Insanity, Anders Breivik and the Tea Party Republicans

Anders Breivik is insane, says his public defender in Norway.  He says the guy has a cold personality and is convinced that he’s contributing to some global movement.  Is sounds like nothing was going to stop him from killing 76 people in Norway because it had to be done.  His worldview demanded it.

The Tea Party Freshman are insane, says Senator John McCain.  He says they’re “bizarro” for thinking they can bring down Obama by triggering an economic catastrophe  by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.  But their worldview demands it and they will not be deterred.

At the risk of offending self-described *right-wing Christians* (not average run-of-the-mill churchgoers and christians), this bizarro view of the world is not uncommon among their cohort.  Right wing Christians are getting all in a huff because reporters are finally starting to get a clue about how their worldview may manifest itself in action.   No, Christians would *never* engage in violence, they say.  But if you accept their denials, you may be missing the part of their argument that is the most important to figuring out how dangerous they really are.  Here’s a snippet from a post by RedState writer Eric Erickson that contains the money quote:

Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That’s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.

All of them can pile on and condemn the Christian because the Christian is just passing through, a stranger in a strange land.

Over the next week, assuming the budget fight in Washington doesn’t over shadow it, you can expect lots more gloating that the guy in Norway described himself as a conservative Christian. Never mind that a conservative Christian would not do what the guy did. The left, however, will not be persuaded otherwise. They are of this world and this world is all that matters until the last day.

John McCain, take note, they will not respond to reason because they are not of this world.  It’s not that they are out of this world.  They just have no interest in what happens to it at this point.  If there is evil in the world, it will be purged.  But it can’t be purged unless there is a Great Tribulation or an Apocalypse.  They see “signs of the end times”.  The world is chaotic, cause and effect are disconnected and everything is violent, uncertain and random.  But these signs say that it will all be over soon.  Earthquakes, famine, disease, a New World Order, the sign of the Beast.  Nevermind that 30 years ago, this could have been applied to the Soviet Union, a different famine in Africa and AIDS.  Now, it is the threat of jihad from Muslims that makes them anxious.  Not extremist Muslims, ALL Muslims.  Forget that this is crazy and that the vast majority of American Muslims are going to ignore the command to go on jihad and murder all of us in our beds.  They don’t have the time or inclination.  They have full time jobs and kids to cart around to soccer games and bake sales and mortgages and stuff like that.  Who has time for slaying hundreds of millions of infidels?

But this imbalance of a tiny minority of Muslims getting the initiative and capacity to slay the rest of us does not occur to the self described “right wing Christian”.

Nor do they worry much about wrecking the global economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.  In fact, they may consider themselves to be catalysts in a twisted interpretation of scripture.  If the world becomes bad enough and conditions unliveable, then surely Christ will return. So, they’re only holding out on the debt ceiling for our own good.  Yes, it’s brutal and horrible for the people who have to suffer but it has to be done.

You might wonder why people who consider themselves to be “not of this world” would even bother running for office.  Presumably, there isn’t a damn thing they can do about what’s going on anyway and God will sort it all out.  But God is going too slowly for their timetable.  After all, we can’t wait forever for Christ to return.  Some of us might die in the meantime.  So, we might have to push God a little bit with a catastrophe of our own making.  And Barack Obama may give them a good excuse to start agitating for a world changing event.  If he’s a secret Muslim running a *Christian* nation, could there be any clearer sign?

You can’t reason with them, John McCain.  You can’t persuade them, John Boehner.  You can’t plead, beg or cajole.  They will have their Armageddon.  The only thing you might be able to do is force them to obey the oath they swore before God to uphold the Constitution.  But even that might not work because they answer only to God.  If you throw them in jail for violating their oaths, that makes them martyrs.  Maybe the best thing to do would be to expel them from their House or Senate positions.  That’s what I would be going for.  But even though they are completely unhinged when it comes to the debt ceiling, they might be useful in some other capacity for House leadership.  And anyway, only Democrats are forced out.  Never Republicans.  Republicans know they need to keep every one of their votes while Democrats are committed to purging any inconvenient ones on their side.  (And we wonder why they are always so weak.)

So, there you have it.  If some of the Tea Partiers who claim to be right wing Christians are holding out, it might be because they get their marching orders from God, filtered through Glenn Beck or some other ignorant blowhard.  They are going to bring us all down joyfully, putting their faith in God alone, listening only to him and the other people who think just like they do. The only way to avert global economic meltdown in the face of such obstinacy may be to exercise the 14th Amendment option and worry about the fallout afterwards.  The fallout may necessarily include filing procedures against the holdouts for violating their oaths.  I would.  It’s not a partisan thing, it’s a sanity thing.  Government can not function when the people elected to run it see it as an obstacle to their heavenly government.

