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Scenes from CPAC

Jill

Mister Leonard Pierce at Sadly, No! has been covering the Conservative Political Action Conference; head over there and check out his commentary. If that doesn’t convince you that CPAC-attending Republicans are total jackasses, Julian sent me this peek at some of the merchandise being hawked at the conference. My personal favorites:

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So we have Barack Obama as a crazy foreigner (can anyone read what the shirt actually says below “Borak”?); Roe v. Wade as “the American Holocaust;” and a t-shirt reading “Poverty will be eliminated the day after stupid and lazy are eliminated.”

This is our “moral majority.”

27 thoughts on Scenes from CPAC

  1. I like to think this is a convenient way for people to save me the effort involved in getting to know them.

  2. I like to think this is a convenient way for people to save me the effort involved in getting to know them.

    Hee. Word. I use bumper stickers to this same effect. If I see any stupid pro-life sticker or marriage = 1 man + 1 woman stickers, I don’t let them in front of me.

  3. There’s no “R” in the Cyrillic alphabet. The “R” sound is represented by “P.” The letter after the “R” on th T-shirt is the “D” sound.

  4. duh. The “B” in the Cyrillic alphabet represents the “V” sound; there’s also a reversed “R” that represents the vowel sound “Ya,” but even if you gave ’em that it’s still unpronounceable. “Voyadk” would be as close as you could get.

  6. Love the bottom t-shirt on the last picture. Social Darwinism, anyone? *rolls eyes* I thought the Gilded Age was over, people. I’m going to fail my history test today if that isn’t the case. Damn conservatives!

  7. The “Borak” one is a parody of the posters for the film “Borat”, if anyone was in doubt about that, which also used faux-Cyrillic. Like anyone cares. (I thought they were accusing him of being secretly an Arab or something last? Are they saying he’s secretly Kazakhstani now?!) I think possibly the image is something like this one, though I can’t find an exact match.

    If anyone thinks Che and Clinton are “same old” anything, it just goes to show they haven’t spent the time to read what either of them stood or stands for.

    Actually, that “America’s Universities” thing could be rather fun to wear ironically.

  8. I found a bigger view on flickr. Something about communist leanings, and, of course, Hussein.

    There’s also this gem.

    Looking through the flickr tags for “CPAC” all I can do is think to myself, “Damn, that’s a whole lot of white people.”

  9. Oh, thanks, BabyPop: that lets me find this. “Communist learnings of Hussein for make benefit glorious nation of Amerikastan” (not “leanings” as the title has it) with all the Ns reversed. The film’s title was “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”.

  12. The “Borak” one is a parody of the posters for the film “Borat”, if anyone was in doubt about that, which also used faux-Cyrillic.

    Right, I get that it’s a Borat parody, I just can’t read what it says under “Borak.”

  15. America’s Universities
    The Last Bastion of Communism

    also:

    The Last Remnant of Meritocracy
    The Holder of Constitutional Ideals
    Decent Wages for Most
    America’s Middle Class Zoo, see ’em before they’re extinct

  16. The sad thing is that even if McCain gets stomped by Clinton or Obama in the general election, it won’t chasten these folks at all. Their reaction will be, “See? If we’d just nominated someone who’s as bat-shit-crazy a right-winger as we are, instead of this limpdick McCain, our side would’ve won in a landslide!” They really are convinced that stuff like calling Obama a commie Muslim is something that resonates profoundly with the rest of the country.

  17. Actually, most of those shirts aren’t representative of “the moral majority.” If Huckabee’s candidacy has shown us anything, it’s that there is a significant divide between fiscal conservatives and religious conservatives — many people who oppose legal abortion would NOT say that poverty is about “stupid and lazy.”

    Purely on the issues? A lot of religious “Republicans” have as much in common with Obama/Clinton as with McCain. If only we could make that case to them, and start bringing some of them leftwards.

  18. Pingback: Republican’s sexist & racist - what a surprise, eh?

  19. Actually, most of those shirts aren’t representative of “the moral majority.” If Huckabee’s candidacy has shown us anything, it’s that there is a significant divide between fiscal conservatives and religious conservatives — many people who oppose legal abortion would NOT say that poverty is about “stupid and lazy.”

    Sadly, no. Are there individuals who oppose legal abortion but don’t think the poor are stupid and lazy? Sure. But they aren’t the kind of people who are going to CPAC, and they aren’t particularly influential in the Republican machine. The fact is that if you look at the full agendas and issue positions of all the “pro-life” groups in the United States, almost all of them either take no position or oppose programs that would help the poor and would lower the abortion rate, like universal health care, birth control access, welfare, etc. You’re fooling yourself if you think that the organized Religious Right has any interest at all in helping the poor.

  20. The organized religious right may not, Jill, but most people who vote Republican based on their interpretation of their religion aren’t part of the organized religious right. I maintain that there’s a bloc of voters who are currently going to the Repubs but would be willing to support government social programs — and might swing Democratic if a Democrat reached out to them and convinced them that their compassion for the poor, not their terror of gay marriage, should guide their vote.

  21. America’s Universities
    The Last Bastion of Communism

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Yeah, right!

    If they think American Universities, especially the Ivy League are bastions of Communism, they obviously never visited the campuses of Berkeley, Oberlin, or Antioch. Compared to those three and other like-minded schools, most American Universities are bastions of the consumerist centrist-right.

  22. I maintain that there’s a bloc of voters who are currently going to the Repubs but would be willing to support government social programs — and might swing Democratic if a Democrat reached out to them and convinced them that their compassion for the poor, not their terror of gay marriage, should guide their vote

    Well, sure, I don’t think anyone disagrees with that. But again, those aren’t the people going to CPAC. The bloc of voters who are anti-choice but who believe in economic justice may certainly exist, but as it stands they’re letting the religious right speak for them. I agree that Democrats need to speak to those people and emphasize compassion and social justice, but at the end of the day I wonder how many staunch religious Republican voters do actually care all that much about the plight of the poor if it means that they’ll have to pay higher taxes.

    I’m not trying to demonize individual conservatives, because I think you’re right that many of them are much more compassionate and level-headed than the religious right would suggest. But the fact stands that the power brokers for the “Moral Majority” in this country — which is what I was referencing in this post — most certainly are hostile to the poor.

  25. Vote Libertarian, and dispense with all the left-right nonsense. Smaller government, and less government interference in our lives, should be everyone’s goals.

  26. Loose Cannon’s out to put me out of a job. And do it in a society where welfare’s not an option. That’s not nice. 🙂

    (I’m being facetious here, but I couldn’t resist.)

    My comment was more meant to comment on these teeshirts — I find them ridiculous and horribly ignorant. I for one refuse to vote for anyone who stands for these bigoted, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, jackoffs that are in no way representative of the true nature and spirit of Christianity.

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