Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Meet Pastor Kevin Swanson
In Fall 2015, in order to court evangelicals in Iowa, three Republican presidential candidates went so far as to share a stage and even shake hands with a hardcore anti-gays pastor who, just like America’s number-one enemy, ISIS, believes that gay people deserve to be killed.
Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee all had plenty of time to abandon the National Religious Liberties Conference in Des Moines on Nov. 6 when they heard Pastor Kevin Swanson explicitly condone the execution of freedom-loving Americans for being unafraid to be who they are. Yet, none of the pro-death-penalty-for-gays, Constitution-touting, “family values” candidates fled in embarrassment, essentially putting the GOP stamp of approval on the whole unAmerican, schizophrenic hate fest.
However, unlike ISIS, which controls a tiny swath of land where freedom doesn't exist and brutality is the norm, "pro-life" Swanson thinks murdering our gay brothers and sisters as some sort of religious punishment is something we should be doing here in the United States. What he is proposing is common practice in ISIS-controlled areas; throwing people who are even suspected of being gay off of rooftops is their preferred religious murder method.
Ironic as Swanson has no doubt also warned about the threat of Sharia Law in America, despite obviously agreeing with at least one grisly aspect of it. Also ironic that he was hosting a religious liberties conference that, apart from borrowing from fundamentalist Islam, focuses solely on the proliferation of extremist Christian ideology and all the perceived attacks Christians are subjected to.
For instance, these rubes are convinced the expression "Merry Christmas" has been outlawed in the United States. The conference literally had nothing to do with religious liberties, and certainly not freedom generally.
Swanson whined about “the sin of homosexuality,” using the Bible to bolster his paranoid rantings and to justify his medieval blood lust.
“In Romans, chapter one, Paul affirms that this particular sin is worthy of death,” Swanson said.
In the United States of America. In 2015.
But who are these gay people anyway? For everyone in Des Moines who was confused about that—and I’m sure there were plenty—Swanson filled them in.
"These are the people with the sores!” Swanson shouted. “The gaping sores! The sores that are puss-y and and people are coming in and carving happy faces on the sores! That’s not a nice thing to do! Don’t you carve happy faces on open, puss-y sores—don’t you ever do that! Don’t you ever do that. I tell you don’t do it!” a sweaty Swanson yelled before whispering ominously, “I tell you don’t do it.”
The problem, Swanson explained in apparent agony, is that normal "Christian families, pastors’ families, elders’ families from good, godly churches, whose sons are rebelling, hanging out with homosexuals and getting married, and the parents are invited.”
Gasp! So many things! Rebelling?? I know, I’ll fuck that cute guy from school, that’ll really show my dad—what an asshole! Hahaha.
"What would you do if that was the case?” Swanson continued with his goofy gay wedding invitation rebellion hypothetical.
“Here is what I would do: sackcloth and ashes at the entrance to the church and I’d sit in cow manure, and I’d spread it all over my body."
If you’re as confused as me by that, Pastor Swanson is saying he would go to a gay wedding dressed in cow shit to show his disapproval.
Sackcloth (burlap) and ashes were apparently used in Old Testament times as a symbol of repentance, among other things. To show your repentant heart, you’d wear (uncomfortable) sackcloth, sit in ashes, and put ashes on your head. The ashes, of course, signified desolation and ruin.
Such a symbol made your change of heart visible and demonstrated the sincerity of your repentance. Or so I've learned via Google.
The humility demonstrated with that ridiculous action, of course, “moved God to intervene."
But why the cow manure? I assume manure being even less pleasant to wear than ashes would be Swanson’s best symbol of repentance for what he obviously perceives as the ultimate sin.
Although I don’t understand why he would have to play with poop if his son were gay. Seems like the son would be the one on the hook for a poop party, not dad, but what do I know, I’m very new to all this spreading of shit all over our bodies to entice God’s gay intervention.
"That’s what I would do,” Swanson insisted. “And I’m not kidding, I’m not laughing. I’m grieving! I’m mourning! I’m pointing out the problem! It’s not a gay time!”
You really have to see the video to appreciate this man's deranged desperation. Swanson’s performance is quite something. Like watching a demented legless man trying like hell to put shoes on.
"Sackcloth and ashes. This is what America needs,” Swanson blurts into the microphone. “America needs to hear the message. We are messed up.”
To understand this kind of hateful, paranoid, narrow worldview, consider that Swanson is a major proponent of homeschooling.
Why? Oh, I'm so glad you asked. Because public schools are breeding grounds for “homosexual indoctrination,” of course. From public school it’s a direct route to homosexuality, which, as we all know, leads to pedophilia. And then your dad has to wear a turd hat, it's a whole thing.
To be safe, keep your kids at home and Bible-brainwashed if you don’t want them to be gay transgender pedophiles or encounter any gays, pedophiles or liberal gay school teachers! Or Girl Scouts! They are everywhere; NEVER buy their cookies under ANY circumstances!!
Likewise, don’t let your girls join the Girl Scouts! They promote feminism and turn girls into lesbians who become transgender pedophiles. The few who resist later have abortions provided by—you guessed it—Planned Parenthood! PP then harvests the baby organs for Lucifer.
I'm not making any of this up. This is the condensed version for your convenience.
As for the puss-y sores, I can only assume that’s some kind of reference to AIDS. I’m not sure what to make of the smiley face sore carvings, although they do sound, you know, gross.
Regarding Swanson’s obsession with homosexuality, the lady doth protest too much, me thinks. More to the point, there's no way this guy doesn't suck dicks. That being said, I can agree with him on at least one thing: Some of us are indeed “messed up."
This nutty Swanson guy introduced Cruz by stating that Jesus Christ "is king of the President of the United States, whether he will admit it or not, and that president should submit to His rule and to His law," before asking Cruz to share his opinion on how important it is for "the President of the United States to fear God."
Hey I don't know about you guys, but I, for one, am scared.
Trump went on to win the presidency—with the help of Russia, rubes and Facebook—and gave cabinet positions to God-fearing lunatics. Vice president elect Mike Pence has suggested conversion therapy for gays and signed a 2013 bill trying to jail same-sex couples for seeking marriage licenses in Indiana.
On the contrary, in his book The Name of God is Mercy, Pope Francis cites “the Catechism of the Catholic Church where it says that these people should be treated with delicacy and not be marginalized,” adding "people should not be defined only by their sexual tendencies: let us not forget that God loves all his creatures and we are destined to receive his infinite love.”
As for Huckabee, it was rumored that Trump had picked him to be ambassador to Israel, which I thought sounded about right considering everyone involved and the overall craziness, but he announced on Fri., Nov. 18 on "The O'Reilly Factor" that Trump had offered him a cabinet position that he declined because it wasn't "the right fit."
Presumably, the job wasn't Overweight Scrote Gobbler because that would be a perfect fit.
To conclude, if you call yourself pro-life while supporting the bombing of a heavily populated civilian area and killing scores of innocent children; the death penalty; turning away refugees—especially children; the murders of abortion providers; the killing of unarmed civilians by U.S. police, etc., kindly shove it up your asshole.
ISIS has been called a Death Cult. So are many pro-lifers. So spare us the fake outrage.
Abortion is a complicated subject, but people mainly have sex for pleasure, not procreation. And shit happens. And the alternative is fucking creepy and medieval.
The alternative to legal abortion is a Religious State where pregnant women are registered and monitored and forced to give birth no matter the baby's health, it's threat to mom's health, or even if it's the result of a rape attack.
Like a creepy science fiction story, or Nazi Germany, The State controls your baby and your health, your decisions, your future—not you.
All to serve some goofy God, which everyone in America would be forced to pretend to believe in.
Not what the Founding Fathers envisioned. The exact opposite, in fact. An embarrassment.
It would be like Jonestown or North Korea. Total paranoia; neighbors ratting each other out to the authorities.
From there it's a slippery slope to mandatory prayer services and religious clothing police wandering the streets, harassing and attacking women.
And that kind of society might make these right-wing loony-tune zealots happy, or even give them a Jesus boner, but that ain't Freedom. That's not America.
So even if you hate abortion, you'd have to be insane not to hate the alternative more (and I don't doubt for a second that you are).
Not to mention, abortions would still be performed but by amateurs. There would be infections and even more death because the moms would die too.
And although you may believe they deserve their one-way expedited ticket to Hell, well, that contradicts your whole pro-life thing, doesn't it.
Tell us more about how much you value freedom and how freedom isn't free, and don't tread on me and all that nonsense.
In reality, YOU oppose and indeed threaten hard-fought American freedom. Real freedom. YOU are the problem.
Here'e the video of Pastor Swanson, you really gotta see this guy.
I also recommend the remix. Enjoy!
Monday, October 12, 2015
Huckpocracy Idiocracy: Pick Your ‘Mental Poison’
There are at least two very distinct strains of Christianity in the United States today: Genuine Christians who practice what Jesus allegedly taught and are concerned about the poor, handicapped, homeless and immigrants—in a word, everyone, but especially the disadvantaged. The living. Think Sister Helen Prejean, death penalty critic.
Then there’s the modern American shit-kicking Christian who hates pretty much everybody. Think Ted Nugent.
Remember when people used to wear those goofy WWJD bracelets? More and more nowadays I find myself looking at these self-described Christians on television, listening to their nasty nationalistic message of exclusion (and fake victimhood) and wonder: What would Jesus do?
(You know, assuming he was a real guy and half as big a sweetheart as his fans claim.) Would he be proud of these assholes?
In the summer of 2014—when Israel was busy killing more than 500 babies in Gaza with the weapons, political support and indeed the blessing from our Christian nation—protests erupted along the U.S.-Mexico border as news began to spread about record numbers of incoming immigrants, mostly unaccompanied children, fleeing increased violence in Central American countries like Honduras, Guatemala, and especially El Salvador.
And by violence, I mean ISIS-like stuff: dismembering and beheading an 11-year-old school boy who refused to join a gang, for instance. And David de la O was not the exception.
Busloads of desperate children and families, much like the people fleeing Syria for Europe right now, were met with angry screaming white folks holding signs like “Return to Sender” and “Send Them Back With Birth Control!”
Some of the literate protesters had probably read Ann Coulter’s latest book “Adios, America!,” or, ironically, enjoyed TLC’s “19 Kids & Counting."
Many of the seething crowd, no doubt, would describe themselves as Christians doing God’s work, just as their parents’ generation did when George Wallace battled the Kennedy brothers alongside KKK terrorists to try to keep Alabama school children segregated “forever” in Jesus' name.
Is this the same Jesus who advocated for poor people? We tell the world’s worst off seeking shelter and compassion in our famous melting pot nation of immigrants to fuck off and that’s Christian?
We do understand what the the Statue of Liberty symbolizes, right?
My people had to flee here because we ran out of potatoes, for fuck's sake! They weren't welcomed either and now we're as ingrained as a blood stain. Just good ol' American jerks like everyone else.
That being said, I don’t go to church or subscribe to a religion but I know for sure that hurling insults at desperate, helpless refugees fleeing death is not nice behavior. I mean, what would Jesus do?
Deuteronomy 15:11 says, “For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’”
Which brings us to Christianity’s latest culture war hero, Kentucky bumpkin Kim Davis.
On Tues., Sept. 8, the Rowan county clerk who had been jailed for refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples was released. It had only been five days, but at her televised victory lap, complete with "Rocky III" theme song, Davis acted like she hadn't seen the sun in ages. And from the looks of her, she hadn't.
Anyway, graceful it was not. But it was timely because former Arkansas governor and Fox News bloviator Mike Huckabee had already organized a rally for that day to capitalize off of Davis, whom it was assumed would still be incarcerated at the time, giving Huckabee the spotlight and opportunity to tell evangelicals and sympathetic morons how afraid to be of a tyrannical government that wants to take your guns and your Bible.
So Davis stole quite a bit of Huckabee’s thunder, which explains why when Donald Trump suckerfish Ted Cruz appeared like a vampire in a cloud of smoke to do his own Al Sharpton-style hijacking of the event, he was physically blocked from approaching the lectern by one of Huckabee’s church goons.
It’s ironic because none of these people have any love for Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, yet here they were using the exact same playbook as the notorious “race hustlers.” I suppose one might call these gentlemen Jesus hustlers inspired by their hero, “Reverend” Sharpton.
Just because the Western world is quickly catching up with modern times like a subduction zone fault line suddenly snapping back and releasing hundreds of years worth of accumulated pressure, some Christians feel, as Fox News likes to put it, “under attack” by inevitable American social progress. (Nevermind that even the Pope said "Who am I to judge?" when asked about gay people in 2013.)
Some of these folks, like Fox News' Bill O’Reilly, are so sensitive to their perceived victimhood that they go apeshit every Christmas when they hear of fellow Americans wishing each other “Happy Holidays!” in order to incorporate New Year’s and Hanukkah, etc. into a generic one-size-fits-all greeting.