People will do all kinds of crazy things in the name of God.  I wouldn’t say they’re insane.  They’re quite sane.  They just have a different worldview, reinforced by endtime TV preachers, unethically ambitious political mouthpieces and global media moguls.  This is the world we live in and they are part of it because they participate in the spread of that worldview.  Whether they appreciate it or not, if they take us down, they’re going down with us.  And there will be no Rapture.  If the Tea Party drives us into the greatest Depression we’ve ever known, they may consider a cold prison in Norway a better alternative to what the rest of the world will want to do with them.

Addendum: This is the Congressional Oath of Office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;

that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion

; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

Krugman going rogue

Bilbo Baggins (R Tea Party- The Shire)

He was shrill before but mostly towards movement conservative Republicans.  Then he found out Obama *are* one.  In Conservative Origins of Obamacare, Krugman lays out the case that we’ve been making for three years now:

The essence of Obamacare, as of Romneycare, is a three-legged stool of regulation and subsidies: community rating requiring insurers to make the same policies available to everyone regardless of health status; an individual mandate, requiring everyone to purchase insurance, so that healthy people don’t opt out; and subsidies to keep insurance affordable for those with lower incomes.

The original Heritage plan from 1989 had all these features.

These days, Heritage strives mightily to deny the obvious; it picks at essentially minor differences between what it used to advocate and the plan Democrats actually passed, and tries to make them seem like a big deal. But this is disinformation. The essential features of the ACA — above all, the mandate — are ideas Republicans used to support.

Then, in Obama the Moderate Conservative, Krugman just gives up and admits that the guy is one of them, admitting that he will get plenty of “foaming at the mouth” comments.

You know, Paul, I’m not so sure about that.  The foaming has mostly stopped to be replaced by wide open mouthed thunderstruck gaping.  The Obots are finally starting to realize they’ve been played.  Even ThereIsNoSpoon isn’t going shwing! over Obama today.  He’s more subdued like, “Obama is totally sucking, wow, I can’t believe how bad he is.  Damn, wish I didn’t have to vote Democrat in 2012”.  So, you know, it’s bad.

But it had to be said, Paul.  I admire your optimism in the face of so many inauspicious early data points.  You do realize that there’s no going back.  There are still a %#$@load of unemployed people out here and our prospects will get bleaker if any deficit reduction plan is implemented.  Whether he’s doing it to get re-elected or because he really believes it’s good for the country, we are still going to suffer hard, long and unnecessarily.  If that sounds like a description of rape, well, that’s because that’s what it feels like.  And it’s only going to get worse right up to election day 2012 because the Republicans *want* the economy to be as bad as it can possibly get before November 2012.   I’m not just going to eat my peas because some cocky young jerks and machine politicians in Chicago are calling the shots.  Are you?

In any case, we will be sending you our complimentary Democrats in Exile welcome package complete with knitting needles, white sheet and HRT starter pack.  Welcome to the club.

In other news: Democrats are starting to agitate for Obama to use the 14th Amendment option.  Things are getting a little too interesting in this lifetime.

Did I mention that the Tea Party Representatives really are out of their Fucking minds?? From Hullabaloo:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said today that some members of his own caucus who are refusing to agree to a compromise debt ceiling deal are hoping to unleash “chaos” and thus force the White House and Senate Democrats to make bigger concessions than they’re already offering. As many as 40 House Republicans, especially Tea Party members and freshmen, have demanded nothing short of changing the Constitution to include a balanced budget amendment before they would vote to raise debt ceiling, even though that has zero chance before the U.S. faces potential default on Aug. 2.

Speaking on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show this morning, Boehner agreed that failing to raise the limit before the deadline would be devastating, and said the “chaos” plan won’t work when asked by Ingraham what’s motivating the recalcitrant Republicans:

BOEHNER: Well, first they want more. And my goodness, I want more too. And secondly, a lot of them believe that if we get past August the second and we have enough chaos, we could force the Senate and the White House to accept a balanced budget amendment. I’m not sure that that — I don’t think that that strategy works. Because I think the closer we get to August the second, frankly, the less leverage we have vis a vis our colleagues in the Senate and the White House.

And then there is this from John McCain who is calling House Republicans names:

Earlier today, he called them Hobbits who were going to refuse to raise the debt ceiling so that the country would turn on Barack Obama and bring down Mordor.

That’s silly, John, Hobbits aren’t that ambitious.

Heads up, Tea Party:  If you really want to make Obama one-termer, you do not want to make Democrats start to feel sorry for him.

Cindy McCain Supports Gay Marriage

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From The Guardian:

John McCain’s staunch opposition to gay marriage was one of the key parts of his presidential campaign. But it has become clear this was not supported in his own household. His daughter, Meghan, is a vocal advocate of gay rights. Now his wife, Cindy, has appeared in a poster campaign against California’s proposition 8 – a law banning same-sex marriage.

