Some one once said "Judge not . . ." Well, screw that. I'm going to judge nutbag phony pastor 'Dr.' Terry Jones by saying he isn't a Christian.
How can I know this? How can I know what's in a person's heart? And aren't modern evangelicals saved by 'grace' alone, leaving them fully able to be assholes & jerks?
Simple: no one who has truly embraced the message of Jesus can act this awfully. This self-aggrandizing prick with his phony doctorate and eBay store is no more a Christian than Jim (no relation) Jones was. Self-important charlatans leading the delusional. At least in this instance (so far) no one has died.
So 'Dr' Jones? Go to Hell. Fuck off and die.
And for the traditional media that sucked up all his droolings like water from Lourdes and sprayed it across our teevee screens? You're not much better.
The story of how one lone idiot, pimping an 18th-century brand of community terrorism, held the media hostage and forced some of this nation's most powerful people to their knees to fitfully beg an end to his wackdoodlery is an extraordinary one. It's a modern media retelling of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", in which a gang of Islamaphobes, cast in the role of Addie Bundren, bamboozle the media into carrying their coffin full of malevolence on a journey of pure debasement. Let's begin at the beginning.
Twenty, twenty, twentyfour hours to go, I wanna be sedated.
25 or 6 to 4..
Only numbers, right. Well how about 61 or 18? To some, 6118 means a great Gretsch guitar. But for today's lesson, 61 is a number being tossed around by Republican politicians, right-wing pundits, and lazy traditional media types instead of the likely more correct 18:
On the January 25 edition of NBC's Meet the Press, host David Gregory allowed House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) to repeat the falsehood that, in Boehner's words, "we've already found" that 61 detainees released from the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay are now "back on the battlefield." In fact, the figure, which comes from the Pentagon, includes 43 former prisoners who are suspected of, but have not been confirmed as, having "return[ed] to the fight." Moreover, even the Pentagon's claim that it has confirmed that 18 former Guantánamo detainees have returned to the battlefield has been questioned by experts.
Jeebus, do you have any time to do, you know, research to look into actual, you know, facts? When you're not too busy dancin' with rapper K-Ro:
Finally, the part that gives us the willies: They had Karl Rove come up (who, by the way, is looking very trim. Wow). Then they had him rap. As "MC Rove." This is on video, see it for yourself here. NBC's David Gregory, provided back-up dance moves, as he does.
The Media Matters piece continues:
Additionally, Seton Hall University School of Law professor Mark Denbeaux -- who has written several reports about Guantánamo detainees, including some challenging the Pentagon's definition of "battlefield" capture and published detainee recidivism rates -- has disputed the Pentagon's figures, asserting: "[The Defense Department's most recent] attempt to enumerate the number of detainees who have returned to the battlefield is false by the Department of Defense's own data and prior reports." He added that in "each of its forty-three attempts to provide the numbers of the recidivist detainees, the Department of Defense has given different sets of numbers that are contradictory and internally inconsistent with the Department's own data."
Gregory also failed to challenge Boehner's assertion that the detainees at Guantánamo "are terrorists who have attempted to kill Americans." As Media Mattersdocumented, a February 8, 2006, study authored by Denbeaux and a lawyer representing Guantánamo detainees analyzed Defense Department data on 517 Guantánamo Bay detainees, finding that more than half "are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies."
Actually, I think we should use the 61 number. We on the left are simply saying that the Bush Administration so badly botched everything about Guantanamo and its hearing process that they held people with no actual charges for years, while letting 18 actual terrorists go. Their own rhetoric makes it look much worse. If the actual number were 61, that would make the Bushies vastly more incompetent at combating global terrorism than we previously believed.
In fact, as Media Matters for America has repeatedlydocumented, other Democrats who opposed abortion rights spoke at that convention and at every convention since, so Casey's opposition to abortion rights could not have been the sole reason he was not given a speaking role. Additionally, The New Republic's Michael Crowley reported in 1996: "According to those who actually doled out the 1992 convention speaking slots, Casey was denied a turn for one simple reason: his refusal to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket."
I mean, c'mon, dude! Do some research, don't just pull crap out of your butt. This myth keeps repeating itself, and having "respected" guys like Matthews repeating it doesn't help.
Joe Klein, who should be henceforth known as Swamp Thing, has always been one of those "fair and balanced" news people we keep hearing about. You know, truth, justice, and the American way. Of course, he has spun this for so long that he actually believed it.
