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On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, George Bush, famously or infamously, had to be instructed on the existence of and differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims. He had no idea--despite centuries of warfare between the two sects--that there was a difference.

Sadly, that cultural ignorance of most Americans is still being played and preyed upon when fostering fear of Islam here, especially in regards to the Cordoba House. As has been previously reported, the Cordoba House is being built by Sufi Muslims, a mystical sub-sect of the Shia Muslims and considered apostates of Wahabbist Sunni sub-sect of al Qaeda.

Fareed Zakaria highlights further proof of the al Qaeda hatred of the Sufis with the July attack on a Lahore, Pakistan Sufi shrine during prayers, which killed 41 and injured 175 more. What gets lost in the amped-up "fear of the Other" rhetoric of Gingrich and Palin and driven by media like Fox News, is that this is not a battle of Islam vs. the US.

Why would al Qaeda attack a holy place at a time of prayer? Because it is a Sufi shrine, part of a sect that al Qaeda despises and regards as a deadly foe in the real battle it is fighting, the battle within Islam.

The Sufis are a sector of Islam originating in South Asia. They're all about mysticism, love, brotherhood and devotion, with very little attention to dogma. They believe in saints, shrines, music, dance, and follow a very liberal interpretation of the Koran.

Sufi poets routinely extol the virtues of wine and song, both forbidden in the purer versions of Islam. Sufism has always believed in tolerance towards other people and religion, and in peace. You can see why al Qaeda views it as its mortal enemy. The more Muslims accept some version of Sufi Islam, the more dangerous for al Qaeda and its extreme jihadist philosophy.

It can't be said enough, with all the misinformation out there: Islam doesn't hate us. This is a battle between al Qaeda and everyone else that doesn't follow their own narrow vision of Islam, which includes other Muslims. The opposition to the Cordoba House is exactly what al Qaeda wants to see.

And how sad is it that George W. Bush eventually came around to understanding this divide and was more moderate in his statements about the Muslim world than the current crop of Republican leaders?

By now most of you have seen or heard about Republican Elizabeth Dole's disgusting and desperate "Godless" commercial attacking her front-running opponent, Democrat Kay Hagan.

Not only has Hagan fired back with an ad of her own (posted above), her campaign has now filed a defamation lawsuit against Dole and fiercely punching back against what has to be the lowest of campaign smears in the 2008 campaign cycle. From The Hill:

Democratic challenger Kay Hagan has filed a defamation lawsuit against Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) for questioning Hagan's faith in what is shaping up as the nastiest campaign of this cycle.

Hagan announced the lawsuit after Dole refused to remove the ad, which suggests Hagan is an atheist and has become the subject of tough criticism from several newspaper editorials in North Carolina. Several polls show Dole trailing Hagan, a state senator.

“Elizabeth Dole would love nothing more than to distract from the issues and her record for the last five days of the campaign,” Flanagan said. “In filing this suit, we’ve made clear that these kind of despicable tactics will not be tolerated, and our campaign is moving forward with the most important task at hand: defeating Elizabeth Dole, and giving North Carolina’s families a voice in the U.S. Senate that they’ve been sorely missing.” Read on...

TBogg: Paranoid Anger Bear Andrew Breitbart's hatred extends to more than just negroes. Update: Maybe they grew a pair

onegoodmove: Links with your coffee...

Its my Right to be Left of the Center: Grayson: May God have mercy on your souls

Circle Jerk at the Square Dance: What new words are we creating in our political tweets?

Class Acts: The Prohibition Blues

HOLY CRAP: Changing the script...Scientology's new enemy...GOP Reps align with Muslim nations...Believer Beware at TBN...10 things Christians and Atheists can and must agree on...Breitbart to repackage "Birth of A Nation" as Obama documentary...Just Crap...Racial tolerance...Cheap Grace...Sectarian Supremacism...Holy Images

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As many of you know, conservatives hate government because it interferes with their precious free market 'GOD', so when they actually control the government they hire unqualified sycophants, who by their very nature undermine the posts they are given because of their incompetence and hatred for the government they draw a paycheck from. They then will use their position like an ideological club as much as possible. This comes in very handy when the administration changes hands, because then they can work to get rid of everything Democratic.

Monica Goodling was a powerful symbol of of the Bush administration. She was given a very powerful position with none of the basic qualifications for the job, just like Heckvuajob Brownie. In her case, she graduated from Pat Robertson's Regent University, and because she's a right-wing conservative hack, she got hired to assist Alberto Gonzalez at the DOJ with the power to hire and fire people. How is that possible, you say?

