I found this news item amusing -- not in trivializing the serious problems of immigration reform -- but because of the language used. File it under, "When Southern conservatives attack!" The target: Repub Sen. Lindsey Graham. Up for re-election, the South Carolina senator is in hot water back home:
Thanks to his high-profile help in crafting an immigration reform bill that has stalled in the Senate, constituents call and leave screaming messages on his office voicemail.
"NO AMNESTY! NO AMNESTY!" one repeat caller yells for a minute or more in angry overnight messages that greet his aides in the morning.
Graham's staff estimates that his Senate offices have received about 3,000 letters, phone calls, e-mails and faxes about immigration in the last month, most of them critical of him.
Talk radio hosts within and beyond South Carolina deride Graham as a Ted Kennedy toady.
Rush Limbaugh has taken to calling him "Lindsey Grah-amnesty."
Bloggers challenge his manhood, assault his patriotism, mock his intellect.
Still worse for where he comes from, they belittle his Southern bona fides.Say it isn't so. Interesting how right-wing bloggers utilize similar themes usually reserved for bashing Democrats. For example, he's acting like a sissy. Michelle Malkin referred to Graham as "Senator Hissy" no doubt because of a fit caught on video, and at "Dump Lindsey Graham," blogger Fed Up In SC suggested, "[Graham] passionately pleaded for the rights of terrorists, whose primary goal is to kill American children." Another blogger summed Lindsey up in one word: Traitor!
Graham's predicament piques my curiosity since I live in the South. Can a Republican be a moonbat? At what point does a Repub cease to be a Repub?
Apparently, the simple answer is when he or she negotiates and agrees with the other tribe, i.e., liberals, the definition of RINO applies. After all, in the Wingnutpedia, it's liberals and only liberals who are the party of "fags" and terrorist-coddling, American-hating traitors.
Real Republicans are manly men who shit red, white, and blue and ride around in pickup trucks. The tribe believes -- perhaps is compulsed to construct -- this idealization about themselves and their leaders whether it's factually true or not. I certainly wouldn't describe Scooter Libby as a patriot or a mensch. But he's the darling of conservatives who want him pardoned. Never mind his crimes. Scooter stuck it to the opposition and that's what Real Republicans do.
In "The right-wing cult of contrived masculinity," Glenn Greenwald explained, it's...
...how the right-wing movement conducts itself and the rhetorical tool they use not only to keep themselves in power, but more importantly, to keep their needy, confused, and scared base feeling strong and protected.This rhetorical device hinges on promoting "us against them," our tribe versus their tribe. In this, Graham's mistake was to consort with the leftiest of the left, Teddy "Splash" Kennedy. I know, I know. The sticking point is amnesty. South Carolinian conservatives don't like it, don't want it. Come hell or high water, their home-state senator had better damn well dance with the tribe.
Yet, what strikes me reading the conservative bloggers and their comment threads is the intensity of the attacks against Graham and the similarity of demeaning verbiage found in anti-liberal diatribes. What's been posted about Graham isn't so different from what Ann Coulter implied about Edwards' manliness.
For me personally, this episode of Lucid Moments™ also shines a light on bipartisanship GOP southern-style. Never compromise. Graham did and now... *spit* ...he's a "sissy."
