Bearing in mind Beck is a national disgrace, how does he want to restore the US's 'honour'? And what empowers him to do so?
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Sunday, 29 August 2010
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Building a Nation of Know-Nothings
By TIMOTHY EGANHaving shed much of his dignity, core convictions and reputation for straight talk, Senator John McCain won his primary on Tuesday against the flat-earth wing of his party. Now McCain can go search for his lost character, which was last on display late in his 2008 campaign for president.
Remember the moment: a woman with matted hair and a shaky voice rose to express her doubts about Barack Obama. “I have read about him,” she said, “and he’s not — he’s an Arab.”
McCain was quick to knock down the lie. “No, ma’am,” he said, “he’s a decent family man, a citizen.”
That ill-informed woman — her head stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler — now makes up a representative third or more of the Republican party. It’s not just that 47 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.
Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are unpopular or ill-conceived — not because millions of people believe a lie.
In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images Rush Limbaugh
So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:
So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:
“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”
Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate.
On the Muslim deception, Limbaugh has sprinkled lie dust all over the place. “Obama says he’s a Christian, but where’s the evidence?” he said on Aug. 19. He has repeatedly called the president “imam Obama,” and said, “I’m just throwing things out there, folks, because people are questioning his Christianity.”
You see how he works. He drops in suggestions, hints, notes that “people are questioning” things. The design is to make Obama un-American. Then he says it’s a tweak, a provocation. He says this as a preemptive way to keep the press from calling him out. And it works; long profiles of Limbaugh have largely gone easy on him.
Once Limbaugh has planted a lie, a prominent politician can pick it up, with little nuance. So, over the weekend, Kim Lehman, one of Iowa’s two Republican National Committee members, went public with doubts on Obama’s Christianity. Of course, she was not condemned by party leaders.
It’s curious, also, that any felon, drug addict, or recovering hedonist can loudly proclaim a sudden embrace of Jesus and be welcomed without doubt by leaders of the religious right. But a thoughtful Christian like Obama is still distrusted.
“I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That’s not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was “born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his father.”
Actually, he was born from two non-practicing parents, and his Kenyan father was absent for all of his upbringing. Obama came to his Christianity like millions of people, through searching and questioning.
Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another non-partisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.
Beck tosses off enough half-truths in a month to keep Politifact working overtime. Of late, he has gone after Michelle Obama, whose vacation in Spain was “just for her and approximately 40 of her friends.” Limbaugh had a similar line, saying the First Lady “is taking 40 of her best friends and leasing 60 rooms at a five-star hotel — paid for by you.”
The White House said Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha were accompanied by just a few friends — and they paid their own costs. But, wink, wink, the damage is done. He’s Muslim and foreign. She’s living the luxe life on your dime. They don’t even have to mention race. The code words do it for them.
Climate-change denial is a special category all its own. Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox.
It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?
But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?
Thursday, 19 August 2010
OUTRAGE OVER PLANS TO BUILD LIBRARY NEXT TO SARAH PALIN
OUTRAGE OVER PLANS TO BUILD LIBRARY NEXT TO SARAH PALIN
19-08-10 | |
PLANS to build a state of the art library next to Republican catastrophe Sarah Palin are causing outrage across mainstream America. Almost 40% of Americans still support the idea of books The issue is forming a dividing line in advance of November's mid-term congressional elections with candidates being forced to declare whether they have ever been to a library or spoken to someone who has books in their home. Meanwhile President Obama has caused unease within his own Democratic party by endorsing the library and claiming that not everyone who reads books is responsible for calling Mrs Palin a fuckwit nutjob nightmare of a human being. But Bill McKay, a leading member of the right-wing Teapot movement, said: "Sarah Palin is a hallowed place for Americans who can't read. "How is she going to feel knowing that every day there are people going inside a building to find things out for themselves and have thoughts, right in the very shadow of her amazing nipples." He added: "Our founding fathers intended for every building in this country to be a church containing one book, written by Jesus, that would be read out in a strange voice by an orange man in a shiny suit who would also tell you who you were allowed to kill. "Building a library next to Mrs Palin is like Pearl Harbour. Or 9/11." And Wayne Hayes, a pig masseur from Coontree, Virginia, said: "I is so angry right now. "It's like something is on fire right in the middle of my head. Like I've eaten a real hot chilli, but it's gone up my nose tubes rather than down my ass tubes." He added: "Would these library lovers allow me to set up a stall next to the Smithsonian Museum and start selling DVDs of bible cartoons as long as it was in accordance with local regulations? "Oh they would? I see. So is that why they're better than me?" Thanks to 'The Daily Mash' for its content |
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
Rupert Murdoch Lied to Media Matters
Surprised? Given FOX 'News'' complete abandonment of any meaningful (i.e. non-partisan) news coverage, and its embracing the practise of simply broadcasting unvarnished US conservative opinion, perhaps we shouldn't be.
