CONSERVATIVE GET-TOGETHER QUICKLY GETS UGLY

…The late Paul Weyrich, Founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation think-tank

 

Here are just more examples of why so few Americans refer to themselves as "Republicans".

 

There was a recent article that described a truly disgusting meeting that was held at the conservative Heritage Foundation. The meeting was originally supposed to be just one more conservative get together for discussing the Benghazi debacle.  However, the meeting degenerated into something totally different.

I say a “disgusting meeting” because, when you get a group of these Benghazi zealots together, they then have to continue making things up for justifying their existence.  And when they start doing that, things usually, very quickly, get pretty down and dirty.

This umpteenth meeting was purportedly about the so called, “unanswered Benghazi questions” surrounding the 2012 attacks on US facilities in Libya.  But the get-together quickly started deteriorating into an ugly taunting of a young woman in the room who was wearing an Islamic head covering.

Here are some other examples of what was going on that also shows why the conservatives are in the bad state of affairs that they are today:

·       The session, as usual, quickly went to accusations about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating the Obama administration.

·       And that President Obama was funding jihadists in their quest to destroy the United States.

·       That Obama and Hillary Clinton were attempting to impose Muslim Sharia laws on Americans.

·       And that Al Jazeera America was an organ of “enemy propaganda”

But it really went downhill when Ms. Saba Ahmed, an American University law student, stood up in the back of the room and asked a question in a very soft voice. “We portray Islam and all Muslims as bad, but there’s 1.8 billion followers of Islam,” she then added, “We have 8 million-plus Muslim Americans in this country and I don’t see them represented here.”

The response to this was immediate and very ugly:

·       Brigitte Gabriel of the group called “ACT! for America” pounced as she said, “180 million to 300 million” Muslims are “dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.” She told Ahmed that the “peaceful majority of Muslims were irrelevant” in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and she drew a Hitler comparison: “Most Germans were peaceful, yet the Nazis drove the agenda and as a result, 60 million died.”  “Are you an American?” Gabriel demanded of Ahmed, before informing her that her “political correctness” belonged “in the garbage.”

·       “Where are the others speaking out?” Ahmed was asked. This question caused standing ovation from the nearly 150 people in the room, complete with their cheers.

The panel’s moderator, conservative radio host Chris Plante, grinned and joined in the assault. “Can you tell me who the head of the Muslim peace movement is?” he demanded of Ahmed.

“Yeah,” audience members taunted, “yeah, yeah.”  As before, Ahmed answered quietly, “I guess it’s me right now,” she said.

·       Mr. Plante then cast doubt on whether Ambassador Chris Stevens really died in Benghazi of smoke inhalation as he questioned why he hadn’t seen an autopsy report.

·       Panelist Clare Lopez of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, and known for her anti-Obama stance, stated that the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack are currently “sipping frappes with journalists in juice bars.”

·       One questioner said he had heard that Gen. Carter Ham, then-commander of U.S. Africa Command, had been “placed under house arrest” at the time of the Benghazi attack. “I’ve heard the same story,” Plante seconded.  (A story that was debunked right after it first appeared over a year ago.)

·       Another questioner, claiming to be from a Web site called GodSaveUSA.com, asked about an assertion that Obama “watched our people die” in real-time drone footage from Benghazi.  (Another bizarre claim by those that are trying to find anything with which to impeach the president.)

·       Panelist and former “Birther”, Frank Gaffney, then revived the old allegations that former Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, has “deep personal” ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and said she may have advocated for laws against “Sharia laws.”  (More false rhetoric.)

·       Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian by birth, who was the most vitriolic when Ahmed had asked her question, Gabriel had dismissed the question as “irrelevant”, about the “2.3 million Arab Muslims living in the United States when it took only 19 hijackers, 19 radicals, to bring America down.” She mocked Ahmed’s “point about peaceful, moderate Muslims” by making quotation marks with her fingers when she said the word “peaceful”. 

·       The young Ahmed was a real class-act when she responded calmly to the taunts of the crowd. “As a peaceful American Muslim,” she answered, “I would like to think I’m not that irrelevant.”

The Heritage Foundation hosted Monday’s gathering in conjunction with the Benghazi Accountability Coalition, a federation coordinated by Mr. Andrew McCarthy and it included 15 additional conservative groups such as Judicial Watch and the Traditional Values Coalition. McCarthy’s talk to the gathering was originally titled “Just the Facts”.  However, the facts never emerged against all the different groups’ self-promotion and the anti-Islam rhetoric that took over the gathering.

If these kind of get-togethers continue to occur, this is this kind of garbage that will continue to keep the Republicans out of the White House for another 4 to 8 years.  Now, I obviously don’t want a Republican in the White House, but I would like to have a real two-party political system.  The current group that calls themselves the Republican Party is not a reasonable alternative as a real political party.

The Republican political challenge today, in all its complexity, requires a true party with a reasonable party plank and a candidate who can get through a nomination process that includes both Iowa and South Carolina.  It must then have increased support from white middle-class voters in both Ohio and the Hispanic voters in Florida. An ideal nominee would therefore, also need to have Tea Party populist roots, middle-class sensibilities, a policy interest in real social mobility for the poor and a conspicuously welcoming approach to immigration. 

This is not possible with the group that currently calls themselves the GOP, or the one that appeared at this Heritage Foundation get-together, and especially those that today call themselves “conservatives”.

Copyright G.Ater  2014