Republican Demagoguery Isn't Just Inside the Beltway
It's always good to be reminded that here in the other Washington, our Republicans are just as nutty, corrupt and paranoid as their cousins in D.C. Today, David Postman over at the Times reports on his blog that state Sen. Joe Zarelli recently hosted right-wing Israeli politicians and others at a two-day conference down in Vancouver, to fan the flames of Islamophobia.
Known as the Convergence Northwest conference, Zarelli invited "[m]embers of Israel’s Knesset, former IDF Generals, community leaders, radio talk show hosts and more" to "discuss the many issues surrounding the current state of Israel, including its role in the global war on terror, its relation to America, and what the local community leader can do."
Among the topics: those damned campus liberals. Much like Daniel Pipes' Orwellian Campus Watch project, according to a report from The Columbian:
Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese-American woman who founded the American Congress for Truth to educate Americans about the threat of radical Islam, suggested that citizens monitor the lectures of university professors and report the names of mosque owners to the FBI.
Other notable speakers included Gil Kleiman, a "veteran Israeli police investigator" who presented a "course in terrorism 101," and dismissed the Palestinians with the following bons mots (according to The Columbian):
"It's sick people doing sick things and there's nothing intellectual about it," he said. "If your whole strategy is, 'We hope the Islamofascists will one day become democratic,' you're going to die."
But if we recall correctly, it's not just Palestinians who have a problem with intellectual dishonesty and democratic norms. Conference organizer Zarelli ran (and lost) an embarrassing campaign in 2002 for U.S. Congress against Brian Baird in southwest Washington's 3rd District. In September 2002 it was revealed that for ten months, including part of his campaign for Congress, Zarelli had been receiving state unemployment checks, totaling about $12,000, while simultaneously earning his $30,000+ a year salary as a state senator. This was shortly after Zarelli made an ass of himself in the race for questioning whether Rep. Baird had made up a story about seeing the explosion at the Pentagon from his D.C. office on Sept. 11 to "endear himself" to the voters. (Turned out, Baird's office did in fact offer such a view.)
And Zarelli, despite being a professed small government Republican, has--like his peers in the U.S. Congress--done more than his fair share to bring the pork home. According to a July 26, 2003 report from the Longview Daily News, Zarelli--having taken over the Ways and Means Committee for then-Sammamish Sen. Dino Rossi--managed to deliver $5 million for a bridge project and another $2 million for a "design study" for a new arts center at Lower Columbia College. All this at a time of, as The Daily News rather euphemistically put it, "steep budget cuts," in the wake of Boeing layoffs and the tech sector downturn of a couple years before that left all of Washington--and particularly Puget Sound--struggling with above national average unemployment rates and limited funding to meet the increasing demand for access to state- funded healthcare and unemployment benefits, due largely to anti-tax policies enacted via ballot measures in the affluent 1990s.
So anyone who thought the days of race-baiting, xenophobic, fear-mongering corrupt Republican demagoguery were over should keep their eyes trained south towards Vancouver--a whole new generation of hacks are just waiting for their turn.
