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July 12, 2010 08:08 PM UTC

Tancredo's Crazy! No, He's Not! He's Sort of Right! Wait, What?

  • 48 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Ready for another twist? Fox 31’s Eli Stokols:

In a new audio recording obtained by FOX 31, Buck is discussing the Tancredo firestorm roughly a day later, on Friday, and said, “I can’t believe that guy opened his mouth.”

Listen here.

It’s a seemingly reasonable reaction, given that Tancredo completely stole the headlines following Buck’s Thursday rally with South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint; and it aligns with Buck’s initial response to the media when, moments after Thursday’s rally ended, he told a group of reporters, “I think there are a lot of threats to the White House and I don’t think the man in the White House is the greatest threat to this country at all.”

…Norton’s decision to stick up for Tancredo, who has endorsed Buck and harshly criticized Norton and her campaign, underscores how this primary continues to be battle to demonstrate the most strident conservative credentials possible.

That dynamic is largely responsible for Buck’s recent momentum; and it may explain why, on Saturday, Buck himself took a notably different stance on Tancredo’s remarks while speaking at the Conservative Western Summit.

The fallout from former Rep. Tom Tancredo’s crazy comments at a rally for GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck continues, with the rhetoric becoming less and less comprehensible by the day. Politico has more on the story today (most of which you’ve already seen here):

Buck quickly distanced himself from the comments, and a YouTube video showed that the Republican primary hopeful did not applaud Tancredo’s remarks. “I love Tom, but I don’t always agree with him. I don’t agree that the greatest threat to the country is the man in the Oval Office,” Buck said, noting that Tancredo “tends to exaggerate sometimes.”

The Colorado Democratic Party still hammered Buck by association, and state party Chairwoman Pat Waak said in a statement: “No one should give Ken Buck a pass on the extreme and shocking statements of his good friend Tom Tancredo.”

But it was former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton, the favored Senate candidate of national Republicans who has been nudged to the right by Buck’s feisty campaign, who jumped to Tancredo’s defense.

“There was a real measure of truth in what Tancredo said,” Norton wrote on her Facebook page. “Obama is spending this country into bankruptcy. [Joint Chiefs Chairman] Admiral Mullen said our debt is a greater threat than terrorism. It’s time to end the culture of political correctness. Obama’s brand of big government is a threat to America.”

Norton’s decision to stick up for Tancredo, who has endorsed Buck and openly criticized Norton’s campaign, shows how completely the Republican Senate primary has become a battle for the hardest-line conservative credentials.

We’ve discussed for some time on this website how the Republican primary for Senate may end up driving the winner so far to the right that it will be difficult for either Buck or Jane Norton to tack back to the center in time for the General Election. But the way things are going now, it’s not right vs. left vs. center that we’ll be discussing, but rather, which candidate can at least be coherent?

Through a spokesman, Buck said he looked forward to a debate that puts not just President Obama, but the whole Democratic Party’s views on debt, energy, Israel and more in the spotlight.

“If Obama leaves office, you turn on your TV and you hear the following, ‘I Joseph Biden do solemnly swear.’ The threat continues because then Nancy Pelosi is in office, Harry Reid is in office, Barney Frank is in office and the liberal progressives continue marching down that path,” Buck said.

Yeah, you said…wait, what are you talking about?

Comments

48 thoughts on “Tancredo’s Crazy! No, He’s Not! He’s Sort of Right! Wait, What?

  1. Ken gets some “love” from the Daily Caller.

    http://dailycaller.com/2010/07

    Republican Ken Buck, riding the tide of his unforeseen surging Senate campaign in Colorado, is angling to join the club of once-seen-as-long shot GOP candidates who’ve beat out their so-called establishment Republican primary opponents.

    “I think it is a classic grassroots versus establishment race,” Buck, running for the U.S. Senate in Colorado, said of his primary fight against Lt. Gov. Jane Norton. “And as much as the other side doesn’t want to accept that characterization, the voters are accepting it.”

