America's Republican Party: Building a bridge to the 13th century.
RE https://t.co/MqBG2pK98s
— Billmon (@billmon1) February 2, 2015
Ta-Nehesi Coates, at the Atlantic, did one of his usual incisive posts on “The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama’s Prayer Breakfast Speech“:
… Christianity did not “cause” slavery, anymore than Christianity “caused” the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion’s share of American history.
That this relatively mild, and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, “the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” by a former Virginia governor gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism in our politics. And it gives you something much more. My colleague Jim Fallows recently wrote about the need to, at once, infantilize and deify our military. Perhaps related to that is the need to infantilize and deify our history. Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct. That is unless you view the entire discussion as a kind of religious one-upmanship, in which the goal is to prove that Christianity is “the awesomest.”…
Dave Weigel, at Bloomberg Politics, thinks “With no campaigns left to run, the president is saying what he means, and not worrying about who it angers“:
… Obama has spoken at the National Prayer Breakfast every year of his presidency. Not until 2014 did he start using the speech to talk specifically about violence from religious extremists. But in his very first speech at the event, in 2009, he’d dropped a reference to how “far too often, we have seen faith wielded as a tool to divide us from one another – as an excuse for prejudice and intolerance.” He’s talked about Islamic terror as an aberration that reformers within the faith can fight back against.
Some conservatives can get away with arguing that; Obama’s insistence that terror groups pervert Islam, and do not grow naturally out of it, is one of his most reliably anger-inducing tics for the right. This year’s prayer breakfast speech was like taking an air horn and blowing right next to the people who’ve been complaining about the noise from the TV…
The rub: Obama clearly doesn’t care. He’s appeared at the National Prayer Breakfasts, yes, but he’s done so after progressives turned on the event. Journalist Jeff Sharlet’s stories about the organizations behind it, and the thuggish anti-gay types who see it as a hot ticket, have soured a lot of people on the left about the NPB. Obama’s never relished the breakfast the way previous presidents have; even commentators sympathetic to Obama think he’s phoned it in. He has no campaigns left to run, so why not phone it in? There’s no political consequence for him saying what he thinks about religion.
Frankly, as a person of faith, I’d feel worse about President Obama if he weren’t “phoning it in” at this event. (And, yes, I realize that showing up for it is as politically ‘mandatory’ as going to Iowa to schmooze Terry Branstad and Steve King.) The Elmer Gantrys who invented it and their fellows who promote it are not interested in God; they are interested in power, and in using their god-puppet as a weapon towards obtaining it.
.@outofideas4anam "Christie Huckabee 2016: Because in your heart, you know the world is actually flat."
— Billmon (@billmon1) February 2, 2015
Baud
And it was something even Bush got right (in rhetoric, anyway) without producing any right-wing anger.
Cain
I missed out on the relgiious thread that John Cole put up earlier.. I thought though I would post something from the Mahabharata, it’s part of the closing chapter after the 9 pandava’s finished the war, and decide to say fuck it, we’re going to heaven now without going through the whole dying thing… Those of you who are dog owners will like it, because rarely does dogs and religion mix!
Yudhisthira’s dog Just to make it clear Yudhisthira is the guy who always is righteous, he’s kind of like a Jesus figure (there is always one, Sri Rama is the other one in the Ramayana) In any case, I think you’ll enjoy the tale. (hint: the dog wins in the end)
Cain
Obama has 0 fucks to give.
Hildebrand
Of course, the vast majority of Medieval scholars, and a good number of regular folks, knew damn well that the world was round. The whole ‘world is flat’ crap came from 19th American hacks wishing to make themselves feel better.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: this whole argument is so exhausting. Whatever you think are policies in the ME should be, we need to work with Muslims. This infantile insistence, not all of it from the right, that Obama “call out” Islam as backwards. if not evil, is counterproductive and thus really fucking stupid.
jl
Hey, a long time ago, didn’t some namby-pamby white man liberal whine about political correctness among his liberal colleagues. Some ruffian uncouth BJ commenters reminded me that the wingnuts are at least as bad.
This is an illustration. More exciting than whether Obama appeared to bow to some other foreign leader, or he used excessively fancy mustard and foreign lettuces on his burger, a la Kerry. Or did not wear a flag pin.
