Ugly Is as Ugly Does

Representative Virginia Foxx has sent out another fundraising letter to a NewsMax e-mail list. We'll delve into that screed, but first:

NewsMax is a conservative web site/media conglomerate backed by Richard Mellon Scaife. It's stock-in-trade is paranoid fantasy. It has fanned the flames against Mexican immigrants and published an erroneous article in August 2007 alleging that Barack Obama was present for Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God damn the United States of America" sermon (he wasn't). Foxx's fundraising letter is prefaced by a note from NewsMax administrators introducing Foxx as a "sponsor" of the web site ... which sort of implies that NewsMax GAVE the Madam its e-mail list. More likely -- and we DO believe in capitalism, right? -- she had to pay for it. Evidently, she targeted just North Carolina subscribers (since she says at one point, "No matter where you live in North Carolina I ask you to join me in restoring the conservative movement in our state.")

The text of the letter is like vintage Jesse Helms: scare the bejesus out of people already primed to think the absolute worst about everybody, except maybe the members of their own church and/or country club (and not all of them either). Although the letter makes us think of Ole Jesse, maybe her real mentor for this kind of writing was her opponent in 2004, Vernon Robinson, who would say absolutely ANYTHING about ANYBODY (including Madam Foxx), as long as he considered him/her a political enemy and hence not quite human.

She begins the letter with some conservative boiler plate ... dropping a name sure to swell the bile ducts (Nancy Pelosi) ... and FDR's (hated) New Deal ... and the plummiest plum of all, Obama's word "Change." "That 'change,' " Madam Foxx fumes, "includes an all-out assault on our principles and our freedoms .... this is a scary time."

What Foxx says scares her are a collection of the usual suspects (abortion, immigration, gay marriage), with some additional manufactured "crises" concocted out of a feverish imagination, like the suggestion that liberal Democrats are getting ready "to silence Limbaugh, Hannity and all the other great Americans on talk radio" by means of "The Fairness Doctrine." Here's the world Foxx imagines as a result:

"Since liberal talk radio can't sell any ads in most places, radio owners faced with dead ad time every day will cancel the conservative programming and go to an easy listening or some other format. Needless to say, there will be no requirement for Katie Couric or public broadcasting to be fair."

If anybody's in on a vast liberal conspiracy, that would be moi, and I'm telling you there is no such plot. This is manufactured "fear" being promoted by ... (wait for it) talk radio blabbermouths like Limbaugh and Hannity. And why this gratuitous nastiness directed at Katie Couric? Because she dared ask Sarah Palin what publications she read?

Foxx also warns her NewsMax buddies to beware of "socialized health-care" (check!), big bullying labor unions (check!), higher taxes (check!), "higher energy prices to combat 'global warming' " (check! Though the difference between this nightmare scenario -- that Obama might want to combat global warming -- and the high gas prices we so recently experienced when NOBODY was combattin' nuttin' ... totally escapes us).

Foxx warns about a hellacious "Freedom of Choice" act which would "strike down every abortion restriction in the country." That's just a plain damn lie. The "Freedom of Choice" bill as written by Congressman Jerrold Nadler says simply, "it is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child; terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability; or terminate a pregnancy after viability when necessary to protect her life or her health." The bill died in committee in the 108th Congress, did the same again in the 110th Congress, and has not been reintroduced yet in the current 111th Congress. If it is introduced in 2009, we will support it. The sad fact is that an earlier version of Virginia Foxx would have supported it too, or at least that was what she told the 100 Women of Watauga County PAC in 1994. Foxx also supported back in those days adoptions by gay couples, but that was then, and now she's remade herself as an extremist willing to wield every pathetic wedge issue in sight.

Foxx also fans the racist fear of illegal immigrants, decrying "amnesty" as though it were about to happen and as though her favorite kissin' cousin George W. Bush didn't advocate it first. Never mind. Considering The Madam's own wealth, earned partly through the sweat of immigrant labor in her family's nursery and landscaping businesses, the irony of her continuing to throw kerosene on the fear of immigrants is ... just gross.

Attacking Katie Couric has apparently become the soup du jour for extreme conservatives like Madam Foxx. But get a load of this whining piece of excrement near the end of her letter:

As you know, conservatives face problems in getting our message out. The mainstream media will not cover our message. In the rare occasion they do, they often distort or misstate it. No better example of the double standard used by the media is available than the treatment of Caroline Kennedy. She has yet to put four coherent sentences together in an interview. If she were a Republican, Tina Fey would be caricaturing her on Saturday Night Live. But because she is a liberal Democrat, she gets a pass.

Following her mentors, Virginia Foxx has now officially transformed herself from an overly ambitious and often rapacious member of the Watauga County Board of Education, who once upon a time actively campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, into a Standard Issue Conservative Asshole.