"How high is the bullshit, Momma?"
"Five feet high and risin'."
In which virtually every angstrom of the broadcast spectra is given over to GOP SpokesMommies. Because that’s what Baby Jesus would do!
And so we strap on our hollyhock codpiece and sugarplum cleats and run screaming into the gooey, smelly slack-water at the low ebb of a Mouse Circus Yule Tide.
So once more unto the Dearth, dear friends, once more…
On "Fox News Sunday" -- Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney; Archbishop of Washington Donald Wuerl; Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham.
Where Chris Wallace continues the proud Fox tradition of never “askin’” no Republican of the First Water nuthin’ that ain’t a softball or a teabag, allowing First Lady Macbeth to open her hellmouth and let the bats (vampire and brick) come winging out unchallenged.
Lynne Cheney: Our sense of mission has been there since the start. September 11th. Long Struggle. Children and grandchildren safe.
Wallace: Iraq? Rethink?
Cheney: Dick wakes up every morning committed to doing this important job. Well, first he has a fresh mug of virgin’s blood, reseats his heart plugs, and then leaps into the fray.
Wallace: And this damnable Democratic Congress?
Cheney: Well, we’ll “cooperate” so long as Dems dutifully bend over and grab their ankles. I personally have the sense there are bright lines.
“Groups” like…80% of the American people.
Wallace: The Midterm Thumpin’?
Cheney: I blame extraordinary ethical failures. Bipartisan of course, but in the 6th year of any Imperial Reign this was to be expected.
Wallace: And Scooter Libby?
Cheney: Fine man and a pal ‘o Dick. In fact, they’re going hunting together! I think it’s bizarre that po’ Scooter is the only one going under the bus for the Valerie Plame dealie.
Wallace (batting his eyelashes and making kissy noises): Oh, Mommy, tell us all why historical education is important?
Because we – and the media particularly – spend so much time flailing our country and finding faults, that we need to teach the Little Ones the really really real true story of our unalloyed wonderfulness.
Wallace (braiding her hair and sighing coquettishly over her wonderfulness): But Mommy, how do you make it fun?
Wallace (treading so lightly that his tiny hooves leave nary a crease on the rice paper): What about the Mary Cheney kerfuffle? The new Grandcheney?
Cheney: We like being grandparents. Mary’ll be a great mother. Period.
Wallace: But what about this horrible, horrible War on Christmas?
Cheney: There IS a war on Christmas! There is!
Cheney: But we should be considerate of all the non-saved, hellbound heathens out there, so, for example, we had a menorah at our Christmas Party. In fact, some of my Best Ornaments are Jewish!
Cheney: And a big shout out to the troops! Thanks for putting your ass on the line for my husband’s delusions of grandeur!
Then onto the God Squad...
Mrs. Lotz: Our spirituality in America ignores the One True God. What is wrong is the object of our faith. We make Gods up. That’s the problem.
Archbishop: We are where we have always been. Our struggle is to not let the spirit get overwhelmed by the commercial/material world.
Immigrants?
Preach to ‘em.
Stem Cell research?
Every blastocyst is sacred.
Every blastocyst is great.
If a blastocyst is wasted, God gets quite irate.
And so we get 15 minutes of the Good Hair Good News Conservative evangelizing in the guise of news.
Not exactly a shock on Jebus’s Fake Birthday on God’s Favorite network.
On "Meet the Press" -- Rev. Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose Driven Life"; Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham.
Whither Jebus?
Americans like Faithy Leaders.
Both sides wrong. Both sides bad. Both sides rude. Both side uncivil.
If only both side would take a breathe and treat the other with respect.
With all due respect, fuck that.
We tried that for 30 years.
The Right adopted Hate Radio and Christopathology as a curative to its paranoid White Southern fantasies of persecuted minorityhood. The GOP took every crossburning freak and Bible-banging bigot into the fold to win elections.
Period.
Preaching that the problem with our nation is that I need to continue to be civil to a people and party that have carefully cultivated blind, boundless, self-satesfied hatred of everyone I care about and everything I believe in ain't gonna fly anymore.
We tried it. For 30 years. It. Doesn't. Work.
When the Right disarms and lays down their weaponized Scriptures, Liberals will disarm and go back to being the open, tolerant people we are by nature.
