Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) gave a sharp response last night to a new Democratic National Committee attack ad against him, over his statement that Republicans can make health care into President Obama’s “Waterloo,” and that it would “break him.” Demint said: “It’s disappointing that President Obama has lowered the discourse of this important debate with false personal attacks,” DeMint said in a statement.” (Emphasis ours.)
So on that subject, let’s look at DeMint’s own contributions to the political discourse — let’s see what his idea of “raising” it has been over this past year.
⢠In January, DeMint said that the way to stop the stimulus was to “get people angry.”
⢠“This bill is not a stimulus, ladies and gentlemen,” he also said — then ventured into some very interesting language. “It is a mugging. It is a fraud.”
⢠In February, he denounced an unnamed author of a stimulus provision to prevent the use of funds for religious purposes, saying the person would “stand in the schoolhouse door, like the infamous George Wallace, to deny people of faith from entering any campus building renovated by this bill.”
⢠In April, he accused President Obama of taking us into Orwellian 1984 territory. “When I read George Orwell’s novel 1984, I would almost smile because I would think that could never happen,” DeMint said. “But he [Obama] really is saying one thing and meaning the complete opposite. He is presenting a complete redefinition of words and ideas.”
⢠In June, he said: “Freedom is dissolving. We don’t even teach what it is anymore.”
⢠He recently went after President Obama for opposing the coup in Honduras — accusing Obama of siding with dictators throughout the world, against American values: “I am hopeful that as President Obama grows in office, he will eventually turn away from despots like Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Castro, and Zelaya, and give the United States’ full-throated support to the people of any country who are fighting for the same values we cherish and defend in America.”
⢠He further played rhetorical hardball with Democrats on the Honduras situation declaring that it was no more a coup than Al Franken’s election to the Senate:
⢠He declared that America is “about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy. You still had votes but the votes were just power grabs like you see in Iran, and other places in South America, like Chavez is running down in Venezuela.”
And of course, we now have the Waterloo comment.
