In the annals of reaching to attain victimization, this Gary Bauer piece should be considered an award winning attempt.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?
New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.
Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.
Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.
Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.
They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.
A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.
Infrastructure week. at last.
It’s the corruption, stupid.
And we’re all out of bubblegum.
If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.
The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.
Tick tock motherfuckers!
Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.
Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.
The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.
This blog will pay for itself.
Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.
Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.
A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
Bark louder, little dog.
I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.
Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.
Lysana
Yep, that’d be a nominee. I bet the butthurt over the AFA and other anti-gay groups being dubbed hate groups would be even stronger, but Bauer’s doing a bang-up job there.
Just Some Fuckhead
If Christians were treated like Muslims we’d have a sane Congress.
Svensker
I’m fucking sick of these assholes.
That is all.
jl
OK, bring on the ‘Bauer awards’. Fine with me.
I do not like all traditional religions equally.
I think this is the funniest paragraph:
“If Christianity were treated like Islam, Christmas and Easter would be publicly celebrated for what they are — the signature events of Christianity, marking the birth and the death and Resurrection of Christ — not stripped of all their theological meaning and transformed into secular holidays devoted to crass consumerism.”
But of course, it is correct. I used to think it was muscular Xtianist fanatical free market capitalism that commercialized Christmas and Easter. But I was wrong, it was the s o s h u l i s t atheist Obama and lefty elites.
I just got an email that proves, stone cold proves, that Obama got in a Satanic Muslin time machine and went back in history to invent Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
dmsilev
I’m pretty sure that it’s illegal to use hallucinogenics of that potentcy without a prescription.
dms
bobbo
Yes, but this is nothing compared to how lucky white people would be if they were treated like black people.
jl
OK, bring on the ‘Bauer awards’. Fine with me.
I do not like all traditional religions equally.
I think this is the funniest paragraph:
“If Christianity were treated like Islam, Christmas and Easter would be publicly celebrated for what they are — the signature events of Christianity, marking the birth and the death and Resurrection of Christ — not stripped of all their theological meaning and transformed into secular holidays devoted to crass consumerism.”
But of course, it is correct. I used to think it was muscular Xtianist fanatical free market capitalism that commercialized Christmas and Easter. But I was wrong, it was the s o s h u l i s t atheist Obama and lefty elites.
I just got an email that proves, stone cold proves, that Obama got in a Satanic Muslin time machine and went back in history to invent Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
PS. sorry of eventual duplicate. I assume that this new blog rebuild will allow us to use the word s * c * * l * s t, since that is what we are, without throwing a comment into moderation. Along with the dioramas.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
what is he talking about, the abortion clinic bombers/killers (Eric Robert Rudolph/Dr Tiller’s murderer, etc.) are treated with kid gloves.
Even the Klan used to be treated with kid gloves, until their attire became the subject of ridicule.
SFAW
Bauer must have been listening to Warren Zevon when he wrote that.
MikeJ
@dmsilev:
HEre’s something I’ve never understood about fundegelicals. They yell that legal health care for women is exactly like the holocaust and at the same time try to argue that they don’t condone violence against doctors. Do they not condone violence against Nazis? Other than the Friends there aren’t a lot of explicitly pacifist christian churches in the US.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Are they STILL whining about that?
joe from Lowell
If Christians were treated like Muslims, I would have heard of a Christian organization that was protested for trying to build a church.
cathyx
I can think of a worse one. If Muslims were treated like white men.
SFAW
It’s always interesting to watch the reaction from a group that’s held power for ages, when they fear that they’re losing the teensiest bit of that power.
cat48
Did you hear about the Christians breaking away from CPAC meeting b/c of teh gays, GOProud was invited? Liberty U, that American Families (whateva it is), & Conservative Women who exist to oppose abortion? I wonder if this is the beginning of a War at the GOP?
sb
There exists no adequate way to measure the visceral hatred Bauer and others like him have for other people who are not like him.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
Ugh. I stopped at the third paragraph.
agrippa
Bauer is pretty insecure. And, has a problem with reality testing.