The wingnuts had no problem with talk about The Crusades when some generals and pundits and politicians were talking about waging another one. So, I guess I can understand why they are so upset. Obama said that maybe, just maybe, The Crusades were not all just the greatest idea ever. That is horrible and traitorous in their minds.
Southern Goth
I bet a lot of people in the room choked on their biscuits when President Obama brought up the Spanish Inquisition.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
jl
@Baud:
” And it was something even Bush got right (in rhetoric, anyway) without producing any right-wing anger. ”
And one of several things Bush said that his wingnut supporters thoroughly ignored as soon as they could.
Tree With Water
“The less said about Lincoln’s religion, the better”.
So said Judge Davis* (Lincoln’s friend and “campaign manager”) to Lincoln operatives trying to drum up support for the Rail Splitter at the 1860 republican convention in Chicago.
*(I think it was Davis).
Trentrunner
The phrase “person of faith” really, truly grates. It’s like when people claim to be “spiritual” and not “religious.” Ugh. Why are people bringing up religion at all ever, unless they’re in their own goddamn churches among their likewise deluded folks? Out here in public, it’s just embarrassing.
And the difference between “persons of faith” and these fundamentalists is one of degree, not kind.
Schlemazel
@Tree With Water:
I love the humility and decency of Lincolns response to the question “Is God on our side?”
“We should be more concerned that we are on His side.”
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Baud: Dunno. There were certainly examples of wholesale rejection of Bush’s comments.
But, yeah, “anger” about it on the right is hard to find.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
cg
To me, “person of faith” sings. And not in an embarrassing way at all.
dslak
@Cain: As someone who wrote his graduate thesis on the Mahabharata, I would just make a minor quibble: Yudhishtira is not really a Jesus-type character. He is concerned with being righteous, but his failings also serve as a catalyst for the Mahabharata war itself. If we have to compare someone in the text with Jesus (and I don’t see why we should), it would really be Krishna, who is supposed to be an avatar of God.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I clickd on your Daily Caller link and got a pop up saying that defunding Amnesty International is Defending America. Tucker Carlson… I was gonna call him the dumbed down Jonah Goldberg but that seems like some kind of redundancy
I also remember Ann Coulter. “We need to invade these countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” So what the fuck was Obama talking about with his “crusade” stuff? That kind of thoughtful foreign policy commentary got Coulter hired, IIRC, as a commentator on ABCNews’ flagship Sunday Show! Nice work, Georgie
Esme's Mom
@Cain: rq
Lovely story, thanks for the link. Reminds me of the Twilight Zone where the old man and his dog die in a hunting accident. The devil pretends to be St. Peter and tries to lure the man into hell with grand promises of a lavish afterlife, but no dogs allowed.
Dharma’s a bitch. On my lap right now.
dslak
@Cain: As someone who wrote his graduate thesis on the Mahabharata, I would just make a minor quibble: Yudhishtira is not really a Jesus-type character. He is concerned with being righteous, but his failings also serve as a catalyst for the Mahabharata war itself. If we have to compare someone in the text with Jesus (and I don’t see why we should), it would really be Krishna, who is supposed to be an avatar of God.
schrodinger's cat
@dslak: Krishna is the master politician, hardly Jesus. He always plays favorites and wants the Pandavas to win at any cost.
Cain
@dslak:
I agree that perhaps Jesus is not exactly the best example.. But Krishna is a bad example for a Jesus figure. Yes, Krishna might be God, but Krishna was a liar, a gambler, a prankster, a womanizer, and a number of othings that the Bible did not believe Jesus to be. Krishna lived like the rest of us, if there was dope available, he’d probably be a pothead. The point was that God lived life. He might have been righteous, but not sure if he was virtuous. :-) I dont think that was the point anyways.
In any case, the Mahabharata is an interesting tale that has sorta villains and sorta heroes. The best part is that, one could argue that other their societal rules neither the villain nor the heroes actually did anything wrong. I think that was the interesting lesson in Mahabharata which is rare in a religious book. You could read the Mahabharata like one cool non-fiction book if you wanted to.
