Three Republican heavyweights are pitted by the GOP against itself. After the dust settles, what stands to be won?
Presently, a bout of infighting could tear the Party of No to shreds, as three heads of the conservative movement come under scrutiny by their own party for different allegiances. These lions are RNC Chairman Michael Steele, pop-celebrity Sarah Palin and attack dog Ann Coulter. Each of them are in trouble for palling around with the wrong type of crowd, and shit’s about to go down.
As widely documented, Chairman Steele already teeters on diminishing support from his party. Between blowing $2k at a bondage club at the RNC’s expense and unabashedly opposing the war in Afghanistan, his career stands at the crossroads.
The only group that wants him representing the RNC seems to be the Frederick Douglass Foundation, which strives to put African-Americans into Washington under the Republican banner. Steele’s now facing calls from this group to chew out Sarah Palin, who defended the disgraced radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger over Twitter.
You know Dr. Laura, the radio host who casually machine-gunned the N-word at a black caller over the radio.
Tensions are running high, and a showdown seems imminent between conservative white hegemonists and minority members of the GOP (a group which seems to be growing inexplicably). Could a public spat between Steele and Palin finally offer a true Republican perspective on freedom of speech and racial sensitivity? One can only hope.
That depends on how far Palin goes in defending Dr. Laura’s choice of language. If the Perez Hilton of conservative social media continues to “let the adolescent out of the bag” through Twitter by insisting that the radio host’s reassignment stands in the face of the First Amendment, black Republicans will only grow more vociferous about Steele debunking her missteps.
As for Palin, if she wants to stay in the fight she should retreat from her stance, in reverse, with her foot on the gas. She’ll won’t stand a chance in a presidential bid in 2012 without the minority vote.
And while the conservatives will eat themselves up over a skewed race/rights war, pseudo-intellectual political author Ann Coulter finds herself in her own right-wing catch 22 over another conservative hot button: homosexuality.
Because Coulter agreed to attend right-wing gay advocacy conference Homocon 2010, whose event slogan reads “our gays are more macho than their straights,” the author has been dropped from appearing at WorldNetDaily’s upcoming conservative conference.
But maybe the GOP should pay a price for all this in-fighting. Specifically, perhaps they should just forget about hegemony and social values, and instead concentrate on restoring credibility with the one message that’s worked for them in decades past: fiscal responsibility.
