Friday, July 17, 2015

Eye Recommend: Rip Off Our Arms and Beat Us With the Bloody Ends

Hillary Clinton participating in an immigration roundtable in Nevada earlier this year.


RIP OFF OUR ARMS AND BEAT US WITH THE BLOODY ENDS, by Steve Benen --
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/rip-our-arms-and-beat-us-the-bloody-ends?CID=sm_fb_maddow
what eye thynk:  This article was published back in May.  Thanks to The Donald, things are even worse for the Republican Party today.
Hillary Clinton's remarks on immigration policy this week left quite a few people surprised.  For reform proponents and other liberal activists, the Democratic candidate's vision was far more ambitious than anyone expected.  For pundits expecting Clinton to run to the middle without a credible primary rival, her increasingly progressive platform is far from predictions...

...The Washington Post's Greg Sargent explained that the Democratic frontrunner has created an awkward problem for leading GOP contenders like Bush and Rubio:  "They don't want to condemn Clinton's remarks too vehemently, because they do want to preserve the chance of performing significantly better among Latinos than Mitt Romney did (which both can credibly claim they may succeed in doing).  Yet failing to condemn Clinton vehemently enough risks angering the conservatives they need in the GOP primary."
The Republican presidential hopeful hoard has not helped themselves with the Hispanic population by refusing to call Trump out for his over-the-top immigration and/or minority rhetoric...and for the the same reason: They don't want to offend all those conservative Trump lovers who are pushing him into the GOP's top-tier and risk looking bad in the early primaries.
Fergus Cullen, a former chairman of the Republican Party in New Hampshire, explained this in an even more colorful way:  his party's intransigence on the issue..."has created an obvious opportunity for Hillary to rip off our arms and beat us with the blood ends.  She's expertly exploiting our party's internal problems."
Those aren't "problems," Mr. Cullen; they're out and out prejudices.
GOP officials are well aware of Mitt Romney's ridiculously poor showing among Hispanic voters in 2012:  it's why the Republican National Committee's post-election autopsy avoided all policy prescriptions except one:  the party would have to pass immigration reform and take the issue off the table...

...Congressional Republicans, we now know, ignored the advice and killed popular, bipartisan reform plans, setting Democrats up to capitalize even oroe in 2016.

Clinton's remarks this week were about the substance of immigration policy, but note that she also referenced partisan politics covertly:  "Make no mistake:  Today not a single Republican candidate, announced or potential, is clearly and consistently supporting a path to citizenship."

Left unsaid: "If you thought Mr. Self-Deportation was bad, the 2016 field is worse."
(Cue Donald Trump.)
The GOP has spent six and a half years using prejudice--against Hispanics, against blacks, against women, against gays, against the poor, against non-believers--all in order to keep their white, Southern, aging base enraged and engaged. They've created their own presidential election year nightmare. 
Now they have just a few months to pretty-up the mess they've created and to dress it up so the whole country will buy what they're selling.  But no matter how many sequins they throw at it, hate is never going to be mistaken for Miss America. 

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