(If you can’t see the MP4 video above, click below.)

As part of their much-heralded rebranding effort, the Republican Party bigwigs apparently thought it would be a great idea to send a Congressman to speak at historically black school Howard University.

Who did they choose for this important task? Which representative did they think would be the best to express their warm embrace of minorities?

Rand Paul, of course! The guy who, on more than one occasion, has said he’s opposed to the desegregation part of the Civil Rights Act: Rand Paul Ducks Record on Civil Rights in Awkward Howard Speech.

As Rand Paul told it, the biggest problem keeping African Americans from voting Republican is that they didn’t know Republicans have long been leaders on abolition and civil rights. As students at Howard University heard it, the problem was that Paul was condescending, misleading, and removed from the issues facing their community.

Would you be surprised to learn that Rand Paul immediately hauled out the blatantly deceptive right wing talking point that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and that Democrats are the real racists?

The Howard audience sure wasn’t.

Paul devoted almost none of his speech Wednesday at the historically black college in Washington, D.C., to explaining the GOP’s thorny relationship with black voters over the last fifty years, and most of it arguing that “the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.” His history lecture focused almost entirely on the period before 1964, when the GOP began to champion the states rights arguments of southern whites. Echoing a popular conservative talking point, Paul repeatedly reminded the audience that Democrats passed Jim Crow laws in the south and that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, as were the first black legislators and the founders of the NAACP.

“Would everyone know here they were all Republicans?” he said at one point, referring to the NAACP’s founders.

“Yes!” came the booming response from nearly the entire audience, who appeared offended Paul would even raise the question.

The complete lack of self-awareness is stunning; it apparently doesn’t even occur to Rand Paul (or the GOP in general) that this talking point is insulting to the intelligence of African Americans, who are very well aware of the history of racism in American politics.

They don’t fall for this transparent, sleazy bullshit, and they’re never going to fall for it. But that doesn’t stop Republicans from trying to pull the scam over and over and over, even when they know they’re speaking to a highly educated, politically aware audience. It’s amazing, and I don’t mean that in a good way; a measure of the deep dysfunction at the heart of right wing politics.

Also see:
At Howard University, Rand Paul Falsely Claims He Never Opposed 1964 Civil Rights Act | Mother Jones
Rand Paul on the Civil Rights Act - Rand Paul Is Out to Lunch

(If you can’t play the MP4 version above, click below…)

Today in an article for right wing blog RedState.com, RNC chairman Reince Priebus demonstrated how serious the Republican Party is about this “rebranding” thing, by asking if President Obama and the Democratic Party support infanticide. Yes, he really did.

In an article published Wednesday on the conservative website RedState, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus blasted Democrats for supporting Planned Parenthood, while floating the damning suggestion that the likes of President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) support infanticide.

“The President, the Senate Majority Leader, the House Democratic Leader, and the Chair of the Democratic National Committee (in whose home state this hearing occurred) made funding Planned Parenthood an issue in the 2012 campaign,” Priebus wrote. “They should now all be held to account for that outspoken support. If the media won’t, then voters must ask the pressing questions: Do these Democrats also believe a newborn has no rights? Do they also endorse infanticide?”

This is damage control, folks — a sop thrown to the religious right, who are getting very angry with the Republican Party and their talk of “rebranding.” The absurdly hateful lie that President Obama supports infanticide has been bouncing around the right wing echo chamber for years, impervious to refutation, and Priebus is very calculatedly playing to that lovely group of people who are willing and eager to believe it.

You’ve probably heard that RNC chairman Reince Preibus announced a new report today, identifying ways that the Republican Party needs to reform.

Call me a cynic, but my reading of the report reveals the same old same old: lots of angst about “messaging” and “reaching out to minorities,” and absolutely no awareness that it’s Republican policies that are the problem, not the way they’re “framing” them. Bottom line: the RNC report is a set of recommendations on how to better trick voters into supporting the GOP, even as the GOP continues to work against their interests.

What I found much more revealing was this exchange between Reince Priebus and a reporter who asked about that disgusting outbreak of white supremacism at last weekend’s CPAC: RNC Chair Asked About Chaotic CPAC Race Panel.

“Question about CPAC last week, where a panel on African American voters dissolved into a shouting match with at least one activist saying that — sorry, hard to read the question — talking about voters being systematically disenfranchised. How, given that sort of backdrop in the party, do you plan to overcome those challenges in your role at the RNC?” National Press Club President Angela Greiling Keane asked Priebus at an event on the RNC’s roadmap ahead after the 2012 elections.

