Friday links! Dogged determination edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 4 Comments

Every American schoolchild knows they should never give up on anything no matter what. Like confidence, honesty, or patriotism, persistence is one of those good qualities that can never go wrong. The trick is to ignore failure. If some setback tempts you to reevaluate what you’ve been doing, put it out of your mind and soldier on. That’s how you guarantee that you enjoy a long, happy life, like a soldier. Today is Friday, and when all else fails us, we will still have our determination to succeed. Won’t you push deeper into the fishbowl with me?

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What’s wrong with the contemporary Republican Party?

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 3 Comments
The Green Bay Tea Party recruits via hostile placards.

The Green Bay Tea Party recruits via hostile placards.

Last week, Ross Douthat described what he called “the donorist view” of what the Republican Party needs to do. Hint: it should change. After a strong showing in the 2010 midterm elections and what appeared to be a groundswell of populist support from the Tea Party, the GOP has utterly failed to retake Washington. Its primary goal—by many accounts its only goal, given the last two years’ obstruction in Congress—was to beat Obama in 2012. That did not work. A lot of people spent a lot of money hoping that it would, and they want answers. They will settle for a plan to do better next time, however, in the form of the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Project.

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Tea Party video warns of dystopian present

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 2 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xReYMOL8nZY

The best part of this video for the Tea Party Patriots—if you’re going to make me choose—is the way it goes from dystopian fantasy to informative commercial in the last three seconds. The second best part is everything else. From the evocatively-named Development Party, with its eerily familiar emphasis on “progress,” to the vaguely Palin-esque woman gazing contentedly at the shores of liberty before she is kidnapped, this trailer captures everything the Tea Party is about. Specifically: a fantasy of persecution and revolt.

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Conservatives accuse own conference of gay takeover, Muslim conspiracy

By Dan Brooks in lying 3 Comments

Glenn Beck shouts "Howard Stern's penis!" into the microphone at last year's Conservative Political Action Conference, shortly before being dragged offstage.

The Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation and Liberty University have all pulled out of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, citing CPAC’s inclusion of GOProud as proof of “how committed they are to advancing the homosexual agenda.” Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link. Obviously, the Republican Party has been taken over by a gay conspiracy; any schoolchild will tell you that. What you may not know is that several members of the CPAC board are also under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood. So says Pamela Geller and several other conference participants, who claim that directors Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist, of all people, are secret Islamic supremacists. Seriously. I’m not saying that contemporary conservatism is defined by conspiracy theories, bigotry and religious persecution, but I am saying that if you put a bunch of spiders in the same jar, don’t be surprised when someone gets his liquefied organs sucked out.

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