The narcissism of Small Differences

Another day, another triumph for malignant stupidity. I have a filter on my e-mail program that deletes most anything that mentions the President. Odds are it's more crap about finding proof that Obama is a Muslim, whether it's in goat entrails, the arrangement of the stars, some spliced together video or some total fabrication by one of Fox's Friends.

I may add filters for the words Mosque, Muslim and Islam as well because like the voices in the madman's head, mad America sees Muslims everywhere and hates them: in any curved line -- even in NASA mission patches and most of all in buildings with Domes. You know those round arches found at St. Peters, on many Orthodox basilicas and even that cathedral of Democracy, the US Capitol building. If it curves like the new moon, like the orbit of an electron, the path of a rocket: if it has a dome, it's Muslim and it's evil.

Take The Light of the World multidenominational church outside Phoenix, Arizona. All truth, decency and sanity notwithstanding the mad morons of America want you to think it's a mosque and for no other reason that it's domed. Looks to the Demented Idiots of Arizona like a Mosque - must be a center of America-hating Islamic Jihad.

In response, there's a banner now waving at the construction site:

"If you think we are different you are wrong, we are building a Christian house of prayer."

Isn't that part of the problem? Are Muslims "Different?" What about Jews, Mormons, Secular Humanists, Buddhists, Hindus, Unitarians, Freemasons? DIFFERENT! BE AFRAID!

The price of freedom

It's something to give lip service to when you're proposing or conducting a war of aggression, preferably a hopeless, poorly organized one. When it comes to tolerating the views of others, the freedom of others: speech, religion and the rest of what the bill of rights guarantees, our hypocrisy comes shining through. Our cowardice, our irrational fear, our bigotry.

My thanks to Libby at The Impolitic for disgusting me with yet another view of America that will be broadcast around the world and justify more hatred of us and more acts against us and more revulsion at our pose of being a moral example. We're not and as Jefferson said " I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." If I were a believer, I'd be headed away faster than Lot could run out of Sodom.




It's infuriating that one of the bravest men I've had the privilege to observe was called a coward by a mob too cowardly to allow religious freedom in New York, cowardly enough to make disgusting religious taunts they'd never tolerate against themselves even if they were accurate -- which they would probably be. I tremble for my country. I tremble with rage at the bigots, the cowards, the enraged hordes of ignorant savages and I tremble at he dawning conclusion that perhaps we have no reason to be proud of America and that we've rarely been any better than this.

There is a price to be paid for freedom, but it can't be paid for in this kind of currency. It's not paid for by attacking Iraq or by supporting corrupt governments or toppling democracies abroad. It's certainly not paid for rioting against freedom and the allegedly sacred rights of man. If this is the voice of America, everything our enemies say about us is true and we have no right to pretend to be a moral example to anyone.

Fear and loathing in Oklahoma

The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming! Some day, anyway -- it could happen, and Oklahoma isn't OK with it. I mean, we really need to trash our secular constitution and make judicial decisions rely on a few selected Jewish commandments palatable to Christian godbothers, but we are simply not going to sleep at night unless we make it illegal for Judges to be swayed by other, illegal religions like Islam; not in Oklahoma.

No, Okies need to "Save our State" and have proposed an amendment to the State constitution making it illegal for judges to reference Sharia or any other international law and as 0.8% of Oklahomans are Muslim, we can't waste any more time in saving the state from the bearded menace. What is needed is a "pre-emptive strike" says State Representative Rex Duncan (Republican of course.) "Court decisions ought to be based on federal law, or state law" says he.

Of course I agree that they should. yet Federal law just might have a problem with the legislature interfering with judicial decisions and process. Beyond that, I think Federal and State laws should be free of any dependence on Christian doctrines as well, but we're talking about Oklahoma here and we're talking about Republicans everywhere and how can we expect even a modest amount of moral or logical consistency?

Stoning Santa.

It may seem strange to be thinking about Christmas on this fiercely hot Florida Sunday, my neck red from spending yesterday on the water, my eyes stinging a bit from spending the morning in the pool, hiding in the air conditioned refuge of my office and reading blogs.

My usual reaction to the alleged Secular Liberal [ read Jewish] War on Christmas is Humbug, but my friend and colleague Abigail Esman writes at World Defense Review that things in Holland have gone a bit further than Wal-Mart greeters being asked to say Happy Holidays. The annual Christmas party held by the agency that runs Amsterdam's public transportation has been canceled because "a Christmas party is too one-sided" in a multi cultural society. It was never controversial in this famously tolerant city before the huge influx of Muslims who now seem to be agitating to legislate every thing from mandatory long sleeves and long pants for construction workers to preventing women from having to sit next to men on airplanes. Santa Claus, in his local manifestation has been literally stoned and chased out of Muslim neighborhoods in Holland.

Holland has often been a haven for those fleeing religious persecutions: Protestants, Puritans and Jews took refuge in the Netherlands. It seems more than sad that those taking refuge there today are willing to use violence and murder to end that tradition when it comes to others.

Of course the lesson I'm preaching this Sunday isn't about how awful Muslims are, but about how awful is the tyranny of religious power. Whether it's using tax money from Atheists to glorify plastic idols in the public square or building monuments to received instructions from Jewish Gods, standing up against legislating from the pulpit is standing up for freedom and indeed safety, for all.