Christianity is alive and well in the USA. And, he cannot see it.
SFAW
You seem surprised. Why? It’s how they roll. (Or whatever the cliche du jour is.)
iriepirate21
If we treated Christians like Muslims, there wouldn’t be any churches near ground zero. Fucktards.
Ash Can
Has Gary Bauer ever written anything that wasn’t fucked up?
Tom Hilton
You can take the basic approach and apply it to any situation where the dominant group resents having to be nice to a minority. I’m imagining a mid-’60s piece called “If White People Were Treated Like Negroes”. Excerpts:
And so on…
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@agrippa: actually, evangelicals have a persecution complex (after all, Jesus was persecuted for his faith) and an inferiority complex, so gop agents like bauer infiltrate the flock and stoke that fire as it leads to contributions and backlash voting.
Zifnab
All Catholic priests would be on the no-fly list.
Jerry Falwell’s face would be on more people’s t-shirts when they burned the American flag.
The Pope would have the world’s biggest head scarf.
Bill O’Reilly would have absolutely nothing to talk about in the month of December.
Those damn free love hippies wouldn’t be able to shut up about how Thomas Jefferson owned a Bible.
Nobody in France would notice.
I like this game.
Tim I
I think the ‘Bauer Awards’ is a great idea. I only ask that they be very large and awarded rectally.
Annie
If Christians were treated like Muslims we would not have the tea party and the media obsession with Sarah Palin– the Queen of all things Christian.
Bnut
I do treat Christians like Muslims. I treat them like they are both full of horseshit.
BTW, I love that “horseshit” doesn’t give me a spell check error.
Tim I
@Tom Hilton:
Nothing mid-sixties about that. Just visit the great Orange Satan, if you want to see the modern (Progressive) version of the game.
Zifnab
@cat48:
They’ve been feuding on and off for decades now. Occasionally, you can get a guy like Reagen or Bush capable of passing out enough hand-jobs to keep everyone happy. But the corporate drones and the religious nitwits have been butting heads for a long time now.
Mike Lamb
I was disappointed in the comments. The first 10 or so were generally reasonable (at least in tone) despite the soft ball that Bauer threw out…
Mark S.
Jesus Christ, I don’t even know where to begin on how profoundly stupid that is.
kwAwk
One could make the case that the treatment of muslims is racist as we hold them to a lower standard, expecting them to have less control over their behavior than Christians.
You could also extrapolate out that if we treated Christians like Muslims there would only be one Christian in the Congress as opposed to over 500.
Which ain’t such a bad fantasy.
SFAW
I think you’ve hit on something. The Scoville scale is already taken, maybe the Jonanism scale? Except “Jonanism” implies that all the people you hate are the same, so that’s probably out. The Gollum scale? I dunno.
SFAW
As Tom Lehrer said: “And everybody hates the Jews”
Jay in Oregon
If Christians were treated like Muslims…
Our political leaders would be falling all over themselves proclaiming their zeal to bomb their countries and starve their children.
The national pastime would be digging through the Bible for out-of-context quotes to “prove” that all Christians wish for nothing but death and destruction of non-believers.
People showing reverence for Christian holy symbols and observing Christian customs would be treated like criminals.
harokin
I’m eagerly looking forward to the new conservative bestseller, “Muslim Like Me,” in which Bauer describes the sweet, sweet, life of luxury and privilege he enjoyed spending a year passing as a Mohammedan.
Svensker
@MikeJ:
Mennonites and Amish. Believe it or not, Baptists used to be pacifists.
Bill Herbert
Oh my.
kdaug
@SFAW: There exists no adequate way to measure how much I would like to put Bauer’s head in a vice, so I guess it all evens out.
kindness
Did you read the comments there? They make the comments here look like a day in the park.
jl
This line is funny too, in an ‘unclear on the concept’ kind of way. But I am a bad Christian, so I had to look up the appropriate verse in the Good Book.
“If Christianity were treated like Islam in America, our president, a professed Christian, would proudly attend Christian-themed dinners and events while skipping Ramadan dinners,”
Luke 18:10-14 (King James Version)
Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.
