April 20, 2011

Video: Carolina Tea Partiers Love Trump!

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Karl Rove must be horrified at what American conservatism’s become. Earlier this week, the master of top-down political messaging took billionaire birther Donald Trump to task for discrediting the Republican Party with his anti-Obama claptrap and joke presidential candidacy. “This is a mistake,” Rove said of the Donald’s crass tack. “It will marginalize him and he’s falling into Barack Obama’s trap.”

Or, it will make him insanely popular with the base of the base of the GOP. Witness this six minutes of jaw-dropping testimony from South Carolina tea partiers at a rally Monday, where Gov. Nikki Haley and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Nowhere Near South Carolina) spoke to the crowd. Democratic operative Tyler Jones documented the tea partiers’ zeitgeist on film. “I interviewed around 25 people total and probably 75 percent of them said they were supporting Donald Trump,” Jones told Slate‘s Dave Weigel, “and just about every single person is a birther. I took two hours of footage and chopped it down to six minutes of mind-blowing stuff.”

On one level, not all that surprising. On another level…well, here’s what Weigel says:

Remember those interviews with racist Democratic voters in West Virginia back in 2008? Remember the interviews outside McCain-Palin rallies — that nice gentleman with the toy monkey who called it “little Hussein”? Yeah. Things are not better now. And there aren’t any Democratic primary rallies at which conservatives can record competing videos.

Anyway, check out this video. It really has to be seen to be believed:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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