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Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who has the highest unemployment rate in the country tried to pull the usual conservative victim card on Andrea Mitchell. She questioned him about Rick Perry's over the top rhetoric. Immediately Barbour played the librul media card. See, you all, he's a right wing Christian conservative so the liberal media will pick apart every single word he says. He needs to be more careful and get used to that treacherous treatment and uncalled for scrutiny, the poor man. Andrea Mitchell corrected him and said it wasn't the liberal media attacking him, but Karl Rove and other conservatives, he didn't bat an eye.
MITCHELL: Do you think that Rick Perry has to clean up his language? Karl Rove said that what he said about Ben Bernanke is not presidential. Others and also Bob McDonnell, who succeeded Rick Perry as head of the Republican Governors Association, was on with me this week and he doesn`t agree that President Obama may not love his country. He said that he thinks that President Obama is a patriot. What about Rick Perry refusing to say that he believes President Obama loves the country?
BARBOUR: I think Rick Perry has to get prepared for the fact that he`s going to be nitpicked by the liberal media league for everything that he says and that he has to be very careful because anything that he says that can be taken out of context will be taken out of context. When you are a conservative, Christian, southerner Republican, you have to expect that.
MITCHELL: Governor, with all due respect, it isn`t the liberal media that`s taken on Rick Perry. We`re talking about Karl Rove, we`re talking about Bob McDonnell, we`re talking about a lot of mainstream and conservative Republicans, John Podhoretz, who say that what he said about the Fed and Ben Bernanke and the president`s patriotism was not appropriate, was not presidential.
BARBOUR: But as a candidate for president, my point is that Rick Perry is a candidate for president or Haley Barbour if I had run or Mike Huckabee if he had run, every one of us has to be prepared to be nitpicked by the mainstream media, and so you`ve got to run your campaign learning to avoid that.
He's a cagey one, but came up short on this exchange. His point is that everybody who criticizes religious Conservatives are a bunch of nitpicking yahoos and if they didn't know it yet, Rove, Podhoretz and McDonnell are all just mainstream media types now. Right wingers are now considered part of their own backlash politics philosophy that Thomas Frank explained in his book The Wrecking Crew. Liberals and the MSM can't seem to get a handle of this kind of politics. Here's a more condensed definition:
The hallmark of a “backlash conservative” is that he or she approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) upper class.
In our current environment, all forms of right wing extremism is to whitewashed into nothingness.
MITCHELL: Does Rick Perry have to change his language if he wants to become a viable Republican standard bearer if he gets the nomination?
BARBOUR: Well, I don`t -- I don`t take it as offensive to say that we would not treat you nice. Now, Andrea, when you come to Mississippi, we treat you nice cause we like you and we`re proud to have you down here. But that isn`t exactly threatening language to most people.But he has to understand, in a position he`s in, as I talked about a minute ago, that`s going to be nitpicked. It could be a good lesson. I thought President Obama made a very good point when he was asked about this. He says when you start off running for president you have lessons to learn. This is a lesson that has to be learned, that you`re going to be nitpicked.
MITCHELL: I`m not -- no, I`m not debating the policy -- I`m just talking about language. Talking about a capital crime, treason, in the context of debating monetary policy.
BARBOUR: He is right on the policy. I would not have used that terminology, and I don`t think it`s the right terminology. But he is right about the policy.
To Haley Barbour, the joke is on us and what is said really isn't offensive in his great state and shouldn't be taken seriously.
MITCHELL: What about the whole question of secession when he said he actually proposed in his last campaign talking about seceding from the nation. He joked about it today.Do you think that that is an issue that might follow him around, and is that appropriate for someone who`s running to be president to have United States?
BARBOUR: If somebody thought he was saying that seriously a couple years ago, that would be one thing, but everybody knew then he was joking about it.My comment when I was asked about it, we already tried that once, didn`t work. We`re not going to try that again.Rick Perry no more meant that at a serious vein the man on the moon (ph). However, he`s going to get nitpicked because he`s the governor of Texas, because the liberal media elite dislike George Bush so much and he reminds them of him. And as I say, conservative, Christian, Republican southerner he needs to understand he doesn`t have the liberty to say things loosely that somebody else might.
See, being a Christian, Republican southerner is at the heart of backlash politics. If Perry says he'll shoot the first person who defends the concept of evolution, that's only being hyped because he believes in Jesus.
