TW3 and Speaking in Tongues
Political Waves
To reflect more of our misanthropy, I'm including a couple of pretty amazing op/eds ... one from Pat Buchanan who speaks reasonably from time to time and then lapses into junk like the following, which plays to fears and white exceptionalism. We can be grateful we were spared his presidency. The next is from Bill Donohue, anachronistic leader of the Catholic League, proving once again that the Inquisition was organic to theological thought ... and shame on the Washington Post for reprinting it in its religion section -- they're really thrashing around to find a readership. If you haven't had enough mindless babble on the other side of those, I'm including a link to Glenn Beck's latest drivel ... makes absolutely no sense but he delivers with customary entertainment value.
This can all be summed up by Tom Tomorrow, and brilliantly, here; and if you need a serious giggle, watch the Yes Men chase Arlen Specter wearing ... well, open it for a belly laugh! At least they KNOW they're absurd and use it to advantage!
I'll be back with more serious topics on Friday.
Jude
Harpers Weekly Review
October 20, 2009
President Obama appeared likely to surge 40,000 troops
into Afghanistan, thus adopting the key military tactic
that the Bush Administration defined as successful in
Iraq. In Afghanistan, a country with no duly elected
president, citizens were turning to Taliban "shadow
courts" for justice, and, in a series of unannounced
government actions, an additional 13,000 U.S. military
engineers, medical personnel, military police, and
intelligence officers were already deploying. The
Pakistani military embarked on its own escalation, sending
28,000 troops into South Waziristan in a failed attempt to
defeat entrenched Taliban militants. The White House was
at war with the FOX News Channel. Rush Limbaugh, who was
deemed too racist to own a professional football
franchise, publicly thanked the Lord for his enemies. A
Baptist Church in North Carolina was scheduling a
Bible-burning for Halloween, and Ellen van Wolde, a noted
Old Testament scholar, confirmed that the Bible had been
mistranslated and that God did not create the Earth.
Health-care lobbying efforts entered a "new, more frenzied
stage" with the passage of a reform bill by the Senate
Finance Committee. "This is now roller derby. It's very
fast, lots of elbows, and people are playing for keeps,"
said Nancy LeaMond, an executive vice president of the
AARP. It was reported that some people in North Carolina
liked John Edwards, some didn't, and others were
indifferent, and that politicians weren't actually cursing
in public more often but media outlets have become more
likely to quote them doing so. Conservative protestors in
Burlington, New Jersey, heckled eight-year-old
schoolchildren as they sang a tune in praise of President
Obama, and Steve Wynn, a casino and resort owner in Las
Vegas, said that Obama has allowed the financial crisis to
persist because he hasn't cut taxes enough. The Dow
"flirted" with 10,000 points, comforting the rich. Goldman
Sachs reported earnings of $3.19 billion in the third
quarter of this year, donated $200 million to its
educational foundation, put aside $5.35 billion for
salaries, bonuses, and employee benefits, and promised a
35-cent per share dividend to holders of its common
stock. The salaries of American workers were being cut at
a rate not seen since the Great Depression.
A woman dressed as a rasher of bacon harassed Muslim food
vendors in Manhattan. "Don't you like bacon?" she
asked. "Bacon is so good. Do you ever put bacon on these
hot dogs? 'Cause they'd taste really good wrapped up in
delicious bacon. Maybe sprinkled with bacon. Or stuffed
with bacon. Come on, don't you love bacon?" Adrian Bulli,
a molecular gastronomist in Spain, was accused of using
poisonous additives to flavor the food at his restaurant
El Bulli, and sports bars were passing off deep-fried
chicken-breast chunks as "boneless chicken wings."
Researchers in Amsterdam confirmed that living near grass
is good for your health. A program to plant 1,000,000
trees in New York City continued despite the objections of
local residents. "I don't want it," said a woman who was
forced to accept a ginkgo. "I don't like it. It can stay
there and die for all I care." Bunnies culled from public
parks in Stockholm were being used to fire a Swedish
heating plant, and the Hanford nuclear reservation in
Washington state was found to be peppered with radioactive
rabbit droppings, all of which must be scooped. Reverend
and "True Parent of all Mankind" Sun Myung Moon married
10,000 couples in Seoul, in what is believed to be his
final expression of "trans-religion, trans-national,
trans-racial" harmony. A Mayan religious leader declared
that the world will not end in 2012, that his religion did
not claim that it would, and that he was "fed up" with
being asked about it. Two thousand box jellyfish swarmed
Hawaii's Waikiki Beach, stinging nearly 200 people, and
fishermen off the coast of Jersey netted a rare parasitic
isopodal louse that attacks a fish, eats its tongue, then
lives on in the fish's mouth. William Wayne Justice, a
federal judge in Texas, known as "the law east of the
Pecos," whose rulings integrated public schools, reformed
prisons, and helped educate illegal immigrants, died at
age 89. A justice of the peace in Hammond, Louisiana,
refused to issue a marriage license to an inter-racial
couple. China created a small black hole, and a glowing
halo was spotted in the skies over Moscow.
-- Theodore Ross
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/10/WeeklyReview2009-10-20
Traditional Americans are losing their nation
Pat Buchanan, WorldNetDaily
October 20, 2009
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=113463
In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," tea party activists and town-hall dissenters.
Comes now, the "Oath Keepers." And who might they be?
Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are "either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia."
Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.
"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can't do it without them.
