“Yes, a majority of Americans said they were against such measures, but let’s not brush past the obvious point: a third of the country is an alarming number of people.”
The problem with making a point like Steve Benen’s is not that it is somehow wrong or grotesquely exaggerated. Rather, the problem is that such straightforward, dramatic statements find themselves anywhere near the realm of American reality.
If I tell you that the headline above Scott Eric Kaufman’s report for Salon yesterday reads, “Michele Bachmann: Refugees coming to America in order to commit ‘rape jihad’ against non-Muslim women and girls”, and would, unfortunately, seem a reasonably accurate description of the wisdom proffered by Our Lady Light Bulb, do any of us really need me to post the detail?
Or is this one of those occasions we can trust that you will click and read, or not, according to your inclination?
Because it really is sickening.
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Image note: Detail of photo by J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo.
Kaufman, Scott Eric. “Michele Bachmann: Refugees coming to America in order to commit ‘rape jihad’ against non-Muslim women and girls”. Salon. 30 November 2015.
The question of a divorceé has long plagued Christian supremacists who denounce marriage equality and gay rights, but, you know, really? Not only has Kim Davis already licensed transgender man and his pansexual wife, and most likely also issued plenty of marriage licenses to divorceés, but it also turns out that Ms. Davis is herself a serial adulterer.
On this point, Travis Gettys of Raw Story considers an appearance by Dan Savage on msnbc; the author, advice columnist, and editor of The Stranger, Mr. Savage spared no punches:
“I think Kim Davis is waiting to cash in,” Savage told MSNBC. “I predicted from the beginning that she would defy all the court orders, defy the Supreme Court, she would ultimately be held in contempt of court, lose her job, perhaps go to prison for a short amount of time. And then she will have written for her, ghost written books. She will go on the right-wing lecture circuit and she’ll never have to do an honest day’s work ever again in her life.”
“This is about someone hypocritically cashing in, and she is a hypocrite,” he added.
Savage referred to the defiant clerk’s statement complaining that courts were asking her to “violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage” — which the columnist dismissed as ridiculous.
“This is a woman who’s been divorced three times and married four times,” he said, reading from the US News & World Report article that pointed out Davis “gave birth to twins five months after divorcing her first husband, (and) they were fathered by her third husband but adopted by her second husband.”
“She’s now onto her fourth husband,” Savage said. “Jesus Christ himself in scripture condemned divorce, called it adultery and forbids it. Jesus Christ himself in scripture says not one word about same-sex marriage.”
Savage said the U.S. Supreme Court had already decided the issue of same-sex marriage, and he said Davis clearly should have followed the law all along.
“She’s not being asked to perform a sacrament, she is tasked with ascertaining that the people in front of her, the couple in front of her, have a legal right to get married and to provide them with that license,” he said. “She is not a minister. She actually thinks she works for God there in the county courthouse, when she actually works for Caesar — and someone needs to acquaint her with that fact.”
Or we might attend Mr. Savage himself, who recently blogged, among other notes:
I would say I can’t wait for a Muslim county clerk in, say, Dearborn, Michigan (which has a huge Muslim community), to refuse to issue a marriage license to a Christian couple on the grounds that the this kafir couple hasn’t been paying jizya… but that’s not going to happen. Religious minorities in this country intuitively understand that to empower religious bigots like Davis is to paint bullseyes on their own backs. So the Jesus-freak goons at the Liberty Counsel work to frame discrimination as a “religious freedom” because they’re confident that American Christians will be the ones doing the discriminating, not suffering from it.
This is an important point. Something about functional reality goes here.
Steve Benen raises an interesting question:
… if Trump can rocket to the front of the Republican pack without the backing of a real national campaign, what happens when the GOP candidate starts trying?
We’re about to find out. Iowa’s Sam Clovis, a prominent Republican activist and media figure in Iowa, had served for months as the state chairman of Rick Perry’s presidential campaign, until this week, when Clovis gave up on the former Texas governor and joined Team Trump.
The problem with the Donald Trump Show is that it really does know how to get attention.
There are days, you know, when it is really easy to pick on an idea. Take Oklahoma for instance. Last week we learned about the strangeness of Oklahoma virtue, and then a spokesman for Gov. Mary Fallin (R) found himself blaming Texas for protests in Durant and Oklahoma City demonstrating support for the Confederacy as President Obama arrived.