About a week ago, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick noted a tidbit that the rest of us missed: TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Regent University boasts that 150 of its graduates, including former top DoJ aide Monica Goodling, are serving in some capacity in the Bush administration. Lithwick noted that this is “a huge number for a 29-year-old school.” That’s certainly true; it’s also a huge number for a small right-wing college led by a radical televangelist who believes Americans brought 9/11 upon themselves.

George W. Bush is the answer. If you forgot who Monica is, here's how she abused the power she was given. And of course she acted like a typical Grover Norquist clone and instructed the DOJ's attorneys to delete and destroy documents.

Turley and Olbermann discussed Alberto and Monica here. (Click to see video)

If McCain had won the election, he would have continued hiring incompetents throughout his administration because having a jackass fail in a key job only helps push the conservative meme that the government is useless and should not be involved in the actual job of governing. I was wondering if David Axelrod and his crew have made a real effort to purge these Heritage/Robertson imbeciles from their ranks?

Here's an example of what conservative governance is all about and what can happen if you don't clean house.

Hullabaloo writes about Bush-era embeds.

During the US Attorney scandal many of us wondered if it would result in a bunch of GOP operatives remaining burrowed in the Justice Department because the Democrats would fear being criticized for "politicizing" the department if they tried to fire them. Republicans, having fully mastered "I know you are but what am I" politics can always be counted upon to cry victim even when the turned tables are of a completely different type and the hapless Democrats end up chasing their tails because they can't figure out how to parry it. It was predictable that, perversely, there would be quite a few wingnut holdovers after the scandal completely safe in their jobs.

It turns out there are burrowers and one of them has left the department and immediately gone to the press to spill breathless tales of racism in the Obama/Holder DOJ -- toward white people, naturally:

Continue reading »

BlogHer: Manifesto – I am not a "brand."

No More Mister Nice Blog: Ayn Rand's Miracle Elixir.

The Happiest Place on Earth: Florida public schools being "sponsored" by churches and gun shops, and conservative hatred for teachers.

Sans Everything: Conservatism as a family affair.

Text & History: Why the Supreme Court’s decision in Rent-a-Center v. Jackson matters.

Lance Mannion: Asperger's.

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily e-mail tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com.

This from Mr. Gilliard

via Driftglass from Steve: It’s not true that the Conservatives I know don’t give a damn so much as they are terrified that they were wrong. Deeply, primally terrified. Their whole psychological infrastructure is cobbled together out of half-baked conservative bumper-sticker ideology, gun lust, socially illiterate hatred of “welfare cheats” and other largely fictional or apocryphal lazy people (read: niggers and other swarthy folk) who want to leech off of them while they work harder and harder for less and less.

Despite a lot of bluster about Freedom and Individuality they are, at heart, happiest when they are conforming to the wishes of the Strong Man; when they know exactly their place in the hierarchy...read on

. Powerline: The Great Unraveling

Powerline :A Sad Day

"What I don't understand is why this tragic case should be an occasion for the partisan hatred which currently bedevils our public life.

" I don't know how to account for it, unless one concludes that for some liberals, politics is about hate, period."

A picture of right wing zealots calling for Jeb Bush's head, yet it's liberals who hate.

Powerline again:

Why? Maybe they have "fallen half in love with death," as Noonan suggests? Or maybe they are just frustrated by losing elections, seeing the tide turn in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East (must Terri die for Bush's "sins"?), etc. Whatever the case, it makes for a sad and sorry spectacle.

A Christian conservative judge (with a price on his head) backed by the Conservative lead Supreme Court is ruling on this case, yet it's Bush hating liberals that are some how calling the shots. They should take a look in the mirror to find where the real hate is coming from.

Is this Arafat's legacy?

I took a taxi cab ride in Philadelphia around 1999. I asked the driver to take me to get a cheese steak sandwich (of course) and he joined me saying he was hungry also. After a few minutes of small talk, he told me that he was Palestinian. I asked him, "Do you ever think there will be peace between Israel and Palestine?" He stopped eating and and said one word: Never! I asked him how come? " They kill babies in the streets! They threw my family out of their homes. How would you like it if someone came to the house that you lived in all of your life and kicked you into the streets?" After a few minutes I said, "Wouldn’t it be better for your people to finally make peace as long as it’s fair so that your families can heal and your society would begin to grow? He threw his sandwich to the ground and said, "There will never be peace! Never! "As long as we still breathe, we would all rather die!"

He was so angered that he took me back to the hotel and radioed in to his boss and told him that he couldn’t work the rest of the night.

At the time I was naive to the whole conflict and I thought I was asking an innocent question. I've heard that resentments are the number one offender in twelve step programs, and as this one goes, well… I’ve never felt hatred like I did talking to that man.

