Tea Party For One

Bernard Gaynor will go down in history as having one of the shortest, stupidest political careers in Australia’s history, and history is where he should stay.

At 11:53am on Tuesday 22nd January, Bernard Gaynor announced via social media that he would be running for a seat in the Senate, as a member of Bob Katter’s Australia Party. Not long after, the deluge of bizarre tweets had begun:

2:42pm 22 Jan @BernardGaynor: As a KAP senator I’ll have the courage to close borders to those who do not accept Aussie values – burkas are not a sign of tolerance. #auspol

I’m quite certain that not accepting the women who wear burkas is a far stronger sign of intolerance, particularly from a man who has spent considerable slabs of his life in Iraq, and a flying visit to Afghanistan.

By 7:38pm, the Sunshine Coast Daily was reporting that Mr Gaynor has said that “Climate Change is crap”. Despite the overwhelming weight of science, in this country the debate on climate change continues, so Mr Gaynor’s position is not rare. It’s just dumb. Mr Gaynor is a proud climate science denier though, and tweeted a link to the story.

The tweeting continued, on topics as diverse as denial of climate change to defence of his Catholicism to the boganisation of Australia Day and the use of the Aussie flag in Australia Day celebrations. Controversial, conservative, and largely unsurprisingly.

Wednesday 23rd January was to be the retired army major’s own chapter of revelations.

8:11pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor As a KAP senate nominee in Qld and former Party National General Secretary, I fully support Tess Corbett.

Tess Corbett is another now-former KAP candidate whose claim to infamy is her statement that she considers gays and lesbians to be in the same category as paedophiles. Its Ms Corbett’s dicey version of the slippery slope: if we accept homosexuality as normal, we’ll eventually accept paedophilia too. That’s a slippery slide that is usually occupied by Liberal Cory Bernardi, who thinks acceptance of homosexuality will lead to acceptance of polygamy and bestiality. Isn’t it just possible that acceptance of homosexuality will lead to a decrease in depression and suicide within the gay community?

But I digress.

Less than a minute after his tweet supporting Tess Corbett, he tweeted again.

8:11pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor I wouldn’t let a gay person teach my children and I am not afraid to say it. #auspol

And there endeth a political career.

8:12pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor If we value free speech and democracy then we would respect the right of Christians to hold their views about right and wrong.

Fair enough, too. I sincerely agree with this point, at least. What Mr Gaynor doesn’t mention is that in every state and territory in this country, it is illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of a lawful sexual preference.

Mr Gaynor was less than 36 hours into the role of candidate, so perhaps we should forgive him for being so naïve in the ways of Twitter:

8:47pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor Woah! Just said prayers & put kids 2 bed. Came back to find many ppl tweeting against discretion over teachers. #goodluckwiththat

8:49pm 23 Jan @BernardGaynor Parents should have discretion over who teachers their children. #auspol

  Around about this time, one of two things happened: Either Bob Katter phoned Mr Gaynor and told him to get off Twitter before he does any more damage, or Bernard himself realised that he was facing a whole world of twitter-related pain, and decided to pray about it. Mr Gaynor’s increasingly popular twitter account went dark. There were no new tweets until the following day when he tweeted a link to a press release containing “clarifying comments”.

It’s always a concern when a politician needs to issue clarifying comments – surely politicians should be able to communicate at a professional level, with honesty and precision, and not need to elucidate their comments later. But no – serial clarifiers include Andrew Laming and Barnaby Joyce. Australians are lucky though – at least none of our politicians have tweeted their Anthony Weiners at us yet. I wonder what a clarifiying statement on that one would look like!


The shortlist (so far) of things Bernard Gaynor doesn't like

 Back to Mr Gaynor’s illustrative comments, which are available on his blog: his argument does not soften his stance against gay teachers, but it elaborates on his position that parents should be able to choose who teaches their children. He even makes a few assumptions about how he believes the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition would act as regards the rights of parents to choose who teaches their children. Hell, I support that right too, which is handy because it already exists. If you don’t like the value set at a certain school, you are most welcome to remove your child from that school and send it somewhere else.

Of course, if you can’t afford a private school that reflects your values, you can enjoy the widely varied range of qualified teachers available in the public school system, and stop making sexual orientation an issue. Alternately, give up your day job and home-school the children.

Mr Gaynor has received a swag of hate-tweets and death-wishes since making his homophobic comments on twitter, and that makes both of us sad. It’s a shock when it happens. I’ve received twitter death-threats from a political candidate because I (politely) challenged his views. Twitter can be a trial because of a handful of people with strongly held extremist perspectives and no idea how to conduct themselves in public.

And that’s it. He has been suspended from Katter’s Australia Party, and which means he won’t be standing for the senate as a member of the KAP. That should have been the end of the shortest, saddest political career since Mal Meninga tried to run as an independent in the ACT. Big Mal lasted a mere 28 seconds; Bernard Gaynor still hasn’t accepted that his race with the Katter stable is over. He’s still tweeting.

25th Jan @BernardGaynor I agree with KAP candidate Jamie Cavanough. I don’t want to buy meat that has been faced towards Mecca and blessed.

