Tag: tea klan

Going Biblical

jonathan-cunningham:

“With Islam, you have a religion that says kill the Jews, kill the infidels. It bothers me when a religion says kill the infidels. It bothers me a lot more when I am the infidel.”

Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” If Islam “says kill the jews, kill the infidels” then Christianity says “Kill Christine O’Donnell”.

Yep. But let me just revise and extend the remarks of the distinguished gentleman with the following suggestions:

James 1:19-20

19 Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath:
20 For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.

Ephesians 4:31-32

31 Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice:
32 And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.

Ephesians 4:25-26

25 Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another.
26 Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath

And, while we’re on the subject, Might I suggest we open our Bibles to Mat. 23:23-28 (or: the Passion of Glenn Beck):

23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

24 Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

In which Lord Jesus warns against slavish observance of the more ceremonial and other outward aspects of religion (and its practice) to the detriment of the spirit of the thing: social justice, mercy, and faith. What a concept. The clear difficulty lies in proving Beck ever actually swallowed a camel. And, rest assured, that will come up and serve as primary defense.

25 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

26 Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

in which Lord Jesus warns against self righteous (and self proclaimed) paragons and proclaimers of religious faith who are, themselves, hollowed out by the same crimes against which they are railing…a particularly trenchant concept which is also hit upon in the nexcerpt (oh yes I did):

27 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.

28 Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

Here endeth The Tea Klan, King James edition. Any politician in the Democratic party currently unable or unwilling to fight back by quoting one or more of these (or other) verses needs to go ahead and get out of politics, right now. Feel free to come on back at a brighter moment in the history of the country. Sorry, it’s just the way it is.

Going Biblical

Come On, Myerson, $303 Ain’t Bad

Since 1980, it’s been a very different story. The economy has continued to grow handsomely, but for the bottom 90 percent of Americans, it’s been a time of stagnation and loss. Since 1980, the share of all income in America going to the bottom 90 percent has declined from 65 percent to 52 percent. In actual dollars, the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent flat-lined – going from the $30,941 of 1980 to $31,244 in 2008.

In short, the economic life and prospects for Americans since the Reagan Revolution have grown dim, while the lives of the rich – the super-rich in particular – have never been brighter. The share of income accruing to America’s wealthiest 1 percent rose from 9 percent in 1974 to a tidy 23.5 percent in 2007.

Looking at these numbers, it would be reasonable to infer that when the Tea Partyers say that they want to take the country back, they mean back to the period between 1950 and 1980, when the vast majority of Americans encountered more opportunity and security in their economic lives than they had before or since. Reasonable, but wrong. As the right sees it, America’s woes are traceable to the New Deal order that Franklin Roosevelt, working in the shadow of the even more sinister Woodrow Wilson, imposed on an unsuspecting people.

In fact, the New Deal order produced the only three decades in American history – the ‘50s, ’60s and ’70s – when economic security and opportunity were widely shared. It was the only period in the American chronicle when unions were big and powerful enough to ensure that corporate revenue actually trickled down to workers. It marked the only time in American history when, courtesy originally of the GI Bill, the number of Americans going to college surged. It was the only time when taxes on the rich were really significantly higher than taxes on the rest of us. It was the only time that the minimum wage kept pace (almost) with the cost of living. And it was the only time when most Americans felt confident enough about their economic prospects, and those of their nation, to support the taxes that built the postwar American infrastructure.

Come On, Myerson, $303 Ain’t Bad

I lied about accessing all of the computers. I then admitted about accessing the computers, but lied about what I was doing. Finally, I admitted what I did

Joe Miller, Tea Klan nominee for Senate. This certainly speaks to his bona fides for high office; it’s always a three-stage cycle: lie, lie about the details of said lie, admit the first lie (and declare it old news). The article also details the fact that he’s a tried and true ratfucker in the Rovian style:

Miller went on three of his co-workers’ computers to vote in an online poll, apparently connected with his failed effort to oust Randy Ruedrich as state Republican Party chair. Miller then cleared his colleagues’ computer caches to erase his tracks, in the process clearing out their passwords and saved websites.

But why no whisper campaign about Ruedrich’s sexuality? Amateur hour.

Six Things

All of which the Tea Klan have declared unconstitutional (bulletized for your enjoyments; click through for detail):

1) Social Security
2) Medicare
3) Minimum Wage
4) US participation in the United Nations
5) Unemployment Benefits
6) The Civil Rights Act

With the possible exception of the UN, these all poll in the ridiculously favorable range, so: Would it kill the DCCC or other national messaging group to make a 30 or 60 second commercial detailing this? Apparently it would.

Six Things

I disagree strongly with the concept of separation of church and state. It was not written into the Constitution. While we have a Constitution that is very strong in the sense that we are not gonna have a religion that’s sanctioned by the government, it doesn’t mean that we need to have a separation between government and religion. And so that, that concerns me a great deal.

Ken Buck, Tea Klan candidate for Senate from Colorado.
We’re going to have to start with phonics, and only then move up to vocabulary.

The Rodeo Clown

lemkin:

This is why you have to point out O’Donnell’s foolishness early and often: [paint other Tea Klanners with her foolishness, blah blah blah]

jasencomstock:

This is not true.  We are not having a constitutional debate between lawyers.  Rush Limbaugh is not going to change his mind on this, neither is O’Donnell- just as you are not going to change your mind on this, or the 2nd amendment, or the 10th.  For the most part, the vast vast majority of Americans are not going to change their minds either. 

“Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”

A large segment of the population wants to believe this and you cannot take it from them by pointing it out. 

