Close Readings: Gingrich on Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading, Uncategorized 6 Comments

Reason #378 why we do not miss 1994

I don’t know about you, but I like my Republicans shrill, vaguely racist and relentlessly accusatory. I was thus terribly disappointed when Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich left the House of Representatives in 1998, leaving that body unable to pursue its constitutionally-mandated function of investigating the President’s real estate deals, campaign financing and extramarital affairs in an endless attempt to remove him from office. Fortunately, President Bush assumed office shortly thereafter, and the Republican Party coincidentally decided that executive privilege was extremely important. Now, though, we have Barack Obama, a man “who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.” That was Gingrich’s assessment of the President in a recent edition of the National Review, and it’s one of the least crazy things he says in the interview. The real money shot is after the jump, and it’s the subject of today’s Close Reading.

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Close Readings: Judson Phillips’s immigration proposal

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 3 Comments

If you haven’t heard of Judson Phillips, it’s probably because you haven’t yet signed up for Tea Party Nation, the national-level organizer of Tea Party organizations that sends you a ton of emails, many of which are titled “Draft” or, once, “Do Not Send.” Judson Phillips may be an idiot. As the organizer of the first national Tea Party Unity Convention, he may also be one of the few identifiable leaders in the still-amorphous movement. The Tea Party Nation website is either the canary in the mine or one arbitrarily drawn constellation in the exploded galaxy that is the Tea Party, depending on whose side you took in the series of schisms that immediately followed its formation. I prefer the first interpretation, since A) the alternative is to have no concrete information about the Tea Party at all and B) Phillips is hilarious. Case in point: his recent screed/policy proposal regarding illegal immigration, which is the subject of today’s Close Reading. Text after the jump.

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Close Reading: WND spat with Coulter offers clearest definition yet of “taking America back”

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 5 Comments

Ann Coulter, photographed here with Jimmie Walker for some wonderful reason

According to Ben Smith at Politico, conservative website WorldNetDaily has dropped Ann Coulter from its Taking America Back National Conference, out of indignation at her decision to speak at the September convention of gay conservative group GOProud. You should probably know that this event is called Homocon. That and the poster’s insightful assessment of Coulter as “the conservative Judy Garland” suggest that we have finally found the fun wing of the Republican Party, but WND refuses to be amused. As founder Joseph Farrah put it:

Ultimately, as a matter of principle, it would not make sense for us to have Ann speak to a conference about “taking America back” when she clearly does not recognize that the ideals to be espoused there simply do not include the radical and very un-conservative agenda represented by GOProud. The drift of the conservative movement to a brand of materialistic libertarianism is one of the main reasons we planned this conference from the beginning.

All right, but you’re not going to be getting any mimosas. Farrah’s comment is the closest we’ve come in a long time to a direct examination of what it might mean to “take back America”—a phrase that has been falling out of mouths and into microphones with increasing frequency. Somewhere in Farrah’s tangle of adverbs and implications is a clear statement about what “taking America back” means. And when something like that happens, you know that for which it is time: another Close Reading!

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Close Readings: Sarah Palin and “refudiate”

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 4 Comments

Sarah Palin, seen here monopolizing a city council meeting in A Just World.

Yesterday, Sarah Palin risked the loyalty of her constituents by announcing her opposition to a planned mosque at Ground Zero, via Twitter. She’s since deleted that post, for reasons the foregoing article makes obvious, but here’s her original tweet:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.

“Refudiate” is, of course, not a word. It seems to be a concatenation of “refute” and “repudiate,” or just a one-letter typo, although Palin’s subsequent defense (see below) suggests the former. The commentariat regards her use of “refudiate” as a gaffe, and they’re having a pretty good time with it. As is often the case, though, Palin is stupid like a fox. It’s a good thing “refudiate” is in that tweet, because it distracts from the rest of it—and you know what that means. When meaning tries to hide behind language, and also when the Combat! blog headline  has “close reading” in it, it’s time for another Close Reading.

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Close readings: Unemployment extension defeated in Congress

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 3 Comments

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, presumably saying "yea" very quietly.

Late Thursday night—while the rest of us were having a dream in which we go to the bank and the teller says “Your account has accumulated substantial interest, Mr. Brooks,” before opening a vault full of zombies, zombies—Congress did not pass an unemployment benefits extension. Already we enter the realm of subjectivity. In strict, learn-about-it-in-high-school journalism practice, one is discouraged from constructing stories around what did not happen.* The headline on the AP story—Congress fails to pass an extension of jobless benefits—has the word “fail” right in it, as if passing the bill to postpone expiry of unemployment benefits for one million Americans were something the legislative branch meant to do and just couldn’t put together. In some sense, that’s kind of accurate. The Senate voted 57–41 in favor of the bill, but a Republican filibuster derailed it during procedure. Those are the facts. What happened depends on what news you read.

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