Cain
BTW to other folks, Yudhishtira failing was that he was a gambler and gambled away everything including his wife. I find it interesting that he didn’t suffer for it when he entered Hell. (Hindu Hell is temporary, you go there, get your ass kicked for a bunch of stuff and then you shoved into a new body and thrown back into the system – e.g. catch and release)
Anne Laurie
@Trentrunner:
Can you give me a better alternative? I am religious (though not monotheistic), so I feel like I have to specify that I have a bias when discussing topics like this.
(I agree it would be better if everyone’s religious beliefs were kept separate from “politics”, the public kabuki theatre, but that’s obviously not gonna happen any time soon in this here America.)
Irony Abounds
I’m not a person of faith, and as each day passes in my life I fail to see how any intelligent person can be. This world is so fucked up, and the human race such a disappointment, the only way there can be a god like creature who created it is if there is a a species of god like creatures and the one that created humans and the Earth is in the bottom 20 percentile of such creatures and humans and the Earth are some slap dash science project created by one of those special ed creatures . I concede that the Earth and humans could be a pre-beta version of an ecosystem conceived by one of such creatures. Anyone believing that there is a God of the type inherent in the Jewish, Christian or Muslim faiths is sadly lacking in any sort of intelligent thinking.
schrodinger's cat
@Cain:That’s what I love about the Mahabharata. Its not preachy and keeps
the moralizing to a minimum
eemom
@Anne Laurie:
You’re a Wiccan, is that correct? Asking because I’m interested.
eta: I think the “person of faith” thing grates on people because it was used constantly, so fucking insufferably and always to vile ends, in the GWB years.
FlyingToaster
@Tree With Water: Actually, it was his law partner William Herndon.
Heliopause
“Christianity did not ’cause’ slavery, anymore than Christianity ’caused’ the civil-rights movement.”
This is true in its limited sense, but suffers from the basic problem. If Christianity is not responsible for it, then who is?
Reparations make no sense if there is no entity to make the repair. Why does it make more sense to absolve Christianity than the great-great-great-grandchildren, who can’t even identify the CSA on a map for a high school exam, of this historical crime?
Christianity did it. America did it. Enlightenment ideals did it. The human race did it. Don’t be a pussy, call it like it is.
Irony Abounds
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I agree that Christians have had their moments in history when heinous acts were committed in the name of Christianity. That doesn’t excuse the fact that Muslims are still committing heinous acts in the name of Islam hundreds of years later. A large percentage, albeit not a majority, of Muslims are either committing or condoning barbaric acts in the name of their religion. They should be called out on it, and their stupidity and barbarism highlighted.
Cain
@schrodinger’s cat:
Me too.. it’s not supposed to be a good vs evil story. Just a complex, human oriented tale. People watch the tv serials because it is in fact like a day time soap opera. :-)
Zinsky
As I have posted on other threads, let’s recall which “Judeo-Christian nation” incinerated 100,000+ innocent human beings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But wait! That was “different”, wasn’t it?
Anne Laurie
@eemom: I’m an animist. I’m too anti-social to be a good Wiccan, although it was a Wiccan (and an old friend) who performed our marriage ceremony. (Spousal Unit’s a born & bred atheist, he don’t care and don’t care who don’t care he don’t care.)
Basically, I believe the universe is alive & crawling with infinite gods, some more influential than others. Short credo: Everything strives; everything is connected; nothing ever stays the same, but nothing is ever completely obliterated either.
Acting on these beliefs makes me a happier person, and one who is more useful to the community. This was not true of the Catholicism I was born into, or of other religious traditions I investigated. (Modern Wicca is very community-oriented, and I haven’t got the patience to cooperate with even half a dozen other peoples’ idea of ritual.)
schrodinger's cat
It has great characters too, even the peripheral stories like Yayati’s are fascinating
Irony Abounds
@Anne Laurie: Fortunately I only had my large margarita and half of my wife’s. If I had another one of those suckers I might have lost any inhibitions about saying what I think about animists. Plus, even though I don’t know you, I for the most part find your posts informative and entertaining, so I would hate to be insulting simply because my BAL reached .08 or above.
