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Right Wing Conspiracy Part XXIV Want to know the truth about statements made by Politicians? Click on the
following web sites to check on what is true and what is false.
FactCheck.org
- Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of
Pennsylvania
THE REPUBLICAN
CONSERVATIVE EXTREMISTS ARE
THE ENEMY by R. Blackbird
Republican Conservative Extremists are selfish,
self serving, power hungry, hateful of the poor, disloyal
to the nation and its people, dishonest, avaricious, scornful of the
nation's history, the dignity of its institutions, its standards of
political morality, and its vision of advancement for all the
people. The Republicans Conservative love war as long as they and theirs do not
have to put on helmets and carry guns into the fighting. They use lies
to start wars that kill hundreds of thousands of innocents and thousands
of our own military service people. They love massive war-time profits,
unavailable to their rich masters if war is absent.
The Republicans
Conservative Extremisits hate the rest of us, which they must, in order to
pass away from themselves and onto us, the financial burdens and losses
their crimes, schemes and thefts cause. They are prolific, incessant,
and destructive liars. They are blasphemers for they insist that
their hateful and destructive deeds are the work of God. They are
apostates for they gleefully attack the poor, the immigrants, the
old and the sick, of whom God has commanded all of us to be mindful.
There is no reasoning with them, for all their logic is built on false
premises. There is no appealing to them for honor's sake for they have
lost all sense of shame and have no honor, there is no appealing to them
for the nation's sake for that it what they hate the most.
The Republican
Conservative Extremists are the enemy.
Excerpts from articles from thedailybeast.com by
John
Batchelor and articles from huffingtonpost.com by
Steven Weber.
The GOP’s living dead won’t stop
haunting their party, says lifelong Republican John Batchelor. Now Rush, Newt, and Dick
are doing what zombies do best: laying waste to everyone’s brains.
The Republican Party has become many bad
things—intolerant, inert, fly-blown, incoherent, and delusional—but the worst is
that the GOP is no longer young. The GOP, according to a Gallup
poll, has lost, forgotten, ignored,
just generally scared off the younger voters, non-white voters, and
female
voters in all demographics.
What is a political party that is
vastly
white, middle-aged, male, Southern, pious, conservative, aggrieved, impotent, nostalgic,
rude—and regarded negatively by more than half the respondents? Time magazine’s
Republican political consultant Mike Murphy looks at the demographics and
warns of a
coming “ice age” for the party. That is grossly optimistic. No longer in second
place, the voter self-identification polls place the Republicans well behind the leading
independents and the second-place Democrats. The GOP is the equivalent of a shrinking
third party on its way to becoming a museum piece beside the Whigs, the Greenbacks, and
the Prohibitionists. The GOP is like a zombie cartoon reading the daily headlines of the
last four years and asking, “Am I dead?”
The GOP is like a zombie cartoon reading the
daily headlines of the last four years and asking, “Am I dead?”
The attack of the living dead Republicans
does have the camp fascination of a George Romero movie as pieces of brains fall out. Last
week, Deputy Minority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, in some quarters regarded as
cunning, boasted soberly not only that, without any polling evidence, “I think
we’re got a shot at taking back the House,” but also that the Obama
administration was comparable to Putin’s rule in Moscow. Cantor did not explain if he
meant that the Obama administration is Soviet socialist, which is balmy, since Moscow is a
robber baron paradise these days, or if he meant the Obama administration stands for
tyrannical one-party rule, which is dopey, since Cantor appears to think of himself as
virile leader of the opposition.
Last week, former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, a generalissimo of zombies, fresh from smearing Supreme Court nominee Sonia
Sotomayor for “new racism,” presented more startling delusions at a
congressional fundraiser in Washington when he claimed that the Republicans were the
“majority party.” He offered no facts to counter the Gallup poll’s
certainty that the Republicans are a minor minority party. Nor did Gingrich, who
increasingly pontificates with the bravado of the vacuous TV anchor from the old
Mary
Tyler Moore Show, Ted Baxter, note that the cash raised in the ballroom of swells was
down by a third from last year; nor did he explain his demagogic remark that the Obama
administration “has already failed,” with bailouts that are chiefly a
continuation of a Republican administration’s panicky policies.
