I've always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created— in the sense of rape—but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.
We don't know, so we had to imagine. Rick is still seen by some as a promising candidate, supportable by right wing fundamentalist leaders. This enthusiasm is only dampened by the fact that nobody outside of right wing fundamentalist leaders particularly gives a flying fuck about Rick Santorum.
But as his campaign flounders awkwardly along like—Oh, I dunno—a man-on-dog sexual pairing trying to jog mid-tryst, it's a good time to be reminded: There are piggish elements within our body politic who will always, always, always abuse women's rights for political gain. And that Rick Santorum's "google problem" was never just Dan Savage's brilliant gag, it has always been the things that he actually says and does.
Frothy lube may stain your futon, but Santorum stains the American political landscape—until such time as his well-established inability to win actual votes brings the Santorum slide to a messy end.
O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.
SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?
O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.
The sun rises and the sun sets. The clock strikes twelve at noon and midnight. Neither of these prove the existence of God, but don't tell BillO. He'd be crushed under the weight of the moon's gravity.
But as the 2012 primaries approach, another de facto requirement for GOP White House hopefuls is emerging. That is, candidates must not only (a) proclaim that they have been called on God to seek the presidency, but (b) declare that divine intervention is the cure for what ails America. Call it the Divine Right Pledge. And so far, it's one most of the GOP field seems more than willing to take.
Of course, the GOP has long been parodied as "God's Own Party." But now, the Party of Lincoln is rapidly turning Honest Abe's mantra ("My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side.") on its head.
"I'm not ready to tell you that I'm ready to announce that I'm in. But I'm getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what I've been called to do. This is what America needs."
If the Lord is calling on Rick Perry to lead the United States, Perry plans to call Him back when it's time to actually run it.
On August 6th in Houston, Governor Perry will tunnel under the wall separating church and state to lead The Response, an evangelical day of prayer and fasting seeking divine intervention for America. As Perry put it:
"I sincerely hope you'll join me in Houston on August 6th and take your place in Reliant Stadium with praying people asking God's forgiveness, wisdom and provision for our state and nation. There is hope for America. It lies in heaven, and we will find it on our knees."
"I think it's time for us to just hand it over to God and say, 'God, You're going to have to fix this.'
(That Perry may now skip the August 6 event in Houston may just be confirmation that God wants him in Washington DC instead.)
Rep. Michele Bachmann may not know much about history, but she does know that God is on her side. The self-proclaimed "fool for Christ," who in 2006 warned that "we are in the End of Days" and counseled "wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands," has been also called on by God.
Lately, there would seem to be a whole lot more people who have a direct channel to the Big Guy Upstairs than one could have humanly thought possible.
It is oft-said that "God works in mysterious ways". But when Michele Bachmann hears voices telling her to run for president, am I the only who thinks the most likely explanation is a batch of bad clams or one-too-many nights role playing The Book of Eli with her equally demented husband Marcus?
Perhaps, these are the very same voices that have shared with her the important role "Founding Father John Quincy Adams" played in ending slavery as he battled the oncoming scourge of puberty? I don't know, just a stab in the dark.
Regardless, whether it is gay marriage or spotting the Virgin Mary in your gordita, our re-embrace of culture-by-theology in the United States (not unlike much of the rest of the world) has led supposedly "serious people" to say things that not so long ago would have landed them a starring role in Girl, Interrupted.
In our current age, in fact, possessing a direct cerebral channel to Deus (or at least claiming you do) would seem to be a requirement for receiving an invitation to a GOP presidential debate.
Whoa, whoa... I'm starting to get a funny feeling in my pants... I haven't felt this way since 2003... what could it be? Oh God! OOOOHHH GOD, YES!!! WE MIGHT HAVE ANOTHER WAR!!!! YESYESYES!!!! OOOOOOOHHHHH GOD!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!
*pant, pant*
So, Iran, was that as good for you as it was for me?
