1st presentation of The Gatewoods

by David Safier

Yesterday, I proposed playing the Henry Gatewood/Republican Debate drinking game. Gatewood, as regular readers of BfA know, is the crooked banker in the 1939 western, “Stagecoach,” who said, in one steady stream of bloviation:

“‘America for Americans! The government must not interfere with business! Reduce taxes! Our national debt is something shocking!”

The film clip is below.

I played the game, marking down every time one of the debaters made a reference to Fearing the Other, ending evil Government Regulation, reducing Taxes or shrinking our shocking National Debt.

By far, the largest number of references were to Taxes, followed by the National Debt and Fear of the Other.

The overall award for the best Gatewood-like performance goes to Michelle Bachmann, who racked up 5 times as many references to the National Debt as any other candidate — more than everyone else combined.

Santorum won the award for the Full Gatewood, racking up good numbers in three of the four categories. Business regulation was the only category not on his radar.

Romney came in next for the attention he paid to both Taxes and Fear of the Other.

And the anti-Gatewood award goes to Pawlenty, who only had one Gatewood-ism the whole night, a single reference to taxes. That may be one of the reasons T-Paw doesn’t stand a chance.

Here, for those of you who, like me, can’t watch this enough, is Henry Gatewood himself spouting off like a modern day Republican, 72 years ago. It’s important to note that the satchel on his lap contains stolen payroll money, to put the icing on his hypocritical cake.