Kudos to Salon.com’s Michelle Goldberg not only for her excellent article on the national gathering of the College Republicans over the weekend, but for having the patience to endure the audience’s vile anti-American rhetoric. I suspect the temptation to run from the convention hall screaming would have been awfully strong if I were in her shoes.
The College GOP conference generated quite a crowd this year at the Washington Hilton; Goldberg estimated about 1,000 students from across the country in attendance. The crowd is apparently pretty important to the party establishment based on the gathering’s speakers: Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former U.S. Sen. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), and fire-breathing right-winger David Horowitz.
Instead of repeating the whole thing, I thought I’d point out some of the more “colorful” comments Goldberg heard at the event.
Jack Abramoff, a powerful right-wing lobbyist and former College Republican chairman, exhorted the next generation to fight hard, lest “the ascension of evil, the bad guys, the Bolsheviks, the Democrats return.”
One guy who sells “No Muslims = No Terrorists” bumper stickers was also doing well selling “Bring Back the Blacklist” T-shirts, mugs and mouse pads.
To gauge how “out of touch” the Democrats are, DeLay instructed, “close your eyes and try to imagine Ted Kennedy landing that Navy jet.” (As Tapped mentioned in response, you’ll also have to close your eyes and imagine George W. Bush landing that Navy jet, since he was a passenger, not the pilot, in his staged landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln. And while Ted Kennedy served in the military, DeLay spent the Vietnam War, as Tapped put it, “defending our nation from the threat of earwigs and cockroaches, having received multiple student deferments because, as he explained at the Republican convention in 1988, ‘So many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like himself.'”)
A former professional wrestler announced that saying “there are two sides to every story brings your loved ones closer and closer to tyranny and outright annihilation.”
One attendee denounced Martin Luther King Jr. for “dividing the country” and trying to help African-Americans “advance over the white society.” The same college Republican said Bill Clinton had been “more dangerous to America than Osama bin Laden.”
Another attendee said plainly, “I’m racist, I love guns and I hate welfare.” He added that before the Supreme Court’s decision upholding affirmative action last month, “I couldn’t admit I’m a racist. They admitted they’re racist, so now I can too.”
It’s odd; I’ve heard right-wingers demand in recent years that liberals “hate America.” What seems clear to me based on comments like those above is that the real problem is conservatives hating Americans.
Eugene over at Demagogue said yesterday that the college Republicans quoted in the Salon article are clearly “a groups of idiots” but he “strongly doubts…this sort of attitude is shared by most college Republicans.”
I sure hope that’s true because this kind of nationalistic jingoism is pretty scary.