The GOP is the equivalent of a shrinking
third party on its way to becoming a museum piece beside the Whigs, the Greenbacks, and
the Prohibitionists.
Gingrich did take aim at his demagogic pal
Rush “Obama to fail” Limbaugh when he said, “I am happy that Dick Cheney is
a Republican. I am happy that Colin Powell is a Republican.” This coy rhetoric was
meant to point to the dull disputes between Limbaugh and those Republican politicians who
he claims are unwelcome in the party because they don’t agree with him. Limbaugh
routinely runs his mouth about disloyal or “squishy” Republicans, as if he was
outing the skin-job Cylons on Battlestar Galactica. It is trite, but it can
quickly turn vulgar. On TV, Limbaugh recently baited Colin Powell and the Republican
moderate stragglers again when he boomed “What has Colin Powell ever done that makes
him so valuable to the Republican Party?”
That Limbaugh doesn’t know the answer
to his self-evidently stupid question is both astonishing and evidence of self-loathing,
if there is a real self. In 2009, it is awful to see that a man of such village courthouse
venom for the valorous Powell can dance around in public as a faux Socrates. Also, there
is a cult of goonish intolerance that hangs around with Limbaugh and his flim-flam
cronies—a cult that is daily fed the same gossip by the same handful of surprisingly
Drudge-dependent sources, a cult that claims to be Republican but could just as easily be
Wahhabist for all its make-believe masculine grievances, a cult that is either harmless or
helpful to Democrats, and yet, with its halitosis of self-righteousness, drives away the
curious, young voter from the GOP.
A once-idealistic, decent political party of
all the states and all demographics for 150 years has now become a cruel cadre that
defines itself like a jihad—by what it is against.
It is not possible to dismiss Cantor,
Gingrich, Cheney, and Limbaugh as only just cult cranks, because the Gallup poll shows
that the nation regards them as speaking for the party, and so do the Republicans
themselves—Limbaugh at 13 percent, Gingrich at 10 percent, Dick Cheney at 9 percent,
far ahead of anyone actually holding or running for office.
Pundits like the nonpartisan analyst Charlie
Cook assert that the party is in its “wilderness period” and will emerge after a
“time-out” like a recalcitrant child of privilege. Partisans like the defensive
former Bush speechwriter David Frum are smeared publicly by Limbaugh and his cult for
trying to push back at the demagogues as “bombastic” and “a stereotype of
self-indulgence;” yet when Frum gets a chance to fight back in Newsweek, he invites
the muggers for an open debate. About what? Polite commentators like Peggy Noonan, while
nodding cautiously to the demagogues as though they are pet gargoyles, beseeches the party
in her Wall Street Journal column to cure its “base-itis,” to open its arms to
something that isn’t an opera of bigotry, to cease the self-branding as “mean,
thick, and angry.”
None of these mewling half-measures speak to
the fact that a once idealistic, decent political party of all the states and all
demographics for 150 years has now become a cruel cadre that defines itself like a jihad
by what it is against. Now and again, I want to shout at them that the city on a hill that
is America was not built by four centuries of honest strife to be a gated-community of
vain whiners. But then I relax and let them do the talking. “Fail” is a word
that ties together Limbaugh, Gingrich, Cheney ,and Cantor, and they use the word like a
curse routinely. “Fail, Obama.” “Fail, Powell.” “Fail,
Pelosi.” “Fail, liberals.” “Fail, Moslems.” “Fail, health
care.” “Fail, moderates.” “Fail, city on a hill.” The zombies
hurl the word at whoever does not look like them or listen to them or need them. They are
speaking into the looking glass. “Who’s the fairest of them all?”
The
Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill.
They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a
roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an
astonishing concession.
Moreover, many important Democrats are open to a
truly large budget deal. President Obama has a strong incentive to
reach a deal so he can campaign in 2012 as a moderate. The Senate
majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt
reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion if the
Republicans meet him part way. There are Democrats in the White
House and elsewhere who would be willing to accept Medicare cuts if
the Republicans would be willing to increase revenues.
