Bill O’Reilly is the sane one in the room.
Ladles and Jellyspoons, I present you with the comic stylings [via TPM] of self-made son and purveyor of a gospel that is good news only in his fevered brain…
Put your hands together for our own, all American Franklin Graham!
“One of the problems we have in the West is that our governments, especially in Washington, has been infiltrated by Muslims who are advising the White House, who I think are part of the problem,” Graham said. “And we see this also in Western Europe. They have gotten into the halls of power.”
Oh Noes! We’re doomed until a good Christian Soldier may come to save the day!
Uhhh. Wrongo on so many axes-o, Frankie boy. So much so, in fact, that Bill O’Reilly, veteran of so many battles fought within his own mind, could not help but do that Village media rarity, and ask a follow up:
O’Reilly pushed back, asking for Graham to name a Muslim adviser to President Obama.
Franklin replied with equal measures of Joe McCarthy and Mole MacCaroney*:
“I do know that they are there. I’ve been told this by a number of people,” Graham responded. “I’m not saying that they’re sitting next to the President, whispering into his ear. But they are in the halls.”
Channelling my inner Abe: hurts too much to laugh and I’m too big to cry.
BTW: just to point out the obvious, being saner than Franklin Graham does not make Bill Legend In His Own Memoirs O’Reilly actually on the beam. The question that prompted Franklin’s first reply was why the west hadn’t united to defeat ISIS — which is, as we say in the halls of reason, a question marred by assumptions not in evidence.
And with that, my fine feathered friends (and the non-avian amongst us), I give you Modern American Conservatism.
*Not that its all that easy to distinguish between those two, by Walt Kelly’s design, of course.
Image: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, St. James the Greater Conquering the Moors, betw. 1749 and 1750. Truly horrible work, IMHO, (sorry), but so apposite.
WereBear
Well, it is Tiepolo. Not a fan.
Amir Khalid
It would actually do America some good to have a few more Muslims among the president’s closest advisers.
Tom Levenson
@Amir Khalid: There is that.
Mustang Bobby
I hear the Goebbels estate is suing Graham for plagiarism.
WereBear
@Amir Khalid: Yep. It’s not like the WASPs have an enviable track record.
Morzer
Holy Jimmy’s horse looks remarkably like Lindsay Graham. Wretched piece of painting other than that little moment of prescience.
Neddy Merrill
As someone says, maybe Driftglass, “Republican stupidity – part infinity.”
prufrock
That painting would look better on black velvet…or the side of a conversion van.
normal liberal
I’m distracted from the consistent awfulness of Franklin Graham by the sheer dreck that is the painting. Hideous on so many, many levels.
mellowjohn
always happy to see a Pogo reference. a warm remembrance from my childhood afternoons with the old Chicago Daily News (may it rest in peace).
Mike in NC
What this country needs in its most dire hour of need is a white man on a white horse to save us all! Does look just a bit like Ted Cruz.
PS – Those of us who thought Billy Graham was one of the biggest grifters of all time have to give his idiot son credit for keeping up the family tradition.
Botsplainer
It’s shit like this that helped me come to the realization that Jeremiah Wright was absolutely correct, and makes me seriously wish that Obama was the tyrant that the right complains he is.
Also, if the Antichrist is truly among us, where do I sign up to be a minion? I would think that there iwould be Cadillac healthcare, above-average compensation, profit-sharing, a bonus plan and a defined benefit pension plan.
c u n d gulag
Hey, I saw this movie before!
Ah, I get it, it’s a modernized remake:
The “Cold War II – Twenty-Teen’s Bugaloo!”
With Muslims in the role of Communist “Fifth Columnists!!”
Starring Fuckin’ Graham, as “Tailgunner Joe:”
“I have here a list of 400 known Muslims in government…”
Have you no shame, Sir?…”
Nope, he’s got none!
NotMax
Uh oh. First the halls, next the offices. Better call Terminex, Franklin.
maya
Actually, that painting has proper perspective for photoshop possibilities by the conservative cornersewer of political art: They can insert any head in St Jimbo’s place they wish; Christie, Jeb, Huckabee, Cruz (would be ideal) but probably not that guy who ran with Mitt. What was his name?
Comrade Dread
I’d like to think his dad would be ashamed that Frank there has abandoned the preaching of (a certain brand of) the gospel for a pathetic attempt at political power and influence, but I’m starting to think American Evangelical Christianity has gone too far down the rabbit hole to feel any sort of shame.