And now, at least with this news, we can dispel the doubt and Fox can quit the charade of being, ahem, "fair and balanced", and admit it's just the GOP's mouthpiece.
And now, at least with this news, we can dispel the doubt and Fox can quit the charade of being, ahem, "fair and balanced", and admit it's just the GOP's mouthpiece.
Click to read: Fox News' corporate parent gave Republican Governors Association $1 million
Thanks to Media Matters for its content
Saturday, 14 August 2010
OBAMA TO DEPORT 15 MILLION REPUBLICANS
Posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010
By Frank Lake Courtesy of The Weekly World News - The World's Only Reliable News
Many in Washington were stunned by President Obama’s decision, the first time in U.S. history that a sitting President has moved to deport legal U.S. Citizens. Senior Adviser David Axelrod spoke to Keith Olbermann, who thought the idea was “genius, you should have done this a year ago.” Axelrod explained the decision, “It is difficult for the President to get his agenda through with all these Republicans standing in his way. When we won the election we thought they would just shut up and let us clean up the mess. We’re left with no choice but to deport these Republicans, so that we can run the country the way we want.”
Napolitano said that mass deportations will start immediately and would not be limited to Arizona Republicans – though they would be the first rounded up. Governor Jan Brewer was picked up last night and driven across the border in an armored car. She was taken to Rosarito on the West Coast of Mexico – where she will be set up with a taco stand. Homeland Security has streamlined the system by seizing the records of Republican Party offices throughout the country. They will begin going door to door, randomly picking those Republican individuals (and families) that “have to go.”
Glenn Beck was taken this morning to an adobe hut in Campeche where he will continue broadcasting his show – to himself.
Once they hit the 15 million mark, the Obama Administration plans to grant citizenship to the 15 million illegal immigrants in this country. Axelrod said, “these new citizens will be registered Democrats and that will make it a lot easier for us to get our agenda passed.”
When asked about the deportations James Carville told CNN that if they came for his wife, Republican Mary Matalin, ICE was going to have some trouble. “I’ll open some cajun whoopass on those bastards.” He was also upset that he’d be out of a job. “If there’s only one party in the country, who’s gonna need political consultants?”
As of 2004 there were 55 million registered Republicans in the country. After the deportations, there still will 40 million left. “This is just the first phase of Operation So-Long-Suckers. If it goes as smoothly as we predict, we can deport another 15 million by the end of the year,” President Obama told Katie Couric, who wept with joy. “There is no other President in the history of our great nation that would the courage and strength to take the necessary steps to bring us all together. You are a God, Mr. President,” Couric told Obama. “I know,” President Obama replied.
As you would expect, most Republicans were outraged at the deportations, but Axelrod reminded them that “you smashed the car into the tree and we’ve been trying to get the car back on the road, and you want us to give you the keys back to the car, so you can smash another tree. Well, you’re not getting the keys back, you’re being sent to your room. Mexico.”
Washington insiders were not surprised that several Republicans supported the deportations: Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine. But even though they spoke in favor of the plan, President Obama is still having them deported. “They’re still Republicans. One and elephant, always an elephant.”
So,if you are a Republican, how do you protect yourself against being deported?
RUN!!!
Monday, 9 August 2010
Palin jumps the shark in "Worst Governor Ever" gotcha
Sarah Palin defaults to stock memes and GOP talking points about "defending the Constitution" when asked simple questions by, of all things, her nightmare audience... a teacher. Actually, I'm just wondering whether it's possible for Palin to jump the shark any more than she already has done, and whether this example actually falls under the 'screws the pooch' category? You decide.
Thanks to Wonkette for the find!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