If the Republican Party were a normal party, it
would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the
deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in
exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases.
A normal Republican Party would seize the
opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It
would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal
footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without
putting any real crimp in economic growth.
The party is not being asked to raise marginal
tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary,
Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate
tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.
This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.
But we can have no confidence that the
Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the
Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few
years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a
psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the
logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them
to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they
will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut
government by a yard, they will still say no. The members of this
movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual
authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a
default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than
raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse
to believe it.
It's not shocking to us. They haven't been a normal
party for a long time and the Obama administration has allowed them to
control the narrative anyway. Of course they are going to push and push
and push for more and more and more. Does anybody believe that
Republicans will eventually not raise the debt ceiling with
what they are already getting? I heard from Andrea Mitchell today that
the date is around July 22nd in which the CBO needs to get the
information from Congress to score so they can have it ready before the
August 2nd deadline.
Is this the big hope for Team
Obama? They agree to off-the-chart spending cuts hoping to get a nominal
increase in revenue somewhere -- which, in the scope of the
negotiations, is meaningless -- and then hope Rand Paul or somebody else
refuses even a deal that David Brooks can't believe happened, and then
they win the Beltway Villagers over to their side?
The debt ceiling was always raised
with no muss or no fuss because the American economy is not the same as
my personal bank account. Tremendous amounts of monies flow through the
world and this country and not raising it would be catastrophic. Since
Brooks is so connected to the grand poobahs of the GOP, you have to
wonder if some of them worried that the Tea Party element actually won't
allow them to raise the debt ceiling unless they get 100% of what they
want, and so they sent him out to do some dirty work. Or is it a ploy to
start singing kumbaya for all the spending cuts they've gotten already
from the Dems once the ceiling is raised?
In general, this political establishment is “wired” in
Republicans’ favor. It’s GOP ideas that get attention; it’s GOP
talking points that get internalized; it’s GOP voices that get
aired.
But when it comes to the debt ceiling and
debt-reduction talks, and the fact that Democrats are the only ones
willing to compromise, I can’t help but wonder if the tide of elite
opinion is starting to turn against Republicans. If so, it’s pretty
late in the game — Brooks and Cohen should have picked up on this
months, if not years, ago — but here’s hoping the circumstances and
radical tactics have left Villagers with no other choice.
I seriously doubt it.
I'm so sick of this debt ceiling discussion that I
started reading the
Game of Thrones
series of books. I enjoyed the
HBO series so I
just finished book two over the holiday weekend.
Republicans: the Damned Truth and the Truth Be Damned
Oh boy. It's like trying
to fix a stubborn cowlick while wearing boxing gloves.
Republicans just do not, will not, uh uh, want
to cooperate in this little thing called Democracy. Period. And their game plan
looks like this:
(Pardon the crude
attempt at a Vonnegut-like visual aid.)
The proof that they will never, ever let this
president -- this Democratic president -- tell them what's what is that no
matter what he posits in terms of fixing all the things Bush broke, things which
always could have been improved upon, things which would benefit less fortunate
Americans, things which would restore our prestige abroad, which would restore
the warmth to the nation's character, the Republicans look at him (and by
extension the majority of America) with dead eyes, crossed arms and do
absolutely nothing.
No alternative plans, suggestions, advice. No
involvement, curiosity, no moments of introspection. Allowing violently disposed
fringe elements to steer policy when that job used to be the bailiwick of
legislators and operatives schooled in poly-sci. It's an approach that begs the
question:
Do Republicans actually like Democracy?
Really. Their strategy seems to be one of
complete disdain for the last 200 or so years of that defining American civil
exercise. They are behaving as though they've discarded all pretense of caring
or participation. Weird.
Ooh! I know! Perhaps the Republicans are
playing into some master plan wherein all power is gradually, systematically
leeched from the masses and centralized into a snug, capitalistic, corporate
version of an aristocracy, keeping The People perpetually strained but
entertained by shiny yet easily broken/disposable/replaceable baubles and only
minimally involved in the basic running of the country so as to provide the
citizenry with an illusion of democratic participation and therefore allowing
them to distinguish their lives from that of common, old fashioned serfs.
