Suicidal Maniacs?

Fred Thompson is the emerging for reasons I don’t quite understand as the Great Conservative (read: White) Hope. His recent comments on immigration offer a penetrating preview of his campaign rhetoric:

“Twelve million illegal immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women and children around the world. We’re sitting here now with essentially open borders.”

Thanks, Senator. When my neighbor, a young woman from Puebla, Mexico — whose husband has overseen the renovation of two buildings in my neighborhood and who takes his family to Red Hook Park to play soccer on Sunday, his only day off — straps her kid into his stroller I’ll wonder if maybe, just maybe, she’s strapping an explosive belt around his waist as well. “Suicidal maniacs” are in our midst and they’re cooking pozole for dinner!

I can’t wait for Thompson to fall for the hype he’s been getting and declare. And Newt Gingrich too, for that matter.

“I’m My Kid’s Mom!”

Sometimes childrens’ Myspace pages say more about their parents then themselves. The pathetic saga of Deryk Schlessinger, whose MySpace page contained racist rants and photos of tortured Army detainees, continues to unfold as his mother, “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger, is called to account for her constant radio refrain, “I’m my kid’s mom!” Deryk’s page was taken down but he is depicted on the left here.

The doctor is not in:

Radio talk-show host Laura Schlessinger is appealing to news media outlets to respect her son’s privacy amid an Army investigation into whether he is behind a lurid personal Web page that featured cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation.

The posting on MySpace.com drew the Army’s attention after the Salt Lake City Tribune reported this month that the Web page was credited to and included photos of Deryk, the 21-year-old son of the outspoken radio personality known to millions as “Dr. Laura.” She can be heard locally on KFI-AM (640).

According to the Tribune, the Web page, which has since been taken down, included a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee, accounts of illicit drug use and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

Dr. Laura is asking for privacy? I didn’t know until now that she believed in privacy rights.

This is a classic example of the Conflicted Conservative in Crisis (CCC), the type of authoritarian figure who projects their unresolved personal issues onto objects that embody what they can’t stand about themselves. Photos of Deryk contain nowhere near the shock value of the shots taken of her at a similar stage in life (iron-stomached adults only). It’s half-past time for Dr. Laura to throw in the towel and enter the Ted Haggard retirement home. Not that she will. There are countless other CCC’s out there in right-wing radioland who are so desperate for her stern advice they don’t care if she’s a total fraud. She can just blame the liberal media and move on.

Diary of a Christian Terrorist

Visitors to Mark David Uhl’s Myspace page will quickly learn that Uhl is a student at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, that he is a devoted Christian, that his name means “Mighty Warrior” — and that he likes Will Smith’s saccharine tear-up-the-club track, “Switch.” Uhl reveals his career ambitions on his page as well: “I will join the Army as an officer after college.” Already, Uhl was preparing in Liberty’s ROTC program.

Uhl waited until he was offline, however, to reveal his plot to kill the family of itinerant Calvinist provocateur Fred Phelps (famous for their “Fag Troops” rallies outside soldiers’ funerals). The Phelpses planned to protest Falwell’s funeral, a bizarre stunt designed to highlight Falwell’s somehow insufficiently draconian attitude towards homosexuals. Uhl made several bombs and allegedly told a family member he planned to use them to attack the Phelps family.

He was arrested soon after and charged with manufacturing explosives. On the surface, Uhl appears to be the latest version of Virginia Tech rampage killer (and “Richard McBeef” author) Cho Seung-Hui. Indeed, both Uhl and Cho were alienated young men who conceived or carried out campaigns of mass murder on college campuses.

But there is a crucial difference between Uhl and Cho: while Cho’s motives remain a source of intense debate, Uhl was an a devout evangelical Christian who advocated religious violence in the name of American nationalism. Uhl’s blog, featured on his Myspace page, offers a window into the political underpinnings of his bomb plot. In one post, Uhl implores Christians to die on the battlefield for “Uncle Sam.” He justifies his call to arms by quoting several Biblical passages and reminding his readers that the “gift of God” is eternal life.

