Amusing Ourselves to Death is a short comic by Stuart McMillen which examines 1984 and Brave New World and asks which book the present resembles. Go read it now.
The first picture is the original photo. The second is what appears on JD Curtis' blog. The third is a view from another angle. JD Curtis seems to think Obama's birth certificate is phony but doesn't even notice how badly faked this picture is! I don't know who faked this picture but it seems to be everywhere.
From "5 Responses to Right Wing Bitterness Over Obama Gettin’ Osama"
Here is a quick primer in dealing with the right’s bitterness today:
1) They will lectures you not to politicize terrorism. You write, “So, you’re flip flopping from when Bush blamed Clinton for not getting Bin Laden? Oh, and by the way, President Obama got Osama.” (Never let them steer the topic away from the very thing they are trying to avoid.)
...
4) The Fox News watching set will say that Obama shouldn’t be trying to take credit for this and they bend over backwards to pretend like they care about the troops. They may say he “snubbed” Bush and has “no class” (you know how the repeat everything their masters tell them). You say, “God Bless Our troops. If only Bush had cared about getting Osama way back after 9/11, eh? But then, we tried it your way and it didn’t work so the President decided to use intelligence and look where that got us. Shocking, I know! Would you prefer we keep giving Bush credit for things he didn’t do, just to make you feel better, sort of like oh, gee, I dunno, an handicap or reparations for Bush’s failures? Oh, and by the way, Obama got Osama.”
Here's how the conservative's correspondence bias works: Conservative President, Great Economy: President is doing a great job.
Conservative President, Poor Economy: President don't really control the economy. Liberal President Great Economy: President doesn't control the economy. Liberal President Poor Economy: OMFG, This idiot is killing the country!!!
Conservatives saying that Obama shouldn't take any credit is expected, just as expected as them crediting and praising Bush if he had accomplished the task.
I've already had this conversation more than once:
"Why can't Obama take credit?"
answer is something like "Because the SEALs did it, all he did was order it/etc."
Ask "Why did we kill Osama?"
Answer "Because he ordered 9/11"
"But by your own logic, he cannot take credit. He did not fly the planes himself, only ordered it."
"I might add that Christ himself was subject to the death penalty, and his sayings were recorded when sentence was passed on him and while it was being carried out, and He did not take the opportunities offered to condemn it in principle. I agree that arguments from silence are not always reliable. But in this case, the silence is pretty eloquent."
Compare his quote to this one from "Serial Mom", a 1994 comedic movie.
Father Boyce: Jesus said nothing to condemn capital punishment as he hung on the cross, did he? Congregation: No. Father Boyce: If ever there was a time to go on record against the death penalty, wasn't it that night? Capital punishment is already the law in the state of Maryland. So what are we waiting for, fellow Christians? Let's just do it. Congregation: Amen.
We laughed at this idea in 1994. What's happened to the world that now people are taking it seriously?
"Lastly, I came to understand the difference between civil marriage and holy marriage as in the sacrament of the Catholic Church. Let me rephrase. I understood that but either willingly chose not to accept it or just didn’t see it. Regardless, I see it now and the significance of that is as follows: Once you understand the great difference between civil marriage and holy marriage, there is not one valid reason to forbid the former from same-sex couples, and all that is left to protect is the latter. Indeed Christians and Catholics alike are well within their right to demand that holy matrimony, a sacrament and service performed by the Church and recognized by the Church, remains between a man and a woman as their faith would dictate. However, that has nothing to do with civil marriage, performed and recognized by the State in accordance with state law." Louis Marinelli
What's really strange is that a higher percentage of young conservatives in Mississippi think interracial marriage should be illegal. (Age group 18-29 are 54% against interracial marriage)
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Tea Party Nation sent out an email to their followers recently lamenting the extinction of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)
Bill Maher: "not all republicans are racist, but if you're a racist in america, you're probably a republican"
JD said "Heck, Klan members continue to run for office as Democrats, even to this day." and gave a link to a man who had renounced the KKK decades ago. Well, because JD thinks old news is so exciting: Links between Arizona Republicans and the KKK
Oh, wait... that was a few months ago... I guess it's not such old news after all.
Muslims hold a fundraiser to raise money for the homeless and for women's shelters. Republicans show up to protest, chant "go back home!" and xenophobic slurs.
If the Tea Party/Republican group had any legitimate reasons for protesting the fund-raiser, they certainly lost the high-ground a long time before they starting yelling "you rape your kids" at Muslim families.
Someone on Reddit joked: "it's not that they hate muslims, they're just against helping the homeless and women."
