Dumbos, the Elephants, Revisited

Yesterday, we looked at a couple of Rethuglican Dumbos. But were their remarks the dumbest of the dumb? They have some mighty stiff competition!

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

WASHINGTON — Michael Steele, the new Republican National Chairman, wants to rebrand the GOP in a new image.

Time will tell whether the Republican Party is prepared for the changes Steele has in mind.

In an interview today with Washington Times, Steele disclosed that he is working on a public relations campaign that seeks to apply GOP principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”

What Steele has in mind, he says, will “surprise everyone” and be “off the hook.”

Original DVD cover.

“We need messengers to really capture that region — young, Hispanic, black, a cross section … We need to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets.” said Steele, who was lieutenant governor in Maryland.

Republicans looking for a blunt leader can stop their search.

“We missed the mark in the past, which is why we are in the crapper now,” he said.

To those who doubt his capabilities, Steele had this message: “I say to them, ‘Stuff it’.”

Wonder what his rap name is going to be. Certainly not Stainless Steele.

From Top of the Ticket at the Los Angeles Times:

The controversy over the validity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate is back on a burner with firebrand conservative Alan Keyes making serious new charges.

In a video [at link above] released Friday, Keyes, who lost to Obama in the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois that launched the new president’s national political career, calls Obama a communist and usurper and says he refuses to acknowledge the validity of Obama’s inauguration over lingering questions in the minds of many conspiracists about the 44th president’s birthplace.

The U.S. Constitution requires any president be born an American citizen.

In June, the Obama campaign released to The Ticket a copy of the then-senator’s Hawaiian birth certificate [copy at link]. But stubbornly persistent critics demand to see the original, which the state has refused to provide, citing personal privacy reasons.

And the critics, including Keyes explaining here, cite Obama relatives in Kenya as saying he was actually born there in his father’s native land when his American mother was too young to pass on her U.S. citizenship.

In December, as The Ticket reported here, the Supreme Court dismissed without comment a New Jersey lawsuit seeking to bar Obama’s inauguration due to questions over his actual citizenship.

From Crooks & Liars:

[…] Alan Keyes, in an interview with a reporter from KHAS-TV, filmed outside a fundraiser for the AAA Crisis Pregnancy Center in Hastings, Neb., said this:

“Obama is a radical communist, and I think it is becoming clear. That is what I told people in Illinois and now everybody realizes it’s true,” said Keyes, who ran unsuccessfully against Obama for the state’s open Senate seat in 2004. “He is going to destroy this country, and we are either going to stop him or the United States of America is going to cease to exist.”

…snip…

This is classic right-wing eliminationism: Depicting the opposition as the embodiment of evil, intent on destroying the nation. For militia/Patriot types, this kind of rhetoric also becomes a call to action.

P.S. And then there’s Bobby Jindal….