“Christians, we have been given life after death and we should help others receive it and not sit here in our big buildings and sing to ourselves so we can go home and feel good about ourselves,” Uhl writes. “Christians, fear of death, fear of death. The fear of death shows you don’t believe.”

Uhl concludes, “God needs soldiers to fight so his children may live free. Are you afraid??? I’m not. SEND ME!!! ”

Uhl’s imploration sounds eerily like the battle-cries of another, more notorious religious radical: Osama bin-Laden. Consider what bin-Laden told the Independent in 1993. “`I was never afraid of death… As Muslims, we believe that when we die, we go to heaven. Before a battle, God sends us… tranquility.”

Christian right leaders from the late Falwell to James Dobson have turned Muslim-bashing into a cottage industry, using the words of bin-Laden and his acolytes to allege that Islam is an inherently violent religion that “breeds” terrorism. After meeting with President George W. Bush two weeks ago about Iran and Iraq, Dobson conducted a hysterical five-part broadcast hyping the threat of radical Islam. (CD’s of those broadcasts will soon be available on Focus on the Family’s website, with all proceeds going to support Dobson’s kulturkampf — and his paycheck).

The response of Dobson and his allies to Uhl’s arrest will reflect more on themselves than on any impressionable 19-year-old college student. The Christian right has warped religious doctrine to advance a Utopian political worldview that promises to purify the land of liberal decadence. Through one of its flagship universities, the Christian right produced a terrorist. Their hysterical warnings of the threat of radical Islam sound increasingly like projections.

But then again, maybe it’s all Will Smith’s fault.

A White Nationalist’s Brownest Friend

I wasn’t surprised when I checked the website of America’s brownest white supremacist, Michelle Malkin, and found no mention of Mark David Uhl, the Liberty University ROTC student who planned to kill the deranged Phelps family with explosives. Uhl declared his intention to commit acts at least tantamount to terrorism, and Malkin claims to be deeply concerned about the threat of terror on American soil. Unfortunately, this match seemingly made in heaven was never to be. Uhl did not possess the one trait that would have rendered him useful to Malkin’s anti-terror crusades: dark skin.

The Phelpses, for their part, (this Patridge Family on bad acid is best known for its “Fag Troops” protests) were going to picket Liberty U founder Jerry Falwell’s funeral to make their point that the late reverend was somehow too soft on the gays. Uhl took it upon himself to prove that while Phelps family patriarch Fred may be more right-wing than even Jerry was, Jerry’s kids will not be outdone by anyone — even a Calvinist maniac who allegedly beats his kids with an axe-handle.

Uhl is arguably a domestic terrorist, and certainly a politically radicalized, Christian nationalist version of (author of literary masterpiece Richard McBeef) Cho Seung-Hui. Indeed, both were young men who carried out or made plans to wage a campaign of mass murder on a college campus.

It is fair to say that if Uhl was an Arab Muslim, he might be chained to a seat right now in a CIA Learjet, clad in a diaper on his way to some secret prison in Eastern Europe for a good waterboarding. And his story, or some stridently recapitulated version of it, would be prominently featured on Malkin’s website. Instead, Uhl’s tale is buried and Malkin… well, she’s worked herself into a petulant frenzy over the murder of a young white couple by a group of blacks. The killing was horrible to be sure, but it did not in any way appear to be a hate crime.

One People’s Project notes that a group of neo-Nazis plans to rally around the killing in Knoxville a week from now, and that the murders were introduced into the blogosphere exclusively by white nationalist bloggers, whom Malkin cites as her sources:

On May 16, Malkin covered the case on her video blog Hot Air. She said that the case is one that has been given life to the story nationally while the national media ignored it, by bloggers concerned with the case. What she doesn’t say is that those bloggers were, until she came on board, almost exclusively from white supremacist circles. Even more curious than that is her timing. Her coverage of the case comes week before posters to the white supremacist Vanguard News Network, including Jim Leshkevich of Hurley, NY, an associate of white supremacist internet radio host Hal Turner, and among the first to write about the case on his blog, plan a Memorial Day Weekend rally in Knoxville in Christian’s and Newsom’s name, despite the fact that the family wants no part of it.

