WataugaWatch

Foot soldiers for the Republican minority in Congress -- a devil's sabbath of tea partiers, birthers, racists, bigots -- invaded the Capitol yesterday. They chanted "faggot" at Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). They chanted "nigger" at Reps. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Andre Carson (D-Ind.), both members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Someone spit on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), another black legislator, and House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said, "I have heard things today that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to get off the back of the bus."

That's just the slime that's gotten reported.

Yup. We shore do hope these fine specimens of humanity are the people who get control of our government!

At least one Republican member of Congress on the Sunday Morning Gasbag shows tried to excuse the behavior -- "Well, people are just so angry" -- without bothering to acknowledge that the misplaced rage has been artificially ginned up by a wealth of misinformation and outright lies spewed by leading Republicans and going back at least a year. Sarah Palin had her tongue all wrapped up in that. And Michele Bachmann. So did our own Rep. Virginia A. Foxx ("at least we Republicans won't be putting people to death like the Democrats!"). The gullible, the naive, the under-informed either fell for that bilge or find it convenient to hang their racism from those particular hat racks.

Haven't been personally enthusiastic about the Senate bill about to be passed, but I confess to being driven to root now for its passage, witnessing the desperation of Karl Rove on ABC this a.m. Rove was either severely over-caffeinated or showing the true panic of realizing a Democratic victory in this matter will damage his own ... shall we be generous and call it "his own legacy"? (His credibility was already as damaged as a Pinto in a roll-over.)

Or take the true creepy mendacity of the fake memo trotted out on the House floor by Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) yesterday. Unfortunately for Garrett, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) also happened to be present, and he don't take no shit. Weiner called out Republicans for the lie, while our own Virginia Foxx tried futilely to come to Garrett's aid. Watch it.

Labels: health care, homophobia, Michelle Bachmann, racism, Sarah Palin, Virginia Foxx

Scott Keadle, a dentist and first-term Iredell County Commissioner, is the other major Republican challenger to incumbent Republican Congressman Patty McHenry (at least, so far as we've heard).

Keadle gave an interview to Larry Clark in the Hickory Daily Record (published this a.m.), and he's positioning himself as critical of both major parties:

"Neither [Democrats nor Republicans] did anything about the budget. Neither group did anything to stop subprime lending that wrecked banking and hurt the economy. Neither party has done anything about illegal immigration. And neither one has lived up to the ethical and moral standards of the people. They're a perpetual embarrassment. All I've heard is talk, no matter which party is in control."

The issue is McHenry's incumbency: "I'm tired of hearing bad ideas from Democrats and excuses from Republicans. We don't need career politicians who care more about themselves than the people they are supposed to serve."

If incumbency is a negative for Patrick McHenry, it's also a negative for Virginia Foxx. A partisan hack who loves the limelight thrown off by the likes of Michele Bachmann ain't no bargain for the unemployed and uninsured people of the 5th District. What Keadle says about McHenry applies just as much to our own Bobblehead.

Labels: Michelle Bachmann, Patrick McHenry, Scott Keadle, Virginia Foxx

Madam Virginia Foxx stood on the west front of the Capitol yesterday, shucking and grinning as one of Michelle Bachmann's backup singers, basking in the glow of some 5,000 anti-abortionists and tea partiers bused in by Americans for the Prosperous to shut down the government and kill health-insurance reform. Many of the demonstrators were covered in fake blood and carried mangled dolls, representing aborted fetuses, as someone else dressed as the Grim Reaper mimicked leading them all to hell. Other demonstrators chanted "Weasel Queen," their favored nickname for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In Madam Foxx's line of sight were a number of protestor signs: President Obama in white coat, his face painted to look like the Joker; "Stop Obamunism"; "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist; and a pair of 5-by-8 foot banners proclaiming "National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945." Both banners showed close-up photographs of Holocaust victims, many of them children.

Those huge Nazi death-camp signs were the visual manifestation of what The Madam had already said on the floor of the U.S. House this past Monday.

Anyone who watched any of this bizarre Michelle Bachmann rally yesterday ("Taking the GOP Off the Cliff") could not miss Madam Foxx and her helmet of white crazy-lady hair. While others ranted at the microphone, she was always nearby, the perfect marionette, though for all her mimicking of great pleasure at being there in the company of so many other political whores, she looked as nervous and as pained as someone secretly passing gas in an elevator.

When her turn came at the microphone, she bellowed, "This Congress is on a collision course with the principles of freedom and liberty that our Founding Fathers bled and died for. We will not be silenced. We will kill this bill."

Well, they ARE clearly the Party of Death.

Labels: health care, Michelle Bachmann, Republican "brand", Virginia Foxx

Virginia Foxx can't meet the voters of the 5th District face-to-face, but she has time to spend on the line with the second battiest loose cannon in the U.S. House, Michelle Bachmann.

What's with this new Republican "townhall" habit of bringing additional reinforcements on the telephone line with you, like Foxx brought that obscure east Tennessee Congressman (Phil Roe) on with her last week, who promptly took up half the hour himself.