  2. never has been and never will be a potentially successful statewide candidate in Colorado.  Closely associating with him won’t be a plus for any statewide candidate in Colorado. Rinse, repeat across the country, with the help of the tea party, rightie talkers and cowardly R leadership and therein lies the best chance Dems have of making it through 2010 without worst case scenario level damage. Fingers crossed.  

  3. I was mistaken when I said Buck embraced Tancredo in our exchange the other day. So maybe that means Tancredo isn’t totally in the mainstream of the GOP. But I still maintain that he can’t be called a fringe type, based on all the other points I made.

  4. Buck’s position is that while Obama is very, very bad for the country, he is certainly not the worst threat we face. Al Quaeda is probably #1, and Obama is not a terrorist (despite paling around with Ayers). Moreover, the problem is not Obama himself, but the liberal progressive movement that has taken over America (and wants to kill white babies – diary coming soon). By distancing himself from Tancredo, Buck gives conservatives the impression that he is defending Obama, which he is not – he thinks Obama is terrible. Thus the nuanced position.

      1. to hate Obama.  I liked him a lot better when he said that he didn’t personally fear for his life now that Barak Hussien Obama is the popularly elected president of the United States.  This biggest threat since the glaciers melted is way over the top.  I’m back to thinking this guy is another waffling turd sucking hard to get the tea bagger vote.

    1. Changed your name, have you? I don’t know how you can claim he is lying. Link please? And this is ridiculous. Just because Klein knew that doesn’t mean Buck knew. And the ads were public knowledge at that time. Spare me your phony Jane Norton funded attacks.

      1. Smart 1 is now undercover as… drum roll please…………….Teapartyfortruth2010. Smart 1 try again. This time change your style and delivery. It was good that you donned the glasses and moustache, except it loses it’s effect on a blog with no video.

      2. to go find out on their own.  Quite a nifty double standard dude.

        I personally think Buck was most honest right after the incident.  You can tell that he subsequently gauged his loss of support by Republican extremists and happily changed his outlook on the affair to pander to his core constituency, the rabid racist red necks in the Republican Party called tea baggers.

        The crazy crowd never did identify these scary threats that are supposed to be more horrific than an I.E.D. placed by Al-Queda blowing up a military convoy and killing American soldiers.  What is a more horrible threat than that?

      3. Since Klein was the campaign manager at the time, that means that Buck’s campaign broke the law. The ads weren’t public knowledge until Klein announced them to the Denver Post.

        How would the public know about TV ads that aren’t on TV yet?

  5. What the hell is Buck suggesting?

    Last I heard, no one had any impeachment resolution out there. So what the hell is Buck suggesting? That someone might maybe oughtta “take out” Obama?

    That certainly seemed to be what Tancredo was suggesting. After all, what Good Patriot wouldn’t want to immediately “take action” against the biggest threat to liberty in the history of the world…

    These people are totally disgusting.

    1. He was supporting his claim that Obama is not the worst threat our nation faces. If it wasn’t him, it’d be someone else – the problem is the progressive movement.

      1. it’s that the influence of rational people of goodwill are the biggest threat humanity has ever faced, and we need to make sure that completely irrational, tribalistic belligerent ignoramouses save us from them!

          1. What a phenomenal idiot you are!

            To answer your question, by any normal definition, no, I’m not a communist. More importantly, I don’t try to reduce everything to overly simplistic, emotionally charged, value-laden, but vague labels that can be exploited to make purely rhetorical arguments devoide of any substance.

            The Soviet Union failed because it did not take into account that people are most saliently motivated at the individual (and highly local, such as family) level, and that social institutions have to actually align those local incentives with the more global interest of creating and maintaining a robust, sustainable, and fair political economy. This error created both a tyrannical government, because the individual and local incentives of its agents went unchecked, and an underproductive economy, because the individual incentives to produce for self-enrichment were not activated.

            This is why I am such a vocal and persistent fan of market dynamics, often advocating extending their logic into areas into which it has not yet been extended (but more in terms of aligning incentives in ways appropriate to the differing context than in terms of the blind ritual that some adhere to).