Dave Neiwert writes that Malkin and her cohorts have also ignored the Aryan Nation membership of Jason Kenneth Hamilton (why do these nuts always have two first names?), the man who went on a killing rampage in Moscow, Idaho. Neiwert adds, “considering his extremist background, it is certain this was intended as some kind of political statement. It was, by most definitions, an act of domestic terrorism.” Although domestic terrorists are more likely to kill Americans on American soil than al Qaeda is (at least statistically speaking), they are overwhelmingly white, at least nominally Christian, and are therefore not very valuable to the self-proclaimed conservatives who habitually promote white nationalist propaganda.

Agent of Intolerance

In my latest, a short history of Jerry Falwell’s exploitation of race to galvanize the Christian right, I note that neither the Washington Post or New York Times mentioned Falwell’s segregationist activism in their obituaries — a glaring oversight if I ever saw one.

Anyway, here’s my piece:

Jerry Falwell, found unconscious in his office Tuesday, expired at age 73, spent much of his life hurling maledictions, and it is probably best to let him speak for himself. He was, after all, a preacher.

In 1984, Falwell called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” Members of these churches, Falwell added, are “brute beasts.” Falwell initially denied his statements, offering Jerry Sloan, an MCC minister and gay rights activist $5,000 to prove that he had made them. When Sloan produced a videotape containing footage of Falwell’s denunciations, the reverend refused to pay. Only after Sloan sued did Falwell cough up the money.

Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life–in 1999 he warned that Tinky Winky, a character on the children’s show Teletubbies, might be gay–but his most infamous remark arrived on the morning of 9/11, after the terrorist attacks, when he proclaimed, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

Though Falwell’s influence waned in his twilight years–his approval rating among evangelicals, according to a 2006 Pew Poll, had drifted downward to 46 percent–his well-publicized gaffes continued to make him one of the most recognizable figures of the Christian right. While the names of evangelical heavies like Focus on the Family founder and chairman James Dobson and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins are unknown to most people, Falwell’s pudgy visage remains the symbol of the culture war his apostles have inherited. As Perkins wrote of Falwell in a newsletter after his death, “He was a pioneer whose legacy, marked by courage and candor, blazed the trail for all men and women of conviction to engage–boldly–on the great questions of our day.”

But for Falwell, the “questions of the day” did not always relate to abortion and homosexuality–nor did they begin there. Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called “values” issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.

As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?”

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”

As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “civil wrongs.”

In a 1964 sermon, “Ministers and Marchers,” Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning “the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations,” Falwell declared, “It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed.”

Falwell concluded, “Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners.”

Then, for a time, Falwell appeared to follow his own advice. He retreated from massive resistance and founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy, an institution described by the Lynchburg News in 1966 as “a private school for white students.” It was one among many so-called “seg academies” created in the South to avoid integrated public schools.

For Falwell and his brethren, private Christian schools were the last redoubt. Rather than continue a hopeless struggle against the inevitable, through their schools they could circumvent the integration entirely. Five years later, Falwell christened Liberty University, a college that today funnels a steady stream of dedicated young cadres into Republican Congressional offices and conservative think tanks. (Tony Perkins is among Falwell’s Christian soldiers.)

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: “We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square.” But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” Criswell exclaimed, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the “pre-born.” For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.

“I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

In 1979, at Weyrich’s behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell’s organization hoisted the banner of the “pro-family” movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government’s attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right’s culture war would likely never have come into being. “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,” former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

As the Christian right gradually transmuted its racial resentment into sexual politics, Liberty University began enrolling nonwhite students and Thomas Road Baptist Church integrated. In the irony of ironies in 2006, at Justice Sunday III, a rally for the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, a man who belonged to a white-only “eating club” at Princeton University, Falwell haltingly rose to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Beside him stood Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, an evangelical antiabortion activist.