Shades of George W. Bush taking Dick Cheney along to hold his hand while he testified to the 9/11 Commission. Or, more accurately perhaps, shades of this.

Labels: Michelle Bachmann, Phil Roe, Virginia Foxx

If you attempt to meet with 5th Dist. Congressprotoplasm Virginia Foxx during her extended vacation, you'll be talking to yourself or to a heroically under-informed 20-something staffer who'll promise to pass on your concerns to the Congresswoman, just prior to throwing those concerns into the trash as soon as you leave the office. Meanwhile, Madam Foxx is allegedly loading and unloading her Maytag, doing several months' worth of dirty laundry.

While rolling stones gather no moss, a rolling log of right-wing nougat will gather every nut. As Foxx was not making herself available in her North Carolina district, or running backward at the approach of any little ole Democratic constituent who looks more or less warm to the touch, she had plenty of time to howl at the moon last night with fellow coyote Michelle Bachmann in Minnesota, where (thankfully) no one knows who the hell she is and she is free to scold women who open their legs and stoopidly get pregnant. "You're just going to have to have those babies, because The Pope told me so, you sluts!"

It's a burden, being an icon of the extreme right. So time-consuming. And a strain to your moral superiority.

Labels: Michelle Bachmann, Virginia Foxx

Our in-box dinged minutes ago with a new e-mail from 5th District Representative Doctor Virginia Foxx. After competing with Michelle Backmann for National Laughingstock for Nutso Partisanship, she's decided to focus on other pressing issues.

What She Said
In the 1970's Richard Nixon appointed the nation's first "drug czar."

What She Meant
Watch this shiny object. You're feeling sleepy. You will forget the recent past.

.....................

What She Said
Presidents decreed the creation of "czars" to manage specific policy areas or national crises with no doubt the best of intentions.

What She Meant
I fry squash for my husband. He likes squash. I like squash too. I'm a sweet little grandmother, frying squash.

....................

What She Said
Presidents view a powerful czar with sweeping jurisdiction as the quintessential problem solver.

What She Meant
I also cook beans. They're good with a little ham.

....................

What She Said
But is it possible to have too many czars?

What She Meant
Have you forgotten what I'm not talking about yet?

Labels: Michelle Bachmann, Virginia Foxx

Madam Foxx makes the list. Right above Michele Bachmann.

Labels: Michelle Bachmann, Virginia Foxx

So Madam Foxx has written Matthew Shephard's mother a note, saying "If there was anything I said that offended you, I'm sorry you were offended," which is parsing words in order not to make an apology, and then lied to WXII-TV, saying she was speaking "off the cuff," when she was clearly reading from prepared remarks in the video we've all seen. And then refused to say whether she now considers Shephard's brutal beating death a hate crime.

Because she doesn't. And if you think for a micro-second that she didn't use EXACTLY the word she meant, then you don't know Foxx. And if you think she's sorry for anything beyond the fact that she's been embarrassed INTERNATIONALLY as the very face of bigotry, then you don't know beans.

She's our Michele Bachmann.

Labels: homophobia, Matthew Shepherd, Michelle Bachmann, Virginia Foxx

The U.S. Senate voted today 89-6 to end the filibuster against the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act, which guarantees its passage. The U.S. House had already voted in the affirmative for the measure in October, 368-28.

And, yes, she did. Madam Foxx was one of the 28 who voted against extending unemployment compensation to the tens of thousands of Americans who are currently losing their jobs at an accelerating pace.

Even Patty McHenry voted for this bill. Even Sue Myrick. In fact, Foxx was the only member of the North Carolina delegation to vote against it. Along with her slobber-buddy, Michelle Bachmann.

Labels: Michelle Bachmann, Patrick McHenry, Sue Myrick, Virginia Foxx

When last seen together, Rep. Virginia Foxx and Rep. Michelle Bachmann were arm-wrestling over who got to tongue George W. Bush (yes, that's Michelle Bachmann in the white, trying to elbow Foxx out of the way). Bachmann went on to her 15 minutes of unfortunate notoriety last Friday on Hard Ball, calling for the investigation of Democrats in Congress as unAmerican.

Virginia Foxx does not intend for Michelle Bachmann to outdo her on the labeling of Democrats at anti-American ... as documented in this Congressional Quarterly article. Foxx has just so far avoided any high-profile venue for her spewings.

But spewings they are.

Roy Carter needs our help.

Labels: Michelle Bachmann, Roy Carter, Virginia Foxx

The Republican presidential campaign has taken a turn in the last month that makes me nostalgic for the 1960s in Texas. Formed in 1958 by an ex-candy maker, the John Birch Society believed fervently and spread the doctrine that its founder wrote, that "the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order managed by a one-world socialist government."

By 1960 I was a high school sophomore in a west Texas high school, scared to death of "the traitors inside the U.S. government" and convinced by Birch propaganda that some of my farmland teachers might be secret commies. When John Kennedy ran for president that year, I received pamphlets proving that he was actually the puppet of the Pope. Pope ... communists ... they were all the same to me ... foreign and dangerous for being unAmerican.