            1. by them setting up the incentive structures instead of allowing it to be determined by free markets. This, in my opinion, is a loss of freedom.

              1. markets without government to secure the transactions, with government back currencies, with laws against fraud, and with definition and enforcement of property rights. Drawing the line of how maximally to facilitate such markets is one of the subtle and complex challenges that governments face.

                1. and this government is way over the line. Let’s see, so far they’ve taken over the housing industry, car companies, insurance companies, etc. And they’re poised to take over Wall Street. What’s left?

                  1. is a matter that requires a nuanced, precise, and in-depth analysis and debate. I’d be delighted to have such a debate, and help engage in such an analysis, with anyone worth the time and effort to have it with.

                    1. Is it possible for something which exists only in the imagination of the speaker to be “impeccable”? Since you’ve never used any logic of any kind on this blog (and other readers can simply glance at the mere assertion that you are once again referring to as “logic”), to the rest of the world it is neither “peccable” nor “impeccable”. But, if a person’s reality exists entirely in his own delusional imagination, completely disconnected from the evidence and mutual persuasion enjoyed by others who are tethered by the normal links to our shared reality, then doesn’t he have the liberty to apply any arbitrary adjective to his equally arbitrary nouns? I suppose so….  

                    2. is that no one has enough respect left for you to waste their time continuing to treat you as a rational human being. The attempts to do so result in nothing more than your bizarre, shallow, self-inflating but utterly substanceless claims, assertions, boasts, and bellows. You’re not the kind of person anyone takes seriously.

                      But, even so, my “non-answer” was actually the right answer, because intelligence requires humility, not an unyielding empty claim to the false-omniscience of shallow ideological certainty. Whether any or all of Obama’s bold economic moves can be characterized as “over the line” by some measure of federal government participation in the economy and its long-term functionality or dysfunctionality isn’t something that intelligent people determine by some a priori commitment to a set of inflexible assumptions, but rather is a question to be explored, using tools generally more complex than those employed on a political blog of this variety.

                      I don’t know the answer, and doubt that anyone does. But I do know the generic arguments on both sides, the context in which the decisions occurred, and the rationale behind them, and, within that body of knowledge, Obama retains my confidence as the thoughtful and rational president that he is, doing the best he can to deal with a complex set of critical and imminent challenges. The risks of bold action were no greater than the risks of having failed to act boldly.

                    3. I guess such questions are too complex for us peons. Better call in the oh-so-smart academic elites. What part of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” do you not understand?

                    4. not some group or category behind which you think you can hide. “Us peons” has nothing to do with anything. For a self-proclaimed conservative, you seem quite committed to evading personal responsibility and individual identity by pretending that you are only definable as a member of some group, which, according to you, is the only context within which criticisms of you personally can be understood. Strange (and hypocrtical), don’t you think?

                      “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” does not imply that no single individual can be criticized for his own individual failings and shortcomings. Claiming that it’s anti-democratic and anti-American to criticize BJ Wilson is one of your most absurd contortions yet, which, again, is amazing, since you’ve already set such a high bar of absurdity to clear.

                    5. “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” does not mean that it is anti-democratic to mobilize expertise in the determination of public policy. It means that we put into place a system which aligns the interests of those who design and implement policies with the interests of those who are affected by them. There are two interrelated challenges to a democratic (or republican) system of government: 1) That government acts in the interests of the governed, and 2) that government does so effectively. To ensure the first by crippling any ability to accomplish the second is a self-destructive approach; the two must be considered and pursued simultaneously.

                    6. You’ve heard of voodoo economics? Welcome to vuvuzela politics, the new grand strategy of the American far right (accompanied by the motto “Since may not have anything meaningful or productive to say, wbut we can still say it as loudly and obnoxiously as possible!”). Of course, some have the good sense to complement their own meaningless utterances with the plagiarized meaningful utterances of others, but that’s another story….

                  2. and that’s taking your grossly overexaggerated characterization of what’s happened at face value. The fact that your characterization is grossly overexaggerated, means that your argument is just ridiculous instead of merely unsupported by the facts.

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