On the day of Falwell’s death, Republican presidential frontrunners fell over one another to memorialize him. Arizona Senator John McCain, who in the 2000 presidential campaign had called Falwell an “agent of intolerance,” then spoke at the 2006 graduation ceremony at Liberty University, praising Falwell as “a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country.”

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whose Mormon faith is listed as a cult by Falwell’s Southern Baptist Convention, hailed him as “an American who built and led a movement based on strong principles and strong faith…. The legacy of his important work will continue through his many ministries where he put his faith into action.”

Rudy Giuliani, the thrice-married prochoice former New York City mayor, gay rights advocate and erstwhile cross-dresser, was also profuse in his praise of Falwell. “He was a man who set a direction,” Giuliani said. “He was someone who was not afraid to speak his mind. We all have great respect for him.”

The gushing eulogies of Falwell by leading GOP presidential hopefuls demonstrated the preacher’s earthly limitations and his enduring influence. Under Falwell’s guidance, the Christian right subsumed much of the Republican apparatus and now holds the key to the presidential nominating process. McCain, Romney and Giuliani may never see eye-to-eye with Falwell, even in heaven, but in the end they paid fealty at his grave.

They’re all Jerry’s kids now.

Farewell, Falwell

Jerry Falwell is dead. I’m working on an obit for the Nation. For now, here is a retrospective of the Rev’s greatest hits, courtesy of the Carpetbagger Report:

March 1980: Falwell tells an Anchorage rally about a conversation with President Carter at the White House. Commenting on a January breakfast meeting, Falwell claimed to have asked Carter why he had “practicing homosexuals” on the senior staff at the White House. According to Falwell, Carter replied, “Well, I am president of all the American people, and I believe I should represent everyone.” When others who attended the White House event insisted that the exchange never happened, Falwell responded that his account “was not intended to be a verbatim report,” but rather an “honest portrayal” of Carter’s position.

August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.”

July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.

October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.

February 1988: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a $200,000 jury award to Falwell for “emotional distress” he suffered because of a Hustler magazine parody. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, usually a Falwell favorite, wrote the unanimous opinion in Hustler v. Falwell, ruling that the First Amendment protects free speech.

February 1993: The Internal Revenue Service determines that funds from Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.

March 1993: Despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gives a sermon saying, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”

1994-1995: Falwell is criticized for using his “Old Time Gospel Hour” to hawk a scurrilous video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that makes a number of unsubstantiated charges against President Bill Clinton — among them that he is a drug addict and that he arranged the murders of political enemies in Arkansas. Despite claims he had no ties to the project, evidence surfaced that Falwell helped bankroll the venture with $200,000 paid to a group called Citizens for Honest Government (CHG). CHG’s Pat Matrisciana later admitted that Falwell and he staged an infomercial interview promoting the video in which a silhouetted reporter said his life was in danger for investigating Clinton. (Matrisciana himself posed as the reporter.) “That was Jerry’s idea to do that,” Matrisciana recalled. “He thought that would be dramatic.”

November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.

April 1998: Confronted on national television with a controversial quote from America Can Be Saved!, a published collection of his sermons, Falwell denies having written the book or had anything to do with it. In the 1979 work, Falwell wrote, “I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” Despite Falwell’s denial, Sword of the Lord Publishing, which produced the book, confirms that Falwell wrote it.

January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”

February 1999: Falwell becomes the object of nationwide ridicule after his National Liberty Journal newspaper issues a “parents alert” warning that Tinky Winky, a character on the popular PBS children’s show “Teletubbies,” might be gay.

September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

November 2005: Falwell spearheads campaign to resist “war on Christmas.”