Of course, one could simply view that as the most efficient way to cover all the bases and kindly not exclude anyone, but to conservatives, it’s a full-on assault on their most sacred beliefs.
“War on Christmas,” they call it. It’s adorable.
These anti-gay, anti-women, so-called “family values” Christmas crusaders are desperate to be taken seriously, yet their representatives in government are parading around to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” with the likes of Davis and taking thousands of selfies with former reality TV star, Family Research Council lobbyist, child molester and adulterer, Josh Duggar.
All of these people, including Huckabee, are hypocrites of the highest possible order. Duggar, a D.C. “family values” lobbyist has admitted to molesting his own sisters. He was doing some family research, alright..
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines hypocrisy as “a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion.”
Take Davis. She’s allegedly fighting to protect marriage, although it could be argued she’s really fighting to deprive other Americans of their rights. But if we take her at her word, who is she to defend the sanctity of this most holy of unions that she just so happens to have desecrated four times in a row?
This woman has been married and divorced several times and even had twins from an adulterous relationship with what I can only assume is the scarecrow from "The Wizard of Oz."
Ironically, the Bible says adulterers like Davis should be put to death. Leviticus 20:10, bitches.
But nevermind all that. Davis could have given a 10-minute soliloquy about the wonders of welfare and no one would have batted an eye as long as she gave props to her guy Jesus.
As for Duggar, he found fame on his ever-growing family’s reality TV show, the mission of which was to spread the word of God via the airwaves to millions of unsuspecting sinner-chumps.
The Duggar clan blended socially conservative politics with their message, making news when patriarch Jim Bob took his daughters across state lines to campaign for controversial Missouri congressman and Senate candidate Todd Akin shortly after Akin willingly made comments in front of a news camera about how a woman’s body “has ways to try to shut that whole thing down” in the case of “legitimate rape,” casting doubt on whether he believed rape was even a thing at all.
Which is beyond creepy when you consider what these people believe should happen after a woman is impregnated by her attacker.
And that brings us to Huckabee. This fat turd. Here’s a guy who promotes hypocritical anti-human “family values” like all the rest of them.
Miley Cyrus is leading millions of innocent Hannah Montana Disney children onto the nude wrecking ball of life, smoking bong-loads of salvia on camera, making obscene tongue gestures all the time, clothes falling off, while Justin Bieber gets arrested weekly as he terrorizes his Calabasas neighborhood, vandalizing property and putting everyone’s life at risk by treating his gated community like his own personal Daytona 500, yet Huckabee sees Beyonce—who never gets into any trouble—as public enemy No. 1?
I’d ask why, but we know why.
Some of her lyrics aren’t “wholesome.” She’s married to that crack dealer Jay Z. But most worrisome, Bey & Jay are American Royalty, which outrages people like Huckabee who associate royalty with whiteness. The American social status quo and power structure has been “flipped, turned upside down” as The Fresh Prince might say, and some of these old-school honkies do not like it, to say the least.
Beyonce’s biggest offense, as far as I can tell, is that she shakes her ass and shows a lot of skin, but that is nothing new. I assume Huckabee never saw Cher’s awful butt cheeks on that battleship.
Likewise, Madonna humped a stage in a wedding dress on live TV thirty damn years ago. She simulated sex—in a wedding dress!—before we even knew what AIDS and gay people were because of our refusal to acknowledge reality thanks to our lingering uptight 1950‘s Christian derp culture.
Oh, but I suppose Beyonce’s exposed skin is brown. Suspicious!
I admit rap music and misogynism aren’t exactly strangers, but the same can be said for the latter and Huckabee's GOP. Like it or not, hip-hop has been the driving force behind American pop culture for at least the last twenty five years. Take it up with the white ad executives who use that music and culture to move product. It’s not going anywhere; it’s mainstream business.
You want to try to control music in America, Mike? In the land of free speech? You’d have better luck trying to reroute the mighty Mississippi out to the Pacific.
And what about that Constitution thing conservatives are always stumbling over themselves to pretend to defend? They want the first black first lady to try to control what music Americans listen to? A black woman dictating to all these rednecks from the White House?
What if she called out Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” for being obscene? That might upset some people like Hickabee—excuse me, Huckabee—who claim to be offended by rap music.
Ironically, a few years ago, Huckabee collaborated on that very song with its author, his friend Ted Nugent. Huckabee played bass guitar on his Fox News show and smiled while Nugent, right along side him, sang a tale about reckless, carefree, unprotected teenage sex that results in sexually-transmitted diseases, which is, apparently, all just part of the thrill.
Huckabee seemed to particularly enjoy when ‘The Nuge’ sang the following part like a sex-crazed pervert who hangs with Josh Duggar:
Well, I make the pussy purr with the stroke of my hand
They know they gettin' it from me
They know just where to go when they need their lovin' man
They know I'm doin' it for free
O-M-G!! But what about the children?!?!?!
In his pre-campaign-rollout jerkoff-billboard-book, titled, dumbly enough: "God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy," Huckabee revives his old attack on Beyonce but gets a two-fer by tossing terrible parent Michelle Obama under the bus as well, writing, “With the first lady so concerned about making sure her daughters' bellies don't ingest unhealthy food, how can she let their brains ingest obnoxious and toxic mental poison in the form of song lyrics? If lived out, those lyrics could be far more devastating to someone's health than a cupcake.”
Oh, lordy. An opportunistic bastardized-Christianity pimp warning about "obnoxious and toxic mental poison?" This guy's irony detector must be broken.
Beyonce and the first lady will have more of an impact on the future than Huckabee could ever dream of having, even if he prints out a million moronically-titled pamphlets trying to guilt gullible people into his silly, ancient belief system until the day he croaks.
If the Obamas are bad parents for not overly-policing their teenage daughters’ musical consumption, then so is everyone whose kids ever listened to Elvis. Because if you remember, the old folks thought he was an agent of the devil too, if not Lucifer himself. Ditto for the world-changing Beatles.
Ask yourself this, Mike: What is more responsible for unnecessary death and destruction in this world—pop music song lyrics, or religion? The Bible or Beyonce? Because one is definitely mental poison.
She's so sweet when she yanks on my meat
Down on the street you know she can't be beat
What the hell
For the record, that wholesome morsel is from Nugent's "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang."
The very idea of parents being able to control what music their kids listen to in the era of the Internet, mp3 players, tiny ear buds and, you know, children occasionally leaving the home to mingle with influential heathens at school, work, church, etc. is laughable, let alone trying to sway an entire nation of adderall-snorting teens to abstain from music deemed unwholesome by some supreme leader. It’s ridiculous and wholly unAmerican.
If we’re going to do that, we might as well have mandatory prayers five times a day and outlaw pornography. Where would it end—Sharia Law??
But, of course, it’s not primarily about the music—it’s about the people making the music.
Nugent put it best in a Feb. 2014 YouTube rant, saying, “Those big uneducated greasy black mongrels on (MTV), they call themselves rap artists. Excuse me? During a bad bloody case of diarrhea, I got more soul than those guys do at the peak of their life. That's not music.”
And not just "uneducated" rappers. Nugent has also said Harvard's President Obama is a “subhuman mongrel.”
By now you should be sensing a theme about these "Christians."
Here’s the thing I don’t understand about folks like Huckabee, Duggar and Davis. If they believe that we are all sinners, that includes them, so why are they preaching to the rest of us? Why do they feel it is their job to play God if they have such strong faith in such an infallible deity who’s going to sort everyone out in the end anyway?
They’re wasting their time and stealing work off God’s desk! Flushing gays down the fiery toilet is probably the only fun the ol’ guy gets to have anymore—leave it to him, bozos!
Speaking of family values hypocrites, Duggar allegedly used two Ashley Madison (adultery match-making Website) accounts to violently fuck porn stars in D. C. while away from his dingbat wife who was comforted in the belief that her sweet, devoted husband was just working hard lobbying for Jesus and smearing loving gay people he’d never met at every opportunity.
Yet he was a great guy nonetheless and immediately forgiven by his flock—including, of course, and most notably, Huckabee, who wrote in a lengthy (post-molestation/pre-prostitute news) Facebook defense of Duggar that he was just another victim of “today’s blood-thirsty media.” Blame the messenger—Fox News 101.
“Janet and I want to affirm our support for the Duggar family. Josh’s actions when he was an underage teen are as he described them himself, 'inexcusable,' but that doesn’t mean 'unforgivable,'” Huckabee pleaded online, adding that even “good people” do “disgusting things.”
Which is a sentiment that one might think would also apply to homosexuals (designed the way they are by God, to use Christian lingo) and not just a serial sexual deviant like Duggar, but, oddly and predictably, no.
Hilariously, Huckabee’s “underage teen” defense evaporated just a few weeks later when adult Josh Duggar made news yet again when his Ashley Madison accounts were revealed.
But, presumably, Duggar was “good” to begin with because of his awesome faith in Jesus Christ, and the gays are somehow irredeemable evil spawns of Satan who willingly chose an unrighteous, icky path.
Then, on Dec. 23, Huckabee surprisingly reversed course and threw his old church buddy under the bus, feeding Iowa radio host Simon Conway a little sample of Arkansas horseshit.
"I really didn’t support Josh," Huckabee farted into the microphone. "I supported his parents, if you’ll go back and look at what I said. There’s no support for what he did."
No?
"He did some things that totally defy everything he supposedly stood for."
No shit??
Best of all, while Huckabee was railing against homos and shaming parents (namely, the Obamas) who let their kids listen to Beyonce’s music—not to mention taking enough selfies with Duggar to fill a child rapist’s jail cell—he’s the guy who raised his son David, in God’s bright forgiving glory, to be a dog torturer.
So, in 1998, Huckabee’s then 17-year-old son was kicked out of an Arkansas Boy Scout camp for allegedly killing a dog with another teenager. But it gets worse. According to a news article citing young Huckabee’s accomplice’s father, the dog was at one point “hung over a limb and choking.”
According to anonymous witnesses, after hanging the dog, David and his buddy slit the helpless creature's throat before stoning it to death. Huckabee’s cover story, as he told Larry King in 2007 while running for president, was that his son, the good boy that he was, was just trying to put the poor dog out of its misery.
He didn’t mention the hanging.
"(The dog) was mangy,” Huckabee told King, the bullshit dripping onto his fat chin. “It looked like it was going to attack.”
But, of course, that act of humanity doesn’t jibe with his son being kicked out of Scout camp.
Marcal Young, scout executive of the Caddo Area Council that operated the camp where the dog was killed said David was kicked out because he violated a Scout law: "A Scout is kind," leaving little doubt that this was more of a Jeffrey-Dahmer’s-early-days situation than the merciful act of an animal lover or self defense.
And instead of praying to God to make it all work out, Governor Huckabee subsequently covered it all up, firing the director of Arkansas’ state police for refusing to write a letter denying the local prosecutor’s request for an animal cruelty investigation.
In 2007, Newsweek quoted the former FBI chief in Little Rock, I.C. Smith, as saying, “Without question, (Huckabee) was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son.”
Just like Jim Bob Duggar. And in the same state. Wow, what a small world! No wonder their families are so close; they have so many cute crimes and cover-ups in common!
Just to be clear: Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee wants millions of parents whose teenagers enjoy Beyonce’s music to do some kind of moral inventory, yet he raised a malicious little maniac who spent a beautiful day at Boy Scout camp torturing a poor dog to death. Man's best friend.
And who knows what kinky skeletons the former governor has in his closet. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that these self-imposed morality police for Jesus always turn out to be the sickest of us all. By far.
Here’s the thing. This isn’t Yemen. The reason our founding fathers went to all the trouble of building this paradise in the first place was to create a secular society based on freedom of religion and a separation of church and state. That is the point of the whole premise: Freedom.
Yet we’ve backslid to the point where you can’t even run for president unless you tout your Christian bona fides, no matter how exaggerated or fictional they are. Muslims are unofficially banned from the White House by the same disingenuous twats who are whining about religious freedom as a way to discriminate against gays.
Take Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson.
Here’s a gifted retired neurosurgeon who believes homosexuality is a choice based on the observation that “a lot of people ... go into prison straight” and emerge fabulously gay. He has also repeatedly compared Obama's America to “Nazi Germany,” and is on record saying he thinks "Obamacare is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery."
Hey, what can you say about Dr. Carson? The man loves rhetoric.
And a few months after Carson said he "would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation," Cruz repeatedly stumped to small crowds all over Iowa, saying, "Any president who doesn't begin every day on his knees isn't fit to be commander-in-chief of this nation."
Insert (get it?) blowjob joke here -->.
American kids have to pledge allegiance “under God” before starting school everyday, Muslim American kids have no hopes of ever being president and we’re supposed to believe Christianity is under attack in this country?
