Texas Eagle Forum, a state chapter of Phyllis Schlafly’s right-wing group, has published in its January newsletter part of an incendiary Internet column from last summer that leveled vicious personal attacks on state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth. Davis is running for Texas governor this year.
The group’s Torch newsletter says Davis and fellow Democratic state senator Leticia Van De Putte of San Antonio, who is running for lieutenant governor, “represent a culture of death” and insists that they “must be defeated.” The same article includes an extended excerpt from a June 30, 2013, column by right-wing writer J. Robert Smith. Smith’s column appeared in The American Thinker.
In the excerpt Smith declares that Davis “is a soldier — now a lieutenant — in the longstanding, broading war waged by the left against traditional morality, virtues, and values” and supports “eliminating unborn babies.” He also calls Davis “this year’s Sandra Fluke,” a Georgetown Law School student whom Rush Limbaugh had called a “slut” because she supported requiring that health insurance cover contraception.
He even sneers that Davis, who was a single mother of divorced parents who worked herself through college, is an elitist because she went to Harvard Law School:
“Davis, portrayed by the Washington Post as a woman who lifted herself up from hardscrabble conditions to make something of herself, ceased being hard scrabble after receiving her law degree from Harvard. The Texas state senator…who went to bat for late-term abortion under the cover of ‘protecting women’s health’ is by virtue of school and degree, an elite. Her trailer park days are long, long gone.”
That TEF’s president, Cathie Adams, finds this kind of vicious personal attack suitable for her organization’s newsletter is hardly surprising. Adams herself has rarely shied from launching similarly hateful attacks on people she doesn’t like.
Adams, for example, has questioned President Obama’s religious faith, said he “fried his brain on drugs,” and compared him to Adolf Hitler. She has smeared former Texas Gov. Ann Richards as an “anti-religious bigot,” called union workers who work to get out the vote “thugs” and referred to supporters of women’s reproductive rights as “stinking stalking feminists.” And the rhetoric she uses when talking about Muslims and gay people is just as hateful.
This kind of rhetoric has become familiar in Texas politics, whether directed against Democrats or Republicans who refuse to bow to the demands of right-wing extremists like Adams.
11 Comments
Oh, and I forget. Where did Ted Cruz go to law school? I think it starts with an H…..
Abbot is going to run a vicious and mean-spirited campaign. Fortunately, I think Wendy is tough enough and dedicated enough to push right through it.
“The American Thinker?” What an odd choice of names for that publication….
November is sooo far away!!
This is the usual fundamentalist, tea party, far right crap. Hopefully, Ms.Davis will feel as I do that to be compared to Ms. Fluke is high praise indeed. The sooner the rest of us vote the tea party and all their minions out of office and out of our lives, the better off we will be.
The only people who lap this shit up are those who would never have voted for Davis in any circumstance. Moving along.
Can someone explain this for me?
Generation after generation after generation of American parents in “hard scrabble” situations have hoped and worked hard to send their kids to college so those kids can learn a lot of fancy, high-level knowledge that would allow them to escape the hard scrabble life and have a better American life than the parents did. In other words, their greatest hope was that their children would become the so-called elites, and the parents did indeed work hard to make it happen. This was always the very essence of the American dream, and now the nutballs at Texas Eagle Forum want parents like those of Wendy to—what—abandon that dream. Let’s face it folks, the word “elite” to these morons means anyone with a college education who is not a card-carrying Rushite. The appeal is to uneducated people in the hard scrabble ranks who believe that educated people have created a society where they no longer “fit in.” It’s true. They have. But not on purpose. The Republican Party and their friends in banking and industry shipped all of their jobs to the third world so they no longer have any place where they can “fit in” unless they get an M.S. or Ph.D.—like that’s gonna happen.
Are you hard scrabble and out of a factory job? Ask your local Republican politician why he sent your job to China or Bangladesh—and watch him lie, lie, lie, lie.
While we are at it here. Please allow me to remind the “hard scrabble folks” that Phyllis Schlafly’s grandson is the head of the conservative Bible project, a formal project aimed at rewriting the Bible so it matches up with right wing extremist ideology. What do you do if Jesus’s words become inconvenient—no problem—just edit them out.
No surprise here. Ignorance, and or a lack of energy to engage in obtaining the facts with regard to a position or action of others, almost always leads to fear. Fear often leads to hatred which leads to unfounded attacks.
It has been this way for centuries and will remain this way forever. A factual measured response is effective for those whose own fear was not triggered by the statements. Those fearfull people who accept the attack as valid, will not respond to, facts.
Sad but true.
Wow… They have nothing intelligent that they can debate about her, so they go straight to the Ad-Hominem attacks. FFS… What do you do against such intense stupidity and abject Hatred? There’s nothing to argue against them, because their points are all conjecture, outright lies or completely unfounded in Scientific principles… So all I can think to do is pity them and shake my head.
So pathetically sad.
When people attack others, it is because they are pieces of crap and they want others to look as bad or worse than they do. Or they are just ignorant. Maybe both.
:/ Why don’t you post less about Republicans and more about TFN?