February 2007: Falwell describes global warming as a conspiracy orchestrated by Satan, liberals, and The Weather Channel.

Dobson Does Iran

I report for Raw Story:

President George W. Bush met privately with Focus on the Family Founder and Chairman James Dobson and approximately a dozen Christian right leaders last week to rally support for his policies on Iraq, Iran and the so-called “war on terror.”

“I was invited to go to Washington DC to meet with President Bush in the White House along with 12 or 13 other leaders of the pro-family movement,” Dobson disclosed on his radio program Monday. “And the topic of the discussion that day was Iraq, Iran and international terrorism. And we were together for 90 minutes and it was very enlightening and in some ways disturbing too.”

Details of the meeting were disclosed by Dobson during Monday’s edition of his Focus on the Family radio program.

Dobson described Bush as “upbeat and determined and convinced,”� adding, “I wish the American people could have sat in on that meeting we had.”

Dobson went on to enumerate a series of meetings convened by Christian right leaders in Washington to discuss the supposedly existential threat to the United States from a nuclear Iran.

“I heard about this danger [from Iran] not only at the White House but from other pro-family leaders that I met during that week in Washington,” he said. “Many people in a position to know are talking about the possibility of losing a city to nuclear or biological or chemical attack. And if we can lose one we can lose ten.

“If we can lose ten we can lose a hundred,” he added, “especially if North Korea and Russia and China pile on.”

Later in his broadcast, during a discussion about Iran with author and self-proclaimed “prophecy expert” Joel Rosenberg, Dobson drew a parallel between current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Adolf Hitler.

“The world looked at Hitler and just didn’t believe him and tried to appease him the way we’re hearing in Washington today,” Dobson remarked. “You know, the President seems to me does understand this, as I told you from that meeting I had with him the other day, but even there it feels like somebody ought to be standing up and saying, ‘We are being threatened and we are going to meet this with force — whatever’s necessary.’”

Dobson continued, “Some of our listeners might not like that but I tell you, if we didn’t stand up to Hitler, we’d be speaking German today.”

Judi’s “Jew Boy”

Lloyd Grove on Judi Giuliani’s divorce of Bruce Nathan, aka Husband Number 2:

Bruce, in his own court filings, claimed that Judi had kidnapped their child and branded her an “unfit mother” and a “social climber” whose “‘main goal’ in life was being involved with whatever was ‘the in thing’ at the moment. Whether it was belonging to ‘the right church’ by converting from Catholicism to Presbyterian; playing bridge with the ‘right people’ … enrolling Whitney at the ‘right schools’ in order to further my wife’s social aspirations; wearing designer clothes and jewelry; and vacationing at the fashionable Hamptons.”

And while “I maintained my Jewish heritage,” Bruce alleged that “my wife thought nothing of physically and mentally abusing me within Whitney’s earshot.” When he couldn’t afford something, she referred to him as “Jew boy” and other slurs.

You Ain’t Cause You’re Not

Brian Farmer of the John Birch Society calls my credibilty into question:

At the same time, he dismisses the North American Union as an extreme conspiracy theory, despite the mountain of evidence produced by the likes of Lou Dobbs and the John Birch Society, which only serves to damage his credibility even further.

“Deborah VonSprecken said Giuliani’s campaign backed out of the event at her home after deciding she and her husband did not fill the bill for the candidate’s talk about the so-called “death tax.”

“They checked our assets, and since we’re not considered millionaires, they canceled,” she said.

VonSprecken told her local newspaper, “Why would Rudy Giuliani not come speak to the average Americans that live in eastern Iowa, instead of qualifying you as a millionaire before he will show up to your place?”

The couple had told the Giuliani campaign staff from the beginning, “We’re just poor farmers,” she said.”