Societies that are rigidly ruled by old-timey religious goons whom their subjects resent are called theocracies. It’s what they have in Iran and Saudi Arabia, that part of the world we claim to despise, yet hardcore Christians more and more aspire to be.
Conservatives always whine about the perceived loss of American exceptionalism, yet the sexy cultural things that make America unique compared to our enemy nations— gays and trans people free to be, women who are free to work, earn money, drive cars, take birth control, wear whatever they want, have promiscuous sex (like men), etc.— are precisely the things conservatives want to get rid of.
They pine for O’Reilly’s idyllic 1950‘s Man’s World America where womens’ role is that of submissive sex slaves and cooks, which is more or less what radical Muslims like ISIS believe, ironically.
I’ve been saying this forever: Christianity and Islam are opposite sides of the same coin. Proponents of each want to return us to a simpler, much more deranged time and both enslave the human mind.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently pointed out this similarity, and, not surprisingly, conservative Christians were a little peeved about being compared to their mortal enemies—even though they clearly have so much nonsense in common.
“Extreme views about women? We expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world,” Clinton told a crowd on Aug. 27, “but it’s a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States, yet they espouse out-of-date and out-of-touch policies. They are dead wrong for 21st-century America. We are going forward, we are not going back.”
I don’t even care for Hilldog, but that was dead-on and it took some lady-balls to say it.
Bill Maher made the same point on his HBO show on what happened to be the fourteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, noting, “If you say, as Kim Davis and her ilk, and Ted Cruz and all those people say that actually ‘I can ignore the rule of man because the rule book of God said’—then you are Iran. Then you are Saudi Arabia. Then you are Sharia law.”
Boom! Roasted. Thank you, Mr. Maher.
Everyone, especially Christians, are worried about the Islamic caliphate that ISIS is trying to build in the Middle East. But they’re just jealous. They don’t want America to be free. They want a Christian caliphate to lord over us all and Biblically dictate all of our lives, even the non-believers. Especially the non-believers.
I don’t get it, hateful Christians. Aren’t we all God’s children? You may hate the gays, but they are our brothers and sisters. In his Facebook Duggar defense, Huckabee wrote, “It is precisely because we are all sinners that we need His grace and His forgiveness.”
That’s great and all, but it doesn’t make sense to hold gay people who haven’t committed any crimes against children, or anyone, to a higher standard than child-molesting predators.
If you use your religion to protect child molesters while pretending to defend wholesome family values while simultaneously attacking pop music artists for behavior that is frivolous compared to the criminal deeds committed by your own friends and family, or label immigrant groups that share your same religion as subhuman criminals, you might be a Christian American. Sorry to steal your bit, Mr. Foxworthy.
Case in point: At the tail end of a bitter political campaign summer in the U.S. that saw Republican candidates competing to outdo each other in the xenophobia category after Trump set the tone with his verbal assault on Mexicans, Pope Francis blew into town drawing a stark contrast between what Jesus allegedly taught and what fake-Christian politicians preach. He was the anti-GOP.
Just a few days after Carson said he believes a Muslim has no place in the White House, Francis kicked off Mass at a packed St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York by paying tribute to the 700 Muslim pilgrims who were crushed to death during a freaky Hajj stampede.
“I would like to express two sentiments for my Muslim brothers and sisters,” Francis said in what might as well have been Latin as far as most American Christians are concerned. “My sentiments of closeness in the face of tragedy that they suffered in Mecca. In this moment, I give assurance of my prayers. I unite myself with you all.”
And that classy humanity, that unfamiliar grace, is precisely why many American conservatives think that even the Pope is a dope—just like minorities, immigrants, poor people, young people, women and liberals. Because after nearly a decade of constant Defcon Obama Fox News freakout, the only language many conservatives understand is that of fear and rage.
It’s the same reason they’ll never forgive presidential candidate Jeb Bush for having the cajones to say that most illegal immigrants’ journeys to this country are motivated by “love.” Which, of course, is common sense to most people, including the pope.
Trump talks about desperate immigrants as criminals, and of building a massive Israeli-occupation-style wall on the Mexican border, which would primarily serve as a "bigly" expensive “Fuck You!” to our friendly southern neighbors.
Francis, on the other hand, offers them hope. The Pope sounded an actual Christian message of compassion and understanding that could not contrast more with the cynical rage of American Christians, especially conservative pundits and politicians and, of course, amateur politicians.
“Many of you have emigrated to this country at great personal cost, but in the hope of building a new life,” the pope said at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall on Sat., Sept. 26. “Do not be discouraged by whatever challenges and hardships you face.”
Challenges and hardships. He might as well have been talking about Trump, or Republicans in general, specifically. And he probably was, at least partially.
Here's the thing. Conservatives are fetus-obsessed and I’d respect that if they had as much respect for life outside of the womb, but very few are as fired-up about homelessness, poverty, capital punishment, gun violence, war and the resulting human crises like waves of refugees that we spit on and shoo away like flies.
In other words, all the issues and people Jesus would be concerned about.
That’s why this cool new pope turned down a fancy lunch at the White House during his first ever trip to the U.S. to dine with bums in D.C. instead. Because unlike the Huckabees of the world, Pope Francis keeps it real. He is an actual good person, not just pretending to be one.
The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah made this point on the heels of yet another American gun massacre on Oct. 5, saying of the paradoxical “pro-life” anti-gun-control crowd, “They’re more like comic book collectors. Human life only holds value until you take it out of the package, and then it’s worth nothing.”
Even hardass Republican presidential candidate and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently echoed that sentiment in front of a town hall crowd in New Hampshire.
“I’m pro-life and I think that if you’re pro-life, you gotta be pro-life for the whole life, not just the nine months they’re in the womb," Christie said firmly. "It’s easy to be pro-life for the nine months they’re in the womb; they haven’t done anything to disappoint us yet. They’re perfect in there. But when they get out, that’s when it gets tough. The 16-year-old teenage girl on the floor of the county lockup, addicted to heroin: I’m pro-life for her too. Her life is just as much a precious gift from God as the one in the womb.”
Wow. Granted, Christie was just pandering to a crowd from New England, which has been ravaged by heroin addiction, but, regardless, that is not the message conservative faux Christians like Huckabee, Carson, Duggar and Davis preach. Speak of the devil, The pope warned us against people like them during his U.S. visit.
“In a world where various forms of modern tyranny seek to ... use religion as a pretext for hatred and brutality,” Francis said in Philadelphia, “it is imperative that the followers of various religions join their voices in calling for peace, tolerance and respect for the dignity and rights of others.”
Amen.
I don’t believe in God, but maybe I do, because I know that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Or multiverse.
Huckabee and friends, on the other hand, probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about outer space or the possibilities of what exists out there. Because for them there is no mystery. There are no possibilities, no other worlds, other creatures. God created us all, but just us, and he’s gonna kill us all when we piss him off with enough gay activity, abortions and Beyonce performances.
But that’s not to say there are no decent Christians out there. I’m sure there are plenty. We just never see them on TV because there’s no conflict (ad revenue) there.
My buddy Fernando and his family are a great example. Their faith is their life, yet they judge no one. They named their thriving taqueria after Saint Joseph who is basically The Man in the Mexican town they hail from. He’s the saint of the local church there, or however that all works. These people abhor abortion just like the jingoistic hateful Christians do, yet they live like Jesus in that they are sweet to everyone. They even give free coffee to homeless people who come in off the freezing street in winter.
They mind their business, work harder than anyone I know and go to church on Sunday—their one free day. Yet, the Kim Davises and Donald Trumps of this country, these embarrassing self-righteous slobs, want these real Christians from Mexico to take a hike?
Good God!
One day, about a decade ago (during “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush’s utterly pointless and tragically stupid Iraq War experiment) my college roommate and I were admiring the Montana sunset when we invited a small church group on to our porch. And it wasn’t long before they made it clear that my friend and I were lousy bums for, get this, drinking beer.
We hadn’t molested any of our sisters, tortured any animals, or bombed any civilians.
But once they found out we didn't share their beliefs, it didn’t matter how sweet or hospitable we were, they just wanted to judge us and tell us all about our impending trip to Hell. They even sent us a postcard a week later to hammer home the point and get one last jab in—to finish us off, so to speak. (Hey, if Davis can have an epic boxing theme, so can I!)
Best of all, Westboro Baptist Church (a.k.a. the shameless "God hates fags" family, which is notorious for crashing U.S. soldiers' funerals in order to conveniently blame their deaths on God's retribution for America's embrace of homosexuals) picketed fellow gay-hater Kim Davis' workplace for her Biblically hypocritical, adulterous lifestyle on Mon., Oct. 20.
Which means we've come full circle-jerk, America.
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of Hell as yourselves.” Matthew 23:15
Then there’s the modern American shit-kicking Christian who hates pretty much everybody. Think Ted Nugent.
Remember when people used to wear those goofy WWJD bracelets? More and more nowadays I find myself looking at these self-described Christians on television, listening to their nasty nationalistic message of exclusion (and fake victimhood) and wonder: What would Jesus do?
(You know, assuming he was a real guy and half as big a sweetheart as his fans claim.) Would he be proud of these assholes?
In the summer of 2014—when Israel was busy killing more than 500 babies in Gaza with the weapons, political support and indeed the blessing from our Christian nation—protests erupted along the U.S.-Mexico border as news began to spread about record numbers of incoming immigrants, mostly unaccompanied children, fleeing increased violence in Central American countries like Honduras, Guatemala, and especially El Salvador.
And by violence, I mean ISIS-like stuff: dismembering and beheading an 11-year-old school boy who refused to join a gang, for instance. And David de la O was not the exception.
Some of the literate protesters had probably read Ann Coulter’s latest book “Adios, America!,” or, ironically, enjoyed TLC’s “19 Kids & Counting."
Many of the seething crowd, no doubt, would describe themselves as Christians doing God’s work, just as their parents’ generation did when George Wallace battled the Kennedy brothers alongside KKK terrorists to try to keep Alabama school children segregated “forever” in Jesus' name.
Is this the same Jesus who advocated for poor people? We tell the world’s worst off seeking shelter and compassion in our famous melting pot nation of immigrants to fuck off and that’s Christian?
We do understand what the the Statue of Liberty symbolizes, right?
My people had to flee here because we ran out of potatoes, for fuck's sake! They weren't welcomed either and now we're as ingrained as a blood stain. Just good ol' American jerks like everyone else.
That being said, I don’t go to church or subscribe to a religion but I know for sure that hurling insults at desperate, helpless refugees fleeing death is not nice behavior. I mean, what would Jesus do?
Deuteronomy 15:11 says, “For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’”
Which brings us to Christianity’s latest culture war hero, Kentucky bumpkin Kim Davis.
On Tues., Sept. 8, the Rowan county clerk who had been jailed for refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples was released. It had only been five days, but at her televised victory lap, complete with "Rocky III" theme song, Davis acted like she hadn't seen the sun in ages. And from the looks of her, she hadn't.
Anyway, graceful it was not. But it was timely because former Arkansas governor and Fox News bloviator Mike Huckabee had already organized a rally for that day to capitalize off of Davis, whom it was assumed would still be incarcerated at the time, giving Huckabee the spotlight and opportunity to tell evangelicals and sympathetic morons how afraid to be of a tyrannical government that wants to take your guns and your Bible.
It’s ironic because none of these people have any love for Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, yet here they were using the exact same playbook as the notorious “race hustlers.” I suppose one might call these gentlemen Jesus hustlers inspired by their hero, “Reverend” Sharpton.
Just because the Western world is quickly catching up with modern times like a subduction zone fault line suddenly snapping back and releasing hundreds of years worth of accumulated pressure, some Christians feel, as Fox News likes to put it, “under attack” by inevitable American social progress. (Nevermind that even the Pope said "Who am I to judge?" when asked about gay people in 2013.)
Some of these folks, like Fox News' Bill O’Reilly, are so sensitive to their perceived victimhood that they go apeshit every Christmas when they hear of fellow Americans wishing each other “Happy Holidays!” in order to incorporate New Year’s and Hanukkah, etc. into a generic one-size-fits-all greeting.
Of course, one could simply view that as the most efficient way to cover all the bases and kindly not exclude anyone, but to conservatives, it’s a full-on assault on their most sacred beliefs.
“War on Christmas,” they call it. It’s adorable.
These anti-gay, anti-women, so-called “family values” Christmas crusaders are desperate to be taken seriously, yet their representatives in government are parading around to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” with the likes of Davis and taking thousands of selfies with former reality TV star, Family Research Council lobbyist, child molester and adulterer, Josh Duggar.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines hypocrisy as “a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion.”
Take Davis. She’s allegedly fighting to protect marriage, although it could be argued she’s really fighting to deprive other Americans of their rights. But if we take her at her word, who is she to defend the sanctity of this most holy of unions that she just so happens to have desecrated four times in a row?