Until then, fuck these people. Sideways.
Rick Warren: The 20th Century saw the death of millions and millions of people at the hands of atheists – far more than Christians ever killed. Godless Communism. Nazism…
Which is where Godwin's Law pops up like a Bouncing Betty and one must loudly call “bullshit”.
Saving for another day the argument that the Infallible and Omnipotent Dear Leader cults of Stalinism and Maoism were anything but “godless”, it is simply ridiculous to assert that Hitler would have been possible without Germany’s long, rich history of unadulterated, Christian hatred.
To make the preposterous inference that Nazism was not (and is not) Christian right down to the shiny tips of its jackboots because it’s oppressive or anti-Democratic and authoritarian ignores oh, say, the last 1,700 years of the Catholic Church.
Pretending Teutonic fascism doesn’t have everything to do with a deep, Protestant taproot that goes all the way to Martin Luther’s second-and-now-scrupulously-underreported best seller, “On the Jews and Their Lies” is both ludicrous and dangerous, and in doing so, Rick Warren – whatever his other virtues – demonstrates the terrible rot that threatens the marrow of all faiths: That willingness to wish away unhappy reality when it does not conform to our pretty, shiny theology.
And thus do men of faith ignore the wide-gauge tracks as they are laid right up the gut of the transept, out the narthex and into the death house.
Now was Nazism a terrible perversion of Christianity?
Absolutely.
So is Fundamentalism.
So is Roman Catholicism.
So is the Westboro Baptist Church.
So is Bob Jones University.
So was the predicate for Slavery.
So is the 700 Club.
So is Focus on the Family
So was the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
So what was your point again?
On "This Week" -- Sens. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C; U.N. Secretary-General-designate Ban Ki-moon; former President Bush and his wife, Barbara.
Whither Syria?
Of visiting Syria, the White House sez, “Bad, Senators! Bad!”
Dodd: Screw that. Ignoring a major regional player is stupid. You don’t have to love them, like them or want to dine with them, but your do have to talk to them.
Graham: No. Talking to dictators is bad. “The world” should hold Syria accountable.
“The World” should do a lot of stuff. Like rain chocolate on my birthday, and voluntarily cool down, spontaneously sweep the air and water clean, and cough up some more oil - preferable in stable places like Nebraska or Disneyland -- so that we can drive Space Shuttle-sized SUVs everywhere on $0.32/gallon gas forever.
But that’s not going to happen either.
"Face the Nation" Guests: -- First Lady Laura Bush.
Why bother?
“The Chris Matthews Show” -- Dan Rather, Clarence Page, Katty Kay, Norah O’Donnell
A Laundry List of best, worst, most, least, wankiest, wackiest, wickedest, and so forth.
All head and no beer.
Except for this little sip of Noron’s weeping, self-serving, faux-center bilge: “In America, you can’t be moderate or objective anymore! Now you have to be either Democratic or Republican!”
Nurse! 5,000 cc’s of fainting couch! Stat!
Oh, the horror. That to take a position on anything or in opposition to anything –- global warming, evolution, slavery, the Holocaust, the shape of the Earth -- means that you are, by Big Giant Head Media definition, immoderate and irrational.
Then Noron immediately violates her own idiot, “objective” catechism and says flatly that Iraq is getting worse!
But…but…Noron, there are people living in bunkers and basement and blogs all over this fair land that assert that Iraq is getting better.
That we’re winning!
That it’s all the fault of the traitor media for not reporting the Good News that positively flows through the streets of Baghdad like Peeps sailing on a river of mulled wine.
In other words, Noron Takes a Position, thereby giving up her Big Media journalistic maidenhead and making her, by definition, immoderate and irrational and no longer worthy of our attention.
So take a biiiig pull off that bottle of Ol’ Doc Friedman’s Ersatz Centrist Patent Medicine you’re so hot to hawk to everyone else, Noron.
Mmmm. Brackish!