Nah. That would be too simplistic, too 19th
century. But back to today:
Even after realizing that Obama, master of
many things they aren't, is also demonstrating a centrist rather than a dreaded
leftist approach to governance, in many ways incorporating aspects which they
themselves have favored in the past, to put forward his workable agenda as
opposed to the armageddon/fascist/socialist dystopia the frothing Republican
mouthpieces warned of, they still refuse to play.
Damn vexing! So, what
could it be?
Hmm. Could it... is it because... oh, I don't
know... is it because he's...
...black?
Nah. That would be too simplistic, too 19th
century. Oh. Wait a minute...
The first week of May was as eventful for
the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) as any time since the
2008 election. It began with
26
counts of extortion and voter registration fraud filed against the group and some of
its members in Clark County, Nev. It continued with the indictments of seven ACORN workers
in Allegheny County, Pa. Democrats staged a floor fight over a Republican amendment to
block any organization that had indicted members from getting taxpayer dollars.
ACORN’s national spokesman was kicked off of Glenn Beck’s Fox News set.
Republicans pounced, and the week ended with
a Republican National Committee fundraising appeal that attacked the Obama administration
for considering the use of “sampling” in the upcoming Census as a
hidden-in-plain sight benefit to ACORN.
Image by: Matt Mahurin
“ACORN’s community organizers are
eager to once again take action to aid their old friend in the White House,” wrote
RNC Chairman Michael Steele. “You can be sure they’ll be manipulating
population numbers.
The 39-year-old group has never been more
controversial. Bertha Lewis, the chief executive officer and chief organizer of ACORN
since the middle of last year, could not have been happier.
“Fine, bring it,” Lewis said in an
interview with TWI, inside ACORN’s national offices near Capitol Hill. She brought up
her fists in a boxing stance. “Let’s bring it. We know what the true facts are.
We know that we’ll win in court. Our strategy now is to beef up our operations so we
can defend ourselves.”
ACORN spent decades under the radar,
agitating on housing and employment issues, garnering the ire of business and conservative
leaders, but not really winning political infamy. That changed in 2008, and Lewis now
believes the organization’s next 39 years might be spent in a permanent offensive
stance — battling lawsuits, defending its “brand” against attacks from
Republicans, and indulging in cable news shouting matches. In the space of months the
group has become the most notorious member of the Democrats’ coalition. To many
conservatives, it’s about time, and it’s the pay-off for years of fruitless
exposes of ACORN’s influence.
“Republicans had been looking for a way
to bring them down for a long time,” explained Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at the
Capital Research Center, an anti-union think tank, “In the last year, all these of
opportunities were presented to them. Barack Obama was running for president, and
he’d been a ‘community organizer’ who’d worked with ACORN, and that
heightened interest in what ‘community organizing’ was, and who these people
were. All these corrupt things you’re hearing about today, they were happening in the
past. They just weren’t as interesting or as sexy for the media.”
The Capital Research Center, founded in 1984
and located in a rambling, busy townhouse off of Dupont Circle, was one of the
conservative organizations that spent years investigating ACORN while having little luck
weakening them. As recently as 2006, a Republican like Sen. John McCain was comfortable
attending the group’s national convention to ask for support on immigration reform.
That changed with the 2006 elections and the indictments of ACORN workers, in key campaign
states like Missouri, for
voter fraud — which was pushed behind the scenes by the Department of Justice and was
part of the broad scandal surrounding the firing of nine U.S. attorneys that ended with
the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
“I think they’ve never forgiven us
for being the impetus of bringing down Alberto Gonzales,” said Lewis. “They came
after us in 2006, and tried to get [former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico] David Iglesias
and these other attorneys to come back with something, and there was nothing. We
don’t get enough credit for bringing down Gonzales.”
All of this came shortly before ACORN’s
leadership would be taken down in a separate scandal. In 2008, the group’s founder Wade Rathke resigned
after an investigation revealed that his brother had stolen $1 million from ACORN. It was
a public relations blow and an organizational crisis — Rathke, according to Vadum,
was an “organizational genius” — and it led directly into a general
election where ACORN faced more indictments and became a bruising point of attack for
Republicans. According to McCain,
ACORN was “destroying the fabric of democracy,” and according to the Republican
Party the group was
trying to “steal the election” by registering fraudulent voters.