Will a new leadership help to create peace? With that type of resentment embeded in their hearts, I don't see it anytime soon.

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Last night Bill O'Reilly announced he was doing an admirable thing -- covering the legal expenses of Fred Phelps victim Albert Snyder -- and in doing so, seemed to express an admirable sentiment: hate talk is a bad thing, and all sides should eschew it.

Except, of course, by Bill's lights, the flow of hate is equal on both sides:

There is far too much hatred in America. That's obvious. It comes from both sides. The Michigan militia and the Westboro Baptist Church are far-right nuts, but there are just as many far-left idiots doing vile things.

Thirty-eight-year-old Norman Leboon has been charged with threatening to kill Republican Congressman Eric Cantor. Apparently Leboon wants to kill Cantor and his family and is now being held without bail. It looks like this guy is simply nuts. Ideology might not be in play.

However, a brick was thrown through the window of the Michigan Republican Party headquarters on Monday. Obviously that's political.

The point is that the situation in America is reaching critical mass. There is far too much hatred in the air.

The press is obviously pumping up inappropriate things that happen on the right and pretty much ignoring hateful things on the left. Bernie Goldberg and I established that on Monday.

But every member of the media should condemn all hate speech and violent activity. It is simply un-American.

Then O'Reilly had Laura Ingraham come on to point out that yeah, those left-wingers can be every bit as nasty as the right-wingers.

Tell you what, Bill and Laura. Come and talk to us again about how nasty and wrong hateful talk from the left is when:

-- A liberal walks into a church and opens fire on the congregation because they're all a bunch of conservatives and he wants to kill as many right-wingers as he can.

-- A liberal walks into another church and shoots a doctor in the head.

-- A liberal shoots three police officers who come to his door because he fears the president is going to take his guns away.

-- A liberal walks into the Holocaust Museum and shoots a guard because he hates Jews and believes it's time to start a race war.

-- A liberal walks into the Pentagon and opens fire because he believes the government is plotting against its citizens.

-- A pack of gun-loving liberals forms a plot to kill law-enforcement officers and start a revolution.

See, that isn't happening. But it is happening with characters from the right, opening fire on various perceived "liberal" targets, law enforcement officers, and government employees. (In order, they've happened in Knoxville, in Wichita, in Pittsburgh, in Washington, twice, and this past weekend in the Midwest.)

No doubt there are some liberals who use ugly and sometimes even violent rhetoric. But there's a big difference between what's actually happening on the ground in terms of the behavior of right-wingers and left-wingers when it comes to acting on the rhetoric: The fanatics on the right are decidedly more violent, and act out violently with much greater frequency.

Why is that? Well, there are two big differences between left-wing and right-wing hate talk, one qualitative, the other quantitative:

-- Right-wing talk is decidedly more violent and openly eliminationist -- which is to say, it speaks more openly about eliminating entire blocs of their fellow Americans, and it does so by harkening to violent themes with much greater frequency.

-- The sheer volume of right-wing hate talk is so much greater. Not only are there more examples, by an exponential factor, of right-wing hatefulness, but the talk is emanating from the upper reaches of the right-wing hierarchy: on TV and radio talk shows with hosts who spew eliminationist hatred daily to audiences of millions daily, and among politicians who represent the supposed mainstream of officialdom, and thus lend their imprimatur to such behavior.

The talk shows, in particular, are a real problem. Especially when you have hosts who repeatedly call someone a "baby killer" day in and day out.

Now that's hate talk. But of course, Bill O'Reilly will never admit to that.

Values War and Piece

The emails Andrew Sullivan gets fuel my despair about where America is headed. The hatred, the intolerance. Why do Republicans hate gay people so??? And why do they let Rove fan the flames of this hatred which can only incite violence?

"I wonder if you noticed that yesterday all eleven states that considered the question of gay marriage voted to ban it. ALL ELEVEN. I think this sends a very clear message -- true Americans do not like your kind of homosexual deviants in our country, and we will not tolerate your radical pro-gay agenda trying to force our children to adopt your homosexual lifestyle. You should be EXTREMELY GRATEFUL that we even let you write a very public and influential blog, instead of suppressing your treasonous views (as I would prefer). But I'm sure someone like yourself would consider me just an "extremist" that you don't need to worry about. Well you are wrong -- I'm not just an extremist, I am a real American, and you should be worried because eleven states yesterday proved that there are millions more just like me who will not let you impose your radical agenda on our country."

What happened to decency in America? What happened to the religious values of tolerance and respect for human life? Treating others as one wishes to be treated?