Hitch’s Sin of Omission

Daniel Lazare sez:

Yet one person is conspicuously absent from Hitchens’s list of religious evil-doers: George W. Bush. Yes, the man who said Jesus is his favorite philosopher “because he changed my heart” and, as governor of Texas, proclaimed June 10 as “Jesus Day,” goes unmentioned. How can this be? The explanation has to do with Hitchens’s subtitle. If “religion poisons everything,” then it must be responsible for most of the evil in the world, since belief of this sort is currently so widespread and pervasive. If a political leader is religious, he or she must be bad, and if he or she is bad, he or she must be religious. This is why Saddam gets slammed for his cynical exploitation of Islam and why Bush, author of the Global War on Terror and the war on Iraq, both of which Hitchens supports, gets a free pass. If he is to be believed, our faith-based President is defending rationalism against religious intolerance.

Note to Carter: I’m much younger than 35 years old, as you’ve alleged. You are apparently relying on my Wikipedia page, which by the way was created by Matt Sanchez, aka Rod Majors. But I guess an astroturfed far-right blogger is only as good as his sources.

Also, fyi I got into journalism a little more than three years ago. Check yourself before you wreck yourself any further.

Romney’s Hot Cause He’s Fly

Placing style over substance is the hallmark of any modern American political campaign. The notion that candidates win races on policy alone is consistently put to rest, especially in presidential contests. But according to TAP’s Garance Franke-Ruta, Mitt Romney has taken political superficiality to the next level.

This blurb, which reads as though it was penned by airhead extraordinaire Perez Hilton, actually comes from official Romney campaign literature:

“In this media-driven age, Romney begins with a decisive advantage. First, he has sensational good looks. People magazine named him one of the 50 most beautiful people in America. Standing 6 feet, 2 inches tall, Romney has jet-black hair, graying naturally at the temples. Women — who will play a critical role in this coming election — have a word for him: hot.”

As Franke-Ruta says, Democratic consultants should have a field day with this one.

“Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) was noticeably absent from the forum. The firefighters’ union was set to send a letter to its members just prior to the forum blasting the mayor for what it said were callous and disrespectful actions following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The letter was never sent, but The Hill obtained a copy just before the forum was set to kick off.

Giuliani’s campaign said at the time that scheduling conflicts prevented him from attending.”

The rise of atheism - James Studdard

The name Christopher Hitchens may not mean much to you if you are not (like me) a political wonk. Mr. Hitchens is an essayist, novelist and supreme polemicist for the Bush administration, generally, and the war in Iraq specifically.

To appreciate his stature as a insightful writer for the right, I would suggest that Ann Coulter, by comparison, would not be worthy to cook him breakfast.

His latest book is probably the most controversial since his excoriation of Mother Theresa a few years ago. He has also written biographies of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. However, this new book titled, “God is not great: How religion ruins everything” given Hitchens’ support of President Bush, seems a bit of an oxymoron and some say it is moreover, a quickly written, not well thought out tome intended to deflect attention away from his dogged support of the war in Iraq. Whatever are his motives, the book is sure to raise the ire of the believers in this country.

Hitchens offers this terse preamble to set the stage for the lambasts of religion to follow in his book: “There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wishful-thinking.”

Hitchens’ rantings about religion is not confined to any one particular sect; he equally attacks and, he thinks, debunks not only the big three monotheistic giants but also Hinduism, eastern mysticism and other faith-based political ideologies like communism and fascism.

It is evident in the book that Hitchens gleefully challenges the credentials of Mother Theresa and single-handedly dismantles the muddled arguments of the fundamentalists who advocate creationism. He even goes so far to compare Hassidic mohels (houses of circumcision) to mere child molesters. However, despite Hitchens’ occasional misplaced assumptions about religion and his often clumsy effort to turn a clever phrase, he still remains (to all but the most closed-minded) a needed check and balance against the insidious incursions of radical fundamentalists.

Hitchens is bi-partisan in his condemnation of faith-based hypocrisy and accuses both the Democrats and the Republicans of using religion to their benefit. He notes, that Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy were the religious darlings of the left and their religion and ethnicity was exploited shamelessly, as only a shameless Christian can do.