Republican officials now admit that the
group didn’t really come close to stealing the race for Obama. On Election Day,
recalled Nevada Republican Party Chairwoman Sue Lowden, the GOP watched the issue closely,
alerted state officials to bogus registrations, and dispatched “trained people”
to the polls to look for voters showing up to cast ballots under assumed names at fake
addresses. None showed up. “Would it have made a difference?” asked Lowden.
“No, none of our races were that close.”
Nonetheless, Lowden was one of many
Republicans who cheered at the indictments handed down in Nevada last week. The charges
came after local officials, several of them Democrats, answered the 11th-hour
controversies over ACORN registrations by asking for official investigations. The timing
was good for House Republicans who spent last week attempting to save an amendment that
was explicitly written to block money for ACORN, but it took others by surprise.
“I’m surprised that it’s not
happening closer to the election,” said David Iglesias, a former U.S. attorney who
lost his job after declining to throw the book at ACORN in 2006. “It’s worse
than beating a dead horse. The horse is just buried. I never reviewed any evidence to see
that ACORN, as an organization, was directing fraud. That’s the kind of evidence that
you need to actually win one of these prosecutions.”
The prosecutions, and their coverage, were a token of ACORN’s new, ever-controversial
reality. In the past six months, they have been accused, by conservatives, of being the
culprits of much more than voter registration fraud, and any hint of ACORN connections
have been enough for robust attacks on liberals. Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public
Policy Center has popularized
the dubious theory that ACORN’s campaigns for low-income housing was “at the
base” of the housing bubble and the subsequent economic collapse. House Republicans
have frequently portrayed the economic stimulus package as a giveaway to ACORN which, they
argued, would be eligible for a portion of $4.19 billion in “neighborhood
stabilization” funding earmarked in the bill for states, local governments and
community groups. David F. Hamilton, Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the 7th Circuit, was
opposed by the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network because he had done some
work with ACORN in the 1970s. At the first anti-stimulus “Tea Party” protests in
late February, some protesters brandished anti-ACORN signs — before the wave of
protests on April 15, a rumor spread that ACORN was readying
a campaign of mass disruptions and infiltration. In Fox News reports, this rumor was
traced back to “some people.” At the Tea Party in Washington, the occasional
trouble-makers that walked by, such as the ironic protesters of Billionaires for Bush,
were greeted by shouts of “ACORN,” even though they had nothing to do with the
group.
Lewis reiterated what she said in April
— “we don’t care about their Tea Parties” — but Heather
Heidelbaugh, a Pittsburgh lawyer who has aggressively investigated ACORN scandals on
behalf of state Republicans, said that three members of the group showed up at the
Pittsburgh Tea Party. They simply weren’t undercover. And in any case, Heidelbaugh
has concentrated more on representing ACORN whistleblowers who claim that the organization
exploits its volunteers and offers up “muscle for money” — protesters for
hire to shake down other organizations. In March, Heidelbaugh testified
before a House panel and got what sounded like a tentative commitment from Rep. John
Conyers (D-Mich.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to investigate the
group.
“The Democrats have found a natural
constituency with ACORN,” said Heidelbaugh, “but there’s a rising tide
here. The more they are exposed by their members, the more difficult it will be for their
natural constituents to support them, because it will be politically impossible to do
so.”
But the break hasn’t happened yet.
Heidelbaugh was disappointed last week after Conyers balked at an investigation after
speaking with ACORN and being told by fellow Democratic members that the case against
ACORN was baseless. One unintended consequence of the Republican anti-ACORN push, so far,
has been unified support from Democrats against the attacks. Only four House Democrats voted against
an amendment that struck Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-Minn.) rule to deny contracts to
any group with a member under indictment.
“The media plays a vital role in
this,” said Heidelbaugh. “If the criticism of ACORN comes across as ‘those
Republicans going after ACORN again,’ it gets covered like a political attack. If you
state the facts, that there are African-American board members of ACORN who want to expose
corruption in this organization, then the Democratic Congress might stop and say,
‘What’s going on here?’ That’s not happening yet.”
