Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [182]
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“Dangerously fanning the flames.” Cantor’s logic was murky. Perhaps he meant that Democrats’ complaints just made the extremists madder.
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“New Right.” In fact, there were a few New Rights in the twentieth century, so the movement should perhaps have been called the New New Right or even the New New New Right. But new is one of those perverse adjectives where the more news you string together, the less new your idea sounds, so most people just ignored the previous New Rights.
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Incidentally, Weyrich declined to support George Bush Jr.’s 1978 congressional campaign, explaining, “We do not regard him as a conservative.”
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“Back to Vermont.” Moore’s philosophy in a nutshell: “Go north, young liberal.” An Illinois native, Moore seems to view the northeast as some kind of reservation for confused socialists. In 1997, he wrote, “The Northeast is dying, victim of the same sclerosis now paralyzing Europe. Republicans may well have no choice but to write it off. With each passing day, the region’s shrinking conservative voting base is retreating to the more economically robust and culturally normal places like Georgia, North Carolina, Florida and Texas.” (Stephen Moore, “Is the Northeast necessary?” American Spectator, 30:12 [Dec. 1997]: 41)
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“Joe the Plumber and Ed the Dairy Man.” What about Dion the Drug Dealer and Juanita the Welfare Queen?
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“Fifteen years of frustration.” That would be since 1993, just before Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution took over Congress and initiated conservatives’ twelve-year reign.
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“Tea Party movement.” There is also a question of what to call Tea Party supporters. After one protester carried a sign that read TEA BAG THE LIBERAL DEMS BEFORE THEY TEA BAG YOU, cheeky liberals began calling them teabaggers.
Teabagging is slang for a sexual act involving oral stimulation of the scrotum, and the label gave rise to a spurt of double entendres about Tea Party members. Conservatives subsequently objected to the label, which some compared to the N-word. Journalists variously refer to them as Tea Party supporters, backers, activists, members, protesters, or simply Tea Partiers (which brings to mind a frat party without beer). (Alex Koppelman, “Your guide to teabagging,” Salon.com, 14 Apr. 2009, http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2009/04/14/teabagging_guide.)
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Jon Stewart’s comment on Santelli’s rant: “Wall Street is mad as hell! And they’re not going to take it anymore! Unless by it you mean two trillion dollars in bailout money. That they will take.” (Jon Stewart, “CNBC Financial Advice,” The Daily Show, 4 Mar. 2009, http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-march-4-2009/cnbc-financial-advice.)
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As often happens when angry people march on Washington, a debate ensued over exactly how many angry people marched on Washington. Newspapers came up with 60,000 to 75,000. At the other end of the spectrum, Glenn Beck estimated 500,000, a number that he called “really conservative.” But Glenn Beck’s idea of “really conservative” is a little different from what most people mean by “really conservative.” (Joe Markman, “Crowd estimates vary wildly for Capitol march,” Los Angeles Times, 15 Sep. 2009, http://articles.latimes. com/2009/sep/15/nation/na-crowd15; “Beck, Limbaugh run wild with estimates on size of 9/12 protests,” Media Matters, 14 Sep. 2009, http://mediamatters.org/research/200909140047.)
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“Serbian national identity.” Pat Buchanan, who has questioned whether American involvement in World War II was “worth it,” also hinted at a chilling sympathy with Serbian nationalists when he wrote, “As the Serbs are losing Kosovo, so we may have lost the Southwest.” (Patrick Buchanan, “Was World War II worth it?” WorldNetDaily, 11 May 2005, http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44210; Patrick J. Buchanan, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart (New York: Thomas Dunne Books,