Recent threads focus on whether Tea Party bigwigs are crazy, or whether it’s all about liberals smearing them. I found the following quotations at a rather left-wing website. There seems to be widespread agreement that the Teabagging masses are ignorant bigots, but these quotes are by Congressman and by candidates for high office.
Are these quotes valid? Or is this just more smearing by left-wingers?
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.:
Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz.:
Glen Urquhart, tea party-backed candidate in Delaware:
Tea party-backed candidate Sharron Angle:
Carl Paladino, New York State tea party-backed candidate for Governor:
Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas:
Christine O’Donnell, R- candidate for Senate:
Are any of these quotes real? Am I the only one who thinks American politics have gone well past the stage of amusement?
Do you have some kind of medical condition that renders you unable to use search engines? If you enter the quotes into Google you’ll find the sources for most of them. In fact I bet you can find video of almost all of them. I found video of Trent Franks calling Obama an enemy of humanity, a CBS story where Uruqhart says Hitler coined the phrase “separation of church and state,” and C-Span footage of Gohmert’s bon mot about hate crimes. O’Donnell said Obama is a Muslim while she was speaking to the Washington Post.
It’s really kind of a bizarre thread. It’s not like they’re quotes pulled from the dusty archives. I remember some, like the Bachman quote, first hand. And not in the “oh my god I’ll never forget she said that” sense, just in the “I was watching Chris Matthews that night two years ago” sense.
I’ve heard most of those quotes, and I think it’s pretty settled that they’re real. Of course, some of the reporting of those quotes is a bit … slanted, shall we say. Like the Paladino prison cum dorm thing. I don’t think his was that great an idea, but the reporting makes it sounds like he was saying he wanted to put welfare recipients in prison (I believe he was pushing more toward the Old Prison as Cheap Institutional Housing thing).
However … I hadn’t heard the “Obama was born in Kenya” thing from O’Donnell. I knew she was a fruit-loop but is she really that mentally challenged? There’s no “that’s out of context” spin you can put to that unless it was preceded by, “Anybody who says the following is a fucking moron:”
To be fair to O’Donnell (why on earth I feel the need to offer this courtesy I’m not sure), from what I can tell, I don’t think she said this:
From here (and here’sthe original story), it appears it was said by an unnamed Tea Partying woman from Birmingham, Ala.
So that doesn’t make the Tea Party look any better, but it would appear this is not amongst the long list of nuttiness that’s spewed from O’Donnell’s lips. Although I have seen plenty of other online sources that attribute this quote to O’Donnell too, so who knows?
The prison-dorm thing is not the kookiest thing Paladino has said or done.
There was the whole horse porn email thing.
And just Sunday he told a group of orthodox rabbis, that he doesn’t want children being “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option.” He tried to get his nephew, who is gay and a campaign staffer, to defend him from the subsequent uproar, but the nephew told the press (the NY Post, no less!) he was “very offended by his comments.”