A common trait of xenophobes is the lack of fact-checking when something seems to confirm their xenophobic beliefs. Check out this post by JD Curtis. (http://treesforlunch.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-iman-of-ground-zero-victory.html) This short post has gets everything wrong yet again. But let's start here: hey JD, who's the future iman of Park51 (which JD calls the "Ground Zero Victory Hamasque")?
"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public. . ."
– Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the New York Times, April 9, 1944
fas-cism n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership,together with belligerent nationalism." (The American Heritage Dictionary 1983)
This was the generally accepted definition of fascism before the right and people like JD started rewriting its history)
JD Curtis asks "Why is the Left so Obsessed with Race?" *Cough* petitio principii, much?
Of course, JD can't prove the Left is obsessed with race so he pulls out some quotes from Right-wingers that simply assert that they are.
"That the Left is obsessed with the topic of race is hardly in dispute."? Oh how easy! Instead of JD actually trying to provide evidence towards his assertions - JD just assumes there is (almost) no question that the assertions are correct!
JD quotes Ann Coulter who asks if conservative arguments are so racist or stupid "shouldn't their arguments be easy to deconstruct?" Anyone who has ever seen conservatives "debate" science will know that stupid arguments take the most amount of time to deconstuct.
But the most hilariously stupid part of JD's argument is this; an hispanic lady on the radio says she was glad that the Gabrielle Giffords shooter wasn't hispanic because she didn't want Right-wingers making it into a racial issue. THIS is his evidence the left-wing is obsessed with race? A lady, who we don't know the politics of, saying "phew! I'm glad the right-wingers won't make this about race?"
The irony of all this is that JD's had a link to this on his sidebar. Read it. Read the comments. I already know JD's response - "B... b. b.. but that's just xenophobia not racism!"
A commenter named ATVLC pointed out that JD's claims that the mainstream media never commented on a questionably racist meal are false. He says: "If you type the phrase Martin Luther Waffles into Google News, you'll see that everyone from Fox News and RushLimbaugh.com to the Huffington Post and MSNBC reported it."
"things that you never hear about from the MSM", huh JD?
A lot of people on both sides of politics have fallen for fake Facebook pages purporting to be Jared Lee Loughner's. There are at least a dozen fake pages so let's look at some.
JD gave a link to this one.
Profile ID = 100001952074770
The major give-away that this is not the shooters Facebook page is that it was created after the shooting.
The second give-away is that the faker spelt the shooter's name the way that the press originally reported it before they corrected themselves. The name is wrong.
I saw another fake that had the shooter worshipping "Sara Palin". I have not seen a Loughner Facebook page that wasn't created after the shooting. Another has his inspirations as:
Chairman Mao, Che Guevara, Noam Chomsky, Kenyan-born Barrack Hussein Obama (that's how it was listed on the site), Saul Alinsky (who?), Hugo Chavez and Joseph Stalin.
Which sounds like a right-wing's idea of who left-wingers admire. The "Kenyan-born" part is a bit of a give-away.
EDIT: The Right is still posting fake Facebook pages but the one slightly-left site that linked to the fake voter reg only did so for about 40 minutes before issuing a correction.
"right-wing politicians (Angle, Palin, Bachmann, Perry) and media celebrities (Palin, Beck, Limbaugh) are much more willing than anyone on the left to dance perilously near to such suggestions, and then distance themselves when shit actually happens"
So JD asks
"What violence has any of them ever caused?"
Byron Williams who was on his way to kill a bunch of liberals at the progressive Tides foundation and the ACLU. He targetted the Tides Foundation because that was one of Glenn Beck's favorite targets. He said Glenn Beck "blew his mind".
That's one example, that GentleSkeptic already quoted. Quick JD! Chicken out and make up a reason to ban GentleSkeptic! He's ruining your narrative! Spin! Spin! Spin!
In this video, when Glenn Beck says you'll have to shoot them in the head, who is he talking about? Liberals, of course!
Violent rhetoric comes overwhelmingly from the Right nowadays. Here's a great write-up of the current conservative political violence.
A lot of words have been written about Loughner, a man who planned and executed a shooting of a Democratic congresswoman. He was obviously influenced by Right wing conspiracy theories (currency backed by gold and silver is one of Glenn Beck's themes) but it is really that simple. A commenter on Metafilter made this interesting comment:
The thing is, it's awfully easy to explain this as a pure historical accident.
Loughner grew up in a place and time without much violent rhetoric on the left, and without much violent religious rhetoric. Angry, violent guys of his generation who were looking for an ideology had two big choices: the right-wing militia movement or one of the violent strains of anarchist anti-globalism. Guess which one of those is easier to find in Arizona?