[…]

Cindy McCain appears in the poster with silver duct tape across her mouth and the campaign slogan, “NOH8”, marked on her cheek.

[…]

“Aligning yourself with the platform of gay marriage as a Republican still tends to be very stigmatic, but Cindy McCain wanted to participate in the campaign to show people that party doesn’t matter.”

John McCain’s office said in a statement that he respected the views of his family but remained opposed to gay marriage. “Senator McCain believes the sanctity of marriage is only defined as between one man and one woman,” it said. In 2008 McCain backed a measure in his home state of Arizona to ban same-sex marriage.

Meghan McCain also appears in the poster campaign. “I couldn’t be more proud of my mother for posing for the NOH8 campaign,” she wrote on Twitter. “I think more Republicans need to start taking a stand for equality.

“I was there when she did it and I almost started crying during the photo shoot.”

Totally uncalled for cheap shot:

Pam Spaulding, who blogs on gay issues, was reminded of an infamous and foul-mouthed bust up between John and Cindy during a campaign in 1992. “Given the Senator’s hot temper, and the fact that he called his wife a trollop and ‘you c*nt’ … this was a nice ‘screw you’ for picking that dimwit Palin and derailing the campaign,” Spaulding wrote.

Kudos, props and thumbs up for Cindy and Meghan McCain. Shame on John McCain and Pam Spaulding.

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Buncha Bigots

Eric Holder, America’s first African American Attorney General under America’s first black President, said in a speech to Department of Justice employees celebrating Black History Month, that we are a “nation of cowards”  because we don’t like to talk candidly about race.  This is wrong on so many levels.

Any time we still have to describe people and their accomplishments as “history making” based on skin color, we have a problem with race.  It’s 2009, for Goodness sakes, and we still have cause to celebrate racial “firsts.”  Not only that, we’ve barely scratched the surface; we have yet to have our “first black” lots of things, like, Senate Majority Leader; hell we’ve barely had any black Senators, given that the nation’s fifth is now president.  We, as a nation, have never had a Native American much of anything politically significant, either; the same is true for many other racially diverse groups.  And, as we all know, our history regarding women’s history, contributions, and employment issues, not to mention those of LGBT people living openly, and people living with disabilities, is woefully deficient.

But, does not talking about it make us cowards?  What good does endless recriminatory discussion do?  Does that really advance anybody’s cause, or does it merely inflame passions needlessly?

In this little community we’ve established here in this little corner of the blogosphere, nobody is required to declare their race, ethnicity, gender, or anything else, nor are they expected to check them at the door, unless they choose to, and we seem to get along pretty well.  Our commonality is based on things other than physical characteristics, like opinion and ideology.  How we think and feel is much more important than how we look, love or pee.

Barack Obama should not be president because he’s black, Eric Holder should not be attorney general for that reason, either.  Because that issue was promoted as justification for their attaining their respective positions, many of us were offended, while, to be honest, many more felt vindicated.  The disappointment was not limited to people of any particular group, though African Americans disproportionately embraced the counter opinion.  Just as many men felt, and still feel, that Hillary Clinton was the better Democratic choice, and many white Republicans felt similarly about John McCain, many black Americans, like me, feel that Barack Obama was not.  Race and gender most often had nothing to do with it.

I call our president Black Obama because his racial background played far too large a part in his election.  When he secured the nomination of his party, fraudulently in my opinion, that fraud was validated by “the historic nature of his candidacy,” blah, blah, blah.  His, and his campaign’s, deliberate, subtle, and blatant exploitation of his racial background was shameful to me.   Race should never trump integrity.  Just because we’ve never had a black president is no reason to embrace this one.

Yet, once he was elected, all sorts of racial baggage was either laid at his feet, or more often, exonerated, while the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement’s triumphs was awarded to him simply because of who his father happened to be.  His own lack of accomplishment, experience, preparedness and qualification was magically rendered irrelevant because he’s a black man.

Seems to me, as long as all we’re expected to do is talk about what’s wrong, and what has been wrong in the past, those things will continue to happen, and continue to be wrong.  Once we decide that these things don’t deserve discussion, contemplation, or consideration, there won’t be anything to talk about, anyway.  When it comes to equality and diversity, let’s all just shut up and do the damned thing.

That being said, when racism, sexism and/or any other “-ism” rears its ugly head, it should be immediately, and uncategorically, rejected by all.  The only caveat, and it’s a big one, is that “-isms” are like pornography, hard to define quantitatively.  While we claim to know it when we see it, ultimately, offense is in the eye of the beholder.  On those occasions, just like any other when one experiences hurt at the hands of another, protest is only to be expected.  Yet that protest should be limited to that particular incident; revisiting old issues only opens old wounds and diverts attention from the problem at hand, greatly increasing the odds that nothing will be resolved.  “You hurt my feelings,” will usually result in an immediate apology, “you always hurt my feelings,” will probably result in a fight.