Name game

Face it, being factually or logically true isn't what makes facts factual. As long as enough people want Barak Obama to be an America hating radical Muslim, he is. As long as there are enough people who want him not to be willing to pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth, or insist that he took his oath of office on the Koran, it doesn't matter that it is a lie. The only thing left of Democracy in the United States is the democracy of slander. Belief is what counts and in a nation desperately addicted to belief and to anger, there's always a ready market for both.

That the infamous Saddam Hussein al-Majid al-Awja contains the same Hussein, means that SenatorObama is Muslim as certainly as Abraham Lincoln was a Jew and General Omar Bradley was a Persian poet. There's nothing in a name. The name Barak, as Intellectual Insurgent once pointed out to me means "blessed" in many Semitic languages. Baruch is the Hebrew form and a thousand Hebrew prayers begin with the word that must have been on Jesus' lips from his childhood.

That John McCain's daughter Bridget was born in Pakistan is no more evidence of his or her secret Jihadi affiliation than that Obama's grandfather lived in Nairobi, and like the strange genetic discovery that Thomas Jefferson had a male ancestor from the middle east, it means nothing. Nobody seems to be concerned that General John Abizaid, former CENTCOM commander is a secret agent from Hamas or Gen. George Joulwan, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander of Europe might be a "terrorist." They have Arabic names.

So what about Regular names like John, which is from the Hebrew Yohannon; is McCain a Zionist?

So just what the hell was "conservative" radio host Bill Cunningham thinking when he described Barak Hussein Obama at a McCain rally in Cincinnati Tuesday saying

"All's going to be right with the world when the great prophet from Chicago takes the stand, and the world leaders who want to kill us will simply be singing [Kumbaya] together around the table with Barack Obama."

He was thinking that anything he can do to elect John McCain is justifiable; any lie, any slander, any old bucket of slime. He was thinking that Americans are so in love with hate and have such a need to believe things that justify it, that he would be greeted with cheers. What were those in the audience who actually cheered thinking? Probably the same sort of thing a chimpanzee thinks before attacking a neighboring band of apes.

Republicans, who seem to loathe Semitic names, have called Obama anti-Semitic. "Anti-Semites for Obama" is the title of a press release a few days ago, according to Wonkette. The same stupid game again. Absurdity, Irony: these are things these fake conservatives can't even perceive. It's a kind of blindness that allows a No matter that he speaks out against the bigotry he has some first hand knowledge of. Republicans like Congressman Jack Kingston who wasn't wearing a lapel pin to sneer that Obama doesn't wear a lapel pin simply can't bridge the gap between their fantasy world and the real one. He's a Muslim and a traitor and that's the same thing and they'll be damned if they're going to let reality get in the way. Perhaps they will be.

It was the Republican party of course who selected Cunningham as a speaker, not McCain; the same Republican party of George Walker Bush that attacked him for having a "black" daughter in the 2000 race; a daughter with Muslim ancestors and relatives with names like Hussein or perhaps Mohammad Ali or Karim Abdul Jabbar - names nobody should have reason to be ashamed of.

Perhaps there's a lot more shame to be felt for supporting such a party; for being loyal to that party more than to the nation that persists, much to my disgust, in allowing them to exist.

No Muslims need apply

I haven't yet stooped to using any candidate's religious affiliation against him and I operate under the assumption that most will not let such things interfere with their professional lives or their oath of office. Of course since so many of the Republican tribe have been espousing Christian Supremacy and confusing Church teachings with the law, it's sometimes hard to refrain.

I continue to think it has nothing to do with his being a Mormon, but Mitt Romney may have crossed a boundary and it may be time to ask what kind of prejudices he has or is pandering to.

"…based on the numbers of American Muslims in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

said Mr. Romney to the Christian Science Monitor. I presume that by "lower levels" he refers to something more than waxing the presidential limo but this, I feel, is a revealing position and shows us as did his snubbing of the man in the wheelchair that there is something less under the tailored suit than is advertised. Would it be too much to consider an appointee's knowledge and skills rather than what ethnic pigeonhole you can stuff him into?

In choosing a candidate, I'm not necessarily put off by suggestions that a cabinet "look like America" but I'm not looking for tokens, I'm looking for competence and that's something sadly lacking in recent years.

"More ironic, that Islamic heritage is what qualifies them to best engage America's Arab and Muslim communities and to help deter Islamist threats"

says Mansoor Ijaz writing for the Monitor and I agree. Would that the idiot George had been able to listen to an adviser who knew the difference between Sunni and Shia and the tensions between them. Ijaz, by the way, is substantially responsible for exposing A.Q. Khan, who had been selling Pakistani nuclear technology on the black market and he did so at some personal risk. Nice to know that Mitt would disqualify him for reasons of ethnic purity.

What I'm looking for in a president is a man who will look for the best and won't preclude anyone on the basis of religion or race or his feelings about abortion or gay marriage or the war in Iraq. That's not Mitt, obviously. I don't care what the president's advisers look like or what ethnicity he thinks they should represent and by automatically relegating people who identify with Islam to lower positions by virtue of that identification, Mitt further disqualifies himself from consideration.

Perhaps he's pandering to what he perceives as an anti-Muslim bias in America or perhaps he really means it. In either event I don't think he belongs anywhere but on the cover of some Men's wear catalog where looking good and holding the pose isn't an act of dishonesty.