bellwether like a state that is 98% white and which selected Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012 as the Republican standard bearers. Finger on the pulse of America, Iowa, finger on the pulse.


Eric Wolfson @EricWolfson

If ignorance is bliss, #IAFreedomSummit must be the happiest place on earth.

Watching the assault on our democracy, and on our common sense, unfold would be more entertaining if it were not for this sobering observation:


BWD @theonlyadult  

One of these people might be the next president. Nothing funny about this #IAFreedomSummit

PLEASE don’t let that happen.


LOLGOP @LOLGOP

The one thing every Republican candidate seems to have in common with normal people is they don’t think Jeb Bush or Mitt can beat Hillary.

And with that, let’s follow the summit of freedumbs on Twitter …

MARTY WEINSTEIN @LUCKYMW  

@anamariecox @JimPethokoukis Don’t even know why this Summit is broadcast in color, there’s certainly no need for it.

Ana Marie Cox @anamariecox

Yup, Scott Walker is right there on the list of Things That Have More Charisma Than Tim Pawlenty, a short list bc I fell asleep making it.


JoeMyGod @JoeMyGod

This Palin speech was clearly randomly assembled from Teabagger fridge magnets. #IAFreedomSummit

Anna Marie Cox helpfully provided a link to the unedited Palin speech (text from the closed captioning … fittingly in ALL CAPS and with no punctuation): Palin’s Performance Art

Steve Dowdy ‏@Steverocks35

Sarah Palin: A noun, a grammatically incorrect verb, and a racist slur

Jon Swaine @jonswaine  

Following Palin, Rick Perry sounds like Pericles

Ana Marie Cox @anamariecox

Is it just me or did Perry visibly stall for a second before he declared, “Right here in… Iowa!”

Matthew @Matthops82  

“Shut up, Jesus loves you.” RT @HuffPostPol: Chris Christie brings New Jersey candor to Iowa evangelicals

Lisa Rowe @txvoodoo

Huckabee doing the aspirational politics thing: “You’ll make FIFTY bucks an hour with us!” Then GOP congress moves on abortion, not jobs.

Lizz Winstead @lizzwinstead

No one in this audience has bread bags on their feet. #JustSayin

Billmon ‏@billmon1

Two key GOP presidential primaries going on right now: The Koch brothers primary, and the Sheldon Adelson primary. The rest is circus noise.

In conclusion:

Kaili Joy Gray @KailiJoy

And that is why I’m a Democrat, the end.

*Still plumbing the depths … no bottom detected.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 17 Comments

17 comments

  2. JanF

    Roger Simon: GOP clown car runs into ditch

    At the Freedom Summit here Saturday, two dozen speakers ground through 10 hours of speeches in front of more than 1,000 far-right Republicans.[…]

    Donald Trump, who definitely rides in the clown car – or maybe the clown limo – strongly indicated he might actually run for president. What mattered, however, was his grenades.

    “It can’t be Mitt,” Trump said, the bright overhead stage lighting, not favoring, his elaborate comb-over. “Mitt ran and failed!”

    Applause from the crowd. […]

    “The last thing we need is another Bush,” Trump said. “I was the one who said that first! He’s very, very weak on immigration. He said, ‘They are coming for love.’ What? Half of them are criminals!”

    More applause.[…]

    [Ben Carson]: “If they want to act like third graders and call us names, let ’em!”

    He got a standing ovation. Unfortunately, the day was filled with Republicans acting like third graders. […]

    Sarah Palin, who has been teasing the press with hints she might actually run for president, appeared to end much hope of that Saturday by delivering a 33-minute speech of such incoherence that even veteran Palin-watchers were puzzled.

  3. JanF

    GOP presidential candidates face delicate balancing act

    DES MOINES – The most wide-open Republican presidential nomination campaign in memory had its unofficial opening here on Saturday at a gathering that highlighted anew the thorny path ahead for candidates as they try to attract support from the party’s conservative base without compromising their hopes of winning a general election. […]

    “The temptation will be to scratch the ideological itch of those in the room,” Matt Strawn, a former Iowa Republican Party chair, said of events like the one here Saturday. “I would submit that those itches are best scratched in private, one-on-one conversations.” […]

    … a party determined to show that it could govern responsibly also put on a messy display over legislation to restrict abortions, with House leaders having to pull one measure after some female members objected to it before later passing another bill that called for new federal restrictions. The White House said it would veto the measure.

    Democrats were swift to say that what happened in the House showed that the Republican Party remains captive of its most extreme elements, and they were only too happy to hold up King and his summit in Des Moines as a further indication that the nomination process could soon be taken over by that wing of the party.

