Conservative columnist and Palinite-hateswarm-survivor, Kathleen Parker, is upset at how some people conduct themselves as Murricans.
Unfortunately for her readers, for some reason she never quite gets around to identifying who these people are exactly. Perhaps, as a public service, someone could piece together the clues she left behind could suss out what specific group of people Ms. Parker might be referring to when she says...
...many Americans still need to be reminded that Muslims, rather than our enemies, are our friends...Having skillfully avoided mentioning the fact that the "extremists" she is so worried about are the clear majority in her Republican Party, Ms. Parker turns to the problem of taking action. Who will stand up to these rude-yet-nameless individuals?
None too soon, we’re beginning to hear reasonable voices rise above the din of nationalistic jargon from some of our lesser, if glaring, lights.
One such voice belongs to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)...
Thus, demonizing or marginalizing Muslims leads not to greater safety but to greater numbers of recruits...
It is also rude and un-American.
We seem to have no trouble demanding that moderate Muslims condemn the radicals, but we’re less than impressive when it comes to moderate Americans taking a stand against our own extremists...
The faith-based community does what it can, but despite Fox News' policy of giving any number of wingnut snake-handlers and end-times goofs unlimited access to America's airwaves, somehow the message of interfaith goodwill "does not reach deeply enough into the secular community to have much effect":
Our failure to communicate with one another can lead only to the sort of frenzied embrace of isolationism and marginalization we’ve witnessed of late. And though interfaith ministries often meet for these purposes, their message does not reach deeply enough into the secular community to have much effect.Actually, Ms. Parker, your Republican party has not suffered from a failure to communicate in the slightest. In fact, they've spent many decades and billions of dollars building a vast and powerful media/political/religious machine for the expressed purpose of communicating their beliefs and intentions with absolute clarity, and then enacting those belief and intentions via the political process.
Or hadn't you noticed?
Ms. Parker also believes that the President has let us all down by not calling Murricans to action --
...I had hoped the president might call on Americans to do their part and issue a call to specific action...-- forgetting, apparently, that if the Kenyan Usurper came out in favor of springtime and Baby Jebus, members of her Republican party would rise as one to denounce it, filibuster it, hold 75 consecutive votes to repeal it and begin immediately worshiping Odin out of spite.
This is the point at which Ms. Parker simply runs out of Big Ideas and begins casting around for stuff that other people might have have tried that has worked in other contexts:
There are already several models available for replication. The “Welcome Table” created by the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation has been extremely successful in healing the wounds of the civil rights era...Actually, Ms. Parker, we are already engaged in a bipartisan debate on issues crucial to the community.
The Village Square, begun several years ago in Tallahassee, and now in a few other cities, brings citizens together to a bipartisan, formal debate on issues crucial to the community...
It's called an "election".
In fact, in some ways it's kind of a perfect election, because just like in the formal debates which take place in high schools all over this country, the sides are so clearly and cleanly divided on so many issues. For example, one side believes the world is a complex place and that we should put a premium on diplomacy, tolerance and evidence while the other side believes that Barack Obama is secretly in league with terrorists, science is a Librul scam, people are poor because they want to be, all worldly problems can be solved by tax cuts and deregulation and we should bomb the fuck out of an entirely fictional country just to be on the safe side.
Weird how someone who writes about politics for a living does not understand this.
Weirder still how someone who claims to be a journalist cannot bear to mention the blindingly obvious fact that almost all serious problem with our country are the result of her Republican party being packed to the rafters with vicious, ignorant, paranoid assholes.
6 comments:
Some of the smarter members of the McDuck Elite and their hirelings in politics, the media, and academia, such as Parker, are waking up to the fact that the vacuum-skulled knuckle-walking Orcs whom they used to climb to power and wealth (even more power and wealth than they already had, that is) are starting to demand their tangible and intangible wages for their service, and are casting about for a Duce or Fuehrer (Godwin, Schmodwin) to give those wages to them, perhaps the kinda-sorta renegade Trumpy McDuck.
But if the McDuck Elite and their hirelings just cut off the Orc-horde, that would mean those horrible Liberals would win, and make them give up some tiny fraction of their power and wealth, although letting them keep the larger portion of those things, as in the New Deal and the Great Society.
But they don't want to give up any portion of those things, because they are addicted to those things, which is why they always moaned and groaned about the New Deal which helped save their dumb @$$es from Communism (although Marx himself crippled Communism from Day One by embracing the fashionable intellectual atheism of his day, ensuring it could never catch on in the USA, because our separation of Church and State retarded the growth of anti-religious sentiment in the USA).
So the McDucks and their hirelings are stuck, and the rest of us are stuck with them and their Orcs--at least until "calendaritis" claims a sufficient toll of the disproportionately superannuated ranks of the Orcs. That superannuation is the one comforting thing about our Orcs; most of them are really too old for storm-trooping.
Parker and her ilk, thank you Bob Novak, truly believe if only Democrats would just do what republicans want and give them everything they want with no compromise, we would soon experience a blooming of bipartisanship everywhere. It is seen by conservatives as cruel if they must accommodate anything or anyone, only they matter.
"...and though interfaith ministries often meet for these purposes..."
Only an apologist of the party that brings us CPAC, and a media that looks the other way for money, could claim "interfaith ministries" are both the solution and a conservative idea. She obviously never read the comment section of any news story about ACTUAL interfaith meetings since Pope Francis was elected.
Especially because these gatherings of faith leaders tend to come to conclusions like brown people aren't evil, the poor are not morally deficient, we're supposed to steward the environment, and free market capitalism IS the problem.
Maybe she could at least call out all the authors (Beck et al.) on my Amazon recommended list that have recently published a disconcerting amount of books claiming both A) Islam IS the problem! and B) Muslims and liberals are working together to destroy America.
I should have posted this before my comment on the Frum post, because this is the earlier post, and this is the title track of Shoot Out the Lights (the theme tune to White Wolf/Onyx Path's Chronicles of Darkness, despite having been written in 1982, 22 years before the Chronicles were launched as the New World of Darkness and an additional 11 years before they became the Chronicles):
In the dark, who can see his face?
In the dark, who can reach him?
He hides like a child. He hides like a child.
Keeps his finger on the trigger
You know he can't stand the day
Shoot out the lights. Shoot out the lights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDZpzJ2KKss
"...and we should bomb the fuck out of an entirely fictional country just to be on the safe side."
Never mind 'Agrabah'(the fictional country in question), I believe we should carpet bomb Mordor at once!
Also funny (not funny "ha ha", but funny horrifying) that the best "reasonable voice" Parker could find about tolerance of Muslims was Lindsey f'ing Graham, who at this point has petulantly demanded that pretty much the entire Middle East be bombed to a pulp so that he can sleep through the night without wetting the bed in fear of Al Qaeda or ISIS. Yeah, that's the ticket to showing our tolerance.
Maybe Graham wants us to write in big letters "we're tolerant, we swear!" on each piece of ordnance we drop on the Middle East?
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