You can always count on Tom Tancredo to say all kinds of insane things, but sometimes it's hard to tell if he just says them to get attention, which he obviously craves, or if he really believes the things he says.
Well, the other day at a campaign event for his pal, Republican Senate candidate and renowned Tea Partier Ken Buck (a favorite of Erick Erickson, too), Tancredo seemed quite aware of this confusion, and did his best to clear it up for us all:
Tancredo: What could be more important for you to do, really, if you think about this? Everything is at stake here. Everything.
I firmly believe with all my heart, you guys, although we have had many threats to our nation -- and we have gone through a whole lot of things, and survived many things. We -- I always say, you know, we survived the Civil War, we survived the Depression, we went through all -- we survived Bill Clinton, for heaven's sake!
But nothing -- I do not believe -- not the Soviet Union, when we were in, you know, that thirty-five year period leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, thanks to Ronald Reagan, God bless him. [Applause]
...
But we had that threat, we survived it. Later, we found out we had another threat to our way of life, and that was Al Qaeda, and we found that out on 9/11.
But I firmly believe this -- it's not just, you know, some dramatic statement a person would make to get press or something or ink. I believe this with all my heart -- that the greatest threat to the United States today, the greatest threat to our liberty, the greatest threat to the Constitution of the United States, the greatest threat to our way of life, everything we believe in, the greatest threat to the country that was put together by the Founding Fathers, is the guy that is in the White House today.
It's actually a bit scarier to realize that people like Tancredo (and Beck, and Limbaugh, and Weiner Savage, and Palin, et al et al) really believe the things that come out of their mouths.
Coulter responded: "No. I'm sorry. It is not intended to be. I don't think you should take it that way, but that is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews. We believe the Old Testament. As you know from the Old Testament, God was constantly getting fed up with humans for not being able to live up to all the laws. What Christians believe -- this is just a statement of what the New Testament is -- is that that's why Christ came and died for our sins. Christians believe the Old Testament. You don't believe our testament." Coulter later said: "We consider ourselves perfected Christians. For me to say that for you to become a Christian is to become a perfected Christian is not offensive at all."
Dateline: June, 2010
Today, Ann Coulter is still busy writing columns like her most recent where she mocks Malia Obama while making some really convoluted parallel to Monica Lewinsky's blue dress. She's featured at CPAC, and she's still listed on the top 20 "Conservative Hotties" list. She has the same content distributor, her agent hasn't abandoned her, and she enjoys the "respect" (I use the term loosely) of the conservative community.
When you're a conservative and suggest an entire religion should surrender itself to another, it's not considered anti-Semitic. I understand Coulter's theology here, but nowhere in that theology is there a suggestion that Judaism should just "go away."
On the other hand, we have Helen Thomas making equally ill-advised and hurtful remarks about Jews leaving Israel. Within a few days, she's forced into retirement, abandoned by her agent and writing partner, villified by the DC Press glitterati, slammed by the White House, and drummed out of a career she's had for 57 years.
There's a new NY Times/CBS poll on the teabaggers, and guess what? It only confirms what we've been saying all along. They are mostly white male conservative sore losers who hate the poor and hate President Obama. Which means of course that they dislike black people, and are staunch Birthers and climate-change deniers. And they fall in line with the GOP because they do not want a third party.
They say the don't like the GOP 54% to 43%. But 92% of them despise the Democrats.
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There's nothing particularly surprising about the rest of them either. These people are nothing new. They have different iterations, but when you get right down to it they are, quite simply, the far right. They hate poor people (especially blacks) and they hate government that helps poor people (especially blacks.) They are deluded about taxes and spending and are paranoid about the government being infiltrated by "the other." They believe they are the only "true" Americans and alternate between insisting that their "traditional values" are best represented by the Bible or the Constitution, both of which they believe they are ordained by God to properly interpret. And they do not really believe in democracy which is really why they hate the government.