Lewis relished in the way that Republicans
were politicizing the case against ACORN, and credited the Democrats with “standing
up” against anti-ACORN legislation — even if they don’t brag about it in
their campaigns. “The more wacko the Republicans get,” said Lewis, “and the
more shrill they are, and the more we stand up, whether it’s the administration or
it’s us, the more people are going to go, ‘You know, these people are wacky,
this is silly, and this is stupid.’”
- in desperate need of a heart transplant
- born without a conscience
- have a poster of Rush Limbaugh on your wall
- have a poster of Carl Rove on your ceiling (above your bed)
- have that 24.99 Sarah Palin alarm clock that you
wake up each morning to ''YOU BETCHA''
- looking around your PTA meetings and seeing only white people
- oblivious to the hurt and suffering around you
- DO NOT see d.e.a.d people
- living in a comfy cushy little world that is
behind closed gates
- rarely getting off your
ass
from watching clusterfox all day other than to go
to the fridge to get more chilled chardonnay
- only look for the letter R in any voting booth
any where for any person (qualified of not)
- are convinced that your lot in life is everybody
elses' fault ..especially democrats
- are a man that wants to control a woman's body
and HER right to chose
- just not giving a DAMN
for anybody but yourself
HOW is THAT American ? or even Human ?
The decimation of the Republican party for a
generation is coming in November.
Excerpts from salon.com by Glenn Greenwald Thursday
February 28, 2008 07:40 EST
One of this week's hysterical press scandals
was that Minister Louis Farrakhan praised Barack Obama's candidacy even though Obama had
previously denounced numerous Farrakhan remarks and the Obama campaign did nothing to seek
out the Farrakhan praise. Nonetheless, Tim Russert
demanded that Obama jump through
multiple hoops to prove that he has no connection to -- and, in fact,
"rejects" -- the ideas espoused by Farrakhan deemed to be radical and hateful.
Yesterday, though, the equally fringe,
radical and hateful (at least) Rev. John Hagee -- a white evangelical who is the pastor of
a sprawling "mega-church" in Texas --
enthusiastically
endorsed John McCain. Did McCain have to jump through the same hoops which Russert and
others set up for Obama and "denounce" Hagee's extremism and "reject"
his support? No; quite the opposite. McCain said he was "very honored" to
receive this endorsement and, when asked about some of Hagee's more twisted views,
responded: "all I can tell you is that I am very proud to have Pastor John Hagee's
support."
McCain's sainted supporter, Joe Lieberman,
last year spoke
to Hagee's group and lavished him with such obsequious praise that Lieberman actually
compared Hagee, favorably, to Moses. Why is Louis Farrakhan deemed by our political
establishment to be so radioactive as to not be fit for good company -- black candidates
are required to repudiate his support even when they haven't sought it and denounce his
views even when they've never advocated anything close to those views -- but John Hagee is
a perfectly acceptable figure whom mainstream GOP politicians are free to court without
any consequences or media objections?
Here is just a small sampling of the belief
system of this welcomed McCain supporter:
TG: If you use the Bible as the basis for
policy, is there any room for compromise? And if you use the bible as the basis for
policy, should Muslims use the Koran as the basis for their policy, and then again, what
possible basis is there for compromise at that point?
JH: There is really no room for compromise
between radical Islam --
TG: I'm not talking about radical Islam. I'm
just talking about Islam in general.
JH: Well Islam in general -- those who live
by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews.
* God caused Hurricane Katrina to wipe out
New Orleans because it had a gay pride parade the week before and was filled with sexual
sin. From the same interview:
JH: All hurricanes are acts of God, because
God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive
to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.
The newspaper carried the story in our local
area, that was not carried nationally, that there was to be a homosexual parade there on
the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it would was
going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other gay
pride parades.