This woman has been married and divorced several times and even had twins from an adulterous relationship with what I can only assume is the scarecrow from "The Wizard of Oz."
But nevermind all that. Davis could have given a 10-minute soliloquy about the wonders of welfare and no one would have batted an eye as long as she gave props to her guy Jesus.
As for Duggar, he found fame on his ever-growing family’s reality TV show, the mission of which was to spread the word of God via the airwaves to millions of unsuspecting sinner-chumps.
Which is beyond creepy when you consider what these people believe should happen after a woman is impregnated by her attacker.
And that brings us to Huckabee. This fat turd. Here’s a guy who promotes hypocritical anti-human “family values” like all the rest of them.
I’d ask why, but we know why.
Some of her lyrics aren’t “wholesome.” She’s married to that crack dealer Jay Z. But most worrisome, Bey & Jay are American Royalty, which outrages people like Huckabee who associate royalty with whiteness. The American social status quo and power structure has been “flipped, turned upside down” as The Fresh Prince might say, and some of these old-school honkies do not like it, to say the least.
Likewise, Madonna humped a stage in a wedding dress on live TV thirty damn years ago. She simulated sex—in a wedding dress!—before we even knew what AIDS and gay people were because of our refusal to acknowledge reality thanks to our lingering uptight 1950‘s Christian derp culture.
Oh, but I suppose Beyonce’s exposed skin is brown. Suspicious!
I admit rap music and misogynism aren’t exactly strangers, but the same can be said for the latter and Huckabee's GOP. Like it or not, hip-hop has been the driving force behind American pop culture for at least the last twenty five years. Take it up with the white ad executives who use that music and culture to move product. It’s not going anywhere; it’s mainstream business.
You want to try to control music in America, Mike? In the land of free speech? You’d have better luck trying to reroute the mighty Mississippi out to the Pacific.
And what about that Constitution thing conservatives are always stumbling over themselves to pretend to defend? They want the first black first lady to try to control what music Americans listen to? A black woman dictating to all these rednecks from the White House?
What if she called out Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” for being obscene? That might upset some people like Hickabee—excuse me, Huckabee—who claim to be offended by rap music.
Huckabee seemed to particularly enjoy when ‘The Nuge’ sang the following part like a sex-crazed pervert who hangs with Josh Duggar:
Well, I make the pussy purr with the stroke of my hand
They know they gettin' it from me
They know just where to go when they need their lovin' man
They know I'm doin' it for free
O-M-G!! But what about the children?!?!?!
Oh, lordy. An opportunistic bastardized-Christianity pimp warning about "obnoxious and toxic mental poison?" This guy's irony detector must be broken.
Beyonce and the first lady will have more of an impact on the future than Huckabee could ever dream of having, even if he prints out a million moronically-titled pamphlets trying to guilt gullible people into his silly, ancient belief system until the day he croaks.
If the Obamas are bad parents for not overly-policing their teenage daughters’ musical consumption, then so is everyone whose kids ever listened to Elvis. Because if you remember, the old folks thought he was an agent of the devil too, if not Lucifer himself. Ditto for the world-changing Beatles.
Ask yourself this, Mike: What is more responsible for unnecessary death and destruction in this world—pop music song lyrics, or religion? The Bible or Beyonce? Because one is definitely mental poison.
She's so sweet when she yanks on my meat
Down on the street you know she can't be beat
What the hell
For the record, that wholesome morsel is from Nugent's "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang."
The very idea of parents being able to control what music their kids listen to in the era of the Internet, mp3 players, tiny ear buds and, you know, children occasionally leaving the home to mingle with influential heathens at school, work, church, etc. is laughable, let alone trying to sway an entire nation of adderall-snorting teens to abstain from music deemed unwholesome by some supreme leader. It’s ridiculous and wholly unAmerican.
If we’re going to do that, we might as well have mandatory prayers five times a day and outlaw pornography. Where would it end—Sharia Law??
But, of course, it’s not primarily about the music—it’s about the people making the music.
And not just "uneducated" rappers. Nugent has also said Harvard's President Obama is a “subhuman mongrel.”
By now you should be sensing a theme about these "Christians."
Here’s the thing I don’t understand about folks like Huckabee, Duggar and Davis. If they believe that we are all sinners, that includes them, so why are they preaching to the rest of us? Why do they feel it is their job to play God if they have such strong faith in such an infallible deity who’s going to sort everyone out in the end anyway?
Speaking of family values hypocrites, Duggar allegedly used two Ashley Madison (adultery match-making Website) accounts to violently fuck porn stars in D. C. while away from his dingbat wife who was comforted in the belief that her sweet, devoted husband was just working hard lobbying for Jesus and smearing loving gay people he’d never met at every opportunity.
Yet he was a great guy nonetheless and immediately forgiven by his flock—including, of course, and most notably, Huckabee, who wrote in a lengthy (post-molestation/pre-prostitute news) Facebook defense of Duggar that he was just another victim of “today’s blood-thirsty media.” Blame the messenger—Fox News 101.
“Janet and I want to affirm our support for the Duggar family. Josh’s actions when he was an underage teen are as he described them himself, 'inexcusable,' but that doesn’t mean 'unforgivable,'” Huckabee pleaded online, adding that even “good people” do “disgusting things.”
Which is a sentiment that one might think would also apply to homosexuals (designed the way they are by God, to use Christian lingo) and not just a serial sexual deviant like Duggar, but, oddly and predictably, no.
Hilariously, Huckabee’s “underage teen” defense evaporated just a few weeks later when adult Josh Duggar made news yet again when his Ashley Madison accounts were revealed.
But, presumably, Duggar was “good” to begin with because of his awesome faith in Jesus Christ, and the gays are somehow irredeemable evil spawns of Satan who willingly chose an unrighteous, icky path.
Then, on Dec. 23, Huckabee surprisingly reversed course and threw his old church buddy under the bus, feeding Iowa radio host Simon Conway a little sample of Arkansas horseshit.
"I really didn’t support Josh," Huckabee farted into the microphone. "I supported his parents, if you’ll go back and look at what I said. There’s no support for what he did."
No?
"He did some things that totally defy everything he supposedly stood for."
No shit??
Best of all, while Huckabee was railing against homos and shaming parents (namely, the Obamas) who let their kids listen to Beyonce’s music—not to mention taking enough selfies with Duggar to fill a child rapist’s jail cell—he’s the guy who raised his son David, in God’s bright forgiving glory, to be a dog torturer.
So, in 1998, Huckabee’s then 17-year-old son was kicked out of an Arkansas Boy Scout camp for allegedly killing a dog with another teenager. But it gets worse. According to a news article citing young Huckabee’s accomplice’s father, the dog was at one point “hung over a limb and choking.”
According to anonymous witnesses, after hanging the dog, David and his buddy slit the helpless creature's throat before stoning it to death. Huckabee’s cover story, as he told Larry King in 2007 while running for president, was that his son, the good boy that he was, was just trying to put the poor dog out of its misery.
He didn’t mention the hanging.
But, of course, that act of humanity doesn’t jibe with his son being kicked out of Scout camp.
Marcal Young, scout executive of the Caddo Area Council that operated the camp where the dog was killed said David was kicked out because he violated a Scout law: "A Scout is kind," leaving little doubt that this was more of a Jeffrey-Dahmer’s-early-days situation than the merciful act of an animal lover or self defense.
And instead of praying to God to make it all work out, Governor Huckabee subsequently covered it all up, firing the director of Arkansas’ state police for refusing to write a letter denying the local prosecutor’s request for an animal cruelty investigation.
In 2007, Newsweek quoted the former FBI chief in Little Rock, I.C. Smith, as saying, “Without question, (Huckabee) was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son.”
Just like Jim Bob Duggar. And in the same state. Wow, what a small world! No wonder their families are so close; they have so many cute crimes and cover-ups in common!
Just to be clear: Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee wants millions of parents whose teenagers enjoy Beyonce’s music to do some kind of moral inventory, yet he raised a malicious little maniac who spent a beautiful day at Boy Scout camp torturing a poor dog to death. Man's best friend.
And who knows what kinky skeletons the former governor has in his closet. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that these self-imposed morality police for Jesus always turn out to be the sickest of us all. By far.
Here’s the thing. This isn’t Yemen. The reason our founding fathers went to all the trouble of building this paradise in the first place was to create a secular society based on freedom of religion and a separation of church and state. That is the point of the whole premise: Freedom.
Yet we’ve backslid to the point where you can’t even run for president unless you tout your Christian bona fides, no matter how exaggerated or fictional they are. Muslims are unofficially banned from the White House by the same disingenuous twats who are whining about religious freedom as a way to discriminate against gays.
Take Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson.
Hey, what can you say about Dr. Carson? The man loves rhetoric.
And a few months after Carson said he "would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation," Cruz repeatedly stumped to small crowds all over Iowa, saying, "Any president who doesn't begin every day on his knees isn't fit to be commander-in-chief of this nation."
Insert (get it?) blowjob joke here -->.
American kids have to pledge allegiance “under God” before starting school everyday, Muslim American kids have no hopes of ever being president and we’re supposed to believe Christianity is under attack in this country?
Societies that are rigidly ruled by old-timey religious goons whom their subjects resent are called theocracies. It’s what they have in Iran and Saudi Arabia, that part of the world we claim to despise, yet hardcore Christians more and more aspire to be.
Conservatives always whine about the perceived loss of American exceptionalism, yet the sexy cultural things that make America unique compared to our enemy nations— gays and trans people free to be, women who are free to work, earn money, drive cars, take birth control, wear whatever they want, have promiscuous sex (like men), etc.— are precisely the things conservatives want to get rid of.
They pine for O’Reilly’s idyllic 1950‘s Man’s World America where womens’ role is that of submissive sex slaves and cooks, which is more or less what radical Muslims like ISIS believe, ironically.
I’ve been saying this forever: Christianity and Islam are opposite sides of the same coin. Proponents of each want to return us to a simpler, much more deranged time and both enslave the human mind.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently pointed out this similarity, and, not surprisingly, conservative Christians were a little peeved about being compared to their mortal enemies—even though they clearly have so much nonsense in common.
I don’t even care for Hilldog, but that was dead-on and it took some lady-balls to say it.
Bill Maher made the same point on his HBO show on what happened to be the fourteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, noting, “If you say, as Kim Davis and her ilk, and Ted Cruz and all those people say that actually ‘I can ignore the rule of man because the rule book of God said’—then you are Iran. Then you are Saudi Arabia. Then you are Sharia law.”
Boom! Roasted. Thank you, Mr. Maher.
Everyone, especially Christians, are worried about the Islamic caliphate that ISIS is trying to build in the Middle East. But they’re just jealous. They don’t want America to be free. They want a Christian caliphate to lord over us all and Biblically dictate all of our lives, even the non-believers. Especially the non-believers.
I don’t get it, hateful Christians. Aren’t we all God’s children? You may hate the gays, but they are our brothers and sisters. In his Facebook Duggar defense, Huckabee wrote, “It is precisely because we are all sinners that we need His grace and His forgiveness.”
That’s great and all, but it doesn’t make sense to hold gay people who haven’t committed any crimes against children, or anyone, to a higher standard than child-molesting predators.
If you use your religion to protect child molesters while pretending to defend wholesome family values while simultaneously attacking pop music artists for behavior that is frivolous compared to the criminal deeds committed by your own friends and family, or label immigrant groups that share your same religion as subhuman criminals, you might be a Christian American. Sorry to steal your bit, Mr. Foxworthy.
Case in point: At the tail end of a bitter political campaign summer in the U.S. that saw Republican candidates competing to outdo each other in the xenophobia category after Trump set the tone with his verbal assault on Mexicans, Pope Francis blew into town drawing a stark contrast between what Jesus allegedly taught and what fake-Christian politicians preach. He was the anti-GOP.
“I would like to express two sentiments for my Muslim brothers and sisters,” Francis said in what might as well have been Latin as far as most American Christians are concerned. “My sentiments of closeness in the face of tragedy that they suffered in Mecca. In this moment, I give assurance of my prayers. I unite myself with you all.”
And that classy humanity, that unfamiliar grace, is precisely why many American conservatives think that even the Pope is a dope—just like minorities, immigrants, poor people, young people, women and liberals. Because after nearly a decade of constant Defcon Obama Fox News freakout, the only language many conservatives understand is that of fear and rage.
It’s the same reason they’ll never forgive presidential candidate Jeb Bush for having the cajones to say that most illegal immigrants’ journeys to this country are motivated by “love.” Which, of course, is common sense to most people, including the pope.
Trump talks about desperate immigrants as criminals, and of building a massive Israeli-occupation-style wall on the Mexican border, which would primarily serve as a "bigly" expensive “Fuck You!” to our friendly southern neighbors.