Later on in a west Texas Baptist college, I began to have thoughts myself that would have gotten me labeled "subversive" by the Birch society. On November 2, 1965, a man named Norman Morrison, a devout Quaker and father of three, used kerosene to burn himself to death outside the Pentagon as a protest against the Vietnam War. I was totally stunned by the TV news covering this horrific event and got myself to the library and read every national newspaper account I could get my hands on. Suddenly, what had seemed remote and beyond my control, took on a personal cost and real pain. I wrote an editorial in the college newspaper not so much praising Norman Morrison as wondering at the enormity of his personal sacrifice for principle, as though I (gulp) actually admired him.

A few months went by. One of my friends who worked part-time as a receptionist for a local dentist, who also happened to be a big commie-hunter for the Birch Society, pulled me aside and told me I should be worried because her boss had a file with my name on it, and inside the file was a clipping of my editorial. "These people are dangerous," she suggested.

I did worry. I was a junior in college, a very religiously conservative son of the soil who cared deeply what people thought. If they came and asked me, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party," I would of course answer no, but national experience had already taught me that in a country divided against itself, a denial was only taken as evidence of lying. The more you said you WEREN'T something, the more you obviously WERE.

We seem to have arrived at the 1960s again, led there by accusations of "palling around with terrorists" among other noxious insinuations. Behold the pattern as it has now gelled:

1. October 5, 2008, in Loudon County, Va., John McCain's brother Joe referred to Arlington and Alexandria in Northern Virginia as "communist country." He quickly apologized and called the remark a joke. At the time he said it, however, it was no joke, and he only apologized because the comment made it into the press.

2. On Oct. 16, 2008, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, at a private fundraiser in Greensboro, N.C., made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the "pro-America" areas of the country, of which North Carolina is apparently one. "No word on which states she views as unpatriotic."

3. This last Friday night, Oct. 17, 2008, in an appearance on Hard Ball with Chris Matthews, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) escalated the assault on Barack Obama's supposed lack of American-ness -- he in fact has, according to Bachmann, anti-American views and values, and furthermore the press corps needs to expose which members of the U.S. Congress may be unAmerican, and by the way, American college campuses are just chock-a-block full of professors who hate America. Here are the relevant exchanges between Bachmann and Matthews:

REP. BACHMANN: ...Most Americans, Chris, are wild about America, and they're very concerned to have a president who doesn't share those values.... Absolutely. I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views. That's what the American people are concerned about. That's why they want to know what his answers are....

MR. MATTHEWS: Sarah Palin was around today talking about pro- American parts of America, and assuming there's other non-parts of the country. What parts of America would you say are anti-American? What parts of this country?

REP. BACHMANN: Well, I would say that people who hold anti- American views. I don't think it's geography. I think it's people who don't like America, who detest America. And on college campuses, a Ward Churchill, another college campus, a Bill Ayers, you find people who hate America. And unfortunately, some of these people have positions teaching in institutions of higher learning. But you'll find them in all walks of life all throughout America.... I think the people that Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large, the people who are radical leftists. That's the real question about Barack Obama -- Saul Alinsky, one of his teachers, you might say, out of the Chicago area; Tony Rezko, who is an associate also.

MR. MATTHEWS: He's a leftist? I thought he was a business guy.

REP. BACHMANN: These are very concerning figures that are in Barack Obama's past.

MR. MATTHEWS: I thought Tony Rezko was some business guy. I didn't know he was a leftist, anti-American guy.... How many Congress people, members of Congress, do you think are in that anti-American crowd you described? How many Congress people do you serve with? I mean, it's 435 members of Congress.

REP. BACHMANN: Right now --

MR. MATTHEWS: How many are anti-American in the Congress right now that you serve with?

REP. BACHMANN: You'd have to ask them, Chris. I'm focusing on Barack Obama and the people that he's been associating with. And I'm very worried about --

MR. MATTHEWS: But do you suspect that a lot of people you serve with --

REP. BACHMANN: -- their anti-American nature.... What I would say -- what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would love to see an expose like that.

4. October 18, 2008, also on MSNBC, Nancy Pfotenhauer, a top aide to John McCain, argued that despite polling and all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, her boss has a strong chance of winning Virginia because of his support in "real Virginia," that part of the downstate far removed in distance and political philosophy from the more liberal northern part of the state, what Joe McCain called the "communist" part.

Evidently, I have once again achieved the distinction of being a bad American, not a real American, an American who could safely be knocked to the ground at a Sarah Palin rally, while the knocker-down is applauded for his superior American-ness. (Judge for yourself the glee of those who were glad that Greensboro News & Record reporter Joe Killian got kicked down ... by some of the reader responses on that link.)

The McCain/Palin campaign can claim all it wants that it is not encouraging an atmosphere of fear and violence. The evidence speaks volumes.

Labels: Joe McCain, John Birch Society, John McCain, Michelle Bachmann, Nancy Pfotenhauer, Sarah Palin