Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Name Those 22 Congressional 'Tea Party' Republi-CON

UPDATE: "The road to Washington is paved with broken campaign promises. But few are so rich in hypocrisy as those of House Republican freshmen caught engineering hometown pork even as they vow to slash the federal budget for the supposed good of the nation." Read The New York Times, Pork? That? What Do You Mean?

First there was the Florida Republi-CON, but he has friends in Congress.

"House Republicans who rode a wave of voter discontent into office last year may be pushing for spending cuts, but they’re also quietly funneling millions of federal dollars back home." Read The New York Times, Cost-Cutters, Except When the Spending Is Back Home.

Fear, Anger, and Hatred = Violence, Again

UPDATE: "Racism is stupidity’s recourse. There are plenty of stupid people in the world. . .

[In the past, it was the persecution of blacks. And today Jews] seemed to have forgotten that not being a race but a religion had scarcely saved Jews from racist persecution.

Hatred of Muslims in Europe and the United States is a growing political industry. It’s odious, dangerous and racist. . .

The settings change, the vile stupidity does not."

Read The New York Times, The Racist Scourge.


UPDATE V: "Evil's larger narrative, and why we must guard against it." Read The New York Times, A Madman and His Manifesto, which notes the "alternative is war under the banner of heaven, as both Breivik and his hated Islamists advocate."


UPDATE IV: Despite his denials, our shameful pastor was just one of many who preach their Islamophobic ideology of fear, anger, and hatred and initially tried to blame Muslims for the massacre:


Of course, he is now trying to back track, and claim he prophesied the identity of the real killer, a professed Christian 'crusader', and in a very nuanced argument offered only for Christians states that the killer was not really a Christian.


UPDATE III: "Breivik is no loner. His violence was brewed in a specific European environment that shares characteristics with the specific American environment of Loughner: relative economic decline, a jobless recovery, middle-class anxiety and high levels of immigration serving as the backdrop for racist Islamophobia and use of the spurious specter of a 'Muslim takeover' as a wedge political issue to channel frustrations rightward. . . [and] to enlist [Christendom] in apocalyptical warfare against an 'infidel' enemy supposedly threatening the territory, morals and culture of an imagined community of devout believers." Read The New York Times, Breivik and His Enablers.


UPDATE II: "How many people can assert [civilization-threatening jihad] before small numbers of the disaffected take them literally? If all that were true, wouldn't a lot of people respond violently? Overheated, hyperbolic rhetoric must come naturally once you've immersed yourself in the hard core anti-jihadist blogosphere. Regulars there lose the conviction that words have precise meanings, and the belief that arguing with integrity requires staying within their bounds. Shortcuts are so much easier, hence the frequent descents into ad hominem, the constant reliance on hyperbole, and the crutch of playing on the civilizational anxieties of the audience, in an effort to shake them into awareness." Read The Atlantic, Anders Behring Breivik and the 'Anti-Jihadist' Blogosphere.

Our shameful pastor and his ilk should repudiate their Islamophobic ideology of fear, anger, and hatred.


UPDATE: "Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian man who apparently justified last week’s mass murder of helpless teenage campers with a 1,500-page 'compendium' calling for a right-wing revolution against Europe’s ruling class. . .

His compendium quotes repeatedly from conservative writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and it’s filled with attacks on familiar right-wing targets: Secularism and political correctness; the European Union and the sexual revolution; radical Islam and the academic left. . .

Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have an obligation to acknowledge that Anders Behring Breivik is a distinctively right-wing kind of monster. "

Read The New York Times, A Right-Wing Monster.

For years our Resident Pastor-to-the-Dictators (AKA Pastor Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Poppins)) has waged a campaign of fear, anger and hatred by hosting professional purveyors of hate.

He is one of many "anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists" that influence people to violence. Read The New York Times, Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.

And "their response to the attacks is nonetheless revealing, in that they are now demanding the kind of nuanced analysis of the Norway shootings that they’ve always failed to offer when implicating jihadism or all Muslims for terror attacks." Read the Washington Post, In response to Norway attacks, right-wing bloggers suddenly demand nuance.

I find it no coincidence that this incident was done on Friday, just before the Pastor's show.

The formula is old: Republi-con fear, anger, hatred = violence. But the Republi-CONs have no shame or concern for the violence they may incite.