This is indeed precisely where we disagree, but for different reasons (I think, anyway). We don’t need to convince (nor, as you point out, are we going to) the Limbaughs and Palins of the world; and but also I feel like these sorts of unreachable Tea Klan true believers are a relatively small fragment of the population; low-information voters, on the other hand, can be swayed by the red meat that those same individuals peddle, but (and more importantly) I’ve found that those low-info voters also deeply understand various foundational concepts implicit to the country or, more accurately, to our national conception of civics and civic duty. Importantly, they also make up most of the electorate. And these same low-information folks might well holler “hells yeah!” at a “Taxed Enough Already!!!” chant, but would recoil in horror if they really understood the full depth of the fundamental changes these folks want in how the country would operate and the foundational ignorance of many of its most prominent proponents.
You can pick off huge numbers of folks that are simply angry, but don’t buy the whole line; but to do so: you have to be having that conversation. Constantly, but also respectfully. Otherwise they’ve got nothing to compare these Tea Klan positions to. The Tea Klan is all fired up; the Democrats are sitting quietly talking about comparative top marginal tax rates over time. By consistently and firmly pointing out the idiocy, you begin to pick off topics near and dear to the Tea Klan. They simply can’t be mentioned anymore because the audience will tune-out, sigh, or laugh. Inoculation is key, though: people have to approach some new Tea Klan candidate armed with some basic and memorable information they’ve retained from the last time these folks were out on the hustings. Thus you progressively and inevitably marginalize and ultimately eliminate as a political force the Tea Klan (by taking away its rhetoric and, essentially by equating said rhetoric with foolishness or hard-hearted and ultimately unamerican concepts) and, in large part, you deeply wound the GOP itself for its role in enabling these crazies.
After all, we must never forget that polls show the GOP is (still) historically unpopular. There are reasons for that, and they extend well beyond “party of Bush” type recent history. We need to call attention to the darker veins of this stuff early and often. That the national party apparatus is constantly afraid to do so is precisely why they fail.

Looking at You, Nevada

jonathan-cunningham:

Raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

I think this, more than anything else, is what truly explains the electoral map:

They are almost the same (though inverted) image, with the exceptions of the Nevada/Utah/Texas WTF are they thinking™ lunacy corridor (and the fact that CO is lately a genuinely purple state, seemingly awakening from a long and careless slumber). And, honestly, Nevada’s current and indefensible Tea Klan tendencies are indeed a reflection of this: we’ve got Reid and still can’t get economic reforms going in this state.

It is not and may never be clear to me why all the Democratic “strategists” in the employ of the national party apparatus are so seemingly oblivious to the fact that we live in a polarized nation, but not polarized along any of the lines they parrot…polarized along the “I can afford to live where I do” and “I have to work three jobs just to buy my dollar’s worth of potted meat product and still keep myself and my family off the streets” lines. This is the real and only issue. It drives everything, most definitely including the Tea Klan.
Yet strategists and their candidates almost never pay more than lip service to the idea of it; more often than not, it’s dismissed entirely in service of better enabling the lives and fortunes of plutocrats.

That the term “working poor” now basically defines the middle class in this country is the real, existential issue. And still nobody but nobody ever wants to talk about it, much less do anything.

The Rodeo Clown

This is why you have to point out O’Donnell’s foolishness early and often:

Are you telling me separation of church and state’s in the First Amendment? It’s not. Christine O’Donnell was absolutely correct – the First Amendment says absolutely nothing about the separation of church and state.“
–Rush Limbaugh

And he’s right…if your requirement for Constitutional legality is based on applying some sort of misguided Biblical Inerrancy to the Constitution and its legal meanings, then you’re going to be disappointed re: church and state. This is, not coincidentally, also why the very same Tea Klanners see a major difference between:

separation between church and state

–and–

separation of church and state

These are seen as completely different statements. And one of those two is coming at you straight from Hitler. And you want the facts to matter?
That the establishment clause of the first amendment implicitly creates a separation between church and state is unimportant to the Tea Klan. They are reading this as the literal string of words and most definitely not for any deeper meaning. We don’t want to cast our lot in with a bunch of pointy-headed lawyers, now do we? The words separation, of, church, and state do not appear. Period. Furthermore, "In God We Trust” is on the currency; the Tea Klan worships Lord Jesus, so that word “God” must mean Christian God and not, say, Tiamat, God of Chaos. That it was put there relatively recently is utterly unimportant: the facts do not matter. It is there; we are a movement made up of Christians, therefore the US must be an inherently christian nation, (because some of the founders were, in fact, Christians) and thus we should be, on that basis, ruled by christian laws, morals, and ideals.

Look, the Tea Klan has about 10 preferred narratives. You’re not going to beat any of them based on the facts or some sober assessment of the deeper meanings of the Constitution and its amendments. The facts simply do not matter.
The only way you beat these memes is by linking them inextricably in the minds of the broader populace with outright lunacy. As soon as anyone starts talking about nullifying the 17th amendment, you need a large fraction of the population to link that with nuts like O’Donnell and instantly, reflexively turn off. Oh, 17th amendment again, that is a rube’s issue, this person must be a nut just like that know-nothing O’Donnell. Wait, didn’t I hear Sharon Angle talking about that same crap? That makes me uncomfortable, no matter how strong she is on the menace of Social Security. Hey, why is the GOP nominee for President yapping on about the 17th amendment just like that crazy woman did? Thus ends the Tea Klan.

I Guess I Didn’t Get That Far

Christine O’Donnell: “…perhaps they didn’t teach you Constitutional law at Yale Divinity School.”
Chris Coons: [Creationism, implicitly “a religious doctrine,” should not be taught in public schools due to the Constitution’s First Amendment.]

Christine O’Donnell: “The First Amendment does? Let me just clarify: You’re telling me that the separation of church and state is found in the First Amendment?”

Chis Coons: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,”

Christine O’Donnell: “That’s in the First Amendment…?”