15 comments:
Sorry, Drifty, but I have to call "Bullshit" when I read it. I turn to you on Sundays because I refuse to poison my brain cells with the nonsense on the blather shows, but you provide good summaries. Except for your condemnation of Rick Warren, of whose politics and spirituality I know little, for saying the truth that is difficult to grasp - Soviet and Chinese horrors were NOT Christian, and while Hitler had a wealth of German anti-Semitism from which to draw, Naziism itself sought to replace Chrisitanity with worship of the Reich and Volk. Christmas was being replaced, by 1943, with solstice celebrations, and church leaders and followers were wasting away in concentration camps and Gestapo prisons. I will be the first to admit that there were deep Christian resources of Jew-hating that aided the Nazis in their crimes; they moved it to a new level, however, a pillar as it were of their ideology, that Jews had to die in order to remove their filth from the world. You may not like Christianity or the Church, and that is fine, but it is important to recognize that they are merely conspirators at a distance to the Nazi crimes, and many many Christians suffered and even died because they were Christians at the hands of the Nazi pagans. The cults of personality around Stalin and Mao, while perhaps aping religions in a variety of ways, are hardly Christian (how could one call Chinese Confucian teachings anything else?) except in the most ridiculous stretching of the term? It may be hard to grasp, I know, but indeed atheists are at the core of some of the worst crimes of the past century. This does not absolve people of faith from their own complicity in horrors. It is merely assigning responsibility where it lies.
What's with the codpieces this year? Digby's writing a history, you're strapping on a hollyhock one on... tribute to our Feckless Leader?
Merry Merry and Happy Happy!
Wouldja believe - I'm hangin with the fam all in and around Chicagoland (Irving Park), the nieces are Irish Step dancing, the luggage finally F'ing came in from CA, and we've got 48 hours to get this Xmas hooked.
Thank goodness this only comes once a year.
Cheers Sir Driftglass! Muhbbe next time I'll get enough time to wager yer skills at pool or finding the true 'spirits' of xmas. Me braugh in law always kiks my ass anyway.
-skunqsh
Merry Merry and Happy Happy!
Wouldja believe - I'm hangin with the fam all in and around Chicagoland (Irving Park), the nieces are Irish Step dancing, the luggage finally F'ing came in from CA, and we've got 48 hours to get this Xmas hooked.
Thank goodness this only comes once a year.
Cheers Sir Driftglass! Muhbbe next time I'll get enough time to wager yer skills at pool or finding the true 'spirits' of xmas. Me braugh in law always kiks my ass anyway.
-skunqsh
Well, I'll have to call tripple-bullshit on geoffrey (comment #1).
The Nazi's were, indeed, in most part Christian.
Hitler himself once said that no german schools should be secular,
since the children needed religious guidance.
And don't forget "Gott mit uns".
True, there were also part of their idiology that was inspired by ancient Germanic pagan beliefs.
None of which is "atheist" in any sense.
The situation in Nazi Germany is complicated, and even a cursory reading would suggest there were conflicts between the pagans and those who saw naziism as the ultimate form of Christianity. In the end, however, it is action that speaks much louder than words. The eradication of any seminary not controlled by Nazi ideology; the removal of pastors and bishops (by law in Germany civil servatns) who did not swear personal alliegiance to Adolf Hitler; eradicating Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost for pagan rituals and holidays; the jailing and murder of hundreds of dissident pastors and priests (over the objections of Hitler's friend Pope Pius XII). In Peter Padfield's biography if Himmler, he states that Himmler had a plan, including a timeline, for replacing Chrisitian churches with nazi worship sites, and the reintroduction of Nordic gods into worship. While the situation on the ground was messy and confused - the post-war purges of Nazi Christians, the so-called "German Christians" from university posts and pulpits and bishoprics prove how messy it was - to call Naziism Christian strains the latter word beyond any identification except what people decide to call themselves. Does this mean Christians who participated in Nazi crimes were not Christians, and therefore Christianity should not be implicated? Of course not! Citing a five-hundred-year-old text, though, and then drawing a straight line through history to Mein Kampf is not just poor history, it is bullshit, pure and simple. As I said before, you don't have to like Christianity or the Church; I would ask for a little intellectual honesty, however, when dealing with such a volatile subject. Warren is right, and so is Os Guiness, and Bishop N. T. Wright of Britain, and many others - secular ideologies have been much more destructive of human life in the 20th century than have religious beliefs. I really don't care whether you like it, or whether you believe it. Your belief does not alter the facts.