"We say if the American people decide it's time for a revolution, we'll fight with you."
Prediction: Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.
And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-hall protesters, calling them "un-American," "Nazis" and "evil-mongers," one can imagine what they will do with the Oath Keepers.
As with Jimmy Carter's long-range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that these are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president.
Yet, the establishment's reaction seems more problematic for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of America divorced from reality.
Progressives are the folks who, in the 1960s, could easily understand that urban riots that took scores of lives and destroyed billions in property were an inevitable reaction to racism, poverty and despair. They could empathize with the rage of campus radicals who burned down the ROTC building and bombed the Pentagon.
The "dirty, immoral war in Vietnam" explains why the "finest generation we have ever produced" is behaving like this, they said. We must deal with the "root causes" of social disorder.
Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:
"Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year's turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations and the financial industry. ... Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick 'none' – a grim statement."
Is all this due to Obama's race?
Even Obama laughs at that. As he told David Letterman, I was already black by the time I was elected. And he not only got a higher share of the white vote than Kerry or Gore, a third of white voters, who said in August 2008 that race was an important consideration in voting, said they were going to vote for Obama.
With black voters going 24 to 1 for Obama, he almost surely won more votes than he lost because of his race.
Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.
Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.
In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.
They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.
They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.
They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.
America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right. ++
America's secular saboteurs
Bill Donohue, President, Catholic League - Newsweek via WaPo
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/10/secular_saboteurs.html
There are many ways cultural nihilists are busy trying to sabotage America these days: multiculturalism is used as a club to beat down Western civilization in the classroom; sexual libertines seek to upend the cultural order by attacking religion; artists use their artistic freedoms to mock Christianity; Hollywood relentlessly insults people of faith; activist left-wing legal groups try to scrub society free of the public expression of religion; elements in the Democratic party demonstrate an animus against Catholicism; and secular-minded malcontents within Catholicism and Protestantism seek to sabotage their religion from the inside.
Yesterday's radicals wanted to tear down the economic structure of capitalism and replace it with socialism, and eventually communism. Today's radicals are intellectually spent: they want to annihilate American culture, having absolutely nothing to put in its place. In that regard, these moral anarchists are an even bigger menace than the Marxists who came before them.
If societal destruction is the goal, then it makes no sense to waste time by attacking the political or economic structure: the key to any society is its culture, and the heart of any culture is religion. In this society, that means Christianity, the big prize being Catholicism. Which explains why secular saboteurs are waging war against it.
When Jesse Jackson led students at Stanford University in the late 1980s screaming, "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Culture's Got to Go," it was a way of undermining this nation's Judeo-Christian heritage. When Yale University returned $20 million to Lee Bass in the 1990s because the faculty objected to its being used to expand its Western civilization curriculum--they wanted multiculturalism--it showed the power of radical secularists.
Sexual libertines, from the Marquis de Sade to radical gay activists, have sought to pervert society by acting out on their own perversions. What motivates them most of all is a pathological hatred of Christianity. They know, deep down, that what they are doing is wrong, and they shudder at the dreaded words, "Thou Shalt Not." But they continue with their death-style anyway.
Secular saboteurs have often seized the arts to make a statement. That's why the blasphemous often tracks the obscene: if the goal is to put an artistic dagger into the heart of culture, then it makes sense to use all the ammo available by attacking the sacred. And they are certainly masters of that art. From scatological artistic exhibitions to the latest obscene installation, the charlatans have succeeded in politicizing the arts and denigrating Christianity.
There was a time when Hollywood made reverential movies about Christianity. But those days are long gone. Now they just insult. And when someone finally makes a film that makes Christians proud, he is run out of town. Were it not for Mel Gibson, there would have been no "Passion of the Christ." But for every Harvey Weinstein who likes to bash Catholics, there is always someone else waiting in the wings to do the same.
The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State harbor an agenda to smash the last vestiges of Christianity in America. Lying about their real motives, they say their fidelity is to the Constitution. But there is nothing in the Constitution that sanctions the censorship of religious speech. From banning nativity scenes to punishing little kids for painting a picture of Jesus, the zealots give Fidel a good run for his money.
Catholics were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party; now the gay activists are in charge. Indeed, practicing Catholics are no longer welcome in leadership roles in the Party: the contempt that pro-life Catholics experience is palpable. The fact that Catholics for Choice, a notoriously anti-Catholic front group funded by the Ford Foundation, has a close relationship with the Democrats says it all.
Secularists within Catholicism and Protestantism are so out of control that it makes one wonder how any serious-minded person would ever accuse these religions of being oppressive. Insubordination of the most flagrant kind is routinely tolerated in a way that would never be countenanced at the New York Times, yet the bad rap always goes to Christians. We're not talking about those pushing for moderate reforms: we're talking about termites eating away from within.
The only way secular saboteurs can be stopped is by an alliance of religious conservatives across faith lines. The good news is that this is already happening. In the fight over gay marriage, the scorecard is 30-0: traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Mormons, along with a big contribution from the Latino and African American communities, have succeeded in throwing a roadblock at this crazy idea.
The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they're too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels. ++
Bill Donohue is President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He is author of the new book "Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America," published by FaithWords.
Glenn Beck Slams Obama Encouraging Volunteerism: "Almost Like We're Living In Mao's China" (VIDEO)
10/19/09
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/19/glenn-beck-slams-obama-en_n_326632.html
"I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
~ Barack Obama
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