So I believe that the judgment of God is a
very real thing. I know there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible
teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before
the Day of Judgment, and I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment
of God against the city of New Orleans
* The End Times -- Rapture -- is imminent
and the U.S. Government must do what it can to hasten it, which at minimum
requires: (a) a war with Iran and (b) undying, absolute support for a unified Israel,
including all Occupied Territories (hence, Joe Lieberman's love affair with them). From
Christian Palestinian Daoud Kuttab in
The New York Times
(h/t PZ
Meyers):
A small minority of evangelical Christians
have entered the Middle East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements
I have ever heard. . . . [Rev.] Hagee, a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member
Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the
publication of his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," in which he argues that a
confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for Armageddon (which will mean the
death of most Jews, in his eyes) and the Second Coming of Christ. In the best-selling
book, Hagee insists that the United States must join Israel in a preemptive military
strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West.
Hagee
believes
that "the president's support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect
the Jewish state," which "will play a pivotal role in the second coming."
These views are not unrelated to Hagee's support for McCain. Quite the contrary; Hagee
cited McCain's so-called "pro-Israel views," his belligerence towards Iran, and
his social conservatism as reasons for the endorsement. And in critical contrast to Obama
and Farrakhan, McCain actually seems to share some of Hagee's more twisted views, as
evidenced by McCain's joyful singing
about dropping bombs on Iran.
The GOP has long been given a pass on
courting the most warped and twisted religious figures around. George Bush
spoke
regularly with Pat Robertson -- never once forced to "denounce" or
"reject" him. In 2006, Rev. Hagee had a
private
meeting with uber-White House neocon (and convicted criminal) Elliot Abrams, who just
happens to run Middle East policy in the Bush administration, and afterwards, Hagee gushed
that he and Abrams (like he and Lieberman) shared similar views towards the Middle East:
"we felt we were on the right track."
Watching the media's treatment of Farrakhan
and Hagee, is it possible to imagine a more transparent, and grotesque, double standard?
In the framework of the Russert-led establishment press, white evangelical Christians are,
by definition, entitled to great respect no matter how radical, extreme and hateful their
professed views are. These are, after all, religious Christians -- People of Faith -- and,
as such, it is wrong, even bigoted, to suggest that they should be repudiated. There is
nothing ever radical, hateful or dangerous about the views of white evangelical Christians
like Hagee.
Thus, white evangelical Ministers are free
to advocate American wars based on Biblical mandates, rant hatefully against Islam, and
argue that natural disasters occur because God hates gay people. They are still fit for
good company, an important and cherished part of our mainstream American political system.
The entire GOP establishment is permitted actively to lavish them with praise and court
their support without the slightest backlash or controversy. Both George Bush and Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sent formal greetings to the 2006 gathering of Hagee's group.
By contrast, black Muslim ministers like
Farrakhan, or even black Christian ministers like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are held with deep
suspicion, even contempt. McCain is free to hug and praise the Rev. Hagees of the world,
but Obama is required to prove over and over and over and over that he does not share the
more extreme views of black Ministers.
How come Tim Russert -- in all the times he
sits and chats with Lieberman, McCain and various high Bush officials -- never reads all
of the inflammatory, disgusting, crazed "Rapture-is-Coming/ All-Jews-will-Burn/
Kill-All-Muslims/ Hurricanes-are-Punishment-against-Gays" pronouncements from John
Hagee and James Dobson and Pat Robertson and demand that John McCain and George Bush and
Joe Lieberman "denounce" those views and "reject" their support?
What's the difference, exactly?
UPDATE: As emaydon recalls
in
Comments, McCain supporter Rudy Giuliani, just a few months ago, stood on the same
stage and gushed with gratitude over the
endorsement
by Rev. Pat Robertson of Giuliani's presidential bid.
That's the same Rev. Robertson who, among so
many great things, said that Ariel Sharon's stroke was
God's punishment for giving
up Gaza and the 9/11 attack was
divine
retribution against America -- America's fault -- for tolerating gays, feminists and
the ACLU. But Giuliani was the moderate, respectable candidate who was free to accept
Robertson's endorsement, and Russert and his friends never demanded that he
"reject" it.