The rationale provided by Mr Cavanough is that if he buys Halal meat, some of the money from his purchase might find its way to the Muslim Community. It’s nice to have his position on Muslims confirmed; it wasn’t quite clear after his comment about burkas.

Meanwhile, just after 2pm today, Mr Gaynor released a statement confirming that he would be fighting his suspension from the KAP. It’s worth reading.

And that’s one helluva hate list to have put out there in just a few tweets: Bernard Gaynor’s 35 tweets have indicated that he does not tolerate gays, Muslims, climate scientists, Bogans and even Bob Katter. It’s fortunate that he has his faith and his family; it appears that he doesn’t have much else right now.

BTW, there is no mention of Mr Gaynor on the official Katter's Australia Party website.

Dazed & Confused

Prior to the US Presidential election last week, columnist and libertarian Deroy Murdoch said,

"It's vital that this be not just a slight GOP win, but a crushing defeat for Obama...We need to discredit and destroy socialism in the US for at least a generation"

Days after the US Presidential election, conservative voters, libertarians, Tea Partiers, and Christian evangelicals are still dazed. Barack Obama was never supposed to win a second term. The result is, for them, sincerely unexpected. The only outcome for which they were prepared included a calmly confident President-Elect Mitt Romney. It's fair to say that the conservative side of American politics was both unprepared for another term with President Obama, and not expecting to have to face it.

Sad faces

It's always hard to be a loser, harder still to do it with an audience. Mitt Romney admitted that he had not written a concession speech. Romney's team went live with a President-Elect website. Republican talking head Karl Rove refused to accept the loss of Ohio and sent Fox News Host Megyn Kelly on a long-legged trek to find the psephologists' bunker. Such was the rock solid belief that Romney would win, it appears that Fox's election night hosts hadn't considered any other result.

Out here in the blogosphere, the sense of shock was less polished but no less vehement. Right wing forum Godlike Productions posted this gem:

Dick Morris was wrong

"I'm not arguing that Romney was a great candidate -- but up against the Worst President In The History Of The United States, The Kenyan Marxist Muslim, The Socialist Redistributor Barack Obama, a tree stump could have won."

Robert Bowen wrote for The Examiner on November 12.

"There are several things to take from this. First, Romney had coat tails—for Democrats. Secondly, the Republican brand is severely damaged by its war on women, its immigrant bashing, and its obstruction in Congress. This damaged down ticket candidates. Lastly, the pick ups in the West show the changing demographic. Hispanic voters shocked Republican know-it-alls and old school pollsters by turning out to vote. Republicans totally underestimated that. They also underestimated the turn out by African-Americans and young people.

If the Republican Party will even survive, it needs to do some soul searching about its policies. Right now, many GOP pundits are saying their policies are fine, they just did not make their case “delicately.” Is there a more delicate way to say “self-deportation” “legitimate rape”, or forced trans-vaginal ultra sounds? I suspect Republicans still do not get it."

I fear the reality is worse than Bowen suspects, and the Republicans simply won't acknowledge it until it’s all too late. Bear in mind that these terms "right" and "left" are literally relative. Both Democrats and Republicans are significantly to the right of centre, and that's part of a bigger problem for Republicans and Tea Partiers.

One of a series of aggressive tweets which Donald Trump later deleted.

Another four years with President Obama will renew the Tea Party's energy; he's someone to rail against, someone to hate, someone to fear. He’s black, with a foreign/Muslim middle name. He’s an easy target. Donald Trump will continue to suggest that President Obama is somehow an illegitimate president. Rush Limbaugh's face will get redder and shinier, Greta Van Susteran will grit her teeth even tighter, and Glen Beck will howl tears of rage.
Still, few Republicans are accepting that conservative voters have also changed. What was conservative twenty years ago is now mainstream, and the ignorance and prejudices that were silently accepted then are now cause for revolt. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly read the electorate well on election night:

“The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming, black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

“The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore.”

It's difficult to define a "traditional" America on the basis of voter preferences in a country where voting is not compulsory, but it is safe to say that the groups which were once considered to be minorities and special interest groups won the election for President Obama. Despite recent economic history, and warnings of a financial cliff heading their way, the more economically and/or socially vulnerable groups - single women, the poor, African Americans, Latino, gay - voted overwhelmingly in favour of the party most likely to look after their needs.
The biggest block of voters to support President Obama was women. This is hardly surprising, given that Mitt Romney’s party was better known for it’s serial ignorance on a range of issues, including pregnancy, rape, abortion and climate change. These are not “Womens’ Issues” – they are human issues. (see left)

These are the issues which will ultimately split conservative politics in America.

The core values of the Republican party are being challenged by America’s changing demography. Much of mainstream America is rejecting the extreme brand of conservatism favoured by the Tea Party, so moving to the right to embrace the Tea Party won’t win Republicans more votes; it will probably cost some in the middle. Shuffling to the left is even more dangerous, because it makes it impossible to be an effective opposition – they would agree with too many Democratic policies and end up opposing them just to be seen to be opposing them. If Republicans were willing to move to the left far enough to alienate the Tea Party faithful, they would lose enough of their base to make winning a Presidential almost impossible.

So where to now for the GOP? Deroy Murdoch wanted to see the Democrats made irrelevant for a generation. It looks far more like the Republicans are the ones who are endangered, a victim of their own conservatism.