Res ipsa loquitur ("The thing itself speaks")
Tennessee GOP Gubernatorial candidate Zach Wamp has a simple message for voters: if you love God, vote for me.
I have been a critic in prior columns of the increasing use of faith-based politics by both Republicans and Democrats, including President Obama. Few, however, are quite as direct as Wamp:
And here’s my heart. I believe God is the center of the universe. He made us to serve him and to serve others. We must restore America to its Judeo-Christian heritage and our constitution.
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If you love the Constitution, vote for somebody else.
Zach Wamp are the sounds of quirky heroes fighting it out in zany comic books.
“POW” “Wamp” “Zach” “POW” “WOMP” … “take that brat man” …
Tootie
Here’s your perfect candidate! All you have to do is move to Tennessee, if you aren’t already there.
Buckeye–
I thought Tootie lived in the state of denial.
Zach Wamp–another C Street fellow…
Those C Streeters are like the plague … every election seanson we get a new outbreak.
….stomach turning………full of rage……can’t stand pandering zealots….C-street scumbags……
Those are some tough vids to swallow on a Sunday morning. Got to go slam my hand in a car door or maybe scream into my pillow now.
Blouise,
You may be giving plague a bad name. It’s a fairly sophisticated virus. C-Streets are simpler. Say like a fungus. Perhaps a better analogy would be a yeast infection or jock itch?
I believe we can have Pularity of numerous things….and a Politicians Personalities is one of the many ones of them….
Now I understand why they wanted to do away with Mental Health funding….they appear to all be eligible….I wonder if they are oriented to Time, Place and Date….the reason they can remember who the President is is its tattooed on the back of the one that is in front of them….
A pox upon the C Street house!
Weren’t wamp rats the little guys (about 2 meters) that Luke Skywalker used to shoot at before he signed up to be a Jedi?
Is WordPress giving anyone the business besides me…
Elaine
You may be right. I thought it was the state of credulity.
Zach Wamp doesn’t need to be elected to anything in order to serve God and serve others. Why, he could resign from his current office and get to the business of serving God and others immediately. What Mr. Wamp really believes is that God has made him the center of the universe. Otherwise, he would not urge that love for God mandates the support of his candidacy.
Buddha,
JOck itch is perfect for Mr. Wamp. I think that the C-Street crowd is just a little too loud in their God talk. I am thinking a nice investigation into the goings on at C-Street just might produce some nasty stuff. The loudest of the Religious Right just always seems to be doing something un-Right like!
raff,
Yes, I nice public investigation in C-Street would be most entertaining.
AY,
WordPress was acting up from here this morning, but it’s been fine much of the day.
Mr. Wamp is just one of many TN politicians playing this tune. I’m about 1.5 miles from a proposed Mosque/Islamic Center and they are literally marching on the Courthouse to stop it. The candidates for Bart Gordon’s seat are having a field day stirring up the fears of the Low Information Voters as they relate to brown people. They are basically trying to see who hates the Muslims more and who can run all the Latinos out the fastest. It’s a pathetic display.
He’s just one of many TN politicians pandering to the “Low Information” crowd here. I’m about a mile and a half from a proposed Islamic center and the townfolk are literally marching to the courthouse to stop it. It’s open season on all brown people here. The three GOPers running to replace Bart Gordon are fighting to see who hates Muslims the most, who will deport all the Latinos the fastest and who can save us from that evil that is Obama.
It’s ugly here in TN.
Mike Appleton:
and by extension whatever he (Wamp) wants to do as governor. Pretty scary if you ask me.
I will assume that most of those responding here do not live in Tennessee. I do, and it’s all I can do to not throw my TV out the window. For months we have been subjected to saturation bombing by all the right-wing candidates: The Darlin family has come to town and they won’t leave.
Like the stifling air outside, the temperature in these ads has risen. Then last week, with fresh mud flying through the air, Zach’s God-slinging commercial hit the airways. The first time I saw it I “like to throwed up.” To my happy surprise, criticism from both sides has been fast and stinging. For now, thank you , Jesus, Haslam’s camp has wisely resisted the urge to tell us how often Bill and the Lord go fishing together.
In the years since Bro. Wamp forgot his pledge to serve only two terms, the Third District has been positively drowning in pork, and I’m sure Zach thought that all his work on our behalf would make this race a cakewalk. But, now that he’s trailing Haslam by a scary margin, the ol’ boy appears to be losing his cool. He released agitated comments in the paper this morning calling his images in a new flyer from the Haslam campaign “sinister” and “Middle Eastern.” There goes the Muslim vote…
For once in this religion-marinated state, a Republican candidate may pay a price for playing the God card. It’s about time.
amati1684, My mothers family lived in Tennessee and what little of it is left still does and they were all, and are now Democrats. My last living maternal aunt is now 90 and she remembers clearly what growing up as the child of a subsistence farmer was like, as well as growing up in a depression.
She and her parents became Roosevelt Democrats and still are. They lived without medical care (couldn’t afford it even when a doctor moved close enough to be seen regularly), any kind of a social safety net, no electricity until the TVA finally got to their county (and they could afford it, which was much later) and city services like indoor plumbing and busses that would save their children a 5 mile walk to school were nonexistent. The programs and progress that benefited them were all Democratic initiatives.
It has always perplexed me that a State that has benefited so greatly from Democratic programs so many people are Republican. Though, the Democrats were Dixicrats and that aspect of the political equation IMO can’t be factored out by any means.
C-Street house is ultimate proof there is no God. No supreme being would tolerate such a disgrace to represent it.
Lottakatz: It’s a mystery to me, too. I think religion plays a great part in it. These people were frighteningly poor and mostly illiterate. Your family sounds a lot like my family — my paternal grandmother rejected signing up for Social Security benefits because she was afraid of taking the Mark of the Beast.
Likewise, my great-grandmother had only enough education to be able to sign her name, so her exegetical skills with the bible were rather limited. But, she could read enough to get the idea that fear was a good thing; and she got more than her share, helped no doubt, by the hard life she endured for so many years.
Of course, both these women and their families gained much from the FDR years. I never heard them say a word about him, and in what little opinion they expressed about the matter, both were conservative in their politics. I have always been fascinated that FDR, an American aristocrat if there ever was one, appeared to care so deeply about the fortunes of the poor and displaced.
This is a striking contrast to the “tough shit” attitude of many politicians today, who seem quite oblivious to the idea that real people will have to live with the consequences of their legislation. Roosevelt may have been faking it, but it worked, and I wish some of the hacks in Washington would at least try to fake some degree of concern for the plight of those among us who are now suffering.
This is classic 1855 fear-mongering which has now been transported in time to 2010. There is ZERO place for this kind of complete trash to be introduced in our global dialogue. People and groups with perspectives this polluted should be encouraged to wander off in the desert together. Forever.
Let me try putting a positive spin on this:
1. It’s nice that after years of “being in the closet” about their fundamentalist religious basis, these politicians are “outing” themselves and living openly. “Fundy pride parade” anyone?
2. After centuries of overt Antisemitism, it’s nice that right-wing fundamentalist “Christians” (cough) are paying lip service to Jewish people. (Until, as they believe, Armageddon comes and the Jewish people who remain true to their faith are all massacred in a second Holocaust…)