Tenar Darell
I guess I just don’t get this event. What do they want from Obama? To say something that signifies nothing. For an anodyne vaguely Christian prayer. For him to say that Christianity of the Methodist variety is the “bestest evah!” (That was the religion of the guy who started this breakfast, right)? He’s the President of the United States. If he did that last he would piss off every Atheist, Pagan, Animist, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Mormon, Greek Orthodox, Jehovah’s Witness, Christian Scientist, Pentecostal, Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Catholic etc. citizen of the nation. And if he did either of the first two, they’d whine that he said nothing and go “hur hur…where’s the eloquence, we want the vaunted eloquence!”
ETA Like I said, I don’t get it. Forget it Tenar, it’s XKCD and someone wrong on the Internet. Obama will always be wrong to them, doesn’t matter what he does.
SiubhanDuinne
@Anne Laurie:
Thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.
— Francis Thompson
catclub
Long game and Obama, who knew?
Crouchback
@Hildebrand: Yes, Billmon’s being unfair to the 13th Century. The Christian intellectuals of that time might have been appallingly ignorant by modern standards, but they were trying to get closer to the truth. That puts them light years ahead of modern religious fundamentalists.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: I’ve finally gotten around to rereading Zelazny’s Lord of Light and now I am getting all confuzzled about Hindu deities again. Damn it.
debbie
He keeps this up, their heads could explode. Keep it up, sir.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Mahabharata has no deities even Krishna, who was elevated to godhood much later is very much a mortal here.* Basically it is a feud between two sets of cousins over who is the rightful heir to the throne of Hastinapur (modern day Delhi).
According to many scholars, Geeta was a later addition.
Another Holocene Human
I’m tired of them dumping on the 13th century to smear Republicans. I’m no historian but frankly the early modern period seemed worse, overall, for your average woman than the medieval period although being a poor person in both eras sucked ballz (except maybe for the period after the plague where the peasants revolted against the church landlords, lol).
I don’t know how the legal status of women compares between medieval and early modern, but it seems to me from the culture that women were just looked upon as less, Calvinism held that they were harlots who seduced men into sin, the legal system treated them as adult children, there were epidemics of STDs, women were extremely restricted outside the home and in terms of occupation, frankly worse than in the medieval period when working class and petty bourgeois women did have options of gainful occupation. While there were outbreaks of burning heretics and genocidal violence throughout the medieval period, women were singled out specifically during the early modern period, not for heresy but for witchcraft, a now specifically female vein of wickedness, about which no lie could be told that was too preposterous.
Which is to say that frankly during the time of Richard the Lionheart women had more rights and dignity than in the world that the Christofascists want to create in their homeschooled quiverfull enclaves today. Richard the Lionheart was pursued on the Continent by charges that he had raped women in Aquitaine, in other words he got Cosby’d, not decades later after all his best work was behind him, but right at the time. And the women were believed and AFAIK not retaliated against even though he and his family were super powerful and he never faced any sort of judicial proceedings. (Princes were the (secular) law and therefore above it, although it’s speculated that Richard’s public penance may have been in part over the rapes.)
I’m no medievalist but this and other details of medieval life are someone extraordinary if you compare to early modern Europe and also to the wacky patriarchal cults we have going on in the US which of course pretend–it’s all lies of course–that they’re recreating 19th century or whatever life.
(American women married after age 18 on average during the 19th century and generally chose their mates. Women were also frequently heads of household by necessity on the frontier, which these Goddard types are always waxing so nostalgic for. The Mormon plural marriage was considered outrageous and almost beyond taboo to non-Mormons, and marriage of very young girls was viewed with horror and disgust. While women were chaperoned meeting suitors (if of a certain social class) marriages of the American-born were not, as a rule, arranged. Fundy bullcrap is just that, bullcrap. Ignorant just-so stories for the gullible.)
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: Honestly, I have so little knowledge of the subject area – despite the shitload of books on Indian religion and mythology lying around my parents house (Dad went through a phase and Dad’s phases, like mine, involve the acquisition and reading of many books) – that I probably should have just kept my big trap shut.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Go research the rights of women in Rome and Greece hint: not a nice subject.. Then compare to the rights that Viking women had. You might find it interesting.