The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.
And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.
I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
Mnemosyne
@kwAwk:
If you define “Christian” as “someone who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ as laid out in the New Testament,” I think we’re already at your 1 out of 500 number.
Tom Hilton
@Tim I: True enough. It’s done (slightly) more subtly, but it’s there all right.
Ruckus
@Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people):
You made it 2 1/2 farther than me.
What a douchenozzle. ETA GB is one not the commenter.
Ruckus
@Tim I:
Rusty 6 ft chainsaws. Running.
Just Some Fuckhead
@joe from Lowell:
Maybe if they tried to build one near Ground Zero, Oklahoma City..
Nah.
stuckinred
The Texas Bowl is about to start! Go Illini!
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
And this differs from current reality how, exactly?
Jeebus.
Southern Beale
Perhaps we should take comfort in the fact that, despite being up all day, the post had generated only 841 recommends.
In a country of 300 million, fewer than 1,000 people find his post worthy of recommendation … well, that has to be a good thing. Right? RIGHT?
{ sobs }
agrippa
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
I agree with that.
There seems to be cynics making use of the insecurity of fearful people.
Skepticat
I’m one of the few and the proud. (Or does that make me a Marine?)
@harokin: Spot on.
Joseph Nobles
Something to remember about Gary Bauer: he was close to the Pentagon when Flight 77 crashed into it on 9/11. So he drinks from the eternal fount of victimization.
Mike in NC
No, but I’m sad that I didn’t previously know about those “Ronald Reagan’s Greatest (!) Moments” coins advertised there. They’d have been a ridiculously laughable Christmas present to all my GOP friends.
Jay C
@Southern Beale:
What you said… that nearly 850 people (drop-in-the-bucket of the population as it may be) would “recommend” this piece of inane whiny self-victimization as anything other than an object of scorn is quite a depressing thought.
General Stuck
OT
Stranger than fiction
Merle Haggard – Obot
PurpleGirl
@Just Some Fuckhead: There are zoning challenges to churches being built all the time, across the country. Usually a congregation has bought a piece of land, not where they themselves usually live but in another area close by and the people of the new church area protest. I can’t think of examples now but I know it happens. Also a church may have built by one congregation, sold to another and sale and transfer of the certificate of occupancy is protested because the the locals don’t like the new out-of-area congregants.
It happens. All over the country. Nice Christians who don’t like other Christians.
ppcli
If Christians were treated like Muslims, there would have been a bungling president who constantly made references to his Muslim faith, to the point where the daily briefing books concerning his unnecessary war on a Christian country featured passages from the Koran under combat photos. All administration departments, including Justice would find some reason for not hiring anyone except mediocre but aggressively Muslim graduates of a couple of recently established fifth-tier Muslim schools founded and run by movement Muslim types (University of Qom, Lynchburg campus and Regent-Caliphate University). The federal judiciary would currently be saturated with such people, and an entire eight years worth would have been systematically burrowed into career positions at Justice, where they could make sure that the only civil rights cases that get pursued are those involving minor slights to Muslims. And…
Ah, I can’t go on. Too depressing. What a maroon Bauer is.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@cat48: I am more than ready for their culture wars to start costing the party and not the country.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@SFAW: Can we work in Iggy Pop somehow? I think his song I’m a Conservative (“It would mean so much to me if you would only be like me”) nails it.
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Svensker: Yeah, til blacks, women, and gays became uppity. Does it count as peaceful if the peace is obtained by keeping the rabble down via tradition and rule of law?
maus
Ok! What’s so weird about this?
If Christianity was a minority faith, it would not take the heat because everyone would be far less familiar with its intricacies, and if it was as oppressed in the public space as Islam, it would be an exercise in tolerance to protect the believers.
I agree!
Hungry Joe
Let’s see … Liberty University would be Wahabi A&M, Bob Jones U would be Osama Tech — and Notre Dame would be Mecca, and field The Fighting Shias. (Still green, though they’d probably lose the shamrock.)
