Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The words do not have to be perfect.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

The revolution will be supervised.

People are complicated. Love is not.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Bark louder, little dog.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

This really is a full service blog.

“But what about the lurkers?”

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Hail to the Hairpiece / Late Night Open Thread: “… The Christian Aristocrats!”

Late Night Open Thread: “… The Christian Aristocrats!”

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As some of us remember all too well, Jerry Falwell Senior made a great profit for himself and his Liberty University project by embracing Ronald Reagan’s most thuggish social policies as the mouthpiece of his very own “Moral Majority“. Now, just as Trump’s campaign has managed to permanently damage the (undeserved) reputations of a number of Reagan-era political holdovers, it looks like he’s going to bang up some of the Religious Reicht’s most valuable second-gen players on his way to flaming out.

From the Washington Post, “Liberty University students protest association with Trump“:

Students at Liberty University have issued a statement against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as young conservatives at colleges across the state reconsider support for his campaign.

A statement issued late Wednesday by the group Liberty United Against Trump strongly rebuked the candidate as well as the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for defending Trump after he made extremely lewd comments about women in a 2005 video. The students wrote that Falwell’s support for Trump had cast a stain on the school’s reputation.

“We are Liberty students who are disappointed with President Falwell’s endorsement and are tired of being associated with one of the worst presidential candidates in American history,” the statement said. “Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him. … He has made his name by maligning others and bragging about his sins. Not only is Donald Trump a bad candidate for president, he is actively promoting the very things that we as Christians ought to oppose.”…

Paul Ryan attempted to faith-shame Clinton staffers, got rebuked by actual practicing Catholics:



Mr. Pierce, at Esquire:

… In truth, there was throughout the last two decades of the 20th century an attempt by conservative Catholics to ally themselves with the most politically active splinter of American Protestantism, which was at that point only about 15 years removed from calling the Pope “the whore of Babylon.” This alliance made no theological sense, of course. But the groups shared a certain attitude toward ladyparts and the ladies who have them that made them kindred spirits…

It was this, I believe, this sort of Catholic white-nationalism that Palmieri and Halpin were addressing, albeit in a clumsy way, and if high-rent Catholics are going to play these games in the political arena, it is not being anti-Catholic at all to talk about what a crock of beans they all are.

This has not stopped the usual suspects from bellowing about the sudden pain in their fee-fees. Josh Marshall’s joint has a good roundup of the professionally outraged…

In illustration of which, Ross Doubthat, NYTimes pundit, tries to navigate between his desire to be seen as a serious well-read intellectual and his terror of Sex Cooties, and gets the opprobrium he so richly deserves:

Reader Interactions

82Comments

  2. 2.

    Major Major Major Major

    “I would undoubtedly feel this more intensely if Catholics were the target.”

    Douthat in a nutshell. Conservatives in a nutshell.
    I can feel the Nazi shit pretty acutely and I’m not Jewish.

  3. 3.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I recall a letter to the local fishwrap where some woman complained about how the Obama administration was persecuting “Christians and Catholics”.

    Uh. Huh.

  4. 4.

    divF

    I’ve been watching Ian McKellen’s Richard III. It is monstrously evil, but somehow not as evil as the Trumpistas. The difference between retail evil in the service of ambition, and incitement to wholesale hate.

  5. 5.

    The Pale Scot

    Holy Sh!t, he’s like a neutron star ( one that is composed of degenerate matter) barreling thru a nebula sucking up all the matter in it’s vicinity and smashing it down to quark soup.

  10. 10.

    RaflW

    Paul Ryan’s performative Catholicism hasn’t quite been enough to fool at least some American bishops. Well, actually the whole US Catholic conference I think chided him for his poor-punishing budgets.

    I hope the current Pope is able to hang on for a while. He is re-ordering things in the Catholic hierarchy and elevating the non-RW bishops in the US to Cardinal. Both a strong signal to the dudes not headed to the Vatican, and a way to hopefully elect a morally decent successor.

    I look forward to a US Catholic church that won’t be playing quite so damn much footsie with the GOP. They don’t seem to be getting too sullied in the current mudbath (unlike TeeVee huckster Fallwell Jr), but a church still working its way through clild sex scandals x100 souldn’t probably hang out with the party of peeping at Miss Teen Oops Naked.

