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America.gov

by Kay| August 21, 20106:11 am| 95 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Fucked-up-edness, Security Theatre

I got this email from one of my sisters:

So, I have been watching them leaving Iraq on tv and went to the US Embassy in Iraq website, just to have a look around. From there, I went to the US propaganda website, america.gov. OMG it’s so sad to read with what’s been going on. It’s just like “we like you, we like Muslims, we have Muslims here and they are FINE, they are doing VERY WELL and thriving and not at all marginalized and look at all these pictures of them: happy and praying.” It says, “offering a place for everyone.”

Here’s the quiz on the front page:

Where is the largest mosque in the United States?

* A. Dearborn, Michigan
* B. Miami
* C. New York

Then there’s this:

20 August 2010
Off to Find America, Mosque by Mosque
Two New Yorkers take to the road for Ramadan

Washington — For Ramadan, Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq are touring Muslim America. They are fasting their way across 30 states and celebrating iftars in 30 mosques. They are driving 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) to get closer to their faith. And they are having a great time. Ali, 26, an Indian American, and Tariq, 23, a Pakistani American, are buddies in New York. A year ago, they said, they were praying at a mosque with a big crowd on the first day of Ramadan and came up with the idea of spending the holy month visiting a different mosque each day — 30 mosques in 30 days. “In New York City, there’s over 800,000 Muslims. If you type my address on Google, you can find 162 mosques in a five-mile radius,” Ali said. “And so we’re like, ‘Hey, let’s try it.’”

Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker and a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said in a Fox News interview that “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” a comment that drew criticism for appearing to equate those proposing the Islamic center with Nazis.
Asked about the view that such remarks could fuel radicalism, Mr. Gingrich sent an e-mail response on Friday that did not directly address his critics but said that “Americans must learn to tell the truth about radical Islamists while being supportive of and inclusive of moderate Muslims who live in the modern world, respect women’s rights, reject medieval punishment and defend American laws and the American Constitution.” He added that he believed “it is possible to be a deeply religious Muslim and a patriotic American.”
Muqtedar Khan, an associate professor of political science at the University of Delaware, said he was not sure the Islamic center dispute alone would radicalize anyone. But he said it was “demoralizing” for Muslims like him who defend the United States as an open and tolerant society.
“For the first time, anti-Islamic rhetoric has gone mainstream,” he said. “What this really does is weaken the moderates and undermine their credibility.”

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Look Who’s Playing the Voice of Reason

by Anne Laurie| August 16, 20106:11 pm| 196 Comments

This post is in: Bring on the Brawndo!, Fucked-up-edness

Dave Weigel reports from Grover “Drown Government In A Bathtub” Norquist:

In my conversation with ATR’s Grover Norquist, he made the counter-intuitive argument that “Republicans will lose Jewish votes by focusing on a mosque in New York.”
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“You’re not just going to lose Muslim votes,” said Norquist, who has long argued that Republicans should win those voters. “You’re going to lose Jewish votes, Indian votes, Buddhist votes. Every member of a minority group looks at a situation like this and says, oh, the people hitting this minority will eventually start hitting me.”
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Norquist dismissively referred the the mosque controversy as a “shiny object,” saying that it, and the Arizona immigration law, would distract Republicans from the winning issues of the economy and the Obama record and give Democrats outs, by handing them wedge issues to oppose the administration on. (We talked before Harry Reid came out against building the mosque near ground zero.)
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“It’s a 70-30 issue that any Democrat can jump on the 70 percent side of,” said Norquist.

Of course, if not for the Democratic chickenshits, Norquist would have been just as happy to keep spinning the ‘Obama, sekrit Muslin’ phantasy — but at least we’d be on the side of reason and history. You’d think Harry Reid would know enough Mormon history not to jump on the “throw the [minority religion du jour] down the well” hysteria-wagon. Hell, you’d think that idiot Peter King would remember as far back as the anti-Irish-Catholic bigotry that our mainstream media was so eager to use against JFK. Way to give the Republicans another weapon, guys!