Cris
If the majority was the minority, and the minority was the majority, the majority would be treated like the minority is today. And vice-versa.
Dude, that’s so deep
Just Some Fuckhead
If Christians were treated like Muslims they’d be fucking sheep instead of little boys.
Villago Delenda Est
Most self-proclaimed “Christians” in this country are actually Mammon worshipers.
Bauer is most assuredly in that category.
Suffern ACE
If Christians were treated like Muslims:
*Oscar Meyer would be protested for announcing it planned to launch a line of pork products aimed at taking advantage of the growing Christian market.
*Bryan Fisher would count up the number of Moravians in prison and casually state that the money spent on them would be better spent rounding them up and returning them to their homelands.
*People would confuse Hindu temples and Catholic Churches.
*Christians who grew beards would be considered more fanatical than the good Christians without beards.
*The young, Wild-eyed Idealists in the Lutheran Volunteer Corps would be watched for both wild-eyed and crazy idealism.
tweez
This is what it is all about:
http://www.heretical.com/miscella/rcnoa.html
Mnemosyne
Fun fact: Gary Bauer is a close friend of Al Franken’s. At least, he was when Franken wrote Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I don’t know if the friendship survived Franken’s Senate campaign.
Delia
@Southern Beale:
Don’t lose hope. I started to read some of those comments and a whole lot of them got side-tracked on the issue of who is Joseph Smith and is Mormonism Christian/believable.
jl
@tweez:
Um… thanks, I guess. That is one weird site.
Did you know that an emergency room is a good place to pick up chicks? I learned that there. There are vulnerable women ‘on the rebound’ sitting around ER rooms.
They know that R Crumb was making fun of them, in a drug addled alienated way, don’t they? (or at least that is what Crumb has said about that kind of drawing.) Or not? Or is that whole site a black, depressing, satire?
tkogrumpy
@PurpleGirl: In my neck of the woods we have a bazillion of what I call scandal splintered fundy baptist churches, each one having seven or eight parishioners, caused by some sexual scandal or other. Some die out others enlarge, until the next scandal. Rinse, repeat. I have been visiting the Bauer thread, dropping little turds under the name my father gave me.
Camchuck
Shorter Cole: “Peak Christnut”?
Price Geoffrey
@Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people): Interestingly, so did I only to go to and scroll thru the comments, which were not what I expected at all. The type of person I figured to read Human Events is clearly represented in the comments after the article by Bauer, but much of the comments are positions that are definitely not fundamentalist- or evangelical-approved. With all the attention paid to the Tea-Baggers, the religious right must be feeling left out. (I’d jape, “left behind,” but it’s too obvious, right?) The incursions of said group into traditionally Christian enclaves like Human Events comments, is especially funny when they call the Christian Dominionists “Socialists,” which, of course, is their main insult. I recently read somewhere (Gawker?) that the nutjob head of the Tea Party Nation, or whatever Judean Peoples Front, called the methodists “Socialists.” I don’t know about the rest of the country, but around here, the fricking Methodists are pretty squarely republican. What the Methodists ain’t is they ain’t angry enough for the Tea-Baggers or they ain’t rage-aholics. The hypermasculine, (almost invariably non-veteran), retired/boomer-demo dude who gets all tea-party in his politics (and listens to talk radio all afternoon and watches Hannity every night) has given up all pretense of Christian alliance and is now calling them the same sh-t that they call us???!!!??? I thought the circular firing squad was strictly our technique. I am acquainted with a Southern Baptist minister and recently he ahs begun calling himself “Socialist” because he believes in “Obamacare.” I bridled at both terms but kept my silence because of where he was going rhetorically, which was to say that it was odd to hear a lifelong republican tool tell me that he radically differs with his party about a major progressive policy. We live in strange and interesting times.
jrosen
Warning: Do not read the comments on Bauer’s expectoration unless you wish to ruin (or at least taint) the rest of your day. It is considerably worse than the “On Faith” section of WaPo.
I wish I could give my brain a hot shower.