Morzer
@maya:
The Man Who Wasn’t There.
NotMax
Maybe if ‘Fraidy Frank closes his eyes, hugs Rudy Giulani really tight and wishes really, really hard the boogeymen will go away.
Roger Moore
@prufrock:
Children, do not take candy from the owner of that van!
Morzer
I think I have discovered what happened to Romanov in Portland:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a33374/man-wakes-up-to-find-his-testicles-have-been-stolen/
Small consolations, eh?
Davis X. Machina
You want a liberal soldier-saint on horseback, you need St. Martin of Tours.
Conscript, and eventually conscientious objector. But along the way, shared half his kit with a homeless guy.
danielx
@maya:
I think Andrew Breitbart’s head would look very nice. A man on a horse…a white horse, naturally.
I must say that CPAC is kind of a public service in that it offers endless opportunities for pointing and mocking. If only it was a real comedy convention….
Roger Moore
@Morzer:
I don’ t think so. As far as I can tell, we’ve established that he is only getting his news from English translations of Russian propaganda because he can’t speak or read Russian.
Botsplainer
@Morzer:
Methinks that the wife should start answering lots of questions – it is all way too perfect and just.
Betty Cracker
The elder Graham wormed his way into the very center of American politics despite being an avid bigot and purveyor of insane views. I’m glad the son lacks the old man’s talent for disguising the bugfuckery.
mai naem mobile
Not that I have any problems with it, but Franklin Graham is going to take the whole Billy Graham Ministries down the toilet.
Morzer
@Botsplainer:
I thought organ-harvesters usually went for the kidneys, rather than the dangly bits, which certainly makes one wonder whether the wife decided that Comrade Bobbittov had gone too far this time.
Anya
The hideous painting goes very well with Graham’s ugliness. Why must we showcase so many ugly Americans? If I take my little enclave as evidence these people don’t represent my America so why am I constantly subjected to their vile viewpoint.
Gin & Tonic
Speaking of the grift, I nearly choked on my coffee this morning when I saw Bernie Kerick on the CNN opining gravely about the DHS funding fiasco (the TV was on it for background noise in the hotel room.) So it seems that their policy now is to have convicted felons as commentators. They’ve scraped through the bottom of the barrel and are now scraping dirt.
Mike J
@Davis X. Machina:
Nurtured dependency to lock them on the liberal plantation!
Betty Cracker
@mai naem mobile: Yes, and godspeed to him in that endeavor!
Jay C
“St. James” is pretty awful: even if you don’t know much about Tiepolo’s oeuvre, you have to figure he could have done better – and probably did, with most of his other paintings. Not least because both Santiago and the hapless Moor at left (or is he a Moop?) look like Tiepolo had to hire a couple of delivery guys from the corner market when his usual models didn’t show…
scav
@Mike J: Can’t trust those furriners wid deir corrrrupted versions of chistianity, necessarily imperfect as not ‘merkan free-market second-amendmentedly exceptional. St Martin, that Pope guy, that long haired freak guy going on and on and on about the poor.
Morzer
@Jay C:
I don’t know that Tiepolo deserves the benefit of the doubt. An awful lot of his work looks suspiciously like an early attempt to be Thomas Kinkade.
NotMax
@Morzer
One might say the tale has everything from dupe to nuts.
Morzer
@scav:
Funnily enough, the late Roman biographers of Martin of Tours tried fairly hard to conceal the fact that he was a soldier – and the same is true of how he appears in late Roman art. Only in the Middle Ages do you find images of him as a knight and texts talking about his military career.
Morzer
@NotMax:
Or dupe to ‘nuchs, even.
debit
What’s with the flying head? It’s like something out of David Lynch.
Morzer
@debit:
I think it’s a daring attempt to show a winged creature from a radical head-on perspective. Neither wise, nor well-executed IMHO.
Mike E
@Gin & Tonic:
The channel is operating as intended…is yer HGTV broken?
scav
“In the halls.” In The Very Halls!. Good to see the miasma theory get a little comeback, as an aside. But to return to the point, Are we soon to see the very halls of power entirely covered in those big color-striped tent thingies as they attempt to fumigate? Is that why so many of their well-meaning are running about throwing smoke-bombs in the very halls etcetera?
Botsplainer
@Morzer:
Yeah, Gospodin Bobbitoff seems to be a guy willing to donate genetic material, so taking the dangles makes little sense on that front.