Those who have read Hitchens over the years knew that it was only a matter of time until he ran out of “colossal” topics which would anger the masses, and thus launch an assault on God. The book is viewed by some as a poor adjunct to Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion.” Hitchens exempts no one group as he declares religion to be a veiled form of child abuse and not to tell your children that Jesus Christ never lived is an example of it. Hitchens’ archenemy, Max Blumenthal, condemns Hitchens as mean-spirited and bigoted, using pretentious intellectual fantasies to discredit principled institutions. Blumenthal stated, “’God is not great’ represents little more than the disingenuous posturings of a certified fraudmeister who has openly cavorted with the most reactionary elements of the Christian right. If Hitchens had any principles at all — if he truly feared the cultural and political consequences of the encroachment of religion into public life — he would have used his still-considerable influence to support organizations and causes that shore up the wall between church and state and which defend the rights of non-believers. Instead, Hitchens has done exactly the opposite.”

Hitchens has reconciled himself to living only once, and only then through our children. He speculates that once people accept the fact of their short, sometimes miserable lives, the better they will be for it. Hitchens believes that one can be ethical without confession of a religion and just a easily the other way around. “Religion,” says Hitchens, “has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.”

I have read Christopher Hitchens’ book, twice actually, to make sure my faith is in tact (it is) and I urge you to read it. Granted, it will test your resolve to adhere to whatever religion you profess, but if you can resolve the conflicts presented by Hitchens, then you can truly feel, in that inner-most place in your heart, that Hitchens is wrong and God is right, or at least, I did. Hitchens sort of wraps up his anti-God tome with this allusion of Blaise Pascal: “We infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. I am so made that I cannot believe.”

Well to Hitchens and Pascal, I say: I am so made that I must believe.

Uncle Tom’s Evangelical Outpost

Joe Carter writes:

It appears that, unlike you, Boone has actually read the Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The hero Tom is admirable because he is gentle, kind, humble, etc. Is that what you are against?

Carter, you are like a gift from the far shores of the right.

Joe Carter’s Favorite Atheist and Tony Perkins’ Ministers of Minstrelsy Save the Day

I have amended an earlier post to reflect Joe Carter’s quoting of the atheist Richard Dawkins to assert that Colin Powell is not in fact black. The substance of my post has not changed at all. Carter calls Dawkins’ essay on race “insightful” and “valuable,” and uses it to provide some intellectual weight to his own point that because Colin Powell has skin nearly as light as Donald Rumsfeld’s, he is not black.

It makes sense that a fundamentalist and an atheist would find common cause on race. Fundamentalists and atheists want everyone to think like they do; they value and encourage conformity. Though Carter despises Dawkins’ atheism and doesn’t believe in science himself, he is attracted to Dawkins’ seemingly scientific case for abolishing racial classifications, especially with regards to black people. For Carter, abolishing blackness would provide the cultural groundwork for ending affirmative action, a policy he openly deplores. If there are no racial minorities, historical wrongs committed against them don’t exist either. There is no need then to right those wrongs through civil rights policies.

In an ideal world, everyone would blend into one race and hold hands and sing Kumbaya. But in this world, and in particular, in the United States, guys like Carter and Dawkins — white guys — are in charge. If Carter’s dream of the end of blackness came to pass, the position of the dominant culture would only grow stronger. And that’s exactly what he wants.

At the same time, Carter
affirms the concept of blackness by citing all the black pastors his boss, Tony Perkins, counts as allies. Not only does this argument contradict Carter’s attempt to undermine racial classifications, it reveals those pastors as nothing more than useful idiots.

When Perkins organized a Justice Sunday rally for the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito, a man who belonged to a whites-only “eating society” at Princeton and opposes affirmative action, Perkins trots out black pastors like Wellington Boone, who once exclaimed, “I want to boldly affirm Uncle Tom. The black community must stop criticizing Uncle Tom. He is a role model.”