Talk about a trifecta; this also happened:
Gov. Mary Fallin (R) and the GOP-led legislature announced they’re prepared to ignore the state Supreme Court, at least for now, while they consider new solutions.
The Republican governor talked to reporters, saying roughly what you’d expect her to say: she’s “disappointed” with the court’s decision; she thinks they made the wrong call; etc. But as KFOR, the NBC affiliate in Oklahoma City, reported, Fallin added one related thought that wasn’t expected at all:
Gov. Fallin said she believes the final decision on the monument’s fate should rest with the people.
“You know, there are three branches of our government. You have the Supreme Court, the legislative branch and the people, the people and their ability to vote. So I’m hoping that we can address this issue in the legislative session and let the people of Oklahoma decide,” she said.
The KFOR report added, “Despite what the governor said, the three branches of government include the legislative, executive and judicial branches” ....
.... We can certainly hope that Fallin, a former multi-term member of Congress, knows what the three branches of government are. Indeed, in Oklahoma, she’s the head of one of them – the one she left out this week.
(Benen)
This is actually one of the big differences. Look, Democrats might well be just as middling, mincing, and incompetent as they seem, but, to the one, to the one, it’s nothing comparable to this, and, to the other, ritual equivocation would only obscure important considerations.
Maggie Haberman’s entry for First Draft, at the New York Times, actually has a really distracting quirk about it.
Surrounded by two of the “three amigos” — as former Gen. David H. Petraeus called them — Senator Lindsey Graham appeared with Senator John McCain and former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in New York on Monday to denounce the deal to contain Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr. Graham, a Republican presidential hopeful from South Carolina who is one of the most hawkish voices in his party, repeatedly invoked the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, just over three miles from the Women’s National Republican Club in Midtown Manhattan, where the “No Nukes for Iran” forum was held.
“My friends, what we will see is a nuclearized Middle East,” said Mr. Graham of the deal’s implications, arguing it would extend well beyond Iran. “They view New York as a symbol of America. This is the place they would choose to hit us again if they could.”
Let us be clear: “Surrounded by two of the ‘three amigos'”? Sen. Graham (R-SC) is the third Amigo. This was a Three Amigo reunion. And they broke out a new version of an old classic. A nuclear nonproliferation treaty is bad because … here’s the new chorus, same as the old chorus.
But, yeah, other than the quirk, the important point is that it remains imperative to remember just how wrong these Three Amigos were.
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Image note: From left, Senator John McCain, Senator Lindsey Graham and former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in New York on Monday. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Haberman, Maggie. “Lindsey Graham and Friends Join to Denounce Iran Deal”. First Draft. 20 July 2015.
Steinhauer, Jennifer. “Foreign Policy’s Bipartisan Trio Becomes Republican Duo”. The New York Times. 26 November 2012.
Former generations might have looked upon filmreel of American servicemen dumping helicopters and other equipment overboard as our ships fled east Asia in the wake of our military debacle in Vietnam and been expected to believe that was what victory looked like. And that really is a note for middle age, because even my own generation seems to forget how we used to say, “America has never lost a war”. And over time that notion has been variously scaled, such that we’ve never fought a foreign war on our territory, and other such historical inaccuracies. No, really, there is even a way in which we argue that what happened in 1814 wasn’t a foreign invasion; after all, they were British. Fast forward to the twenty-first century when a guy from Mexico looking for work constitutes an invasion.
Never mind. Nostalgia, of a sort.
Let’s try a game show voice. Beauchamp says!
Wednesday night, Sen. Tom Cotton went on Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room to talk about Iraq and ISIS. He said something surprising.
Meta-irony. The headline is, “Tom Cotton says ISIS is winning in Iraq. That is false.”
It’s a nice headline, I suppose. Functional. Direct. Not really much of a gray area, you know?
The headline isn’t the problem, of course; it is merely the frame. Because the question does, in fact arise: Why is this surprising?
“We just haven’t rolled back the Islamic State at all over the last six or seven months since we began our air campaign,” he said. “They’ve continued to hold the ground they always have. They haven’t advanced, but we haven’t rolled them back, either. And that’s not going to be enough to defeat them.”
