Stewart, in re David Margolick’s really nice McCain piecein which the senator says “I never considered myself a maverick. I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities.” (Thanks, InOtherNews!)
Is there any way to read this other than: “I didn’t agree with the ‘marketing strategy’ that The GOP Powers That Be pushed on me for the 2008 campaign, but I went along with it anyway because I wanted to win”?
It was McCain’s “maverick-ness” — which I define as “the sense that he wouldn’t just toe the GOP line” — which attracted some people to him.
Now we find out it was all just a big lie. Oh, sorry, “marketing.”
Either he was deceiving us then or he’s deceiving us now.
I wonder what even happened to “2000 McCain” — a candidate who many people (myself included) would have considered voting for. Did he ever really exist or was he just thoroughly demolished by the George W. Bush war machine?
I really want to like and respect McCain, but the more I learn about him, the less I do.
The country is founded on the double standard. That’s our history.
We were founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.
Am I right?
A group of slave owners who wanted to be free, so they killed a lot of white English people, in order to continue owning their black African people so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people.
You know what the motto of this country ought to be? “You give us a color, we’ll wipe it out.”
About 80 years after the Constitution is ratified the slaves are freed. Not so you’d really notice it, of course, just sort of on paper. And that was of course during the Civil War.
Now there’s another phrase I dearly love, that is a true oxymoron if I ever heard one: “civil war.” Do you think any country could really have a “civil” war?
Now of course the civil war has been over for about 120 years… but not so you’d really noice it. Cuz we still have these people called “civil war buffs.” People who thought it was a really keen war and they study the battles carefully and they try to improve other strategies and the tactics to increase the body count. In case we have to go through it again sometime.
In fact some of these people actually get dressed up in uniform once a year and go out and refight these battles.
You know what I say? Use live ammunition, assholes, would you please?
You might just raise the intelligence level of the American gene pool.
Hey, but what do you expect, we’re a war-like country, we come from that northern European gene—the blue eyes, boy everybody in the world learned real quick when those blue eyes sail out of the north you better nail everything down, motherfucker. Nail it down, strap it down or they’ll grab it. If they can’t take it home they’ll burn it, if they can’t burn it they’ll fuck it. That’s what happened to us.
And it’s a war-like country, come on. I mean, forget foreign policy, even the domestic rhetoric is war-like. Everything about our domestic policy invokes the thought of war. We don’t like something in this country? We declare war on it:
The war on poverty
The war on drugs
The war on crime
The war on AIDS
The war on cancer
We got the only national anthem that mentions fucking rockets and bombs in the goddamn thing, you know what I mean?
[Ronald Reagan, et al] were going to get government off our backs.
Yeah, but when it comes to abortion, they don’t mind government being in a woman’s uterus, do they?
Yeah, backs are no good, but uterus? Okay by them.
These people call themselves “right to lifers”.
Don’t you love that phrase, and don’t you love the way these kind of people pervert the English language?
“Right to Lifers…”
You realize that most of the ‘Right to Lifers’ are in favor of the death penalty, and they support the South American Death Squads, and they’re against gun control, and they’re against nuclear weapons control?
When they say “right to life” they’re talking about their right to decide which people should live or die.”
“Racist teabagging klansman” is the 2010 version of “unpatriotic terrorist lover.” Both are inflamatory & neither encourages discourse. — Twitter / Dave Simon (@ds)
Those who were accused of being “terrorist lovers” were not going around and holding pro-terrorist rallies, they were doing things like protesting a war against people not involved in 9/11, or wanting the USA to not torture or wanting, you know, actual trials for people we were holding in Gitmo.
“Terrorist lover” was patently untrue. It was slanderous (lay-person definition) and there was no actual evidence to support those inflammatory claims.
Trying to “encourage discourse” with these people is fruitless. They don’t want discourse. Maybe some small percentage of them would, but it’s the few rotten tens of thousands who ruin it for the other twelve.
The Democrats have tried compromise and discussion. The Republicans have responded with a chorus of “No no no no no” and filibusters and Sarah Palin calling Advanced Directive Counseling “Death Panels”.
The Democrats tried to hold “Town Hall” meetings, and Republicans came in and called Obama a Nazi. I’m reminded of the video with Barney Frank where he said:
On what planet do you spend most of your time?
“You stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis,” he said, adding such behavior demonstrated the strength of First Amendment guarantees of what he called “contemptible” free speech.
“Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table,” Frank said to the woman. “I have no interest in doing it.”
Every time the Democrats have tried to be reasonable, they are met with unflinching, unmitigated, unrelenting resistance and refusal to budge a centimeter.
Now after all of that we get them spitting on Democrats, cutting the gas line to a Democrat leader’s house, and calling a former civil rights leader the “n-word.” Not to mention subtle and not-so-subtle calls for Obama’s assassination.
If it wasn’t true, it would be inflammatory.
The teaparty movement might have started with a noble ideal (especially for a Libertarian) but it has become a shameful movement defined more by anger and hatred than anything else. The Klan opposed social change by violence and terrorism. Are the “teabaggers” all that different? Honestly, I don’t think so. Not until the leaders of the movement start denouncing — in no uncertain terms — the extremists in their midst. Silence implies consent.
The above image is what I saw when I clicked on the link below:
Classy move! The GOP has come around and is urging you to
donate to Planned Parenthood. http://gop.am/Aqbz (via Mike FTW)
(which of course is the GOP’s link shortener being used in a way that the GOP probably doesn’t want it used.)
Am I the only one interpreting the caption “Accidents Happen” with the look on their faces? His fake half-smile and her with the “this is the smile I make when the story you’re telling hits 35 minutes”?
Him: “Oh gawd if my parents found out I slept with a black chick I’m going to get disowned… please don’t let her be pregnant… please don’t let her be pregnant… “
Her: “Seriously, I slept with an Asian dude? How drunk was I last night? Gawd I hope I’m not pregnant. PLEASE don’t let me be pregnant…”
We haven’t heard as much about “Family Values” lately. The Republicans have been busy protesting taxes and health care.
This story won’t change anyone’s mind, but I need to share it anyway.
A friend called last week, needing to talk. Her husband has become an alcoholic. A friend of his died last fall, and he went totally off the edge. This is a man who never drank and was vehemently anti-alcohol whose life took a very unfortunate twist.
As you can expect it has been hellacious on her and their 13 year-old daughter. She finally convinced him that he either had to get help or she was going to leave him. Let’s make this explicitly clear: she does not want a divorce, but she couldn’t take it any more.
After a few stints in 3-5 day “detox” programs, which did nothing except set him back up for another “down cycle” back into alcohol, he agreed to go to a 21 day in-patient program. There were filling out the admission paperwork when he suddenly refused to stay, and left. As they were driving home, she told him she was done, she was divorcing him if he didn’t get help.
To his credit, he turned the car around, drove back to the clinic, and they filled out all of the paperwork.
Only to find out that their insurance would not cover it.
Would not cover it.
Here’s a man tearing his family apart by alcohol, a man who has finally agreed to get help when “threatened” by his wife who is at her wits’ end. A man who has insurance which he has been paying into for close to 20 years.
But they won’t cover rehab.
She is now planning to divorce him. He can’t go back to work until he completes a detox program… which means that he’s out of work and will probably lose his insurance.
At its best, it will probably mean financial ruin for the entire family. At its worst he may give up and drink himself to death. These are very real possibilities.
If you want to tell me this system isn’t broken, maybe I can bring you to the 13 year-old and you can explain why helping her dad save his life would be against your political views.
Hypothesis: to the US Right, the idea that someone gets something they do not deserve is gut-level offensive, whereas the idea that someone goes without what they do deserve doesn’t stir a feeling of outrage. It’s easier to shrug about that.
For Liberals it’s the opposite.
If true, this makes it doubly odd that so many Christians are on the Right, since it’s so fundamental to Christianity that God has given Mankind a great gift that it absolutely does not deserve.
That would be absolutely true if there was a general adherence in practice to the idea that God’s “grace” (which is oversimplified thusly: “we believe that we deserved to be sent to hell, but through God’s love we have been given the chance to go to heaven”) is truly unmerited.
However, in actual practice, there are many Christians who are referred to as “functional atheists” in which they live their lives as if they need to earn their way into heaven. If you can set aside the fact that this term is obviously sloppy (an “atheist” would not believe there was a God nor a heaven), the term “functional” refers more to the fact that they do not believe that God’s grace is sufficient to save them, and that they need to work hard to earn their way into heaven.
You may have heard the expression, even from Christians: “God helps those who help themselves.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of just about everything in the New and Old Testaments, where God is routinely shown to be helping those who absolutely positively cannot help themselves.