Priebus responded to the question by saying the RNC plans to hire hundreds of paid staffers to reach out to minority communities across the country.

“For one thing, you have to show up, right?” he said. “I mean, if you’re going to get the order, you have to ask for the sale. I mean, that’s just sort of basic. Which is why we’re launching this unprecedented effort to bring in — I’m not talking about hiring two or three people down the hallway at the RNC — what we’re talking about is hiring hundreds of paid people across the country this year to make the case in minority communities across America.”

Priebus seems to think the only response needed is to pay people to go out and promote the GOP to “minority communities” — but he completely ignored the question. And there you have the GOP’s problem in a nutshell. They believe they can fix things by just hiring more PR shills, but can’t even be bothered to address a real incident of very real, very ugly racism, at the premier right wing conference.

ON CBS today, Priebus said, “We’ve done a really lousy job of branding and marketing who we are.”

I have to disagree. With “death panels” and “self-deportation” and forced vaginal ultrasounds and insane comments about “legitimate rape” and creationism and climate change denial, the Republican Party has done an absolutely smashing job of demonstrating exactly who they are. The best marketing in the world isn’t going to help you if your product sucks.

For reference, here’s the report they want you to believe is a sincere effort to promote reform:

And today at CPAC, a full-on right wing racist meltdown at a panel discussion on (yes, irony is dead) “minority outreach:” CPAC Participant Defends Slavery at Minority Outreach Panel: It Gave ‘Food and Shelter’ to Blacks.

What this guy says is no different than the rhetoric you can find in the comment sections of almost any right wing blog or news site.

A panel at the Conservative Political Action Committee on Republican minority outreach exploded into controversy on Friday afternoon, after an audience member defended slavery as good for African-Americans.

The exchange occurred after an audience member from North Carolina, 30-year-old Scott Terry, asked whether Republicans could endorse races remaining separate but equal. After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?”

[…]

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

Also see:
Tea Party Event on Racial Tolerance Turns to Chaos as White Supremacists Arrive | TPMDC
CPAC’s ‘Trump the Race Card’ Panel Derailed by Actual Segregationist - Elspeth Reeve - the Atlantic Wire

The New York Times headline says the Republicans who signed a legal brief arguing in favor of same sex marriage are “prominent,” but in fact this is a very marginal group that includes no one in a real position of power.

WASHINGTON — Dozens of prominent Republicans — including top advisers to former President George W. Bush, four former governors and two members of Congress — have signed a legal brief arguing that gay people have a constitutional right to marry, a position that amounts to a direct challenge to Speaker John A. Boehner and reflects the civil war in the party since the November election.

The document will be submitted this week to the Supreme Court in support of a suit seeking to strike down Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative barring same-sex marriage, and all similar bans. The court will hear back-to-back arguments next month in that case and another pivotal gay rights case that challenges the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act.

The Proposition 8 case already has a powerful conservative supporter: Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general under Mr. Bush and one of the suit’s two lead lawyers. The amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief is being filed with Mr. Olson’s blessing. It argues, as he does, that same-sex marriage promotes family values by allowing children of gay couples to grow up in two-parent homes, and that it advances conservative values of “limited government and maximizing individual freedom.”

So how do you imagine the right wing base is going to respond to this attempt at a “rebranding” scam? If you answered, “With a torrent of bigotry and hatred,” you win!

Let’s check out Hot Air, which is supposed to be a “socially centrist” right wing blog. How are the commenters responding to Allahpundit’s weak endorsement of this legal brief? Well, there are a very few people supporting this initiative, but by far the majority of the comments are like these:

Yay, now maybe NAMBLA will send some bucks toward the GOP.

[…]

The Vichy Right.

[…]

Many prminent Republicans are out of touch with their consituency in America’s Heartland.

[…]

May each and every one of them be sent packing their bags come next election.

We are not fooled. We know darn well what’s really at stake is religious liberty, not a few members of the buggery brigade with self-inflicted butthurt (in more ways than one) being unable to have their relationship sanctioned by the state.

[…]

The Republican party is dead.

[…]

Caligula’s horse apporves.

[…]

This is one area where I have to give Russia credit. They know how to deal with their perverts over there.

[…]

These people can not be considered Republicans in any sense…

The GOP is not a conservative party… it’s an imperialist party… and grassroots national security conservatives and capitalist conservatives have aided this transition… and I want nothing to do with it anymore.