A message was sent.
A set of neuticles and some hormone replacement on a (daily? weekly?) routine basis and he’ll have full sexual function sans spermatozoa so long as his assailant didn’t dig out his prostate.
Jay C
@debit:
You’re right: Ceiling Cat would have been much of an improvement….
MattF
Quite a painting. I can’t say I’d want it hanging over my mantlepiece. And that horse has more personality than the rider.
Morzer
@Botsplainer:
I can only imagine how drunk or drugged the guy must have been for that to happen. I guess he could always go for the literal “balls of steel” option, now that someone has taken the “balls to the (trophy wall)” approach.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer:
Not likely. Every last one of those things cuts into the boss man’s hookers and blow slush fund.
Gin & Tonic
@Mike E: I wasn’t, um, in control of the remote.
MattF
I would assume, btw, that the ‘people’ who are warning Franklin about the President’s Muslim advisers communicate via disembodied voices in his head. Frank has presumably learned that it’s a bad idea to speak openly about that sort of thing. People will misunderstand.
Botsplainer
@Villago Delenda Est:
No, you’re describing the problem in terms of the compensation scheme of an employer who happens to be an upstanding white Christian businessman. Satan (and his closet earthly minion) knows that everybody needs a taste, and is willing to share.
Sherparick
@c u n d gulag: Yep, you got it. Also, among the 27% for whom Franklin Graham speaks (and unfortunately are 55% of the mid-term electorate) they know that “Muslims” are now “15%” of the U.S. population, are about the same amount as the Black population, which in their minds are same group (except Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Mia Love, Ron Christie, etc.). By the way, someone apparently forgot to CENTCOM that we are not pounding ISIS/ISIL/DASH. See http://www.centcom.mil/en/news/articles/feb.-19-military-airstrikes-continue-against-isil-in-syria-and-iraq
Inside the Conservative Bubble, these facts simply do not penetrate.
Elmo
The naked bigotry is so awful. I work in NOVA, and there are a few Muslims in our office. No headscarves, but during Ramadan we try not to have office lunches just out of decency.
And this filthy little worm is disparaging those good people. The Muslims I know are patriotic, hardworking, funny, kind, warm, and generous. He talks about “infiltrating” like they are self-evidently duplicitous and evil.
Where is the hard pushback? Where are the “mainstream” conservatives calling this out for what it is?
Fuck this is infuriating.
Botsplainer
@Villago Delenda Est:
As a further example, this – an open letter from Satan to Pat Robertson.
Mike J
@Elmo: Half of why they do it is because they’re bigots, half is because it pisses off decent people and they want to prove they aren’t soft enough to be mistaken for a member of that camp.
Hildebrand
@Elmo: Mainstream conservatives no longer exist. If Peter King is your party’s voice of reason (re: DHS fiasco), there is no one left to call out anything.
delk
Is it a halo, or are the flying heads playing ring toss?
Hildebrand
@Botsplainer: That is the best thing I have read in a while. Perfect.
Mike G
Right-wing propaganda — the paranoid storylines stay the same, only the scapegoats change.
Public fear = their power
kindness
The teachings of Jesus that I was raised with are nothing like what goes through Graham’s fevered mind. Of course I don’t call myself a true Christian any more either. Being that we aren’t alone in this universe and each world has to have a bunch of their own local prophets. I will be highly amused to the heads of Fundies exploding when we finally do get a formal first contact event. Entire books of dogma up in smoke in a moment. Delicious it will be.
MattF
@kindness: Have you read the recently published novel “The Book of Strange New Things.” It’s kinda-sci-fi about a missionary traveling to an alien planet to preach Christianity. It’s actually a quite good and subtle book.
Ruckus
@Elmo:
And this filthy little worm is disparaging those good people. The Muslims I know are patriotic, hardworking, funny, kind, warm, and generous. He talks about “infiltrating” like they are self-evidently duplicitous and evil.
You can insert any minority in the place of Muslims and the idea still fits who most are and what conservatives are/do. At their hearts conservatives are selfish little children who want the world to be a gum drop world with graham cracker lunches and everyone to look and act like them. Anything outside of that becomes monsters under the bed.
Scamp Dog
@kindness: Nah. They’ll just claim Jesus wants us to bring The Truth to these poor, benighted alien souls.
