The I Hate America Group: Beck, Rush, Drudge, GOP

President Obama flew to Copenhagen to stump for a Chicago Olympics in 2016, a move that would have created 350,000 jobs and pumped billions into the economy. The plan was not to be, as Rio Je Janiero got the '16 games. But the more curious effect was the rejoicing from certain corners about America's failure.

This rejoicing didn't come from Iran, or North Korea. It didn't come from Europe. It came from Americans who normally parade their patriotism for all to see. These Americans are rejoicing in America's failure to boost our economy and our prestige in the world.

The word that would often be throw around for these Americans is "traitor".

So who are these traitors?

Media Matters presents the Two Minute Hate:

Glenn Beck on the "sweet" news that Chicago lost the Olympics:

Rush Limbaugh called it "the worst day of his presidency," adding that Obama "has failed" and the entire episode was an illustration of Obama's "Mars-sized ego."

He continued: "For those of you on the other side of the aisle listening in who are upset that I sound gleeful, I am. I don't deny it. I'm happy. Anything that gets in the way of Barack Obama accomplishing his domestic agenda is fine with me."

He then echoed Drudge's comment: "The ego has landed"



Upon being informed of the news, a gathering of conservatives at the Americans For Prosperity -- one of the main organizing groups behind the tea party protests -- erupted in applause. They cheered once more after they were told that Chicago had been eliminated during the first round of voting. The moment was captured on video (below) and reported by Hotline On Call:

These traitors run against the wishes of a super-majority of Americans: A poll conducted by Zogby International from Sept. 22 to 25 showed that 84 percent of Americans support having the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Chicago.

Why do they hate America?

Jack Kemp is an Islamofacist America-hater

In an open letter to his grandchildren, Jack Kemp wrote:

My first thought last week upon learning that a 47-year-old African-American Democrat had won the presidency was, "Is this a great country or not?"

Let me explain. First of all, the election was free, fair and transformational, in terms of our democracy and given the history of race relations in our nation.

What do I mean?

Just think, a little over 40 years ago, blacks in America had trouble even voting in our country, much less thinking about running for the highest office in the land.

A little over 40 years ago, in some parts of America, blacks couldn't eat, sleep or even get a drink of water using facilities available to everyone else in the public sphere.

You see, real leadership is not just seeing the realities of what we are temporarily faced with, but seeing the possibilities and potential that can be realized by lifting up peoples' vision of what they can be.

When President-elect Obama quoted Abraham Lincoln on the night of his election, he was acknowledging the transcendent qualities of vision and leadership that are always present, but often overlooked and neglected by pettiness, partisanship and petulance. As president, I believe Barack Obama can help lift us out of a narrow view of America into the ultimate vision of an America where, if you're born to be a mezzo-soprano or a master carpenter, nothing stands in your way of realizing your God-given potential.

My advice for you all is to understand that unity for our nation doesn't require uniformity or unanimity; it does require putting the good of our people ahead of what's good for mere political or personal advantage.

The party of Lincoln, (i.e., the GOP), needs to rethink and revisit its historic roots as a party of emancipation, liberation, civil rights and equality of opportunity for all.

President-elect Obama talks of Abraham Lincoln's view of our nation as an "unfinished work." Well, isn't that equally true of all of us? Therefore let all of us strive to help him be a successful president, so as to help make America an even greater nation.

Frank Schaffer: GOP arsonists burned down our national home

(Huff Post)
Open Letter to the Republican Traitors (From a Former Republican)

You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.

I used to be one of you.

How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan defined the modern conservatism that used to be what the Republican Party I belonged to was about. Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today's wholly negative Republican Party. And can you picture the gentlemanly and always polite Ronald Reagan, endorsing a radio hate-jock slob who crudely mocked a man with Parkinson's and who now says he wants an American president to fail?!

With people like Limbaugh as the loudmouth image of the Republican Party -- you need no enemies. But something far more serious has happened than an image problem: the Republican Party has become the party of obstruction at just the time when all Americans should be pulling together for the good of our country.

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"The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative idealogues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all-reactionary, all backward, there-is-no-global-warming rube reality. Actual conversatives, let alone the educated classes, have long sense fled." - Frank Schaffer

Jack Cafferty: GOP is becoming a cartoon

(CNN)
The Republican Party is becoming a cartoon.

If the Republicans are ever to emerge from the long dark night they have created for themselves it will have to be without pandering to the right wing nuts that comprise Rush Limbaugh's radio audience. Didn't they learn anything in the last election?

All of which is to say the GOP is blowing it big time. They were handed a golden opportunity to redeem themselves with the election of Barack Obama -- a chance to line up and in unison condemn the evil their party put in the White House the previous eight years.

But instead of getting on board the change train and recognizing the incredible amount of damage their people had done to the country, Republicans go blithely along as though nothing has happened.

I hate to break it to them, but a lot has happened. And they're not going to like any of it.

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows the Republican Party's favorability rating at an all-time low. President Obama's is at an all-time high. The same poll shows that Republicans are getting most of the blame for the partisanship that hinders governmental progress. And perhaps most telling, when asked which party is best equipped to lead the country out of recession, the Republicans trail the Democrats by a stunning 30 points.

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The GOP's circular firing squad

(MSNBC)
Simply put, the public isn't buying what Republicans are selling right now.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this past week put Republican popularity at near historic lows. Just 26 percent in the survey viewed the party positively, compared with 68 percent for President Barack Obama, despite the economic crisis and sharp GOP criticism of his $3.8 trillion budget plan.

Republicans trailed by more than a 30-point margin on the question of which party is best positioned to end the recession.

(David Frum in Newsweek)
It wasn't a fight I went looking for. On March 3, the popular radio host Mark Levin opened his show with an outburst (he always opens his show with an outburst): "There are people who have somehow claimed the conservative mantle … You don't even know who they are … They're so irrelevant … It's time to name names …! The Canadian David Frum: where did this a-hole come from? … In the foxhole with other conservatives, you know what this jerk does? He keeps shooting us in the back … Hey, Frum: you're a putz."

Here's the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of "responsibility," and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as "losers." With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we're cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush's every rancorous word—we'll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership?

Rush is a traitor. Really

On Friday, Rush Limbaugh was - again - wishing for the recovery bill to fail:

"I want everything he's doing to fail... I want the stimulus package to fail.... I do not want this to succeed."

Steve Benen of Washington Monthly points out that if, in 2003, a Democrat - or anyone - expressed a similar sentiment about the war on terror, they would lose all credibility, allies, advertising revenue or jobs they held. And rightly so.

But in the hypocritical world of GOP politics, they sit by while FatBoy hammers at America. Read what he said - he hopes the recovery fails. He's willing to see this nation go down the drain so Obama doesn't get credit, and votes, for savin our economy.

Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat traitor.

From Benen:

Limbaugh is, without ambiguity, rooting for failure. In the midst of an economic crisis, Limbaugh quite openly admitted that if Obama's economic policies are successful, it would undermine the talk-show host's worldview. As such, Limbaugh wants desperately to see more Americans suffer, more workers unemployed, more businesses close up shop. The key here is philosophy -- if government spending can stimulate the economy, as it always does, then the right is wrong. Limbaugh would much prefer a suffering nation than a reevaluation of conservative ideas.

Keep in mind, of course, that such talk under Bush's presidency would force someone from the airwaves. If a prominent progressive figure said, just as the president was sending troops into war in early 2003, "I want everything he's doing to fail. I want the war in Iraq to fail. I do not want the president's national security agenda to succeed," he or she would lose all advertising revenue and be fired. In the midst of a crisis, Americans rooting against America, based on nothing but ideological rigidity, are pariahs.