Can we stop being shocked that Target and Best Buy threw the interests of their LGBT customers under the bus? Yes, the candidate and PAC in question are terrible on matters of equality, but they are all for tax cuts for business. And it should come as no shock when a big corporation comes to the conclusion that making more money trumps their “values”. Target is going on about their previous endorsements from HRC and the like, and that’s real sweet, but the fact that they’re willing to compromise that because of “pro-business” positions – well, it’s maddening, but it shouldn’t come as a shock.
(Who the hell is still getting consumer electronics from Best Buy?)
In the bigger picture, this is why you have to be scared about all this Teabagger bullshit (yes, I’m going to use that epithet, because fuck those redneck mental defectives). There are far too many people out there who will at least be uncomfortable with (if not outright deplore) the excesses of the movement, but they’ll go along with it because it’s on their side. And there are people who may think that Sarah Palin is a clown, or that holding hearings on whether the 14th Amendment should actually apply is abysmally stupid, or get embarrassed that elected officials endorse questioning whether Barack Obama is in fact a secret Muslim and not an American citizen at all – but you know what? They’ll still pull the GOP lever, because that’s their side.
I’m not interested in the whole false-equivalence, either. People will scream “MoveOn!” and “Michael Moore” and “International ANSWER” – but you know what? None of those entities ever had a prominent role in the Democratic party, none of them were elected officials, and certainly no Democratic leaders felt compelled to genuflect before them and rush to embrace their flakiness. Meanwhile, the Senate’s top Republicans wants to address the notion that people born in the United States shouldn’t automatically be citizens – and hold Congressional hearings on the topic. The last time the Democrats went this far off the baseline was 1972 – and establishment Washington and its kept catamites in the Beltway media are still acting as if George McGovern and his boosters are running the day-to-day operations of every politician left of Joe Lieberman. All you have to know is that individual mandates for health insurance were part of the Republican health care position in 1994, and that cap-and-trade was a Republican answer to greenhouse gasses in 2008, to know that the Democrats are if anything running to the right to try to make something happen.
So yeah. At this point, we are at the mercy of whether non-insane Republicans are willing to stand up and say “this isn’t cool.” I’m not even talking about embracing the Obama agenda – I’m just talking about simple stuff, like making it abundantly clear that Obama is an American citizen and the legitimate President, that the first sentence in the 14th Amendment is clear and unambiguous and not up for debate, that there are no such things as “death panels,” that the election wasn’t stolen by ACORN, that there is no pending government plot to take everyone’s guns and open concentration camps. I would like to see prominent conservatives come out in public and loudly proclaim, in short, that they don’t want to base our political discourse on derangement and abject stupidity.
I’m not going to hold my breath.