Ultraviolet Thunder
Wait, FRANKLIN Graham?? Not his superannuated and perpetually baffled daddy? For a minute there I was attributing the whole thing to senile dementia, but for Franklin there’s no such excise.
ed_finnerty
The card says Moops
RaflW
Lindsey has noticed once again that the crazies are ruining things for all the cushy “moderates” in the Senate GOP.
I think you’re in trouble.
Villago Delenda Est
@Scamp Dog: The historical precedent exists, when Europe discovered the Americas.
Just more souls to reap for the Lord.
Villago Delenda Est
@RaflW: He’s definitely in trouble, and the thing that probably infuriates him the most is that he knows, deep down, that asshats like Cruz WANT the trouble, because they’re hoping it will create the conditions for a Christianist Theocracy that will not bother to verify that Lindsey is in the closet before they have him stoned.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@c u n d gulag: except the Soviets had actually infiltrated the US government threw the cunning plan of offering Americans an alternative to starving to death in the streets during the Great Depression. Something Isis and Al Quida don’t offer. The communist wanted utopia, the Jihadist want the Apocalypse.
low-tech cyclist
Apparently Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham and influential evangelical leader in his own right) has never heard of the commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
This hardly makes him exceptional within the American evangelical movement, though. They seem to believe God has given them carte blanche to lie about their enemies.
Speaking of enemies, when Jesus said, “love your enemies,” that apparently didn’t sink in with them, either.
Villago Delenda Est
@low-tech cyclist: Just about everything the historical Jesus is supposed to have said doesn’t register with these vile creatures.
RaflW
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: “the Jihadist want the Apocalypse”
So do at least a plurality of the CPAC folks.
c u n d gulag
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
“The communist wanted utopia, the Jihadist want the Apocalypse.”
So do our American Christian conservatives – the American Taliban.
Some Muslims want a Jihad.
Many of our Christians, want a ‘Jesus-had!” *
*Hey, I just thought of that term!
How do you folks like it?
Baud
@c u n d gulag:
I think it’s terror-ific.
c u n d gulag
@Sherparick:
They’re not in a bubble anymore.
Bubbles can burst.
They’re now in a round deep-sea diving-bell!
J R in WV
Franklin is a despicable piece of crap. End of story.
Perhaps he could be persuaded to go out to Arizona and lay hands on the ex-Sheriff to cure his ills?
POS!
sm*t cl*de
Truly horrible work, IMHO
At least it’s not El Greco. But the cross on St James’ flag is wrong… it should be broken.
tybee
@c u n d gulag:
cut the rope.
Chris
@Comrade Dread:
I used to think Billy Graham was a good guy relatively speaking and not a 1980s Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson type, until I started actually reading about him. I like Truman’s “all he cares about is getting his name in the paper” assessment.
Tree With Water
The nut didn’t fall very far from that tree.
Another Holocene Human
“Even Bill O’Reilly” is like “even the liberal New Republic.” Bill O’Reilly’s shtick is to cast himself as reasonable and centrist to his deluded followers by finding a good punching bag on the right every few weeks and letting ’em have it.
O’Reilly–and much of his viewership–are older Catholics. They never liked Franklin’s dad even when most of Protestant America was kissing his knuckles*, and they certainly don’t care for Franklin, and since Franklin doesn’t have the friends or respect his dad did he’s a very safe target to go after.
*-pretty sure it was a mutual dislike, Billy Graham was from the old school where the RCC was the whore of Babylon and Catholics were going to hell
Another Holocene Human
@Chris: Never cared for Billy Graham but nobody really deserves what his kids have done to him in his dotage.
Another Holocene Human
@RaflW: Graham claims to want to make a difference. I’m sure he’s set for life and could be a crusader for good government, run for SC Gov or AG or mayor of a big city not Charleston (which is doing just fine mayor wise, thank you) but instead he stays in the Senate by jumping on every internet hate meme (I love
ham biscuitsChik-Fil-A!) and spreading hysteria about terrorism and the furrins. Put on a tri-corn hat and man the battery, punk.BubbaDave
…is that horse giving the viewer a “come-hither” look?
c u n d gulag
@tybee:
But not before having everyone fart in the Oxygen line! ;-)
Felixmoronia
How can that horse even stand upright with Blake Farenthold on it’s back?
brettvk
That’s not St. James the Greater. It’s a young Rob Schneider.
xenos
@Mike G: and you could replace “communist” in that statement with “papist” if you wanted to get authentically 19th century about it.
Thes nuts have been cursing the country for a long time.