When Perkins is confronted about his well-documented links to white supremacist groups, he refers reporters to his ally, Ken Hutcherson, a confirmed fraud with no known constituency and all the political acuity of a former NFL linebacker. (Hutcherson, by the way, was accompanied on a trip to Latvia by Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively).

Frauds, gay bashers and Uncle Tom admirers — these are the kind of black folks Joe Carter and his boss can live with. As for those black people like Colin Powell who carve out their own space and demand respect on their own terms, according to Carter, they shouldn’t be able to call themselves black at all.

This is the level of discourse inspired by Joe Carter:

Well let’s see, Mr. Powell: Blumenthal, a Jew, making a mockery out of Christianity..how unique.. You two must be the North American dealers in Crappola.

The LAPD’s Kent State Lite

LAPD Chief Bill Bratton learned these tactics from the best of course of all the worst.

Scratch a Racist, Find a Moron

Despite the fact that both of Colin Powell’s parents (left) are black, Family Research Council webmaster and racist auto-apologist Joe Carter claims that Powell is not black himself

Racists are more sophisticated these days than ever before. They use fancy terms to describe themselves: Vanderbilt University professor emeritus Virginia Abernethy calls herself a “racial separationist,” claiming her rationale for segregating whites and minorities derives from her expertise as an anthropologist. George Wallace didn’t need a PhD to declare segregation today, tomorrow and forever, but we’re living in a brave new world. As Howard Fineman told Don Imus, “[T]hings have changed. And the kind of — some of the kind of humor that you used to do you can’t do anymore. And that’s just the way it is.” (According to Fineman’s rules, Imus’ problem wasn’t his racism, but his failure to go along to get along).

Some of those racists who have taken Fineman’s lesson to heart have embedded themselves inside the Christian right. One of their favorite nests is the Family Research Council, the advance guard of the struggle for Christian supremacy in the United States. This group’s president, Tony Perkins, was appointed by its board of directors despite his confirmed ties to white supremacist groups, including the Council of Conservative Citizens, a well-documented link he refuses to publicly discuss. Two generations ago, Perkins would have been a leader of the forces of massive resistance, but in today’s political climate he has transmuted his penchant for racial animus into bigoted crusades against homosexuals, Muslims and insufficiently submissive women.

At bottom of the FRC’s apparatus is its webmaster, Joe Carter, a middle-aged man who spends his days engineering juvenile pranks that he himself describes as “silly.”

As I documented below, Carter has devoted several posts on his personal blog, evangelicaloutpost, to advancing the sort of racialist arguments normally found on websites like VDare and American Renaissance. Besides suggesting that blacks are genetically inferior to whites — the legal profession, Carter says, is not one of their “natural talents” — Carter quotes the atheist Richard Dawkins, who he calls “insightful” and “valuable,” to assert that Colin Powell should not be considered black because he is of “mixed race and intermediate physical characteristics,” (intermediate?) and blackness is “not a true genetic dominant.”

For pointing out the obvious racist undertones of Carter’s arguments, he unleashed a long, hysterical post larded with the usual attempts to attack me vicariously through my father, who he accuses of “nepotism” without explaining what exactly my father has done to merit this criticism. The nature of Carter’s response was entirely predictable and almost as unintentionally funny as the reactions by other extreme rightists to my factual reporting. What I didn’t expect, however, was Carter’s defense of his classification of Colin Powell as not black (read: white). Given the chance to reverse his twisted claim, Carter instead flew into a petulant frenzy.

In the interest of fairness, I am giving Carter another chance to explain how a person with two black parents could not be black. Did Carter even know that both of Powell’s parents are black immigrants from Jamaica? If not, he should correct himself. But if he did, he only further confirms his well-deserved reputation as another racist using the Christian right as a vehicle to advance the longstanding campaign to roll back civil rights for racial minorities.

Mumon at Dailykos has posted a thorough run-down of Joe Carter’s pathetic path from prankster to racist auto-apologist.