Francis, on the other hand, offers them hope. The Pope sounded an actual Christian message of compassion and understanding that could not contrast more with the cynical rage of American Christians, especially conservative pundits and politicians and, of course, amateur politicians.
“Many of you have emigrated to this country at great personal cost, but in the hope of building a new life,” the pope said at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall on Sat., Sept. 26. “Do not be discouraged by whatever challenges and hardships you face.”
Here's the thing. Conservatives are fetus-obsessed and I’d respect that if they had as much respect for life outside of the womb, but very few are as fired-up about homelessness, poverty, capital punishment, gun violence, war and the resulting human crises like waves of refugees that we spit on and shoo away like flies.
In other words, all the issues and people Jesus would be concerned about.
That’s why this cool new pope turned down a fancy lunch at the White House during his first ever trip to the U.S. to dine with bums in D.C. instead. Because unlike the Huckabees of the world, Pope Francis keeps it real. He is an actual good person, not just pretending to be one.
The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah made this point on the heels of yet another American gun massacre on Oct. 5, saying of the paradoxical “pro-life” anti-gun-control crowd, “They’re more like comic book collectors. Human life only holds value until you take it out of the package, and then it’s worth nothing.”
Even hardass Republican presidential candidate and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently echoed that sentiment in front of a town hall crowd in New Hampshire.
“I’m pro-life and I think that if you’re pro-life, you gotta be pro-life for the whole life, not just the nine months they’re in the womb," Christie said firmly. "It’s easy to be pro-life for the nine months they’re in the womb; they haven’t done anything to disappoint us yet. They’re perfect in there. But when they get out, that’s when it gets tough. The 16-year-old teenage girl on the floor of the county lockup, addicted to heroin: I’m pro-life for her too. Her life is just as much a precious gift from God as the one in the womb.”
Wow. Granted, Christie was just pandering to a crowd from New England, which has been ravaged by heroin addiction, but, regardless, that is not the message conservative faux Christians like Huckabee, Carson, Duggar and Davis preach. Speak of the devil, The pope warned us against people like them during his U.S. visit.
Amen.
I don’t believe in God, but maybe I do, because I know that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Or multiverse.
Huckabee and friends, on the other hand, probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about outer space or the possibilities of what exists out there. Because for them there is no mystery. There are no possibilities, no other worlds, other creatures. God created us all, but just us, and he’s gonna kill us all when we piss him off with enough gay activity, abortions and Beyonce performances.
But that’s not to say there are no decent Christians out there. I’m sure there are plenty. We just never see them on TV because there’s no conflict (ad revenue) there.
My buddy Fernando and his family are a great example. Their faith is their life, yet they judge no one. They named their thriving taqueria after Saint Joseph who is basically The Man in the Mexican town they hail from. He’s the saint of the local church there, or however that all works. These people abhor abortion just like the jingoistic hateful Christians do, yet they live like Jesus in that they are sweet to everyone. They even give free coffee to homeless people who come in off the freezing street in winter.
They mind their business, work harder than anyone I know and go to church on Sunday—their one free day. Yet, the Kim Davises and Donald Trumps of this country, these embarrassing self-righteous slobs, want these real Christians from Mexico to take a hike?
Good God!
One day, about a decade ago (during “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush’s utterly pointless and tragically stupid Iraq War experiment) my college roommate and I were admiring the Montana sunset when we invited a small church group on to our porch. And it wasn’t long before they made it clear that my friend and I were lousy bums for, get this, drinking beer.
We hadn’t molested any of our sisters, tortured any animals, or bombed any civilians.
But once they found out we didn't share their beliefs, it didn’t matter how sweet or hospitable we were, they just wanted to judge us and tell us all about our impending trip to Hell. They even sent us a postcard a week later to hammer home the point and get one last jab in—to finish us off, so to speak. (Hey, if Davis can have an epic boxing theme, so can I!)
Which means we've come full circle-jerk, America.
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of Hell as yourselves.” Matthew 23:15
Sunday, June 30, 2013
True Colors Shining Through
Oh, Paula.
You are utterly full of shit.
For some reason, that bothers me more than the likely possibility that the celebrity chef and former Food Network star is a racist.
When I first heard about her current troubles, I wasn’t shocked at all. In fact, I’d be more surprised if Deen, a 66-year-old Southerner, didn’t cherish some idiotic outdated prejudices.
But her current stance of half-apology, half-Southern fried pride is not working for me.
When she started bawling and playing the victim during Monday’s Today Show interview, giving the performance of a lifetime while proclaiming, “I am not an actor,” I felt weirdly offended.
Like, with all due respect, Ms. Deen, fuck you.
During the introduction for the Today Show interview, Deen was quoted from her May 17 discrimination lawsuit deposition acknowledging that she’s used the n-word on several occasions.
When asked, “Have you ever used the n-word yourself?” Deen’s reply was, “Yes, of course,” as if to say, that’s a silly question—doesn’t everybody use it every day?
Deen said in her deposition that she used the slur after being robbed by a black guy while working at a bank in 1987, but when asked, she admitted having used the n-word on other occasions, saying “I'm sure I have, but it's been a very long time.”
Deen also admitted to telling the sort of “off-color jokes” involving the n-word that, of course, “we have all told.”
To her credit, she was very candid during the recent deposition, admitting to repeated use of the king mother of racial epithets.
But during her TV interview Monday, Deen lied to Matt Lauer, saying she only used the n-word once in her entire life—twenty six years ago, when she recounted the bank robbery story to her presumably racist husband.
When Lauer asked if she ever used the word at other times, which she admitted in her deposition, Deen shook her head “no” emphatically, like a lying three-year-old who has the evidence of guilt all over her face or written in permanent marker on the walls.
So after being surprisingly truthful in her deposition, she goes on national TV and lies to millions of us while putting on a whole poor-me performance as if she’s the victim?
“There is someone evil out there who stole what I have because they wanted it,” Deen whined to Lauer.
She even complained about the language used by young blacks in her kitchens as a way to deflect or justify her own foul mouth (even though black cooks calling each other “nigga” is a little different from their boss, an old white Southern lady—who, according to her deposition, prefers “really Southern plantation style” weddings with “little niggers” serving food in bow ties—using the same word to talk about her employees).
And Deen is sort of a big deal. Jay-Z once wrote, “I’m not a businessman—I’m a business, man!”
Well, the same applies to Paula Deen.
She’s one of these walking brands like Oprah or Martha Stewart, which means she has people. And when her original Today Show interview was cancelled last Friday, even though Deen was already in her New York hotel room the day before, I’m sure it was because her people pulled the plug for business reasons—trying to weigh whether it was best to apologize or not, and if so, in what format, etc.
But one thing’s for sure, Deen didn’t skip it because she was “exhausted,” as Lauer said Monday had been her excuse, and she definitely didn’t take the extra time to hire some PR wizards to help her strategically design her apology, as evidenced by Monday’s subsequent shitshow.
Actually, what ultimately piqued my interest was when Deen cancelled on the Today Show and pissed off the staff. Lauer was visibly bitter on the air last Friday, having to explain why they suddenly had no guest—his dick waving in the wind.
Then Deen released an awkward videotaped apology on YouTube that was quickly taken down, but not before I’d enjoyed a screening. In it, a seemingly unrehearsed and disheveled Deen rambles briefly in an awkward way that ultimately carried over to her Today Show interview.
My favorite part was when the Southern sweetheart unwittingly sabotaged what should have been a carefully crafted apology toward the end of the interview with Lauer, becoming emotionally unhinged and basically admitting she's a lost generation backwoods bumpkin who cherishes some of the South’s nastier old traditions.
“I is what I is and I’m not changing,” croaked a tearful, defiant, bloated Deen.
Then, just for good measure, she got all Biblical on our asses.
It’s hard to say why (except that it’s the go-to move for any phony-baloney Jesus Freak/cult leader/politician who’s caught sinning whilst declaring everyone else evil), but maybe she knew that the interview was a total disaster and this was her last ditch effort to get anyone’s sympathy—lock up the Christian vote, so to speak.
“If there is anyone out there that has never said something that they wish they could take back, please pick up that stone… and throw it so hard that it kills me.”
She used that one twice in a row while sobbing pathetically. Think of an undeserving rich woman losing a lottery ticket down the drain and you’ll understand the kind of tears that were shed. I’ve never felt less sympathy for a crying grandmother.
Lady, you’re still fabulously wealthy, stop crying like a penniless baby.
As my grandmother used to say, “Cut the crap!”
As of Monday, only the Food Network and Virginia-based pork producer Smithfield Foods had dumped Deen on the heels of her secret folksy racist persona becoming public knowledge, but now, a dozen of her valued “partners” have told the famous chef to take a hike.
But unlike how Deen’s apology tour trainwreck has caused her former business partners to head for the hills, her ignorant fans—who believe in an America where we can call black people niggers while they serve us food—have flocked to support her.
For what it’s worth, I imagine these folks have prized year-old Chik-Fil-A leftovers in their freezers—trophies from an early battle in the great American Culture War, when the fast food company publicly supported “traditional marriage” as a way of sticking it to gay people just to be assholes, and subsequently experienced a Southern sales bonanza last summer.
In fact, so many rabid lunatics from Red America are so passionate about defending the n-word as a thing that people say, an unprecedented second “Paula Deen Cruise” had to be added for 2014.
Yep, that's right: Paula Deen has a cruise. It’s a thing, apparently. Eight days on a boat in the beautiful Caribbean with a bunch of fat bigots.
Praise Jesus.
I love the irony. Conservative “family values” type people mourn the death of traditional America, saying political correctness has ruined everything because slobs like Paula Deen have seemingly lost the freedom to call black folks niggers.
And yet, Deen’s former employee who brought the discrimination lawsuit is the one who’s evil?
What would Jesus do, y’all? Keep it real and own his mistakes, or lie while throwing everyone else under the bus to protect some profits?
One thing’s for sure: this is a clear-cut case of political correctness run amuck because culture warrior Bill O’Reilly declared that racism in America was destroyed by the unifying powers of 9/11—despite logic, Paula Deen, George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin, and millions of unintelligent Obama-haters.
Some people would like to think racism isn’t a thing anymore. How convenient. I wonder what Paula Deen would like..
“What I would really like is a bunch of little niggers to wear long-sleeve white shirts, black shorts and black bow ties. You know, in the Shirley Temple days, they used to tap dance around. Now, that would be a true Southern wedding, wouldn’t it?”
Deen’s love of the n-word is no bueno but it pales in comparison to the kind of racism being practiced by Donald Trump and millions of like-minded “birthers” who have continuously charged President Obama of being nothing more than a fraudulent Muslim monkey who snuck into Harvard, and therefore the presidency, via affirmative action.
Bill Maher says these people, along with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—who played a critical role Tuesday in striking down the part of LBJ’s Voting Rights Act that polices the racist South and prevents them from inventing modern Jim Crow era tricks to disenfranchise black voters—are the real racists.
“Just the fact that (Scalia) talks about black people voting as an entitlement, that is so much more racist than anything Paula Deen ever said," Maher said Friday, keeping it pretty real, as usual, on HBO’s ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’.
Maher thinks all the negative attention Deen’s received is overblown compared to “real racism.”
“We have replaced having a conversation about race with, 'Oh, OK, liberals feel good about themselves if they make the bad person go away,'” Maher said.
“Who’s the bad person? The one we caught saying that one word. Donald Trump is a worse racist, but he gets to keep his show because he never said the word. Sarah Palin is a worse racist—she said Obama was shucking and jiving his way to victory. Newt Gingrich said he was the food stamp president. This is real racism.”
Within minutes of the Voting Rights Act being gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court last week, Southern states began changing their election laws to make it harder for minorities to vote.
You are utterly full of shit.
For some reason, that bothers me more than the likely possibility that the celebrity chef and former Food Network star is a racist.
When I first heard about her current troubles, I wasn’t shocked at all. In fact, I’d be more surprised if Deen, a 66-year-old Southerner, didn’t cherish some idiotic outdated prejudices.
But her current stance of half-apology, half-Southern fried pride is not working for me.
Like, with all due respect, Ms. Deen, fuck you.
During the introduction for the Today Show interview, Deen was quoted from her May 17 discrimination lawsuit deposition acknowledging that she’s used the n-word on several occasions.
When asked, “Have you ever used the n-word yourself?” Deen’s reply was, “Yes, of course,” as if to say, that’s a silly question—doesn’t everybody use it every day?
Deen said in her deposition that she used the slur after being robbed by a black guy while working at a bank in 1987, but when asked, she admitted having used the n-word on other occasions, saying “I'm sure I have, but it's been a very long time.”
Deen also admitted to telling the sort of “off-color jokes” involving the n-word that, of course, “we have all told.”
To her credit, she was very candid during the recent deposition, admitting to repeated use of the king mother of racial epithets.
