Thank god I have such a weirdly specific memory that hoards unimportant pieces of information. Otherwise I might not have remembered Newt Gingrich getting all self righteous and faux outraged like only a true conservative blowhard can over rhetoric about "the 99%" in November of last year.
I repudiate, and I call on (President Obama) to repudiate, the concept of the 99 and the 1. It is un-American, it is divisive, it is historically false.
online pharmacy buy albuterol online cheap pharmacyYou are not going to get job creation when you engage in class warfare because you have to attack the very people you hope will create jobs.
Here's a video if for some reason you desire to hear Newt Gingrich's voice:
Two quick questions.
First, is Gingrich still supporting the guy who wrote off 47% of the country as useless parasites on the heroic Producer class?
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Second, can you recall or find a single instance of anyone in the media referring to Romney's comment as "class warfare"?
I guess it's only class warfare when there is a proposed reduction in the amount that the asses of the wealthy are kissed.
J. Dryden says:
Eh, this one's pretty simple: Newt Gingrich is a big ol' racist.
"Class warfare" has always been a dog-whistle for "darkies and immigrants gettin' uppity." Papers once went out of their way to emphasize the 'furrin-ness' of socialist organizers/union protesters, just as now the media emphasizes the, shall we say, swarthiness of the underclasses who receive governmental assistance. And for good reason:
There's one sure-fire way that the moneyed have managed to hold off the forces of unionization, fair employment, etc. for so long: They perpetually remind poor white people that they are *white*, so that they will forget that they are *poor*.
See, most poor people in this country are white. Decisive majority, there. With the sole exception of the Native Americans, the people who live in the most godawful, jaw-dropping, you've-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-me state of poverty in this country are white. (And black. And Hispanic. But mostly white.)
But the rich don't want the poor whites to remember that, because then they might, you know, hook up with their fellow not-haves and get organized. Soooooooo–
Poverty has been consistently linked in the public eye as a mark of the minority. Poor white people don't think of themselves as poor, they think of themselves as white, and since the rich are uniformly white (y'all are adorable, Jay-Z and Oprah, but the CEOs of GSK and ExxonMobil laugh their asses off at your pretenses to wealth), the poor whites think of themselves as part of that club. (Shhh! Don't tell them the truth.) And sooooooo–
When the poor white majority hears about the 99% and "class warfare," they think of themselves as being *inside* that 1% ivory palace, and the brown hordes outside clamoring to get in.
Dog-whistle racism. Reagan's greatest legacy to the American political discourse. When, oh *when* will we put that man's face up on Rushmore where it belongs?
Graham says:
It's only Class Warfare when we fight back.
Middle Seaman says:
In this stage of Central Americanization of the US, the media works for the 1%. Expecting the media to support the poor, the union and even the middle class borders on insanity. Solving the media problem is simple: I don't read papers and don't watch news and current affairs program on TV. If we all do the same, blogs and twitts will be the only source of political and social information.
We have way more voices.
Major Kong says:
So, the poor need to be punished in order to get them to work. They need "tough love" and "skin in the game".
Ah but the "job creators", those mighty John Galt-like titans of industry who stand astride the globe – THEY are such fragile little hothouse flowers that they need constant encouragement and tax cuts lest they curl up in a fetal position and take the economy with them.
anotherbozo says:
Following what Graham said, the depiction of the 47% as shiftless parasites suggests a debilitated collective, not an army worth fighting. The oligarchs realize they've won the war; all that remains is what to do with the dead weight of the POWs. Of course Mitt would like to cut them loose from what he regards as the public teat.
The press have no problem identifying this mindset; their employers usually share it (see Middle Seaman).
mr potato head costume, halloween costume says:
I will give you time to ponder the title question as I give you two examples. Heart disease and heart related problems are one of the leading causes of death in this country. Everyday in offices, homes, planes, on the road, etc. people are suffering heart attacks and inevitably requiring someone to call 000 to organise an Ambulance. In many instances due to traffic, Ambulance shortages and system inefficiencies, paramedics are arriving at a patient's side to late to prevent major damage or death. In fact in the US, nearly 80 percent of all sudden cardiac arrests occur at home and fewer than 5 percent of those victims survive. In the market place now is a product called a Home Heart Start Defibrillator. This amazing product allows virtually any user to restart a person's heart that may have stopped by talking a person clearly through the process. It even checks to see whether the electrical pads are in the right place and if the person actually needs the process at all. It even coaches a person trough CPR.
c u n d gulag says:
Conservative POV:
To incent our "Job Creators (All kneel… Let us pray for them… Let them prey on us… All rise!)" we must give them MORE money.
To incent the 47%, we must take money AWAY from them.
See?
It's simple!
Hazy Davy says:
Class warfare is punishing the rich.
Criticizing the less rich? That's electoral strategy.
(I actually think they're being logically consistent, here. Granted, Newt's being ridiculous by asserting that job creation only comes from wealth….)
WyldPirate says:
Along the lines of J. Dryden's comments, I was watching Mississippi Burning the other day and there's a scene in it that is illustrative of what is going on today with Republican tactics. The only thing different is the codewords are slightly less obnoxious.