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Reid, Coward and Fool

by $8 blue check mistermix| August 16, 20104:04 pm| 133 Comments

This post is in: Assholes, Democratic Stupidity, Fucked-up-edness

Harry Reid’s statement:

The First Amendment protects freedom of religion. Senator Reid respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built some place else. If the Republicans are being sincere, they would help us pass this long overdue bill to help the first responders whose health and livelihoods have been devastated because of their bravery on 911, rather than continuing to block this much-needed legislation.

There’s a simple reason why Republicans keep the Wurlitzer running: it works.

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The Republican Party in a Microcosm

by John Cole| August 16, 201012:20 pm| 95 Comments

This post is in: Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Bring on the Brawndo!, Fucked-up-edness

Salon has a good rundown of how the hysteria over the community center in NY started. In a nutshell, Pam Gellar and Rupert Murdoch:

Here’s a timeline of how it all happened:

– Dec. 8, 2009: The Times publishes a lengthy front-page look at the Cordoba project. “We want to push back against the extremists,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the lead organizer, is quoted as saying. Two Jewish leaders and two city officials, including the mayor’s office, say they support the idea, as does the mother of a man killed on 9/11. An FBI spokesman says the imam has worked with the bureau. Besides a few third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site, no one much notices the Times story.

– Dec. 21, 2009: Conservative media personality Laura Ingraham interviews Abdul Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan, while guest-hosting “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox. In hindsight, the segment is remarkable for its cordiality. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” Ingraham says of the Cordoba project, adding at the end of the interview, “I like what you’re trying to do.”

– (This segment also includes onscreen the first use that we’ve seen of the misnomer “ground zero mosque.”) After the segment — and despite the front-page Times story — there were no news articles on the mosque for five and a half months, according to a search of the Nexis newspaper archive.

– May 6, 2010: After a unanimous vote by a New York City community board committee to approve the project, the AP runs a story. It quotes relatives of 9/11 victims (called by the reporter), who offer differing opinions. The New York Post, meanwhile, runs a story under the inaccurate headline, “Panel Approves ‘WTC’ Mosque.” Geller is less subtle, titling her post that day, “Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction.” She writes on her Atlas Shrugs blog, “This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” (To get an idea of where Geller is coming from, she once suggested that Malcolm X was Obama’s real father. Seriously.)

Basically, as with everything else with the modern GOP, fringe lunatics gin up a story, Murdoch pimps it, and then the rest of the Wurlitzer takes over. Loudmouth radio announcers, shameless politicians, wingnut bloggers, and unhinged lunatics unite to create a controversy out of nowhere.

This is why I simply have no respect for anyone who remains with the GOP. Period. This is the modern Republican party in a nutshell, whether it be death panels, the MONSTER MOSQUE, terror babies, or Obama’s birth certificate. The crazy people are running the show, and folks who remain in the GOP but tepidly speak out against it aid and abet the lunacy. We should stop using the phrase “reasonable Republican” and “sane conservatives” and call them what they really are- accomplices. It’s Malkin and Gellar and Louis Gohmert and Palin and Bachmann’s party now, and they’re just providing them cover.

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With friends like these

by DougJ| August 15, 201011:42 am| 77 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Military, Fucked-up-edness

Juan Cole has a piece up about the possibility of the United States or Israel bombing Iran. He concludes that it is very unlikely to happen, that Israel (and in particular Netanyahu) would never do it without getting the green-light from the United States, and that Israeli intelligence is deeply skeptical about how effective such an action would be.

But Cole is anti-Israel. So the anti-Israel position is that Israel is a normal ally/client-state that considers the wishes of the United States and is inclined to think carefully before starting another major conflict in its region. The pro-Israel position is that that Israel is a treacherous, rogue state that would happily undermine the United States to pursue a paranoid, Cheney-style foreign policy.

We are wrong to talk about bombing Iran because it will never happen, the whole issue is a tempest in a teapot. At the same time, we are wrong to accuse Jeff Goldberg of bullshitting when he says there’s a 50-50 chance that it will happen. And finally, only an Israel-hater would oppose American neocons’ efforts to drag Israel into an unnecessary bloody conflict.

I hope that clears everything up because this is my last post on the subject.

