The "L" Word

By Mustang Bobby

(Ed. note: Make sure to watch the great clip from The West Wing below. There are many, many good reasons we're proud to be liberals. -- MJWS)

Digby points to an article in The Week that alerts us to the growing popularity of liberalism:

A full 25 percent of voters in this month's election identified themselves as liberals, according to exit polls, a marked increase from 22 percent in 2008. (Conservative is still a more popular identifier, with 35 percent of voters claiming that label.) Still, the "L" word is more popular than it has been since 1976. Conservatives managed to turn "liberal" into an insult in the 1980s, and when Republican icon Ronald Reagan won re-election in 1984, only 17 percent of voters confessed to being liberal. Today that number has ballooned to 25 percent.

The article attributes the trend to a couple of reasons, one being that Barack Obama made being liberal "cool" again, and the other the fact that there's the perception out there that conservatives are uncaring and disconnected:

It's not that Americans are suddenly gung-ho about liberal politics, says Gary Bauer at Human Events. Voters are still filled with "strong skepticism about whether Obama will be able to accomplish Americans' goals." The Obama campaign simply managed to drive people away from Mitt Romney with a relentless barrage of negative ads smearing him — and, by extension, conservative politics — as "uncaring and disconnected." Republicans can regain this lost ground next time around if they just learn from this loss.

Yeah, if they just knocked off the gay-bashing, the misogyny, the racism, and the need to inject fear and loathing into everything from children's TV to health care for the elderly, they wouldn't be such bad folks after all. Of course, if they did that, they'd be on their way to being liberals.

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Mr. Toad's wild ride

By Mustang Bobby

Gary Bauer, the former head of the Family Research Council and for whom the term "evil little toad" was coined, told the audience at the ironically-named Values Voters Summit that the majority of people who vote for Barack Obama are welfare recipients and fraudulent voters:

After his speech, Bauer told TPM "voter fraud is rampant in urban areas" and he expected that to help Obama.

Bauer also told TPM that "there are a lot of people who will vote this November because they depend on government largesse," meaning checks from Washington. He expects those voters to go Obama as well.

"They will vote for their own perceived interests, which is they don't want anybody cutting back the size of the checks," Bauer said.

He then killed a fly with his tongue and hopped back under the rotten log he calls home. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Behind the Ad: Unintentionally hilarious "American Values"

By Richard K. Barry 

(Another installment in our extensive "Behind the Ad" series.)

Who: American Values.

Where: North Carolina.

What's going on: Every now and then a political ad comes along that looks like it must be the beginning of one of those Saturday Night Live send-up commercials. But no, this one is real. Failed Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer has a group called "American Values" and this ad, called "New Morning," is not, apparently, intended as a joke.

As you will see, the punchline comes from an anguished woman who says, "Obama is trying to force gay marriage on this country. That's not the change I voted for." The man with her then says, "That's not the change I voted for either."

Yes, President Obama is going to force that woman to marry another woman and that man to marry another man. He's going to force everyone to be gay. Damn him!

Seriously though, tell me you're not half thinking Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg should be saying these lines until you realize this is not a joke, at least not intentionally.

Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Craziest Conservatives of the Day: G. Gordon Liddy and Gary Bauer

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Quite a pair these two make, the fascist and the christianist, generally speaking, and there they were today on Liddy's radio show today spewing the usual right-wing bullshit about Obama:

LIDDY: I'm convinced that despite his protestations to the contrary, that Barack Obama is a Muslim. I don't believe that he's a Christian at all. I believe he's a Muslim.

BAUER: Well, you know the church that he famously or infamously attended was, was odd in many ways. Not only the rantings of its pastor, the clear racist rantings of its pastor, which the President chose to listen to year after year with his family and his children. You know something that still in my view has never been adequately explained. But it was also a church that had some real strange ideas about Islam and Christianity. I've seen a number of suggestions that there were many people in the congregation that considered themselves both Christian and Muslim. Something that I’m sure both real Christians and real Muslims would deny is possible.

No matter how many lies I hear from conservatives, it still amazes me that anyone can say with a straight face that Obama is a Muslim. To these bigots, though, it would seem that anyone who isn't fervently hostile to and hateful of Muslims, and of Islam, may be a Muslim. It could be that even being friends with, and perhaps even shaking hands with, a Muslim makes one a Muslim.

And, make no mistake, bigotry it is. During the conversation, Bauer lamented the "accommodation of Islam" in "our schools." By that, presumably, he meant acceptance and perhaps just simple toleration of Islam, and by "our schools" he surely meant Christian schools.

See what's going on here? The problem for conservatives like Liddy and Bauer isn't just Nidal Malik Hasan, it's the very existence of Islam in America. And they see it everywhere, a ubiquitous enemy threatening their fascist-christianist utopia, so much so that they've come to believe their own lies, if they've ever been able to distinguish their lies from the truth, which is doubtful, lies they direct at Obama, making allegations without a trace of evidence, all to reinforce their bigotry, and that of their followers.

It's easy to write of Liddy and Bauer, and especially the former, as crackpots on the fringe, but, on the right, the fringe is increasingly the mainstream, conservatism having succumbed to crackpottery. As well, both men are fairly popular on the right, if more with the Republican base than with the Republican establishment. And so they speak not just for themselves but for those who support them -- in Liddy's case, all those who listen to what is a fairly popular radio show.

I don't like paying so much attention to a wacko like Liddy, but it's important that we call out such craziness. Because if it's sheer craziness you want, along with bigotry and paranoia, you don't have to look any further than what's popular among conservatives these days.