  4. JanF

    King For A Day: The Iowa Freedom Summit

    On Sarah Palin:

    When I saw her at CPAC last year, she sounded like an angry middle-schooler. Now she sounds like an angry fourth-grader. She did make time to call the president “an overgrown little boy,” which, of course, is not in any way About Race, because nothing ever is About Race. She also had a brilliant idea to move all the Cabinet departments out of Washington. Why [not] move the Department of Agriculture to Iowa, she suggested, where somebody who knows something about agriculture could run it. The Secretary of Agriculture is Tom Vilsack. Once, he was a governor. Of Iowa. Oh, dear. Maybe we should move the Department Of State to an actual state! If you think she’s a national leader, you’re an idiot and I feel sorry for you.

    On Scott Walker:

    … once you think about running for president,  the country is supposed to hit itself over the head so it forgets you ever had a life and a career before the prospective campaign began. … It’s how Scott Walker can say, of his time as Milwaukee County Executive that he worked to eliminate the “culture of corruption” in that office, and not have to mention that six different people who worked for him when he was county executive went to prison, including one dude who embezzled money from a fund earmarked for taking the children of soldiers killed in action to the zoo.

    On Jeb(!) and Mitt(?):

    “We have a common cause,” [Ken] Crow said. “None of us want Madam President. There’s 50 million of us, 50 million conservatives, and when I say conservatives I mean Christian conservatives, right to life people, in addition to the Tea Party. If we activate those 50 million, we’re going to get our guy nominated. We’re going to contribute money. We’re going to have boots on the ground and everything that he needs or she needs to get the nomination.

    “It’s dire. Because, if we don’t do this, then Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney will be the nominee and it’ll be déjà vu 2012.  You’ll have 20 million Tea Party people who will sit this election out in protest against the Republican Party, feeling like they had another candidate crammed down their throats.”

    Charlie handicaps the rest of the field and concludes with this about one of the protesters, a DREAMer named Monica Reyes who wants to know where the Republican Party stands on immigration reform:

    In 2003, Reyes was three-years old and she came to the United States from Mazatlan, her mother fleeing an abusive husband and ending up in New Hampton, in Steve King’s congressional district. She lived in what is now called in the immigration community a “mixed-status” family. Monica has sisters who were born here, and are therefore, at the moment anyway, as American as I am. She lived the undocumented life until the president’s executive order allowed her to get a driver’s license and to buy a new house in Waterloo. Quite simply, if the people in the theater up on the hill get their way, and they do what they’ve promised to do, Monica Reyes loses the car, the new house, and her little sisters lose their mother. Her family, values and all, ceases to exist.

    “You never stop looking over your shoulder,” she said. “Even with what the president did, I know it can all go away fast. That’s why I am here today. Do they stand with the DREAMers or do they stand with Steve King. We’ll see.”

  5. JanF

    Ben Carson pulls crowd to its feet

    “What I have a problem with is when people try to force people to act against their beliefs because they say ‘they’re discriminating against me.’ So they can go right down the street and buy a cake, but no, let’s bring a suit against this person because I want them to make my cake even though they don’t believe in it. Which is really not all that smart because they might put poison in that cake,” he said to chuckles from some of his staff …

  10. JanF

    D.R. Tucker over at Ed’s place, posted about “picking our poison” and thinking in terms of the two candidates most likely to be duking it out for the nomination:

    Yet, there’s a good chance that depending on who wins the GOP nomination, either Jeb or Mitt will become the next president; sadly, there are plenty of voters in this still-sexist society who will never be ready for Hillary. That forces us to consider the question: between Bush and Romney, who would screw over this country less?

    If we are to be governed by a Republican between 2017 and 2021, would it not be better, from a progressive perspective, to be governed by a shallow, pliable, weak man like Romney rather than a hardcore wingnut ideologue such as Bush? Because Romney has no ideological core – liberal in one election, moderate in another, “severely conservative” in a third – he could presumably yield to protracted progressive pressure, especially if his party were to lose seats in the House and Senate in 2016 and 2018.

    However, a known zealot like Bush – a pudgier Ted Cruz, basically – would likely drive this country to the brink of economic and ecological Armageddon. […]

    Romney would be an irritating president, to say the least, but at least he’s eager to please whatever audience he’s in front of. If he’s facing an audience of Americans demanding changes in economic and energy policy to benefit the 99 percent, I don’t think he’s the sort of person who would wholly ignore those demands.

    I agree with him that neither of these candidates would be acceptable as president but there are differences. We should be careful about any claim to “moderation” from the completely immoderate Republican Party and vote for whichever Democrat is nominated. There is no room for a purity pick when lives are on the line.

Comments are closed.