Although cavorting with the likes of Pat Robertson and John Hagee is perfectly acceptable
in Russert World, Russert also demanded,
back in January, 2006, that Obama opine on various controversial remarks from the highly
influential political philosopher Harry Belafonte (h/t
JKP1000):
MR. RUSSERT: I want to talk a little bit
about the language people are using in the politics now of 2006, and I refer you to some
comments that Harry Belafonte made yesterday. He said that Homeland Security had become
the new Gestapo. What do you think of that?
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Belafonte went to
Venezuela, as you well know, some time ago and met with the Hugo Chavez, leader of that
country, and said some things that obviously were noted in this country and around the
world. Let’s listen, and come back and talk about it.
(Videotape, January 8, 2006) . . .
MR. RUSSERT: Is it appropriate to call the
President of the United States "the greatest terrorist in the world"?
Obama is required to denounce certain people
with whom he has no connection while the likes of Bush, McCain, Lieberman and Giuliani are
free to associate themselves openly with the most extremist elements around.
Here is the
McCain
campaign website proudly promoting a video of Rev. Hagee's reverent introduction of
McCain, while McCain and wife Cindy stood proudly by, during the candidate's "No
Surrender Tour":
During his remarks, Rev. Hagee denounced
those "in Congress who whine about the cost of the war"; said we can't withdraw
from Iraq because "Israel will be in greater danger than ever before," pointed
out that "Allah [is Ahmadinejad's] God -- not ours"; and raved that McCain
"is the leader and the [other candidates] are followers." Rev. Hagee concluded:
"Without victory, there is no survival." McCain then went over to him and warmly
shook his hand.
As millions of people anticipate the release
of the latest Harry Potter book and film, we're reminded once again of Satan's ongoing
attempt to deceive and destroy. The whole purpose of the Potter books is to desensitize
readers and introduce them to the occult.
I begin by thanking your founder, Pastor
John Hagee. I would describe Pastor Hagee with the words the Torah uses to describe Moses,
he is an "Eesh Elo Kim," a man of God because those words fit him; and, like
Moses he has become the leader of a mighty multitude in pursuit of and defense of Israel.
John McCain and Joe Lieberman -- Hagee
reverence and all -- are our nation's Serious, principled, and moderate figures. Just ask
Tim Russert, Fred Hiatt, Joe Klein, Gloria Borger, Chris Matthews, et al.
The Catholic League's Bill Donohue, the media's anointed arbiter for all matters relating
to what he claims is "anti-Catholic bigotry," is
quite furious about McCain's
warm embrace of Pastor Hagee:
Catholic League president Bill Donohue
addressed this today:
"There are plenty of staunch
evangelical leaders who are pro-Israel, but are not anti-Catholic. John Hagee is not one
of them. Indeed, for the past few decades, he has waged an unrelenting war against the
Catholic Church. For example, he likes calling it 'The Great Whore,' an 'apostate church,'
the 'anti-Christ,' and a 'false cult system' . . . .
"In Hagee's latest book, Jerusalem
Countdown, he calls Hitler a Catholic who murdered Jews while the Catholic Church did
nothing. 'The sell-out of Catholicism to Hitler began not with the people but with the
Vatican itself,' he writes. . . . "Senator Obama has repudiated the endorsement of
Louis Farrakhan, another bigot. McCain should follow suit and retract his embrace of
Hagee."
Whenever Bill Donohue attacks Democrats as
being anti-Catholic -- during, for the instance, the
grave matter of
the Edwards campaign's hiring of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan as campaign
bloggers -- Donohue was ubiquitous, treated with the utmost respect. Donohue's righteous
protests over John McCain's embrace of such a stark, hateful anti-Catholic bigot merit at
least as much attention as the Edwards Blogger Scandal, to put it mildly.
I interviewed The Catholic League's President, Bill Donohue, regarding the McCain/Hagee
connection. The write-up on the interview is
here; the
podcast can be heard
here
For information on all individuals
and organizations listed in this website, or the name of a contact person in your area
that can give you further information on the Religious Freedom Coalition of the Southeast,
or the First Amendment Coalition, contact us at dynionmwyn23@hotmail.com.. Let us hear from
you!
You may call also call us at
000-000-0000 If you access our voice mail, we will call you back collect if long
distance.
Or, you can write to us at: RFCSE, P.O. Box
673206, Marietta, GA 30006-0036