  12. 12.

    piratedan

    I’m sure that those are good people out there spitting on the press corps covering Donald’s rallies. You can tell that they’re harmless thanks to the riot gear that the local LEO is wearing to escort them to the motorcade. After all, I’m sure that the proprieties are being observed when they scream about coming for them physically in person and on-line. I dare say, I’m sure that they’re almost Brooksian in expressing their valid economic insecurity concerns.

  14. 14.

    piratedan

    @Major Major Major Major: well all the national polls are saying McCain with a double digit lead despite Clinton pulling even with Trump. They must have some encouraging internal polling that gives them hope. I think that there is a largely quiet undercurrent of disgust with Mr. Trump, no matter the unrequited unwashed passion you see at his rallies.

  16. 16.

    Adam L Silverman

    If Douthat doesn’t think Catholics are being targeted he needs to spend some time in the comments of these threads. Hell the cultural marxism article by itself is just plain offensive – as is the entire site:
    http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2016/03/dean-weingarten/pope-francis-blames-weapons-manufacturers-brussels-attack/
    http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2015/09/robert-farago/quote-of-the-day-pope-francis-edition/
    http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2015/06/robert-farago/pope-weapons-manufacturers-cant-call-themselves-christians/
    http://culturalmarxism.net/pope-francis-christians-with-guns-are-going-to-hell/
    http://www.naturalnews.com/050443_Pope_Francis_gun_control_Vatican.html
    http://louderwithcrowder.com/pope-francis-says-youre-not-a-christian-if-you-own-a-gun/
    http://www.ammoland.com/2015/06/pope-francis-says-youre-not-christian-if-you-own-a-gun/
    http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/wow-the-pope-just-angered-christian-gun-owners/
    http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/boston-globe-christian-weapons-makers-are-not-hypocrites

  17. 17.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: Hare Krishnas used to ask if they could give whoever they approached some literature (usually a pamphlet) and a flower. There’s a spoof scene of this in the movie Airplane.

  19. 19.

    Adam L Silverman

    And with that, I’m to bed. Have a nice night everyone and be good to the new commenter. Don’t want to scare him/her off too soon!

  20. 20.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: You indicated you’re not Jewish. I am, so riffing off of that them I asked if you’d like some literature (about Judaism). And now, whatever comedic value there might have been, has, I’m sure, been pummeled into a painful death.

  21. 21.

    sigaba

    Perhaps worth linking at this point to Politco Mag’s Longread about the formation of the religious right in the 1970s.

    Long story short, there weren’t enough Catholics in the US to repeal Roe v. Wade, and there weren’t enough Southern Baptists in the US to stop the integration of southern religious schools, but with their powers combined they formed a big enough constituency to fight for both jointly, under one pretense, defending “religious freedom.”

    ETA: In fact, most of the Protestant leaders in the US were accepting of Roe, including conservative factions like the Southern Baptists. They completely changed their tune and aligned with the Catholic position by the late 1970s. The protestant pro-life orthodoxy is religious revelation in service of political coalition-building.

  22. 22.

    GxB

    Just doing my duty and posting a “Well, if you’ve lost Liberty ‘University’…” post.

    Christ – there is no bottom here is there?

  24. 24.

    PJ

    @GxB: The bottom won’t be reached until it’s Trump and Melania with a pistol in the bunker. Hopefully we won’t get anywhere near that point.

  25. 25.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @RaflW: Falwell Jr. has an insurgency on the campus of his own university to worry about right now. The blinders are coming off.

  28. 28.

    scav

    Presumably, if Douthat actually knew or was related any women (that he recognized as people), he (theoretically) might feel a little more intensely about those issues as well.

  29. 29.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @PJ: I hope that poor kid Barron is able to escape. He doesn’t need this. His mom should grab him and get out while the getting is good, and send a pack of lawyers after the short-fingered vulgarian.

  31. 31.

    sigaba

    @Villago Delenda Est: Really how is it any different from what we’ve seen over the past few weeks…

    From the article. This passage still pisses me off.

    Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

    When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

    Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.

  33. 33.

    Anne Laurie

    @PJ:

    The bottom won’t be reached until it’s Trump and Melania with a pistol in the bunker. Hopefully we won’t get anywhere near that point.

    It is most sincerely to be hoped. And not just because we want him around as an example of where race-baiting bullies end up.