Yesterday he wrote this on his Time blog (called Swampland, get it? Sorry.):
I heard about Jerome Corsi's book a few weeks ago from my mother, who said that her great fear--that Barack Obama has covert Islamic associations--had been confirmed by a new book. I told her not to worry, that many reputable people had looked into the matter and Obama was more likely to be spotted in Whole Foods than praying in a mosque. (Since my mother has never been to Whole Foods, so she didn't quite get my wry allusion.) "I hope so," she said, dubiously.
So we know the market for trash is there, and not so far from home. And we know, that Mary Matalin, who appears regularly on mainstream media programs like Meet the Press called the Corsi book in the New York Times today:
“a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.”
But hey, Mary stands to make big bucks off this scholarship, which I'm sure was submitted for peer review and otherwise held to the highest editorial standards--and I'm sure her reputation and mediagenicity won't be damaged by this poisonous crap, and we're all friends here, aren't we? And, yknow, they say politics ain't beanbag...and it's all in the game to tell innocent, well-intentioned people that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim or that John Kerry wasn't really a hero in Vietnam. Or, as George W. Bush, once told a rightly outraged John McCain--whose wife and daughter Bush's minions had smeared--"It's just politics."
Back in the day, John McCain was the sort of politician who would stand first in line to call out this sort of swill. (As, I'm sure Barack Obama or John Kerry would do, if some hate-crazed, money-grubbing left-winger published a book claiming that McCain had been successfully brainwashed in Vietnam--as Kerry did indeed do when a group of spurious Bush-backing Vietnam vets tried to claim exactly that about McCain during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina.)
When 'back in the day' was that, Joe? When McCain rolled over and played dead when the So. Carolina attack took place?
The man, the myth, the legend: McCain, the Maverick. But it's based on nothing, yet Klein still buys into it, else he wouldn't have stated it this way. Simply means to me that he may have come to an epiphany, but it hasn't given him the ability to look backwards and see what went wrong.
What do I mean by that? This, from the same piece:
I know that people like me are supposed to try to be fair...and balanced. (The Fox mockery of our sappy professional standards seems more brutally appropriate with each passing year.) In the past, I would achieve a semblance--or an illusion--of balance by criticizing Democrats for not responding effectively when right-wing sludge merchants poisoned our national elections with their filth and lies. And it is true, as John Kerry knows, that a more effective response--and a bolder campaign--might have neutralized the Swiftboat assault four years ago. It is also true that Corsi's book this time is far less effective than his Swiftboat venture, since it doesn't come equipped with veterans willing to defile their service by telling lies to camera.
Really? I don't remember you telling us in '04 that the Swiftboaters were "telling lies to camera".
No, I remember you as, as you point out, "fair...and balanced". Here's the thing, Joe. Name me one time, Joe, that you called out the "right-wing sludge merchants" for their "filth and lies". Yeah, that's what I thought. Believing in your own mythology much, Joe?
Well, Joe, thanks for coming around finally. I just wish it could have happened when it would have made a difference, like in 2000 when Al Gore "invented the internet". When GWBush was going to have a "humble foreign policy".
Or in 2004 when the Swiftboaters and Malkin said that Kerry had shot himself for a purple heart.
Because now it won't make any difference. You've gotten in and out of the clown car one too many times. Just because you've seen the light and gotten a new Prius doesn't matter. Because the courage of your convictions comes about because you now have cover. The American public is less moved by the lies and filth from the Right, and the Obama movement is gathering strength.
Had you been a maverick back in 2000 or 2004, when it might have helped, well, you might be taken more seriously now.
We didn't watch the debate. We would have watched the Angels' game, but instead we went to visit a friend whose husband died unexpectedly Monday; very sad.
Broadcast to a prime-time network audience on ABC and devoid of a single policy question during its opening 50 minutes, the debate easily could have convinced the uninitiated that American politics has all the substance of a Beavis and Butt-Head marathon. If the debate was a dress rehearsal for the Oval Office, then the job of a 21st-century president primarily consists of ducking gotcha questions. As Obama rightly complained, deflecting a fatuous question about his seeming reluctance to don an American-flag pin, "This is the kind of manufactured issue that our politics has become obsessed with and, once again, distracts us from ... figuring out how we get our troops out of Iraq and how we actually make our economy better for the American people."
Indeed.
First, this gotcha journalism is tawdry and teen-age, and any so-called journalist who thinks it's part of their job needs to go back to J-school. Is this all that's left of the legacy of Murrow and Cronkite, and other lions of our formerly great press?
Second, we, the politically active and aware public, need more from you. We're as smart as you, and we can analyze these stupid gotcha issues, and dispose of them quickly. We need questions that matter on more specific Iraq policy, economic plans, health care proposals. One of these people is likely going to be the next President of the U.S., not middle school student body president. Please treat them, and us, with respect.