Crouchback
@Zinsky: Seriously, that’s the worse crime you can come up with for a Christian nation in WWII? Not that little thing called the Holocaust? Go back further we’ve got the Belgian Congo, various famines under the British Empire, the near genocide of the original inhabitants of North America, etc. Of course, moving past Christians in WWII we can look at the atrocities the Japanese committed in East Asia or the way the Red Army raped, pillaged and murdered its way across Eastern Europe. It was a horrifying war.
Incidentally, back in the 1990s the Japanese student association at American University decided to hold a presentation on Hiroshima & Nagasaki. The Chinese student association responded with a presentation on Japanese atrocities in China. So easy to forget your own sins.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: I am no expert either. I haven’t read the book you mentioned so I have no idea what it is about.
Another Holocene Human
@Hildebrand: The Greeks, of course, knew this.
The historian Loewen has more on how Americans as a group got taught the myth in “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and Lies about Christopher Columbus. Lies Across America is a really good book as well (talks about all those racist historical markers and the difference between Civil War memorials put up in the 1860s and 70s versus the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy crap put up everywhere during the height of the Jim Crow era, also great stuff on the “Glory” memorial in Boston).
http://www.amazon.com/James-W.-Loewen/e/B000APVWNE/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: It is a SciFi book. The premise is that a group of people from Earth land on a planet and establish a new society based on Hindu thought. The settlers find a way to transmit their atman to new bodies and thus become effectively immortal. They then set themselves up as gods. One of them, Sam, rebels and offers Buddhism as an alternative. More stuff happens. It also parallels Hesse’s Siddhartha as a story. It is a good read.
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, I’m aware.
OTOH, Romans had forceps and Vikings, Celts, Germanii had … bupkis.
Pick your poison….
(Greek life seemed a lot worse than Roman overall, especially over time as patriarchal marriage in Rome got abandoned, and so on. Marriage contracts are also an interesting study.)
Another example, Egyptian women during the earliest periods of recorded history had more rights than Egyptian women during later periods, especially Greek era and following. Thousands of years ago Egyptian women could own property which is like the biggie right there.
Another Holocene Human
I dunno about Vikings or Goths (Swedes, traveling or homebodies), but the Franconian people had salic descent which was a OMG FUCKING DISASTER for both women and well everybody who was a Frank or lost a war to them, or got caught in the blowback of those fucking brother-killers fighting another one of their destructive wars.
That bullshit is 1/2 of what caused the dark ages, which were dark, the economy collapsed and cities emptied out as desperate people took to the woods for subsistence existence, that is a fucking dark age. (Other factors like disease played a role.)
If you read about the actual Brunhilde and her Game of Thrones life … the whole only-males-rule-split-the-booty-up-between-the-sons form of government was the real drama queen in the tale. Primogeniture always seemed stupid to me as the child of a democracy but it was a fucking REFORM, damn, note how after the formation of the French state (Franks who settled down?) the nobility came up with this codified custom for disposing of excess sons.
It’s still stupid, all kinds of hella shitty things have been done by ruling families to each other because of hereditary power schemes.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Equal rights and a voice at the Thing seem to matter. I am not qualified to decide whether they matter more than the technological improvements that Roman medical practice offered in return for sexual slavery. I will leave that decision to those better qualified than me.
Another Holocene Human
Romans also supposedly had oral birth control, some sort of special wild fennel in North Africa which is now extinct.
I loved the show history cold case, gotta see the episode about the woman and the three babies, absolutely tragic.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Have you ever tried for pithy?
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: Being a pre-Christian Viking probably beat about anything else going in Europe at the time, but let’s not kid ourselves, Vikings had to buy tech from others, that’s how bad it was.
And dying in childbirth is a pretty shitty way to go.
I’m not sure why you would reduce Roman women’s status (Republic or Empire?) to sexual slavery, especially given that Roman patricians were not only allowed but pretty much expected to rape their slaves of any gender.
Another Holocene Human
Omnes the real story with the Greeks and Romans is to compare them to the Persians, who of course in terms of human rights were just eons ahead of Romans and especially the Greeks. It’s a much fairer comparison anyway, similar states of technological advancement and social/economic organization.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Look, Vikings left their fjords with nothing but weapons. They went places and stole shit. Then they traded it for shit they needed. It’s what they did.
