Kobach will carve out a Bantustan in downtown Wichita called ‘Nuevo Leon’, and he’ll make Mexico pay for it.
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I can never quite decide who Kobach reminds me of the most: Eichmann or Heydrich.
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Proving yourself to be the newest poster boy for GOP hypocrisy in the name of the wild goose chase “Voter Fraud Commission” or commonly known as another Trump Circus Act can only come from the politically weird state of Kansas and a corrupt GOP administration. They’ll probably promote you.
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I hear Brown(Ko)bach’s free market has really been working out great for Kansas. So much so, in fact, that they’re taking it national!
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There were Republicans who stood up to Reagan on South African sanctions.
"Eventually, in 1986, the Senate passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act with enough votes to override Reagan’s veto. “I think he is wrong,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), explaining his break with the administration. “We have waited long enough for him to come on board.”
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Not unlike the ‘but they need jobs so low wages are better then nothing’ argument justifying slave wages in Bangladesh etc…
P.s. yes research has shown standard of living goes down when these companies move in
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The liberation and election of Nelson Mandela really hurt all those black South Africans that Kris Kobach we can be absolutely certain was really concerned about. Just like he is extremely concerned about black folks voting in his own country.
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Why is it that these uber ambitious president wannabes from the midwest like Kobach and Sasse go to Ivy League schools but dont have the balls to be anything but stereotyped Reagan Era Cookie Cutter Conservatives. So fucking trite.
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I remember this well. Opposition to apartheid was taking hold in the US because the minority government in South Africa was so friggin’ awful and brutal that even Americans were having a hard time defending it, particularly with our own version of apartheid still fresh in our memories (and still, then as now, extant in parts of the South and in our country’s dying inner cities).
This happened at a moment, during the awful, pivotal Reagan years, just before the Republican agitprop machine had re-energized and weaponized racial malice to the staggering degree that exists today: when the Southern strategy still operated in the shadows, delicately, packed with dog-whistles and genteel code.
The right didn’t want divestiture, because their corporate buddies were profiting hugely from South Africa, and also because as reactionaries they believed profoundly in two things—the entitlement of the rich to do whatever they wanted to do in pursuit of profit, and the White Man’s Burden: but they couldn’t come right out and say any of this, because apartheid was so bloody awful, and because their friends the Afrikaners were giving the Master Race a bad name, as powerful white people so often do.
So they hit on this line: We don’t like apartheid, but if we do anything to defund the profiteers, it’s the workers who’ll be hurt. Sure, apartheid is terrible, the Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln, but if we pull our money out of South Africa, workers will go hungry, and as Republicans we just can’t bear the thought of hungry workers.
To give you some context for what utter, malignant, Republican BS this was: Pat Buchanan was spouting this same line at this same moment. This was Party Line on the fringe right that was beginning to consume the entire Republican Party.
Although the timeline is a little before the invention of the Frank Luntz mantra mills, Koch money was already flowing into the whole agitprop grift machine at this point, so there were plenty of reactionary pundits who came up with the same talking points at the same moment. Buchanan and Kobach—racist reactionaries then as they are today---- were just two loyal laborers in the dark money army.
In fact this attack on divestiture was one of the earliest examples of the Orwellian, inside-out blather, the malicious inversion of reality, that has by now become the Republican facon d’etre, the contemptible and easy lies that allow them to make pious utterances seemingly out of the highest and noblest of motives, meanwhile doing everything they can to subvert ethics, basic humanity and common decency in pursuit of power and profit. Kind of like what Mad Donald is doing to affordable care right now. Kind of like what the Republicans in Congress are doing to literally everything right now.
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Even more disgusting, when you realize it was IBM that helped the Nazis with their segregation and documenting of Jews and other who were sent to the camps. 
Obviously they learning nothing other than that they can make money off of the mistreatment of other humans.
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Connor
IBM rather liked the way people were controlled by the Nazi organization. Making money was just icing on the cake for them.
True.
Like the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Third Amendment, the Fourth…
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Trump: Kobach’s letter against The Blacks is a very nice touch. Its a feature, not a bug. My supporters are very happy with my administration.
My recollection of that time are the same. It about the time that I began to notice that all, and I mean, all, Republicans were spouting the same weak argument. It was the beginning of the Right Wing Echo Machine, only we were years away from calling it that.
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This. Every word.
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You know, it’s weird to think about it, but once upon a time, long, long ago, long before he was in leadership, even Mitch McConnell actually had a moral principle and scruple or two banging around in the vast empty box where non-sociopaths keep their consciences. He really did. So did Hatch.
Long gone, beyond all hope of recall. There will never be a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” moment where shame and self-loathing recall their better selves, because there was never much “better” in them to start with. But they once weren’t the utterly unscrupulous power-for-power’s sake, say anything, do anything monsters they are now.
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And because the stakes have gotten so much higher in their own lifetimes. By “stakes,” of course, I mean money.
If you have seen any of Howard Fineman’s work on McConnell over the years it’s quite illuminating. Fineman covered him for years for the Louisville Courier Journal. McConnell worked for a Republican senator who was a moderate Rockefeller type and a stalwart on civil rights as well as a stickler about senatorial order and procedures. The question is what went wrong with him.
I remember when he first beat Dee Huddleston by running a bogus commercial flogging (that old standby) missed votes in the Senate–most of which were paired absences, of course. And I swear mostly he was just being rewarded by Kentuckians for entertaining them with a hilarious commercial, and it was devastatingly funny. They got a lookalike (from a distance, and Huddleston was quite distinctive) and did the old escapee running from the bloodhounds schtick. And this guy running across the hills in a suit with the yelping hounds, yeah, it was funny.
And for about twelve years, he was basically indistinguishable from Huddleston except for his vote for majority leader. But that’s back when the Senate was still a club, still a place where heterodoxy was the norm and expected and raw partisanship was viewed as a tolerable eccentricity.
What happened to him? Power. Because the platitudes are true. It is corrosive. There ought to be a label on it: “WARNING: MAY EAT YOUR SOUL!” It takes enormous integrity, or at least strength of will and purpose, to not be corrupted by it, turned into a seeker of power for power’s sake and the more you get the harder it is to remember why else you’re there.
This is the reason I roll my eyes at people who think they are cynical and worldly wise because they always say “follow the money!” as if money is the only thing (or the most important thing) that motivates people in the capital of a nation. They’re ignoring even the genesis of the phrase: “follow the money.” It wasn’t an admonition to look for avarice and who was feeding it. It was a clue, dropped by Mark Felt to Woodward and Bernstein, on how to find their way into the heart of the conspiratorial cabal that was the Nixon Administration, men who were as power-oriented as a dog or a pig is fixated on food. Money was a mere means to an end to them. Sure, they liked living an affluent lifestyle, who doesn’t? But it was all about power, in the raw, undistilled, unsullied with anything like principle or, really, any other urge excepting only NIxon’s personal, and, yeah, almost pathos-inducing, desire to be liked despite his own sense of unworthiness and inferiority.
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