“This Will Always Be So” (Or Not)

Some readers may recall a post from a little while back featuring Richard Dawkins appearing on MSNBC’s weekend “Up” program where he floated the provocative idea of taking politicians to task for some of their kooky religious beliefs… Well, guess what? It seems that someone did precisely that the other day at one of Mitt Romney’s “town hall” events…

Asked if it’s a sin for a white man to marry and procreate with a black woman, needless to say, being the gutless douchebag he is, Romney reacted to the question as if he’d just been tossed a red hot BBQ charcoal. “No” was his emphatic response before quickly turning to the other side of the crowd for a more scripted inquiry.

But wait, how can that be? Evidently, the God-inspired, yet indisputably racist proclamations of the Mormon religion’s “second prophet” (you know, following the grifter with the magic top hat) are currently null and void. That whole thing Brigham Young declared about “the penalty, under the law of God” as regards to whites conjugating with blacks being “death on the spot”… Well, not so much now, I guess.

I think we may well have a better insight into why Mitt Romney is, as one of his former rivals memorably said, such a “well-lubricated weathervane.” Seems Dawkins may have been onto something here after all when it comes to better understanding a political candidate’s mindset via their religious beliefs.

Different Messengers, Same Story

A “conservative” speaks out about the controversial shooting of “gangsta hoodlum” Trayvon Martin.

While it’s easy to dismiss the commenter given that he’s a 400 lb. redneck with a drawling southern accent, wearing denim overalls and a coonskin cap, the fact of the matter is that his opinions and convoluted rationalizations concerning the murder of Trayvon Martin are essentially identical to those now being peddled by the well-heeled millionaire pundits on Fox News and so-called “conservatives” across the spectrum of right-wing media.

Update: Video has just now surfaced showing George Zimmerman – the paranoid wannabe cop who claimed he was beaten to within an inch of his life – emerging in handcuffs from a police cruiser shortly after the incident, but without assistance, completely unscathed from his allegedly life-threatening altercation. No bloody contusions, no broken nose, no signs of his head having been repeatedly slammed into the ground, no blood spatter, no tell-tale grass stains on the back of his shirt; in short, nothing whatsoever that would corroborate his ludicrous version of events on the night he chased down and shot a black kid for the crime of wearing a hoodie and, as Zimmerman put it in his call to 911, “just walking around, looking about.”

I wonder how the virulently racist wingnuts will spin this next?

What’s the Matter With Mississippi?

This short film by Alexandra Pelosi asks some regular folks in Mississippi why the poorest state in America is also the most conservative:

Pesky Facts: Mississippi has highest rate of child poverty (31.9 percent), highest rate of infant mortality (10.3 percent), highest rate of obesity (35.3 percent of total population), lowest median household income ($35,078), highest teen birth rate (71.9 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19) and highest overall rate of STDs.

“Obock Obama”

Wearing a matching sweater vest, Foster Friess, the billionaire investor backing Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum’s frothy campaign to be Theocrat-in-Chief of the Free World, introduces his pet candidate at CPAC 2012:

After opening with a mildly amusing (albeit implausible) joke at the expense of Mitt Romney, Friess goes on to observe that rather than supporting hackneyed old political warhorses as the Republicans have too-often done in the recent past, Democrats have won presidential elections by bringing “fresh faces” like Carter and Clinton “from out nowhere”… A fair enough comment perhaps, but then he goes on to add, “they bring Oback Obama from beyond nowhere.”

So where exactly is “beyond nowhere”… Chicago, Hawaii – Kenya, perhaps? And how utterly puerile is it that this high-rolling billionaire doesn’t see fit to call the President of the United States by his proper name, but instead deliberately mangles it for comic effect?

GOP Voters

TPM offers up an amusing snippet from one of pollster and evil genius wordsmith Frank Luntz’s infamous focus groups; in this case with Republican caucus voters in Iowa – who are, evidently, some of the most obtuse and profoundly ignorant people on planet Earth.

It would be interesting to know how many of the participants in Luntz’s focus group are regular viewers of Fox News and/or listeners of Rush Limbaugh, et. al. because all of their remarks are simply echoes of the hilariously fact-free tropes about President Obama that are routinely peddled by the right-wing media.

Explaining Islamophobia

An excellent piece from The Real News exploring the complex ideological roots of Islamophobia as a mainstream version of so-called Dispensationalist theology positing a “pretribulation rapture” and eschatological “end times” perspective that’s been subsumed by neo-Conservatives and Christian Fascists over the past few decades, and which, ironically, shares a good deal of unfortunate commonality with anti-Semitic paranoia and bigotry once prevalent in Europe.

The op-ed article by Sener Akturk and Mujeeb Khan referenced in the video can be viewed here.

Back to the Future

One thing that’s striking about the “Tea Party” movement is it’s almost exclusively white racial composition. This inconvenient truth was very much in evidence at last week’s TPN convention in Nashville, Tennessee. It shouldn’t be terribly surprising therefore that when former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo suggested a return to the odious practice of excluding people of colour from voting by means of a so-called “literacy test” his remarks were greeted with cheers from the virtually all-white crowd.

This latent racism is just one of the more disturbingly regressive aspects of the Tea Party movement, along with a general desire to roll back the clock to some vaguely defined time in the past where it’s imagined that laissez-faire Capitalism completely unhindered by meddlesome government regulation resulted in freedom and prosperity. This of course is nothing short of delusional ignorance.

The Dark Heart of “Teabagging”

Al Jeezera English explores the troubling correlation between marginalized ideological extremists like “disenfranchised” neo-Nazi white supremacists and the angry populism of the “Tea Party” insurgency.

It’s hard not to think that a powerful undercurrent of racism and bigotry doesn’t help drive the furious outrage that characterizes the desire of these highly motivated activists to “take their country back”…

KKKBA

It’s hard to believe this isn’t a joke, but apparently the organizers of All-American Basketball Alliance hope to start its inaugural season this summer with a 12-team lineup composed only of white, American-born men. According to a news release from would-be commissioner Don “Moose” Lewis, only players who are natural-born U.S. citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league.

JR: Just Racist

Boy, it sure doesn’t take much to stir up the hateful anti-immigrant sentiments of ignorant racist scumbags over in Bloggin’ Tory Land…