Also, if you think that Roman women had any power other than that they could work personally through sex or browbeating or some other indirect means, you has a confused,
eemom
@Anne Laurie:
Thanks for that very interesting and informative response. (Didn’t see till now because I was off doing RL stuff.) Too tired to comment further now, but very interesting things to think about.
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: looking at stuff like marriage and divorce laws, ability to control property, stuff like that. you seem very focused on political power specifically
not only that there are women buried with weapons at Roman and Viking gravesites and both are contested
john fremont
@jl: The Crusades not being a great idea was also brought up by the Pope about 15 years ago. He went as far as apologizing to the Eastern Orthodox church and to various Islamic leaders.
Villago Delenda Est
@john fremont: Yeah, but he’s not a Christian as far as the fundigelicals are concerned.
Tree With Water
@Anne Laurie: Many people who have experienced the effects of lysurgic will recognize your world view as something glimpsed during, shall we say, their detour.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Irony Abounds:
Hundreds of years later?!
It’s still going on right now, today. From Christian terror groups in India and Africa to our own home-grown “pro-life” assassins and arsonists.
Muslims aren’t special in this regard. Neither are Hindus.
I’d be genuinely surprised to hear about Buddhist terrorists, but hey, you never know.
AxelFoley
@Another Holocene Human:
Yeah, we call that swallowing. ;)
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: No, I am not focused on political power specifically. I was talking about societal position. Viking society may have lacked a lot, but women had more equality there than they did in Classical societies. It comes as no real surprise that Scandinavian countries have a good record on equal rights.
Chris
@Baud:
I have to say – as much as “I totally DID disagree with Bush!” is teabagger bullshit 99% of the time, this is one of the 1%. I actually DO remember fundiegelicals during the Bush years telling me that they were uncomfortable with the steps Bush was taking to be sympathetic and accommodating to Islam. Long before Bush became unpopular. Naturally, it never rose to the level of a national scandal the way it did when Obama did it, but yes, the discomfort was there.
Figures that of all his crimes, that would be the one they’d choose to get squeamish about.
Chris
@Irony Abounds:
Sure. The problem arises when you blame the entire religion/culture (e.g. over a billion people, and over a thousand years of history) for those kinds of crimes, while simultaneously demanding that everyone bury their heads in the sands with regards to the same crimes when committed by members of your own religion/culture. Which is what our right wingers are doing right now, what they’ve been doing WRT Islam since 9/11 at least, and what they’ve been doing in some form or other to whatever they’ve decided is the cultural enemy of the day for… oh, quite a while.
Chris
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
This. I’m fine with what Obama was saying in general, but… it really pisses me off that the go-to equivalent for 9/11 when discussing Christianity is always “the Crusades, the Inquisition.” As opposed to Uganda’s government passing Saudi-style “kill the gays” laws; Christian militias like the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Anti Balaka Movement doing the same thing in East and Central Africa that Daesh is doing in the Middle East; various death sqads in Central and South America… and prominent Christian groups based in the West happily standing behind all of it.
(The list of dictators Pat Robertson did business with and lobbied for, alone, is well worth the look. Not just your garden variety “you don’t try to vote me out and I don’t bother you too much” crooks – mass-murdering lunatics like Rios Montt, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Charles Taylor. Needless to say, no one who matters has ever thought Pat Robertson deserved to be called to account for it, even rhetorically).
“Christian Al Qaedas” aren’t a relic of the Middle Ages or the Catholic/Protestant wars. Or even the Ku Klux Klan era. They’re still around now. They’re still killing people left and right now. And the same people who are now flipping a shit over what Obama said are up to their eyeballs in it.
Bjacques
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Burma, d.b.a. Myanmar.
donald
@Chris: I’m glad someone else beat me to it. I wouldn’t expect Obama to point out that the Christian Right has supported people every bit as evil as ISIS, but it is very surprising and disappointing to find so few people online who seem to have thought of this. And to add to your list, a poll from just a month back found that church goers were more likely than not to support the CIA’s torture program. As a churchgoer myself I found this very depressing.
Chet
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I used to accompany my mom to church on Sundays, just to keep her happy. The last straw that made me quit doing so was hearing the pastor approvingly quote that Coulter line during a sermon. Now it’s Christmas and Easter only, and then only because I enjoy the music.