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GOP Nominates Racist Idiot in SD26
By Jeff Fecke | December 30, 2009
As you may or may not have heard, State Sen. Dick Day, R-Waseca, is leaving the Minnesota Senate in January to focus on lobbying. That means a special election to fill out his term, of course, and the GOP appears to have picked a real winner.
The GOP endorsee is former Waseca City Council Member Mike Parry, and he’s much as you’d expect him to be:
In his speech to the delegates, Parry said the government had been “living too long in a dream world. Enough is enough. We need to tell them, ‘balance this budget without raising our taxes. It can be done.’ ”
He told delegates that, like them, he wants “a senator that is not worried about being politically correct. Welfare is meant to be a safety net, not a hammock.”
So yeah, he’s your typically annoying GOP teabagger. One who isn’t politically correct, gosh darn it. And incidentally, one with a Twitter account.
I expect you can see where this is going.
My former colleague at the late DFLSenate blog, Patrick Timmons, realized that a guy who brags about his willingness to speak truth to the powerless probably would be willing to post a few stupid things on his Twitter feed. And boy, did he ever. For one thing, as was discovered by the redoubtable Sally Jo Sorensen at Bluestem Prairie, Parry evidently seemed to think that absentee ballots were only able to be cast by soldiers overseas, because the link he cited said that absentee ballots could be cast for many, many reasons. And Joe Bodell found that Parry had criticized local spending, saying, “local governments should stop spending money[.]” This rather undermines the GOP’s preferred attack line on DFL gubernatorial candidate and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, who has been relentlessly attacked for not spending enough money on snow plowing — whether or not he actually hasn’t.
But the most serious and outlandish tweet was found by Timmons, who discovered this (now scrubbed) tweet, which I quote in its entirety:
read the exclusive on Mr O in Newsweek. He is a Power Hungry Arrogant Black Man
Yup. Obama’s not just power hungry. He’s not just arrogant. He’s also a black man. These are evidently, in Parry’s estimation, all equally problematic.
Needless to say, Parry has been quickly scrubbing the record, deleting 33 tweets that could prove damaging to his electoral future. Of course, that rather suggests that Parry is, in fact, worried about being politically correct. But then, most Americans don’t think that racist idiocy is amusingly politically incorrect. Most Americans think it’s simply wrong.
Topics: Barack Obama, Election 2010, Legislature, MN GOP, Race | 3 Comments »
December 31st, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Linked to your blog from the Minnesota Independent. Thanks for this post letting America know to be on the lookout for Parry in the future. I’m hoping you guys stop his advance up MN’s electoral chain.
majii in GA
December 31st, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Interesting. . . but who will be the straw candidate the DFL will set up to be crushed by this guy? It is Dick Day’s district, after all – I can’t imagine that there is a wellspring of liberal thought there. If you can shed some light on that, it would be most helpful.
January 3rd, 2010 at 5:52 am
This seems to be the way of the world these days, unfortunately. The idea of a ‘conservative ascendency’ took root as part of the ‘consensus’ of the 90s, and became conventional wisdom as issues of terrorism and immigration took on a new urgency in the early 00s in my country (Australia) and yours. The future would belong to sober-minded ‘serious’ conservatives, prepared to make ‘hard choices’ and forsake all the namby-pamby liberalism that ‘got us into all this trouble in the first place’. And they BELIEVED this, it really soaked into the grassroots, and so out of power there’s an increasing congruence between the perpetually aggrieved fringe (who never would have gotten within daylight of the conservative parties when they were in power, simply because the fringe feeds off alienation and you can’t be alienated when Times Are Good) and the broad base itself.
This may seem like a very broad conclusion to draw from a little bit of evidence, but something very similar happened in New South Wales, the state where I live, recently: the Liberal Party, which because we like to screw with Americans’ heads is the conservative party, nominated a former head of One Nation’s youth wing for a marginal state seat. One Nation is basically our BNP, our Front National, our Buchanan Brigades, our Tom Tancredo, our…you get the drift. Racist bastards. And now they’re considered acceptable not because the party’s enthusiasm is so low but because it’s so HIGH, driven by rage and a sense of mounting national crisis, making the fringe and the base more and more indistinguishable. Once, you could easily tell the difference between ‘Republicans’, on the whole, and the howling kooks. Now nothing’s quite so certain.