[…]

The end goal of the SSM crowd isn’t SSM, it’s to force acceptance of homosexuality by those who regard it as unnatural an immoral. Government sanctioned SSM will give rise to government sanctioned bullying, suing, discrimination, etc. of religious people and organizations who refuse to give homosexual relationships the moral equivalence they demand.

This isn’t about equal rights, its about forcing people to accept something against their will or to STFU if they won’t accept.

[…]

“RINO” is too nice a word for those “Republicans”. Supporting this kind of approach to gay marriage is absolutely against what Republicans should stand for.

[…]

If gay marriage was about who you love, “gay” would be synonymous with “homoLOVEuality” not “homoSEXuality”. It’s about men having sex with men. It’s unhealthy, perverted, mutual masturbation. It’s responsible for the country’s AIDS epidemic. Isn’t there some sensible person who’ll stand up and call it for what it is? I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but, this is a major cultural shift, redefining the word “marriage”, for everyone, for all time. For our children, in our religious institutions, in every formal and informal social circle we inhabit. Let’s not gloss over what we’re talking about.

[…]

Jesus weeps.

[…]

Yes, in modern America, all prominence comes from helping obama destroy America, because, as we all know, by its very nature, America is bad, and must be transformed.

[…]

Should homosexual men be allowed to “marry” 11 year old boys? The Founders didn’t deem it necessary to put in the Constitution that men can’t marry other men or 11 year old boys. Ruth Bader Ginsburg feels the age of consent should be 11. The only basis in the future on which you prevent homosexual men from marrying 11 year old foreign orphan boys is that it shocks the conscious of the majority and the majority won’t allow it. What shocks your conscious is irrelevant to the sort of people who Democrats promote to the bench.

[…]

Come on, people. You are going to have to step it up if a comment is going to be reposted at LGF. NONE of these comments are hateful enough!

[…]

Oh how cute, the little corn-pone faggot accusing me of being a closet pervert. Maybe we talk about it because that’s what they DO, you knuckle-dragging bumpkin.

[…]

There is no such thing as gay pretend marriage. You idiots cannot just redefine anything you want and then try and claim that it was always defined like that. Of course, you leftist scum specialize in tearing language apart and leaving nothing but meaningless utterances and a disheveled syntax, reflections of your fevered minds.

Gay pretend marriage is not illegal in various states, the perversion of the language just doesn’t exist in those states any more than marriage of a man and a car exists.

[…]

No one really cares what lesbians do. Lesbianism is a big nothing-burger. Lesbianism is just pathetic but not much of an affront to sensibilities - except for bull dykes doing some ridiculous imitations of what they think is manly behavior. They are sort of offensive, though kind of funny.

[…]

There is still no such thing as gay pretend marriage. If you find a gene for homosexual attraction (and I have little doubt that there is, though much homosexuality is environmental and a matter of “fashion” among the leftist perverts) then you’ll also find one for pedophilia. Are you advocating for pedophiles to be “legalized” and marriages to 5 year olds sanctioned because some screwed-up chromosomes might support that? I’m sure you do, because you are a brain-dead leftist who is out to do nothing but tear civilization down and return the Earth to slime, your biological peers.

[…]

Does anyone other than Allahpundit give a damn what his buddy David Frum thinks (about anything)?

[…]

These people can not be considered Republicans in any sense…

The GOP is not a conservative party… it’s an imperialist party… and grassroots national security conservatives and capitalist conservatives have aided this transition… and I want nothing to do with it anymore.

[…]

Isn’t it just hilarious that sexual deviancy not only goes against any moral system worth speaking of, but even against the most basic Darwinian concepts which liberals tout as superior to creation?

If a “gay gene” existed (which is does not), it would be DE-volution, a step backward by evolutionary standards, because it went 180 degrees against continuation of the species! How crazy is that?

[…]

The headline should read.Dozens of prominent elite Rinos sign supreme court brief.

[…]

Isn’t it funny how even a straight-forward discussion of homosexuality leads to the use of terms which are totally accurate, but still trigger decency filters?

[…]

It may be ants that eat at the body of liberty, but give the ants long enough, enough methods of attack, and enough ants the body of liberty will be eaten.

Cut off the ant trails to the body of liberty and you have less ant bites.

On and on and on it goes. I guess this rebranding thing is harder than it looks.

And remember, this is at the right wing site that’s supposed to be socially centrist. I don’t have the stomach for it, but if you really want to see the right wing base freely expressing itself, check out Free Republic. Just be sure to wear your HazMat suit.