But during her TV interview Monday, Deen lied to Matt Lauer, saying she only used the n-word once in her entire life—twenty six years ago, when she recounted the bank robbery story to her presumably racist husband.
So after being surprisingly truthful in her deposition, she goes on national TV and lies to millions of us while putting on a whole poor-me performance as if she’s the victim?
“There is someone evil out there who stole what I have because they wanted it,” Deen whined to Lauer.
She even complained about the language used by young blacks in her kitchens as a way to deflect or justify her own foul mouth (even though black cooks calling each other “nigga” is a little different from their boss, an old white Southern lady—who, according to her deposition, prefers “really Southern plantation style” weddings with “little niggers” serving food in bow ties—using the same word to talk about her employees).
And Deen is sort of a big deal. Jay-Z once wrote, “I’m not a businessman—I’m a business, man!”
She’s one of these walking brands like Oprah or Martha Stewart, which means she has people. And when her original Today Show interview was cancelled last Friday, even though Deen was already in her New York hotel room the day before, I’m sure it was because her people pulled the plug for business reasons—trying to weigh whether it was best to apologize or not, and if so, in what format, etc.
But one thing’s for sure, Deen didn’t skip it because she was “exhausted,” as Lauer said Monday had been her excuse, and she definitely didn’t take the extra time to hire some PR wizards to help her strategically design her apology, as evidenced by Monday’s subsequent shitshow.
Actually, what ultimately piqued my interest was when Deen cancelled on the Today Show and pissed off the staff. Lauer was visibly bitter on the air last Friday, having to explain why they suddenly had no guest—his dick waving in the wind.
My favorite part was when the Southern sweetheart unwittingly sabotaged what should have been a carefully crafted apology toward the end of the interview with Lauer, becoming emotionally unhinged and basically admitting she's a lost generation backwoods bumpkin who cherishes some of the South’s nastier old traditions.
“I is what I is and I’m not changing,” croaked a tearful, defiant, bloated Deen.
Then, just for good measure, she got all Biblical on our asses.
“If there is anyone out there that has never said something that they wish they could take back, please pick up that stone… and throw it so hard that it kills me.”
She used that one twice in a row while sobbing pathetically. Think of an undeserving rich woman losing a lottery ticket down the drain and you’ll understand the kind of tears that were shed. I’ve never felt less sympathy for a crying grandmother.
Lady, you’re still fabulously wealthy, stop crying like a penniless baby.
As my grandmother used to say, “Cut the crap!”
As of Monday, only the Food Network and Virginia-based pork producer Smithfield Foods had dumped Deen on the heels of her secret folksy racist persona becoming public knowledge, but now, a dozen of her valued “partners” have told the famous chef to take a hike.
But unlike how Deen’s apology tour trainwreck has caused her former business partners to head for the hills, her ignorant fans—who believe in an America where we can call black people niggers while they serve us food—have flocked to support her.
Yep, that's right: Paula Deen has a cruise. It’s a thing, apparently. Eight days on a boat in the beautiful Caribbean with a bunch of fat bigots.
Praise Jesus.
I love the irony. Conservative “family values” type people mourn the death of traditional America, saying political correctness has ruined everything because slobs like Paula Deen have seemingly lost the freedom to call black folks niggers.
And yet, Deen’s former employee who brought the discrimination lawsuit is the one who’s evil?
What would Jesus do, y’all? Keep it real and own his mistakes, or lie while throwing everyone else under the bus to protect some profits?
One thing’s for sure: this is a clear-cut case of political correctness run amuck because culture warrior Bill O’Reilly declared that racism in America was destroyed by the unifying powers of 9/11—despite logic, Paula Deen, George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin, and millions of unintelligent Obama-haters.
Some people would like to think racism isn’t a thing anymore. How convenient. I wonder what Paula Deen would like..
Deen’s love of the n-word is no bueno but it pales in comparison to the kind of racism being practiced by Donald Trump and millions of like-minded “birthers” who have continuously charged President Obama of being nothing more than a fraudulent Muslim monkey who snuck into Harvard, and therefore the presidency, via affirmative action.
Bill Maher says these people, along with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—who played a critical role Tuesday in striking down the part of LBJ’s Voting Rights Act that polices the racist South and prevents them from inventing modern Jim Crow era tricks to disenfranchise black voters—are the real racists.
“Just the fact that (Scalia) talks about black people voting as an entitlement, that is so much more racist than anything Paula Deen ever said," Maher said Friday, keeping it pretty real, as usual, on HBO’s ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’.
Maher thinks all the negative attention Deen’s received is overblown compared to “real racism.”
“We have replaced having a conversation about race with, 'Oh, OK, liberals feel good about themselves if they make the bad person go away,'” Maher said.
“Who’s the bad person? The one we caught saying that one word. Donald Trump is a worse racist, but he gets to keep his show because he never said the word. Sarah Palin is a worse racist—she said Obama was shucking and jiving his way to victory. Newt Gingrich said he was the food stamp president. This is real racism.”
Within minutes of the Voting Rights Act being gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court last week, Southern states began changing their election laws to make it harder for minorities to vote.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Conspiracy Season: 2012 Election
Well, overlord Obama has won re-election despite a mountain of conservative conspiracy theories.
I have to give Fox News credit for ignoring the desperate lunacy of political evil genius Karl Rove, and ultimately acquiescing to reality Tuesday night.
Rove, of course, served as George W. Bush’s top political advisor, helping to destroy John Kerry in 2004 by somehow turning his Vietnam service into a negative, despite the fact that Republicans loathe draft-dodging types and Bush never made it anywhere near Vietnam.
On election night Tuesday, Rove had to juggle the weirdness of being a Fox News commentator who was also running an anti-Obama SuperPAC, the goal of which was to get Mitt Romney elected the 45th president of the United States.
The New York Times’ David Carr described the tension in an article yesterday:
Leading up to the election, Fox News spent two straight months calling President Obama a liar regarding the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya. What’s ironic is that, of the dozens of conservative conspiracy theories, this was the only one where there might actually be some there there.
But it’s hard to take conservative media seriously after trying so desperately to sniff out so many other, lamer conspiracies while inciting fear, paranoia and hatred in the misinformation process.
For instance, GOP ringleader and hypocrite former opiate addict Rush Limbaugh said he thinks the shitstorm caused by an American-made anti-Islam movie was a conspiracy “set off” by the U.S. government.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The Oct. 5 jobs report came as good news to President Obama. The national unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent for the first time since taking office in January 2009. One year ago, unemployment was at 8.9 percent.
The continuously high unemployment rate has been an albatross around Obama’s neck, indicating economic stagnation, but the new lower rate spelled progress, albeit slowly, which could only mean one thing to conservatives: Conspiracy.
Just 48 hours after the deadly Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, I was doing some channel surfing when something that NBC’s Richard Engel said about repressed Muslims on the other side of the world struck me as familiar.
Speaking from Cairo, Engel said that widespread sentiment among Muslims there, and all over the Middle East, is that the U.S. government is responsible for secretly circulating the anti-Islam video that led to widespread protests and violence throughout the region, citing as evidence of the conspiracy, along with the recent American-made video, instances of U.S. troops peeing on Qurans and Taliban corpses, and crazy Florida “pastor” Terry Jones, who threatened to burn Qurans in front of media cameras last year, and apparently helped circulate this video, The Innocence of Muslims.
“They think the United States is secretly paying for not only this movie, but lots of activities like this,” Engel said. “They think it is part of a hidden agenda, a secret plot where the U.S. condemns this kind of thing, but secretly funds organizations like this.”
“And they believe (the video) is evidence that the U.S secretly wants this in order to undermine Islam,” Engel explained.
And as Engel pointed out, anti-West conspiracy theories aren’t only popular in the Mid-East.
“It’s the same kind of mentality you have in North Korea, by the way,” Engel said. “It’s not just in the Middle East. It’s something that’s indicative when you have a totalitarian regime.”
North Korea is a great example. Look how paranoid the people are. It’s like a prison where the inmates are so neglected, yet brainwashed, that they worship the warden who starves them, and wail in the streets when he dies. They live in their own surreality. It’s Bizarro World.
It’s not at all unlike the millions of Americans who saturate themselves with conservative media that tells them the president’s goal is to pervert and subvert America.
“I was in North Korea and I spoke to the miners we worked with and they were convinced that American school children, everyday, wake up plotting how to bring down North Korea,” Engel explained. “And when I told them that is really not the case ... they just didn’t believe me.”
But Engel also said that Egyptian authorities reinforce the conspiracy theory by cracking down on protesters when protesting is supposed to be something the U.S. encourages. It makes it seem like the U.S. has something to hide and only convinces “those who have a conspiratorial mind that they are correct,” Engel said.
Engel went on to explain the popular local sentiment.
“Why else would the Egyptian authorities be fighting back, using American tear gas—because once again, they are firing American tear gas on these people here—if they didn’t have something to hide, if they weren’t defending some sort of hidden, secret conspiracy?”
Sort of like how the “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theory seemed proven, some would say, by President Bush’s convenient use of it as an excuse to finish a war his father started with Iraq. In other words, if you already believe a grand conspiracy, it’s not such a long leap to find a supposed motive because your mind wants to believe in and find evidence that might support the theory.
The reason conservatives are so freaked out about Obama is twofold: America has a rich history of racism, and conservative media exploits and harvests that latent racism for fucktons of money. They invent and perpetuate Armageddon themes like Chuck Norris’ Thousand Years of Darkness ad until the folks who get all their information from these sources are convinced that our president sympathizes with terrorists who kill Americans.
In an ominous fear-mercial, Norris indirectly calls the Obama administration “evil,” warning that “our great country and freedom are under attack,” and that, of course, “it may be lost forever” if Romney can’t find enough old white people to vote for him.
“We know you love your family and your freedom as much as Gena and I do,” Norris deadpans while creepily clutching his wife's hand in a garage somewhere. “And it is because of that we can no longer sit quietly, or stand on the sidelines, and watch our country go the way of socialism, or something much worse.”
Something much worse? What could that be? Let’s consult the major conservative conspiracy theories. The answer could be any of the following, or any combination of the following:
• Obama is a Muslim
• Obama is not an American.
• Obama is a terrorist-sympathizer.
• Obama is helping the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrate the U.S. government, via Hillary Clinton’s Muslim aide, to impose sharia law.
• U.S. public schools and colleges are liberal mind-control factories that fail to teach the truth about our 6,000-year-old planet.
• The media is controlled by liberals who hate conservatives and not only doesn’t treat them fairly, but conspires against them at every turn.
• Obama’s father was some other guy and his mom was a fat slut, etc. (Dinesh D'Souza: Obama’s America 2016 documentary)
• The Obama administration controls weather forecasts and climate scientists. Global warming is a liberal hoax.
• Obama spread the video that pissed off Muslims to sow Mid-East turmoil and make green energy viable.
• The Obama administration influences the Bureau of Labor Statistics to lie about the unemployment rate—but just this once. Where were they during the September 2010 election when unemployment was 9.5 percent?
“This inherent distrust seems to permeate every corner of the Obama record,” writes Dashiell Bennett of the Atlantic Wire. “Rather than argue that the President is out of touch with most Americans, some must go further and insist that he is not an American at all. Increased Democratic turnout sways the election? Voter fraud. Miscounting the size of crowds at public events? The media is bending over backwards for their favorite liberal. Convention events canceled due to the weather? The National Weather Service does what they're told. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court decides a tough case in the President's favor? He was blackmailed.”
There are dozens of major GOP conspiracy theories. So many that they overlap each other. Fox News and others have so regularly carpet bombed their audience with conspiracy theories that they're left pissed off, paranoid, vulnerable and gullible. At this point, they'll believe anything.
It reminds me of the hit HBO show “The Wire,” specifically, when Det. Bunk Moreland tricked a naïve young suspect into confessing by telling him a Xerox machine is a lie-detector. “The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” he explains with a smirk.
Well, it’s true with modern day conservatives: The crazier the conspiracy theory, the more popular it is.
Exhibit A:
“Now my question is,” Limbaugh asked his self-described ditto-head radio listeners on Sept. 20, “Could it be—feeding this false narrative—that Obama is setting off these protests in the Middle East? Had this film lie never been told, had the regime behaved in a more adult and responsible manner, would there be all this chaos around our embassies in the Middle East?”
Limbaugh agreed with rioting Middle East Muslims, saying on his show that Obama incited them with the video, insinuating that the “administration” had something “to do with it,” comparing the president to mischievous cartoon child, Bart Simpson (“Nobody saw me do it; you can’t prove anything; I didn’t do it”).
Of course, bad Bart impression aside, Limbaugh gave an idiotized fantasy version of events that didn’t make any sense at any point. He implied that rioting Muslims were doing so because of lingering resentment over Obama killing bin Laden (despite the fact that there was never any backlash from the Muslim world about bin Laden’s death), and then exposing them to a video (that they already knew about), which led to anti-American violence and helped Obama in a way that was unclear.