In the scene, Gene Hackman's character is telling Willem Dafoe's character a story about his father poisoning a black farmer's mule. Hackman says that his father, upon realizing his young son knew he killed the mule to keep the black farmer from getting ahead out of jealousy, replied: "if you ain't better than a ni**er, son, who are you better than??"
Divide the rabble and set them against each other while you pick their pockets and bleed them dry. The wealthy classes and elites have been playing this game for centuries all over the world and it's worked like a charm. It's not going to end anytime soon.
sluggo says:
There will be record amounts of shoulder surgery next year, because of all the effort 'job creators' are putting into patting themselves on the back.
ladiesbane says:
Don't anger the job creators? WHAT JOBS? Having the 1% on your side is great unless that's actually your poll number.
Newt is bright enough to know that, in an election year, any group called "the 99%" doesn't just mean unemployed city kids and well-off hippies from Sausalito. It means votes.
And it really burns his biscuits that the party went with Romney instead of him this time, since he would have been able to don his propaganda hat and divide the left even more than Obama has. Whenever high-minded lefties huff on about not voting for Obama, Newt chokes on the ashes of his campaign. Like Mitt, he can't rally his own team's sincere endorsement — but unlike Mitt, he could scatter the left-wing pigeons so hard they'd be writing in votes for Mumia Abu-Jamal, if they bothered to show up at all.
And hey, did anyone see him at the GOP Convention, holding "Newt U"? It was "designed to support and expound upon the overall messages of the convention"…without actually uttering Mitt Romney's name.
Which I found totally understandable. "Yeah, we hooked you up with a shitty blind date, but we're still friends, right? Still share those same core values, right?" They weren't selling Mitt — they were trying to rally the team after a season that was a farce.
Republicans need to recall the various (artificial) surges in the primary debates and ask themselves, "Are we really better off than we were last November?"
DiTurno says:
Short answer: IOKIYAR.
Pam says:
Well said J. Dryden. It always amazes me how some of these poor (as in financially) white folks seem to think they're just one paycheck away from exclusive 1% membership.
Sarah says:
Dude. When the Powers that Be and the pundits talk about immigrants gettin' uppity, they are talking about "darkies," so your point there is redundant.
My social philosophy professor (who is also the university chair for the philosophy department) is a German-born immigrant with a very distinct accent and as white as the sun. (He also, I swear to God, looks almost exactly like Mark Twain. But I digress.) I'd bet my financial aid that he's not going to get any of the "show me your papers" guff when the Florida legislature gets around to passing that law.
J. Dryden says:
@ Sarah: That's quite true nowadays, but the strategy is old enough to have once encompassed immigrants of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Slavic origins, to name but a few. Lotta "non-white whites" have fallen under this hammer, though lately, yes, it's all about the melanin-enhanced.
Sluggo says:
@ Sarah
Mark Twain looked Canadian to me. I would check his papers. He could be smuggling free medical care.
mel in oregon says:
still recovering from the idiocy of the packers loss by incompetent refs. the nfl is symbolic of american capitalism. the owners show there disdain for the players, fans & coaches, but wtf they're billionaires, & billionaires are always right. don't ever expect corporate media to criticize their paymasters. as far as gingrich, a self-indulgent slob, not very intelligent, but just like romney in that he thinks he is owed things because of his wealth. fuck the wealthy, they engage in class warfare all the time, they always have throughout history. obama is constantly thanking his fate that romney is so pathetically stupid.
Kelly says:
I think you meant to say the "liberal media."
g says:
And President Obama should heed the words of Newt Gringrich because why?
Why does he matter?
Sarah says:
Hah. My professor did say he was happy to leave Germany 20 years ago, and implied it was because of lingering baggage left over from WWII. But maybe it was really because he didn't like Germany's socialized healthcare.
Arslan says:
I tried watching the video but all I could hear Newt say was "Please send me to the GULAG. I want to spend the rest of my life in a GULAG." It's really strange because I hear the same thing when a lot of other politicians and businessmen speak.
ladiesbane says:
Arslan, you depress me. When I was in college during the Reagan years, we used to say, "Don't worry about (X) — he'll be first up against the wall when the Revolution comes." It turns out people wanted babies and SUVs and solid insurance jobs more than they wanted change. (Mea culpa: I am now more likely to shout, "Get me a glass of chardonnay while you're up, would you, Honey?" than I am to shout, "Smash the patriarchy! Smash the state!")
The Revolution has been postponed indefinitely.
Arslan says:
See Spain, Greece, Italy, OWS, etc. The world is changing. Back in the Reagan years the neo-liberal fun was just starting.
Kavneet says:
Well, I don't think that Ron Paul is a plain and simple nutojb. I think he's a complex nutojb. Congressman Paul has some very sensible and compassionate stands on some issues. His abstract antipathy to the United States of America's federal government leads him down some very nutty roads, however, and some of his right wing social attitudes are quite ugly.Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, is a New Year's Eve drunk, party-favor-tootin' nutojb.