When they lose they stage a national hissy fit of epic proportions and persuade the Village (where they are perceived as the personification of the heartland of America) that they are something very important. Now that they have their very own TV and radio networks featuring crazed right wing demagogues 24/7, they are more successful on those terms than ever. But they are nothing new, nothing new at all. They are mostly a bunch of cranky, white men with money who are trying desperately to hang on to their privileges. Same as it ever was.
They are what we have called "Republicans" for at least the last 30 years.
Most of them get their information from FOX News because they don't read websites and only 6% believe George Bush had anything to do with the deficit. Oh, and only 20% of them have heard of Ron Paul and they just love Glenn Beck. Why the media is spending so much time trying to figure these people out is a mystery to me now. They are arch-conservative racist wingnuts who hate the government, but still want their Social Security and Medicare.
Poll after poll will say the same thing. When they lose they get angry. When they get angry they make f*&ked up signs and scream in town hall meetings about the Constitution.
Watching the rise of the Tea Party movement has been a frustration to me, and not just because it is ugly and seeks to traduce so many of the values I hold dear.
“I just don’t have time for anything,” a housewife told a news magazine in 1961. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”
Even worse has been the overwhelming historical myopia. As the Times’s new poll numbers amply confirm — especially the ones establishing that the Tea Partiers are overwhelming Republican or right-of-Republican — they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government.
Good old Joe. He's doing what he does best. Throw as much dirt as he can on the left. While giving an interview with the conspiracy theory-wingnut site known as Newsmax, he says he's really happy that the Republicans might have the momentum in the 2010 election. Praise the Lord and all that jazz.
But in a Newsmax interview published Monday, he took himself one step further toward the party he once campaigned to defeat.
There were a lot of people, particularly Democrats, who were declaring after the 2008 election that we were beginning a period of Democratic dominance that would go on for decades," Lieberman told Newsmax. "Now, all of a sudden, the momentum is with the Republicans. And that's — thank God — that's the way people have spoken, you know? That's our democracy."
The senator also said that "everybody should listen" to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.
“I think Sarah Palin for a lot of people has become a spokesperson," Lieberman said. "People worried that government has forgotten them, has grown too big, that the deficit is growing too large, and in some sense that we’re not being as strong as we should be in the world — Governor Palin has spoken to those concerns as much as anyone.
We should listen to Sarah Palin because she speaks nonsense, right Joe? Palin supports every policy that led to the anger that permeates our nation and would have continued with the same policies that caused a Global Financial meltdown even if she doesn't understand what they all mean.
She's the one that beat him out of being the VP poster boy for his BFF, 'I'm No Maverick' McCain.
Lieberman runs on bitterness and hate for anything that is to the left of his "Bomb Iran" wet dreams. We can all thank Al Gore for Holy Joe.
Al Snyder's son died in Iraq in May of 2006. Members of the rabidly anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church picketed his son Matthew's funeral, causing immense personal, emotional pain for him, his family and their friends.
Snyder won a $5 million civil lawsuit against the church and the Phelps family, but it was recently tossed out of a federal court. To add insult to injury, the court has now ordered Snyder to pay all of the church's legal fees:
BALTIMORE — Lawyers for the father of a Marine who died in Iraq say a court has ordered him to pay legal costs for the anti-gay protesters who picketed his son's funeral.
The protesters are led by Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church. Albert Snyder of York, Pa., had won a $5 million verdict against Phelps, but it was thrown out on appeal.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed earlier this month to consider whether the protesters' provocative messages, which include phrases like "Thank God for dead soldiers," are protected by the First Amendment.
Lawyers say Snyder already is struggling to come up with the fees associated with filing the brief with the high court. Read on...
I really hate to waste Mr. Amato's bandwidth on these despicable people, but Mr. Snyder needs our moral support as well as help with legal costs. I hope he doesn't pay one thin dime to these people, but he'll need lawyers to help continue the fight. There is a legal fund set up for him, if you'd like to show him some love, you can do so by clicking here.