Uh, sorry, Drifty and HM, but I think GKS pwn3d you two.
Hitler wasn't Christian.
Bonhoeffer and Niemoeller (sp?) and Kolbe were.
Alas, it scarcely surprises me that believers and non-believers alike do horrible things, since both groups consist of members of the species HOMO SAPIENS, which is a species that survived for many millennia in an amoral, pitiless natural environment, but could not have done that if its members had not evolved the capacity to do horrible things at times. (a shorthand version of my idiosyncratic understanding of "Original Sin".)
From the swamps of Arkansas, Ivory Bill Woodpecker
To Geoffrey:
"Citing a five-hundred-year-old text, though, and then drawing a straight line through history to Mein Kampf is not just poor history, it is bullshit, pure and simple."
Nowhere did I actually do this.
I didn't say Christianity was a Nazi ideology.
Or that Nazi ideology was solely based on Christian beliefs.
Of course it wasn't.
I said that most of the Nazi's
were Christians.
You, however, are the one to lay it at the feet of atheists, which is false on its face. Hitler had strong contempt for a lot of things about the Christian churches of his day...
In a sort of ironic twist he saw them as a form of Bolshevism. But that doesn't change the fact that he believed he was doing the Lord's work, that -he- had the "right" take on God.
So, Geoffrey, instead of being angered at strawmen of your own making, I'll just send this back against you:
"I would ask for a little intellectual honesty, however, when dealing with such a volatile subject."
-------
To ye of the Ivory Bill:
I'll just quote Hitler himself, then:
"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
&
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people."
"I'll just quote Hitler himself, then."
Riiight, we all know der Fuehrer would NEVER pretend to be a Christian; he was SUCH an HONEST man. ;)
From the swamps of Arkansas, Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Ivory.
Hitler was raised Catholic,
but ended up viewing Luther as a great man.
Hitler certainly used Christianity for his own purposes, agreed.
But that doesn't preclude him from actually believing in God.
The Nazi party platform even included a portion about the importance of Positive Christianity, as they called it.
(To differentiate it from certain types of Christianity that Hitler disliked).
So, no, Hitler wasn't a Christian in the typical sense (if such there is), but he did, indeed, believe. That his beliefs were immensly fucked up (such as believing that Jesus wasn't Jewish, but Aryan) is another thing entirely.
As for him being atheist, well,
let's quote him again:
"An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal)".
HMDK, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what specific variety of arsehole Der Fuehrer was. At least we agree that he WAS an arsehole; I suspect some of our right-wing brethren secretly like him.
Oh, ye of the Ivory bill...
Respect returned.
I hope you realize I'm not trying to pick a fight here;
(Not with you, at least... cock-sure and dead-wrong Geoffrey is another matter)
because, so far, I find you to be the kind of believer that I can respect.
(You don't fling strawmen, you don't say: "'cause the bible sez so, that's why!" and you seem to honestly believe what you say,
instead of repeating dogma.)
I'm just curious as to -why- you don't think Hitler believed in God... Any god... pick a god...
When almost everything he ever wrote and said indicates that he DID.
And saying something like:
"Oh, well, Hitler lied about a lot of things, so surely he lied about this!", doesn't really wash.
Because the flipside is that he was extraordinarily honest on other points.
I urge you... and anyone else, for that matter, to actually read "Mein Kampf", if for no other reason than to lessen the chance of a sequel, so to speak.
Or are you saying that he wasn't Christian because "No Christian would do such things as he" ?
I don't think you are, but IF you are, then, well, what can I say but: "You're not a true Scotsman!".
With porridge on my mind, instead of IN it,
Yours,
Michael S. Olsen.
I suspect that the only "god" a megalomaniac like Hitler believes in is that guy he sees in the mirror.
Well, Ivory, the same could be said of a lot of the popes
and of Martin Luther himself.
Wether a person commits good or evil, when they do so on a grand scale people have a tendency to say that they only do/did so "for their own benefit".
It's a convienent way for certain political or religious ideologies to perfom a Pontius scrubbing of the hands, but that doesn't magically make their hands soapy fresh.
A longer response will come topside one of these days soon, but may I say that this is just the sort of intriguing and thoughful debate I can't hardly find anywhere in the analog world.
Thanks for letting me listen in :-)
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