“The Islamic State seems to be winning now,” Cotton later added.
This is, in fact, the exact opposite of what is occurring. ISIS is losing substantial ground in Iraq, and it’s hard to imagine why Cotton is insisting otherwise.
“Every day, all along border states, maybe other places, there are murders by people who have been arrested coming into this country, who have been released by the Obama administration, I believe in violation of the law, who are murdering Americans all over our cities. We hold the Democrat Party and the president personally accountable for this action”
The phrase is, “Can of corn”.
With a blooper so facially ridiculous that even a newspaper fact checker wants in on the action, Rep. Pete Sessions, hardly a man known for dignity and restraint, aimed for the bleachers.
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) accused President Barack Obama and Democrats Thursday evening of continually releasing undocumented immigrants who are murdering Americans.
“Every day, all along border states, maybe other places, there are murders by people who have been arrested coming into this country, who have been released by the Obama administration, I believe in violation of the law, who are murdering Americans all over our cities,” the Rules Committee chairman said at a meeting while discussing Obama’s deportation relief policies. “We hold the Democrat Party and the president personally accountable for this action.”
The comment came during a discussion of a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security, which many Republicans believe needs to include measures to block Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Congress must pass funding for DHS by the end of Friday to avoid a shutdown, and House Republicans are planning to vote on a three-week bill.
(Foley)
There are those who would readily suggest that laughter is the best medicine, but we’re told that doesn’t apply to appendectomy recuperation. Nonetheless, perhaps there would be some benefit in considering the potential of laughter as a public health issue.
That is to say, it really is not appropriate to wish ill onto others. That is to suggest one ought not hope their inverse-favorite hypocritical Congressman or U.S. Senator who wailed and cried about how the president had too many policy czars and even went so far as to introduce legislation to sunset every appointed czar on a timetable and regardless of conditions on the ground and then went on to demand an Ebola czar because it was easier than explaining why Republicans refuse to confirm the nominated Surgeon General should actually have to come face to face with an ebolite suicide bomber wearing Daa’ish colors, while also acknowledging that yes, there are actually people in the world who would laugh if that happened and it’s not exactly hard to understand why.
I don’t know, is that sentence going to collapse on itself like the World Trade Center?
What’s that? Too soon? Okay, okay, okay. But it’s true that some sort of unfortunate, ghoulish, cruel joke really does seem needed here. So … er … ah … right.
Or maybe chuckling over the idea that, say, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA1) wants a promotion to the U.S. Senate.
Actually, that’s a pretty fun joke right now; he took out Rep. Paul “Pit of Hell” Broun (R-GA10), who is vacationing away the waning months of his Congressional tenure while fearmongering ebola in order to pitch for a conservative super PAC. And polling averages show Kingston trailing his Democratic opponent, Michelle Nunn, by two points.
Still, though, wait ’til November to laugh. The polling data is thin, and this is Georgia, after all.
Oh, right. Jokes. Humor. Laughter. Public health.
You know what would be great for public health during this ebola crisis? If everyone just laughed at people like Jack Kingston. You know, break the tension, blow some steam, so we can get back to serious considerations.
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Huber, Adam. “You Can’t Spell ‘Pandemic’ Without ‘Panic'”. Bug Martini. 16 October 2014.
Maddow, Rachel. “GOP forgets anti-czar nonsense, calls for Ebola czar”. The Rachel Maddow Show. msnbc. 17 October 2014.
Haberkorn, Jennifer. “Rep. Paul Broun: Send money, stop Ebola”. Politico. 17 October 2014.
Well, we would have gone with the gay joke, or the one about Daa’ish … or ebola or climate change or whatever … but, you know, this panel is, shall we say, a bit more on topic given the way things are going around here today. Via Tom Tomorrow and Daily Kos comes this look into the nightmare season, a misfortune of cyclical proportions that Hallowe’en and Election Day are so narrowly separated. To the one, Christmas starts in June, these days. To the other, it’s a Year Six election.
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Tomorrow, Tom. “The House of Feeeaaaarrrr”. This Modern World. Daily Kos Comics. 20 October 2014.
This Is 