    But Melania’s got a young son to protect… and Donald is a pure coward. She’ll flee Trump Tower w/Barron if it comes to that (IIRC, her parents have an apartment in NYC, and I sincerely hope the poor woman has been squirreling away emergency funds.) Trump might shoot some of his advisors, if they were dumb enough to turn their backs at the wrong moment, but he’d never have the guts to put a gun to his own precious head. Assuming he even knows how guns work — my bet would be, as with so many other practical skills, he’s always assumed that’s what the help is for.

  41. 41.

    ? Martin

    @GxB:

    Christ – there is no bottom here is there?

    Probably not. There’s virtually no bottom for Trump. He’ll keep lashing out so long as he has an audience to feed him the adulation he needs. Once that runs out, well, that’ll get dark fast. As to the degree to which his followers will adopt his personality traits, that’s holding up better than I would have thought. I have to think the friction of this effort can only serve to shrink his numbers, but I don’t think he’ll ever run out of arenas he can fill, even if he ends up just running back and forth across West Virginia hollering about the global conspiracy against coal.

  42. 42.

    Amir Khalid

    @Peter H Desmond:
    Well, the England of Richard III’s day had its share of religious and ethnic out-groups, I believe, but you couldn’t tell them apart at a glance: just about everyone looked white.

  43. 43.

    Mary G

    Falwell Jr. gave a snotty reply:

    To which Jerry Jr responded:

    I am proud of these few students for speaking their minds but I’m afraid the statement is incoherent and false. I am not ‘touring the country’ or associating Liberty University with any candidate. I am only fulfilling my obligation as a citizen to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ by expressing my personal opinion about who I believe is best suited to lead our nation in a time of crisis. This student statement seems to ignore the teachings of Jesus not to judge others but they are young and still learning.

    What a douche.

  45. 45.

    Keith P.

    @Villago Delenda Est: I read a Redstate’r ranting about Jr. It was pretty amusing because the author graduated from Liberty and held it out as a bastion of conservative, religious thinking. She despises Jr (“he’s not a pastor; he’s a lawyer”) but spoke of Sr. with a huge amount of respect. All I could think was “Fartwell?!?!?” Redstate is an interesting place to read these days.

  46. 46.

    Calouste

    @Anne Laurie: I think Trump is going sit there in Trump Tower, all alone, the day before the sentencing comes up in one of the many court cases that will see him off to jail, a bunch of lines of dodgy blow on the glass table in front of him, his last 20 dollar bill rolled up between his tiny fingers.

  47. 47.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Keith P.:

    Redstate is an interesting place to read these days.

    I try to stay out of the sewers, never know what you’ll catch down there.

  49. 49.

    Joyce H

    I’m sure everyone here knows this, but perhaps you know people who don’t, so I think it merits mentioning and passing on to those friends of yours who don’t realize it – everyone understands that when Trump and his alt-right friends use the phrase ‘international bankers’, they mean Jews, right?

  52. 52.

    Origuy

    @Amir Khalid: Mostly the Scots and the Welsh, I think. Everyone was a Catholic in Richard’s England; Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible was decades away. Edward I had expelled the Jews 200 years earlier. I’m not a Ricardian scholar, but Shakespeare treated him pretty badly. He seems to have been a very good administrator and showed an unusual concern for the poor.

  54. 54.

    TriassicSands

    We don’t have to fear Trump’s fascism, though it is real and dangerous. What we have to fear is the cowardice and utter lack of integrity of the Republicans. If Trump is elected, it won’t be long before he commits impeachable offenses. If a Democratic president did what Trump is very likely to do, the House Republicans would impeach him or her in a heartbeat. The Constitution protects us against someone like Trump who never should have been nominated and, if he wins, will put a permanent stain on this country.

    However, it is obvious that Trump is incapable of controlling himself. He will almost certainly try to use the presidency to punish political enemies (as he has already promised to do with HRC) and enrich himself and his cronies — I won’t use the word “friends” since it is all but impossible for me to imagine Trump having a real friend. People like Christie and Giuliani are just there for what they can get out of it, not because they are loyal friends of Trump’s. Freed from restraint, once in the White House, Trump will overstep the limits of taste and legality and when he does, a political party with any integrity would do the right thing and impeach him. If the House impeached, it would be a pretty simple matter for the Senate to convict and remove him from office. However, we’ve seen how craven Paul Ryan is and he’s leading a pack of cowardly weasels, so the protections the Constitution offers may be unused even in the face of outrageous provocation.