It's easy to believe he could have latched onto another movement in a different place or time: revolutionary socialism if he'd grown up in the US during the 60s or 70s, the IRA if he'd grown up in Belfast, radical Islam if he'd grown up in Yemen, the ELF if he'd been in a hippie town in Oregon, whatever. The fact that he picked the biggest violent movement around and it happened to be right-wing says less about the psychology of right-wing politics and more about the role of familiarity and convenience in guiding our political identities.
It's more than just the Tea Party waving guns and smashing Democratic party windows. Here's some examples of recent right-wing violence
Richard Poplawski, loser who lived with his mom, killed three cops he thought were Obama people trying to take his guns away. He was stockpiling a mini arsenel of guns and machine guns.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512560,00.html
Jim David Adkisson, right-wing loser who wrote his "I hate liberals" letter and massacred a bunch of liberals at a Unitarian church. He was found with a bunch of right-wing idiot books from Micheal Savage and Bill O'Reilly. He said he “wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book,” http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/jul/28/church-shooting-police-find-manifesto-suspects-car/
James Von Brunn, white supremecist who believed Obama was created by jews and shot up a Holocaust museum and killed a black employee.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/06/11/2009-06-11_holocaust_museum_guard_.html
Scott Roeder, the latest anti-abortion extremist murdered Dr George Tiller.
http://www.kansas.com/2010/04/01/1249310/roeder-to-be-sentenced-thursday.html
Byron Williams, another right-wing loser was on his way to kill a bunch of liberals at the progressive Tides foundation and the ACLU. He targetted the Tides Foundation because that was one of Glenn Beck's favorite targets. He said Glenn "blew his mind" by supporting all his wacko conspiracy theories.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2010/1016/Did-Glenn-Beck-s-rhetoric-inspire-violence
Keith Luke, white supremecist who killed two minorities and raped and attempted to kill a third. His targets were minorities and jews. As a white supremecist he believed liberal jews are trying to exterminate the white race.
http://www.adl.org/learn/extremism_in_the_news/White_Supremacy/Keith+Luke.htm?
And that's just recently. If I went back further I could write a list of women's health clinic bombings, anthrax letters to Democrats, even Timothy McVeigh was a registered Republican.
There is also a great deal of right wing violence that you won't hear about. Most often the right-wing target people who are easily marginalised and denied protection of the law.
Every time you read about some racist assault or harassment, every time you read about a queer-bashing or a burned synagogue or a protest at the home of an employee of a family-planning clinic: that is right-wing violence. The media only calls it such when somebody dies because acknowledging that right-wing violence is an every day, all the time thing would disrupt the conservative media's "both sides are equally bad" narrative.
EDIT:
Right-wing blow-hard JD Curtis spewed out this while this post was in draft. He missed the point that many people have been making that currently the violence is coming overwhelmingly from the Right. He's trying to deflect criticism with a cry of "decades ago there were violent from the Left!".
Have you ever noticed that JD will compare any philosophy from the Left and call it "the Left" but only ever chooses "conservative" from the Right. So it's anarchy vs JD's malleable definition of conservative. JD has also redefined the right-left spectrum so right-wing philosophies he doesn't like are no longer right-wing. The Nazis and the Fascists for example. I don't know whether he is dishonest or merely brainwashed.
I've decided to blog about another blogger... until I get bored which will probably be real quick.
Who?
He's a certain establishment stooge on blogger. A right-wing authoritarian blow-hard. A self-important hypocrite who spews dishonest rhetoric like broken septic tank. I guess that could describe a lot of people but I'm talking about JD Curtis and his blog Trees for Lunch.
JD wants to live in a world where the Left-wing is always wrong and the Right-wing is always right. Since no-one is always right or always wrong, he uses dishonest sources or just plain hypocrisy.
He often uses Conservapedia as a source, a group so incredibly biased that they literally are rewriting the Bible to remove its "liberal elements". Yes. Really.
JD is seems to hate freedom... oh he says he's for more freedom but it's clear he means freedom for him and people just like him. As soon as it's about someone else,like say, homosexuals or Muslims, then JD goes into authoritarian crack-down mode. He the kind of guy who spews bigoted ideas and threatens lawsuits on anyone who dares call him out on his bigotry... as I've seen.
He accuses the Left of using the word "fascism" to shut down communication then he goes and labels things he doesn't like as fascism.
JD is fond of censorship, just as long as he's doing the censoring. But he can't censor anyone here; I've read the blogger terms of use. I bet he loves that I'm going to do a few posts on him.