What we have in America, most demonstrable on the Extreme Far Right of politics, is a combination of American individuality, a belief in American exceptionalism, with a light dusting of religious scented “manifest destiny”. That is why we have expressions like “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” which might seems as if it is the 11th Commandment.
Moreover there surprisingly little by the way of social justice action in American Christian churches. By which I mean the churches attended by rich and powerful white people. For example, in the days of slavery, it is true that there are white churches which fought against it (Methodists, in particular, if I remember my history correctly), there were very many white churches where slaves could attend (as they had no right to assemble independently) as long as they sat in the back or in the balcony. These churches routinely preached on a scant few verses in the New Testament about slaves obeying their masters.
(n.b. there are even fewer verses in the NT supporting slavery than their are condemning homosexuality… and those which do are not clearly—to scholars, not to those who have their mind already made up—equivalent to the understanding we have of sexual orientation today. At least one talks about giving up “natural” relationships for “unnatural” ones; which, of course, suggests to some that if one’s “nature” is to be attracted to members of the same gender, then it would be wrong to refuse them. But I digress…)
When literacy among the slaves improved to the point where they could read the Bible on their own, the slaves adopted the story of the Exodus—Moses leading the people out of slavery—as their meta-narrative. The Exodus story is a fundamental part of the story of the Jews in their relationship with God, and is one the main overarching stories in the Old Testament. Yet slave-owning Christians ignored the Exodus story. It’s not that they didn’t know the story of Moses, they just didn’t think that it applied to them.
I was teaching an “Introduction to the New Testament” class for a group of people who want to become ‘lay (as in “not ordained”) pastors’, usually of smaller churches which cannot afford a full-time ordained minister. One conversation involved the issue of health care. I made a theologically-based argument in favor of universal health-care as a Christian issue, based on the Old Testament emphasis on hospitality, the Old and New Testament emphasis on caring for the widows and orphans, the story of the Good Samaritan (where Jesus answers the question “Who is my neighbor?” by talking about religious leaders who did nothing to help a man who had been mugged and left for dead, but a Samaritan—who was considered a “mixed breed” and therefore less than others—helped the man in his time of need).
One woman in the class, whose attitude and dress (and the fact that she missed one of the classes because she was on a cruise with her husband), effectively conveyed that she is financially “secure” replied, “I’ve worked hard for what I have!”
That was the sum total of her argument. Zero theological basis. Zero indication that she had been at all influenced by the moral codes of the Old and New Testaments about caring for others. She has worked hard for what is hers, and she doesn’t want to have to share with those who haven’t worked as hard.
This attitude is especially prevalent with people who have come from a place of social/economic privilege, but it is also seen among those who see themselves as having gone from “rags to riches”: the idea that everyone has an equal shot at success, and if you haven’t succeeded, it probably means that it is your fault for not trying hard enough.
Like the slave-owners of early America, it is not that she is unaware of these Biblical stories, she just doesn’t think that they apply. She would probably try to argue that the Good Samaritan wasn’t a government-run program, but rather the act of an indivdual deciding how he should spend his money. And thus the “Good Samaritan” becomes an example of Reagan-esque “trickle-down” economics, completely ignoring the fact that for all the years since Reagan, it has been proven without a fact that (by-and-large and with few exceptions), the free market will not help those in need, but will happily let them die in the gutter.
Meanwhile I would guess that she—and many others like her—would want to continue the myth that this country was founded on Judeo-Christian “values” and therefore we ought to post the 10 Commandments on public property to reinforce those values. Despite the fact that it’s pretty hard to make a reasonable case that American culture has much to do with the 10 Commandments at all, with the possible exception of thinking that killing, stealing, and lying are bad.
(Another aside: I have heard the Hebrew word for “steal” in “Thou Shalt Not Steal” in its original context has a connotation about kidnapping others and forcing them into slavery. So it might be hard to even argue that we were founded on that commandment, given that many of the Founding Fathers were owners of slaves who had been kidnapped from Africa.)
The Christian church was part of the inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr. and many other great and powerful leaders for social change. Many denominations are responsible for establishing not only churches, but schools and hospitals. Many modern-day Christian churches continue to provide important social services and support.
Unfortunately, 20+ years of watching extreme conservative Christianity cozy up to extreme conservative Republicanism has twisted the message of Jesus in a plethora of ways, and it would be a mistake to think that actual Christian doctrine plays a role in influencing political views of a certain group of Christians who are more likely to interpret Scripture to defend what they already believe politically.
Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)
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