    Fear cowardly Republicans. They are the real threat.

  55. 55.

    Sm*t Cl*de

    But I respect your concerns and I would undoubtedly feel this more intensely if Catholics were the target

    I am impressed with Douthat’s honesty. He has come out and stated that he’s down with genocide as long as he’s not involved.

  56. 56.

    Sm*t Cl*de

    @PJ:

    The bottom won’t be reached until it’s Trump and Melania with a pistol in the bunker.

    As someone who is opposed to the ubiquitous availability of firearms, I suggest cyanide capsules instead.

  60. 60.

    Zinsky

    Yank Liberty University’s tax-exempt status and make the pseudoChristians pay taxes like the rest of us. If they want to participate actively in the political process, then they damn well better pay up! The deadbeats! Americans need to call out these slimy conservatives for wanting to have it both ways.

  62. 62.

    JGabriel

    Jerry Falwell via Mary G:

    This student statement seems to ignore the teachings of Jesus not to judge others but they are young and still learning.

    Said the man who judges everyone, while simultaneously judging his own students.

  64. 64.

    Aleta

    Obsessed with ‘the enemies outside our borders’ and the ‘war on Christians,’ but the U.S. conservative movement has taken itself out.

  67. 67.

    BruceFromOhio

    @TriassicSands:

    Fear cowardly Republicans. They are the real threat.

    This, this, this. The dumpster fire will get hosed out, and possibly take a chunk of the two-bit ratfuck soulless Republican legislature with it. The poisoning of the RW electorate and the puke funnel that programs it has no antidote, and is a lingering illness that ain’t going away in my lifetime. A Clinton presidency has the grifters rubbing their hands with glee at the imminent 4-to-8-years of fleecing of the rubes, guaranteeing the poisoning to continue. It’s as if the whole of the body conservative and its media IV have been transported to Flint, MI, for the sole purpose of guzzling the water.

  68. 68.

    peter

    @JGabriel: And Falwell Jr. completely misinterprets the “render unto Caesar” passage from the Sermon on the Mount. He has it exactly backwards. Of course his daddy was pretty bad at the Bible too.

  69. 69.

    sherparick

    For Paul Ryan, Ross Douthat, and Jerry Fallwell Jr., someone has a message for you:

    “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.” Matthew 23:27 KJV

    “Uncleanness” is of course a high, Elizabethan/Jacobin era euphemism for “shit.”

  70. 70.

    Snarki, child of Loki

    Jerry Falwell Jr. says he spoke with Trump last night, says Trump gave him evidence what women have said didn’t happen.

    The shit lumps don’t fall very far from the horse’s ass.

  75. 75.

    Jinchi

    Jerry Falwell Jr. says he spoke with Trump last night, says Trump gave him evidence what women have said didn’t happen.

    And Trump swore him to secrecy, because he’s such a gentleman?

  76. 76.

    Unknown known (formerly known as Ecks, former formerly completely unknown)

    First they came for the Catholics. But I wasn’t Catholic so…
    DOUBTHAT: Shit.

  77. 77.

    ChrisGrrr

    @Adam L Silverman: Actually, you’re once again the motivator of jealousy, here in Cocoa Beach. The proper follow-up would be to acknowledge how rare and unlikely that would be… but c’mon now.

  78. 78.

    glory b

    Haven’t read all of the comments, but as a Pittsburgher, I remember the liberal, labor priests who never mentioned abortion or birth control. I vaguely knew that no birth control was a part of their faith. I had one Catholic friend who told me some of the members of her parish looked at her parents sideways about having only two children, but her mother brushed it off.

    I also have a coworker who mentioned that she and most of her friends have 5 or 6 siblings, but they all have 2 or 3 kids. No one comments, the parishioners are glad they go to church at all.

    The vociferous stance on abortion in the Catholic church always looked sort of ginned up, growing up, most Catholics I knew were big on economic justice (shout out to Monsignor Charles Owen Rice).

  82. 82.

    RaflW

    @Mary G: Yeah, that nozzle is plenty terrible.

    Not least because of course when he is out hustling for Trump, he is absolutely trading on his reputation, his role at Liberty, and reminding us of his sanctimonious prick father. He can pretend it’s his private citizen role, but he’d not be getting any airtime if he was just an average schmuck.

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