Of course, Limbaugh didn’t mention the late abu Yahya al Libi, al Qaeda’s No. 2 man who was vaporized in an American drone blast this past June in Pakistan and, according to leaflets left at the scene of the attack in Benghazi, is the real reason for a planned, coordinated strike on our personnel there. Mr. Libi was from Libya. (The attack in Libya is alleged to have been orchestrated by Ansar al-Sharia, a group supported by al Qaeda. The movie protests were most likely used as cover for the attack.)
“So you got Obama, spiking the football, bragging about killing bin Laden, and then inciting these people with this video, telling them there’s this video that some American loony tune made,” Limbaugh said before adding a sarcastic Obama impression, saying, “Yeah, ‘We didn’t have anything to do with it. My administration had nothing to do with it. We didn’t do it.’”
So Obama’s covert agents spread an amateur film to Middle East media outlets? Usually these conspiracy theories have some round-about way of making sense to their believers, but I couldn’t figure out how Obama benefitted from “feeding this false narrative,” by throwing “gasoline on a simmering fire,” as Limbaugh put it.
“And so this is the price that a desperate regime trying to hang on to power—and sadly for the world, the more desperate Obama gets, the more damage he inflicts on the rest of the world!” Limbaugh huffed and puffed. “By blaming this video, that makes them mad.”
By blaming the video, that makes them mad? I’m sure the video itself was plenty to make them mad. It supposedly portrays the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a bit of a dickhead. And Muslims have traditionally been a little sensitive when it comes to satirical renderings of their prophet, to say the least.
We’ve seen how similar situations have gone over in the past, but I’ll give Limbaugh the benefit of the doubt and assume the Salman Rushdie and Danish cartoon debacles slipped his delusional mind. There’s nothing new or shocking about this. Half the world is free to express ourselves and have poor taste, while the other half— tortured and shackled—can’t even grasp the notion.
What’s really happening is that by blaming the video, it makes conservatives mad—not Muslims.
A sane conservative could easily argue that the Obama administration used the video protests as cover for several days to avoid calling the Libyan attack a coordinated terrorist strike because it was election season here. A sane conservative could ask why security wasn’t beefed up more at our Mid-East posts on Sept. 11. There are plenty of critical questions to ask this administration about the attack in Benghazi, yet conspiracy theories are what dominate the conservative airwaves.
As always, no angry Muslims waited to figure out who was to blame. The offensive material was released online in the free world by the video’s creators, who wanted to incite the Muslim world. They sent it to Egyptian media, which, like ours, has goofy characters with crooked interests, some of whom exploited it and attributed it to the U.S. government, and the shitshow began. Violence would have resulted regardless of who’s to blame for the production and dissemination of the silly video.
Limbaugh blaming the U.S. government for the video’s release and/or circulation is the exact same conspiracy theory that Middle East dictators are using to get their people riled up and united against the United States to distract attention away from their own brutal regimes.
As Richard Engel explained from Cairo, “The region’s dictators are in part responsible for imposing this mentality that is a closed circuit. It is a way of looking at the world that sees it through a conspiratorial paradigm. And that was convenient for the dictators because it got people hating the West, hating Israel, hating America, and not hating their own leaders who presented themselves as the only thing that could protect the people of this region from this onslaught that was coming in from the outside, and those mentalities don’t die easily.”
Limbaugh is now arguing the same thing that propagandized people in the Mid-East are! The video was an inside job. Muslims who think the U.S. government is behind the video believe the goal is to undermine Islam. But Limbaugh is preaching to conservatives who think Obama is in alignment with the Muslim Brotherhood, who believe he “pals around with” and “sympathizes” with the jihadists who kill Americans.
But why would Obama want to piss off his Muslim buddies? It didn’t add up. How do dead ambassadors and terrorist attacks on American interests help Obama?
The answer finally came on Oct. 9 when Limbaugh told his listeners that Obama “privately” wants turmoil in the Middle East, so that American oil supplies will be disrupted, thereby causing an American green energy revolution. Aha! Of course.
“We have a president who is very content … and an energy secretary, Steven Chu, who want the price of gasoline to get up and go higher,” because “they’re big believers in this green energy hoax,” Limbaugh said.
“Privately, that’s exactly what (Obama) wants,” Limbaugh said, referring to a hypothetical situation where “tumult in the Middle East” during Obama’s presidency “interrupts oil supplies to this country.”
Limbaugh said that “in a free market, nobody would turn to” green energy because it’s “so expensive.” But “if you get fossil fuel prices up to ten bucks a gallon, eight bucks, whatever,” Limbaugh reasoned, “then green becomes more attractive, and with government subsidies, they could get the price of green energy to lower than gasoline if gasoline prices skyrocket.”
Great Scott!
“These guys are getting exactly what they want,” Limbaugh said about Obama, Chu, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “This is who they are. They gonna bring this country down.”
So just to be clear: According to Limbaugh—and, therefore, millions of like-minded Americans—President Obama’s terrorist-friendly regime circulated the anti-Islam movie because although it undermines Islam, which is the president’s very own secret faith, it also helps his American green energy conspiracy prosper, which is apparently more important than aiding his secret terrorist allies.
Gotcha.
The way Limbaugh chooses his words would be admirable if his interests weren’t purely malignant. He takes extreme care in crafting his rhetorical weaponry. It’s designed manipulation with a purpose.
Limbaugh refers to the Obama administration as a regime. It automatically makes one think of a Middle Eastern, Muslim dictator. After eight straight years of George W. Bush referring to Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, we’re very familiar with the term, but having it applied to the U.S. government is new.
By using a word that’s usually reserved to describe America’s enemies to describe our own government, Limbaugh is trying to create a distortion. It’s meant to help people subconsciously draw the same conclusion as Chuck Norris’ ad: Obama is evil. He’s a foreign enemy trying to destroy our beloved Christian nation under God.
As you’ll see by the following definitions, Bush used the word regime appropriately:
Calling the Obama administration a regime is all a part of the right’s campaign to discredit the president as unAmerican. They question everything from his birth certificate to his faith. I don’t think it’s insignificant that he’s the first black president in a country where half the people fought passionately to defend the enslavement of black people just 150 years ago.
Words matter. It’s the reason conservative media referred to the president as candidate Obama during the campaign. It’s the reason health care reform is a “government takeover” that’s been “rammed down our throats.” It’s propaganda. It plays on our emotions and biggest fears.
In America’s case, we fear Muslim terrorists. We’re so easily manipulated post-9/11. Media outlets understand this and they ride it all the way to ratings and financial glory to the detriment of the truth, our political discourse, and our democracy.
And it certainly doesn’t help that the president's strange African name frames a middle name that he shares with a famous, now-deposed despot. It’s too valuable to many conservative figures not to use regularly. Despite the custom of ignoring middle names, he’s Barack Hussein Obama!
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was no stranger to GOP conspiracy theories about President Obama. Despite zero evidence, Romney repeated the false Fox News meme that Obama goes around the world “apologizing for America” and sympathizing with our enemies, despite the killing of bin Laden and an unprecedented uptick in drone strikes that have wiped out more al Qaeda members than President Bush ever dreamed.
Then, despite a 9/11 anniversary truce that both presidential campaigns agreed to honor until midnight, Camp Romney preempted the deadline and released a statement based on a backwards timeline just hours after the Benghazi attack, which wasted no time politically capitalizing on the deaths of American personnel, saying that the Obama administration was responsible for independent statements from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo earlier in the day, before the attack.
“It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” Romney’s gun-jumping statement said, referring to a preventative message put out by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo earlier that day as crowds began to gather outside in protest of the American-made, inflammatory movie.
In response to Egyptian media accounts of the movie, a statement titled “U.S. Embassy Condemns Religious Incitement” was posted on the website of the Embassy of the United States Cairo, Egypt, along with some similarly themed tweets. The website message read:
“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions … Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”
Although the message wasn't cleared by the White House and was put out before the Benghazi attack, according to Romney's campaign, it was a clear cut case of Obama sympathizing with terrorists who kill Americans, despite the fact that nobody had been killed yet when the message was posted.
But, really, why so many conspiracy theories among the right?
Well, consider that most Americans get their information from the television. And despite conservatives whining about the unfair “mainstream media,” their “fair and balanced” network is consistently the most watched cable news network in the country, by far. (I’m convinced it’s a big reason Americans will end up just as we’re depicted in Mike Judge’s prophetic Idiocracy.)
The television. That's how so many people come to believe in the same crazy crap. People really believe they’re getting news from Fox News. And therein lies the problem. It’s not news; it’s a political propaganda and entertainment machine. But that’s confusing, no?
It reminds me of that Dave Chappelle comedy bit about women who dress like whores, but then act surprised and offended when a guy hollers at them like a piece of meat.
“’Just because I’m dressed this way does not make me a whore,’” Chappelle says in the bit, imitating an upset lady. “Which is true. Gentlemen, that is true. Just because they dress a certain way doesn’t mean they are a certain way, but ladies, you must understand that that is fuckin’ confusing.”
People who don’t know it’s not news, or refuse to believe it, go on subjecting themselves to conspiracy theories galore. Propaganda. It’s why Richard Engel can’t convince people on the streets of Pyongyang that Americans aren’t plotting to destroy them any more than he can convince Muslims on the streets of Cairo that the U.S. government isn’t responsible for an amateur video.
But how to thwart all the misinformation and paranoia that repressed people with no rights and American conservatives love to consume? Richard Engel offered his opinion for a solution.
“They need education, they need more free thinking,” Engel said, “and they need to break out of that conspiracy theory.”
President Obama commented on the anti-Islam movie fallout at the UN on Sept. 25, drawing a distinction between the West’s free speech and the shackled minds of the Muslim world, saying, “As president of our country, and commander-in-chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so.”
At the root of all the conspiracy theories, I think, is hate. Where did it all come from? Some of it is innate, but much of it is continuously harvested by the media. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi tried to take some of the blame on behalf of his colleagues.
“Mainly for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone,” Taibbi recently wrote. “In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote.”
Conservative columnist and former George W. Bush speech writer David Frum agrees. Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show Friday, Frum said that Fox News viewers who were caught off guard by Romney’s election night loss were essentially propaganda victims who had been “fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.”
Fox News’ Megyn Kelly appears to be aware of conservatives’ and their media’s rift with reality. During Fox News’ election night coverage, when Rove was dragging his heels to admit defeat, Kelly turned to him and in a very Karl, cut the crap already kind of way, asked, "Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?"
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough echoed what Frum said, essentially that the main conservative media outlets have obviously prioritized making huge shitpiles of money above telling their audience the truth.
“Conservatives have been lied to,” Scarborough said unequivocally on his “Morning Joe” show Friday. “They’ve been lied to by people who engage in niche marketing and make tens of millions of dollars engaging in niche marketing—and I’m a capitalist; God bless ‘em, they can do whatever they want to do—but that’s not an electoral strategy, that’s a business strategy..”
That was Friday morning. By Friday afternoon, CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus had resigned, citing an extramarital affair. The timing (less than three days after Obama was re-elected), and the fact that Petraeus was the top spy in the world, has raised questions and birthed brand new conspiracy theories.
Not surprisingly, today, Fox News introduced the official Petraeus conspiracy theory despite investigative journalist Bob Woodward saying on “Meet The Press” yesterday that Petraeus’ Benghazi testimony would have likely supported what the White House has already said.
“It turns out that Petraeus, a week and a half ago, went to Tripoli, Libya, and conducted his own personal inquiry into Benghazi, interviewed the station chief, actually got the base chief from Benghazi down, interviewed him, interviewed the head—I think, twice—of the Quick Reaction Force that was involved in this episode, so he knows the full story,” Woodward said.
David Gregory asked, “What was going to be the takeaway from what Petraeus would have presented had he testified?”
“I think it would, essentially, back up the White House,” Woodward said, eliminating the administration’s motive to get rid of Petraeus before he could deliver any damning, contrary testimony.
But, of course, Fox News is skeptical.
“As an old intelligence analyst, the way I read this is: The administration was unhappy with Petraeus not playing ball 100 percent on their party line story,” said Fox News military analyst Lt. Col. Ralph Peters. “I think (Petraeus) was getting cold feet about testifying under oath on their party line story. And I suspect these tough Chicago guys knew about this affair for a while, held it in their back pocket until they needed to play the card..”
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson points out that certain stories are just too ripe, too juicy, not to become conservative conspiracy theories. Like George W. Bush to the 9/11 “truthers,” sometimes it’s just too easy not to go for the conspiracy. Like a great sale on crappy, unnecessary knickknacks that you just can’t afford to pass up.
“What we have here—(Petraeus is) the head of the C.I.A., so this immediately becomes a spy novel,” Robinson said today on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “And you’re never going to convince people that there are coincidences in a spy novel, so the fact that the Director of National Intelligence hears about (the Petraeus situation) on Election Day is always going to give rise to conspiracy theories.”
Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren kicked off her show tonight asking, “Is it coincidence, or is it cover-up?”
Here we go again. We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
I have to give Fox News credit for ignoring the desperate lunacy of political evil genius Karl Rove, and ultimately acquiescing to reality Tuesday night.
On election night Tuesday, Rove had to juggle the weirdness of being a Fox News commentator who was also running an anti-Obama SuperPAC, the goal of which was to get Mitt Romney elected the 45th president of the United States.
The New York Times’ David Carr described the tension in an article yesterday:
Just after 11 p.m. on Tuesday, Fox News called Ohio for Mr. Obama. But Mr. Rove, who had helped finance over $300 million in attack ads, was getting phone calls from Romney officials protesting that forecast. He went on live television to challenge it, citing data he was receiving from the Ohio secretary of state.Reality won. Undeniable, hard facts won. It was a refreshing change of pace for a network that’s known for spewing anti-Obama, anti-government freak-out ideology 24/7.
“That’s awkward,” said Megyn Kelly, the co-anchor, speaking for many of us.
If Fox News had backed up under pressure from the Romney campaign and Mr. Rove, it could have fomented temporary but damaging unrest among its many fervent viewers.
Instead, Ms. Kelly walked down the hall and confronted the decision desk with Mr. Rove’s protest. She asked the head of Fox News’s decision team, Arnon Mishkin, “You tell me whether you stand by your call in Ohio given the doubts Karl Rove just raised?” Ms. Kelly may as well have been asking, “Are we a news organization or an instrument of the conservative agenda?”
Leading up to the election, Fox News spent two straight months calling President Obama a liar regarding the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya. What’s ironic is that, of the dozens of conservative conspiracy theories, this was the only one where there might actually be some there there.
For instance, GOP ringleader and hypocrite former opiate addict Rush Limbaugh said he thinks the shitstorm caused by an American-made anti-Islam movie was a conspiracy “set off” by the U.S. government.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The Oct. 5 jobs report came as good news to President Obama. The national unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent for the first time since taking office in January 2009. One year ago, unemployment was at 8.9 percent.
The continuously high unemployment rate has been an albatross around Obama’s neck, indicating economic stagnation, but the new lower rate spelled progress, albeit slowly, which could only mean one thing to conservatives: Conspiracy.
Just 48 hours after the deadly Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, I was doing some channel surfing when something that NBC’s Richard Engel said about repressed Muslims on the other side of the world struck me as familiar.
“They think the United States is secretly paying for not only this movie, but lots of activities like this,” Engel said. “They think it is part of a hidden agenda, a secret plot where the U.S. condemns this kind of thing, but secretly funds organizations like this.”
“And they believe (the video) is evidence that the U.S secretly wants this in order to undermine Islam,” Engel explained.
And as Engel pointed out, anti-West conspiracy theories aren’t only popular in the Mid-East.
“It’s the same kind of mentality you have in North Korea, by the way,” Engel said. “It’s not just in the Middle East. It’s something that’s indicative when you have a totalitarian regime.”
It’s not at all unlike the millions of Americans who saturate themselves with conservative media that tells them the president’s goal is to pervert and subvert America.
But Engel also said that Egyptian authorities reinforce the conspiracy theory by cracking down on protesters when protesting is supposed to be something the U.S. encourages. It makes it seem like the U.S. has something to hide and only convinces “those who have a conspiratorial mind that they are correct,” Engel said.
Engel went on to explain the popular local sentiment.
Sort of like how the “9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theory seemed proven, some would say, by President Bush’s convenient use of it as an excuse to finish a war his father started with Iraq. In other words, if you already believe a grand conspiracy, it’s not such a long leap to find a supposed motive because your mind wants to believe in and find evidence that might support the theory.
The reason conservatives are so freaked out about Obama is twofold: America has a rich history of racism, and conservative media exploits and harvests that latent racism for fucktons of money. They invent and perpetuate Armageddon themes like Chuck Norris’ Thousand Years of Darkness ad until the folks who get all their information from these sources are convinced that our president sympathizes with terrorists who kill Americans.
In an ominous fear-mercial, Norris indirectly calls the Obama administration “evil,” warning that “our great country and freedom are under attack,” and that, of course, “it may be lost forever” if Romney can’t find enough old white people to vote for him.
Something much worse? What could that be? Let’s consult the major conservative conspiracy theories. The answer could be any of the following, or any combination of the following:
• Obama is a Muslim
• Obama is a terrorist-sympathizer.
• Obama is helping the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrate the U.S. government, via Hillary Clinton’s Muslim aide, to impose sharia law.
• U.S. public schools and colleges are liberal mind-control factories that fail to teach the truth about our 6,000-year-old planet.
• The media is controlled by liberals who hate conservatives and not only doesn’t treat them fairly, but conspires against them at every turn.
• The Obama administration controls weather forecasts and climate scientists. Global warming is a liberal hoax.
• Obama spread the video that pissed off Muslims to sow Mid-East turmoil and make green energy viable.
• The Obama administration influences the Bureau of Labor Statistics to lie about the unemployment rate—but just this once. Where were they during the September 2010 election when unemployment was 9.5 percent?
“This inherent distrust seems to permeate every corner of the Obama record,” writes Dashiell Bennett of the Atlantic Wire. “Rather than argue that the President is out of touch with most Americans, some must go further and insist that he is not an American at all. Increased Democratic turnout sways the election? Voter fraud. Miscounting the size of crowds at public events? The media is bending over backwards for their favorite liberal. Convention events canceled due to the weather? The National Weather Service does what they're told. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court decides a tough case in the President's favor? He was blackmailed.”
There are dozens of major GOP conspiracy theories. So many that they overlap each other. Fox News and others have so regularly carpet bombed their audience with conspiracy theories that they're left pissed off, paranoid, vulnerable and gullible. At this point, they'll believe anything.
Well, it’s true with modern day conservatives: The crazier the conspiracy theory, the more popular it is.
Exhibit A:
“Now my question is,” Limbaugh asked his self-described ditto-head radio listeners on Sept. 20, “Could it be—feeding this false narrative—that Obama is setting off these protests in the Middle East? Had this film lie never been told, had the regime behaved in a more adult and responsible manner, would there be all this chaos around our embassies in the Middle East?”
Limbaugh agreed with rioting Middle East Muslims, saying on his show that Obama incited them with the video, insinuating that the “administration” had something “to do with it,” comparing the president to mischievous cartoon child, Bart Simpson (“Nobody saw me do it; you can’t prove anything; I didn’t do it”).
“So you got Obama, spiking the football, bragging about killing bin Laden, and then inciting these people with this video, telling them there’s this video that some American loony tune made,” Limbaugh said before adding a sarcastic Obama impression, saying, “Yeah, ‘We didn’t have anything to do with it. My administration had nothing to do with it. We didn’t do it.’”
So Obama’s covert agents spread an amateur film to Middle East media outlets? Usually these conspiracy theories have some round-about way of making sense to their believers, but I couldn’t figure out how Obama benefitted from “feeding this false narrative,” by throwing “gasoline on a simmering fire,” as Limbaugh put it.
By blaming the video, that makes them mad? I’m sure the video itself was plenty to make them mad. It supposedly portrays the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a bit of a dickhead. And Muslims have traditionally been a little sensitive when it comes to satirical renderings of their prophet, to say the least.
What’s really happening is that by blaming the video, it makes conservatives mad—not Muslims.
Limbaugh blaming the U.S. government for the video’s release and/or circulation is the exact same conspiracy theory that Middle East dictators are using to get their people riled up and united against the United States to distract attention away from their own brutal regimes.
As Richard Engel explained from Cairo, “The region’s dictators are in part responsible for imposing this mentality that is a closed circuit. It is a way of looking at the world that sees it through a conspiratorial paradigm. And that was convenient for the dictators because it got people hating the West, hating Israel, hating America, and not hating their own leaders who presented themselves as the only thing that could protect the people of this region from this onslaught that was coming in from the outside, and those mentalities don’t die easily.”
But why would Obama want to piss off his Muslim buddies? It didn’t add up. How do dead ambassadors and terrorist attacks on American interests help Obama?
The answer finally came on Oct. 9 when Limbaugh told his listeners that Obama “privately” wants turmoil in the Middle East, so that American oil supplies will be disrupted, thereby causing an American green energy revolution. Aha! Of course.
“Privately, that’s exactly what (Obama) wants,” Limbaugh said, referring to a hypothetical situation where “tumult in the Middle East” during Obama’s presidency “interrupts oil supplies to this country.”
Great Scott!
So just to be clear: According to Limbaugh—and, therefore, millions of like-minded Americans—President Obama’s terrorist-friendly regime circulated the anti-Islam movie because although it undermines Islam, which is the president’s very own secret faith, it also helps his American green energy conspiracy prosper, which is apparently more important than aiding his secret terrorist allies.
Gotcha.
The way Limbaugh chooses his words would be admirable if his interests weren’t purely malignant. He takes extreme care in crafting his rhetorical weaponry. It’s designed manipulation with a purpose.
Limbaugh refers to the Obama administration as a regime. It automatically makes one think of a Middle Eastern, Muslim dictator. After eight straight years of George W. Bush referring to Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, we’re very familiar with the term, but having it applied to the U.S. government is new.
As you’ll see by the following definitions, Bush used the word regime appropriately:
1. a mode or system of rule or government: a dictatorial regime.
-Dictionay.com
1. a government, especially an authoritarian one: ideological opponents of the regime -Oxford
In America’s case, we fear Muslim terrorists. We’re so easily manipulated post-9/11. Media outlets understand this and they ride it all the way to ratings and financial glory to the detriment of the truth, our political discourse, and our democracy.
And it certainly doesn’t help that the president's strange African name frames a middle name that he shares with a famous, now-deposed despot. It’s too valuable to many conservative figures not to use regularly. Despite the custom of ignoring middle names, he’s Barack Hussein Obama!
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was no stranger to GOP conspiracy theories about President Obama. Despite zero evidence, Romney repeated the false Fox News meme that Obama goes around the world “apologizing for America” and sympathizing with our enemies, despite the killing of bin Laden and an unprecedented uptick in drone strikes that have wiped out more al Qaeda members than President Bush ever dreamed.
“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions … Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”
Well, consider that most Americans get their information from the television. And despite conservatives whining about the unfair “mainstream media,” their “fair and balanced” network is consistently the most watched cable news network in the country, by far. (I’m convinced it’s a big reason Americans will end up just as we’re depicted in Mike Judge’s prophetic Idiocracy.)
It reminds me of that Dave Chappelle comedy bit about women who dress like whores, but then act surprised and offended when a guy hollers at them like a piece of meat.
People who don’t know it’s not news, or refuse to believe it, go on subjecting themselves to conspiracy theories galore. Propaganda. It’s why Richard Engel can’t convince people on the streets of Pyongyang that Americans aren’t plotting to destroy them any more than he can convince Muslims on the streets of Cairo that the U.S. government isn’t responsible for an amateur video.
But how to thwart all the misinformation and paranoia that repressed people with no rights and American conservatives love to consume? Richard Engel offered his opinion for a solution.
“They need education, they need more free thinking,” Engel said, “and they need to break out of that conspiracy theory.”
At the root of all the conspiracy theories, I think, is hate. Where did it all come from? Some of it is innate, but much of it is continuously harvested by the media. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi tried to take some of the blame on behalf of his colleagues.
Fox News’ Megyn Kelly appears to be aware of conservatives’ and their media’s rift with reality. During Fox News’ election night coverage, when Rove was dragging his heels to admit defeat, Kelly turned to him and in a very Karl, cut the crap already kind of way, asked, "Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better, or is this real?"
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough echoed what Frum said, essentially that the main conservative media outlets have obviously prioritized making huge shitpiles of money above telling their audience the truth.
Not surprisingly, today, Fox News introduced the official Petraeus conspiracy theory despite investigative journalist Bob Woodward saying on “Meet The Press” yesterday that Petraeus’ Benghazi testimony would have likely supported what the White House has already said.
David Gregory asked, “What was going to be the takeaway from what Petraeus would have presented had he testified?”
“I think it would, essentially, back up the White House,” Woodward said, eliminating the administration’s motive to get rid of Petraeus before he could deliver any damning, contrary testimony.
But, of course, Fox News is skeptical.
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson points out that certain stories are just too ripe, too juicy, not to become conservative conspiracy theories. Like George W. Bush to the 9/11 “truthers,” sometimes it’s just too easy not to go for the conspiracy. Like a great sale on crappy, unnecessary knickknacks that you just can’t afford to pass up.
Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren kicked off her show tonight asking, “Is it coincidence, or is it cover-up?”
Here we go again. We’re gonna need a bigger boat.
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