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Wishing WILL Make It So, Or Else

by Anne Laurie| August 12, 20103:50 pm| 205 Comments

This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Fucked-up-edness, hoocoodanode, The Wingularity, We Are All Mayans Now

Via commentor El Cid, the latest incarnation of our great Real American(tm) tradition of insisting that what we want to be true must be true… and death to anyone who disagrees. “Sovereign citizens spin history, reject government”:

As many as 300,000 people identify as sovereign citizens, the Southern Poverty Law Center found in a study to be published Thursday that was obtained by The Associated Press. Hate group monitors say their numbers have increased thanks to the recession, the foreclosure crisis, the growth of the Internet and the election of Barack Obama in 2008…
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At the heart of their belief system: The government creates a secret identity for each citizen at birth, a “straw man,” that controls an account at the U.S. Treasury used as collateral for foreign debt. File enough documents at the right offices and the money in those accounts can be used to pay off debt or make purchases worth thousands of dollars.
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The movement is based on a form of “legal fundamentalism,” said Michael Barkun, a retired Syracuse University political science professor who researches anti-government and hate groups.
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“These people really seem to feel that filing certain kinds of legal papers that are connected to their theories will somehow also magically have the power to alter relationships and grant things that otherwise would be unobtainable,” he said.
[…]
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Gingrich Hustling Gingrich

by Anne Laurie| August 10, 20105:24 pm| 68 Comments

This post is in: Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Bring on the Brawndo!, Fucked-up-edness, Wingnut Event Horizon

John H. Richardson’s profile of Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican is up on the Esquire website, and it’s one of the most terrifying things I’ve read in years. Richardson thinks Gingrich intends to run for President in 2012 (“Will Newt Gingrich really run for the presidency? A lot of people think he’s not really serious, that he just likes the power and attention and the opportunity to get free publicity for his books… the answer seems glaringly obvious: Newt Gingrich wants to be president so bad, he can taste it.”).

As to whether this would be a good idea, for Gingrich or for the rest of us in this Rethuglican-battered nation, well… “As a reporter, I’ve always believed that everyone has some kind of inner coherence. No matter how inexplicable their behavior may be, there is always logic somewhere. This proved true with a multitude of subjects, from murderers to movie stars. Until Newt Gingrich.”

Please read the whole article. I’ve been extremely scornful of the idea of Gingrich actually running for President, as opposed to fan-dancing (or stripper-poling) a perennial round of first-class speaking junkets and high-visibility media appearances calculated to preserve the Gingrich(tm) brand’s valuable shelf-space in the Wingnut Welfare Walmart. But Richardson’s reporting suggests that the person most bedazzled and mislead by the non-stop hustling might just be Newton Leroy Gingrich, and that’s a dangerous thing indeed, because there is much further confirmation here that Gingrich is a bullet point on the Powerpoint timeline of Weirdly Charismatic Rightwing Sociopaths, probably the most significant version between Richard Nixon and Sarah Palin. Richardson includes stories of Gingrich’s unsettling behavior just before he resigned the Speakership that read like an opera bouffe version of Nixon during Watergate, and aggregates details of his personal and professional life that make Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes look like a rough draft:

It’s been twelve years since his extraordinary political career — the one in which he went from being a bomb-throwing backbencher in the seemingly permanent Republican minority to overthrowing the established order of both parties — collapsed around him. And yet, stunningly, in all that time Newt Gingrich hasn’t been replaced as the philosopher king of the conservative movement. And as the summer rolled on, a revivified Gingrich sat atop the early polls of Republican presidential contenders, leading the field in California, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas and polling strongly in Illinois and Pennsylvania. This year he has raised as much money as Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee combined. He is in constant motion, traveling all over the country attending rallies and meetings. He writes best sellers, makes movies, appears regularly on Fox News…
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He thinks of himself as president, you tell her. He wants to run for president.
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[Ex-wife Marianne Gingrich] gives a jaundiced look. “There’s no way,” she says. She thinks he made a choice long ago between doing the right thing and getting rich, and when you make those choices, you foreclose other ones. “He could have been president. But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don’t like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new … you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way.”
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She stops, ashes her cigarette, exhales, searching for the right way to express what she’s about to say.
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“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” she says. “If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president.”
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