Eric Holder said:

…”we, as average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.”

I think he’s half right; we, as average Americans, don’t talk to each other, period.  If we did, race would probably never come up.  And when, and if, it did, we’d probably be able to work it out.

Cross posted at Cinie’s World with one modification; I removed a link to the post below, since, it’s the post below.

Thursday: Rove makes a point

MC Rove dances at the WH Correspondents Dinner in 2006. A date that will live in infamy.

Karl Rove says that McCain couldn’t compete against Obama’s money advantage.  Karl forgets that the media also fellated Obama while destroying the intellect of Sarah Palin, the DOW took a dive at a most conveeeeenient moment (Thanks, Wall Street!) and Flight Jacket Thrill Bush had the lowest approval rating in history.  It’s quite possible that Dennis Kucinich could have won against McCain.

Ok, maybe not Dennis.

Obama continued his lucky streak in November.  He has an uncanny knack for winning on everything but merit.  Karl says “follow the money” in his column in the WSJ called McCain Couldn’t Compete with Obama’s Money.  Hmmm, you could read more than one meaning into that headline.  But let us assume tha Karl is referring to the $250,000,000 advantage Obama had in October and November and the fact that *today*, both campaigns have to spill the beans to the FEC about where it all came from.

On May 31, as the general election began in earnest, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee had a combined $47 million in cash, while the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee had a combined $85 million.

Between then and Oct. 15, the Obama/DNC juggernaut raised $658.7 million. I estimate today’s reports will show Mr. Obama, the DNC and two other Obama fund-raising vehicles raised an additional $120 million to $140 million in October and November, giving them a total of between $827 million and $847 million in funds for the general election.

Nearly a billion dollars.  Imagine how many foreclosed properties in Chicago that would have saved.

How did Mr. Obama use his massive spending advantage?

He buried Mr. McCain on TV. Nielsen, the audience measurement firm, reports that between June and Election Day, Mr. Obama had a 3-to-2 advantage over Mr. McCain on network TV buys. And Mr. Obama’s edge was likely larger on local cable TV, which Nielsen doesn’t monitor.

Whoa!  That’s a lot of ad time to fast forward through on the DVR.  Karl is giving too much credit to ad time.  It may have given Obama the air of inevitability but I don’t think it would have worked so well if there weren’t other factors in his favor.  I think Karl doesn’t want you to pay much attention tot he other factors that I mentioned above.  The Republicans were WILDLY unpopular.  If it weren’t for Rove, Obama could have never have carried it off.

Then Karl gets to the point: McCain was hoisted on his own petard.  One can almost detect a note of glee that McCain was done in by his own campaign finance reform.  Karl pronounces it dead and predicts that no candidate will ever make the mistake of going with public financing again.  It’s going to be one giant pool of money for each side. There will be ad buys the likes of which we have never seen, GOTV efforts that will annoy even the most committed voters, a Greek temple for every pol.

But the fact remains that Obama got only about 1/4 of his money from small donors of $200 or less.  The rest came from the same fat cats that have always contributed to campaigns, except that *this* year, they switched parties to the tune of about $500,000,000.  That’s a lot of money from untraceable debit cards.  Karl must be secretly admiring Obama.  Maybe he’s seen Obama in a Flight Jacket.  Heck, for all we know, he gave David Axlerod the idea to use the prepaid debit cards in the first place.  It could happen.

Karl is right about one thing though: we need to see where the money came from.  In this day and age, there is simply no excuse for not being able to publish this information instantly.  The technology is there.  Let’s see just how much money those fictional characters pitched in and by what means.  It’s only fair, especially now that Bill Clinton has had to cough up the list of donors to his library. In fact, Obama would look like a hypocrite if he didn’t let us examine his books. I mean, we *PUMAs* know what a corrupt politician Obama is but the rest of the progressive blogosphere who went on ad nauseum about how resilient Obama was to corporate cash will not believe it until they see proof.  Ok, they might not see it even then but maybe we can get them to shut up about the Clinton library and Global Initiative, which looks positively modest and beneficent at this point compared to Obama’s obscene amount of campaign cash.

The end does NOT justify the means, Obots.  Obama ruined our primary system, our campaign finance system and our right to self-determination.  He’s really no better than Bush and Rove in that respect.  He may be the president next year but we will remind ourselves *daily* about how he got there.

It ain’t pretty.

One more thing:

I found this video on Design*Sponge, one of my new favorite sites.  It takes you through the process of making homemade peppermint marshmallows.  What a great idea for a cold Saturday afternoon in December.

McClatchy: Obama Already Acting as “Co-President”

Barack Obama is a man in a very big hurry. For those of us who have been paying attention, this is nothing new. As soon as he won his Senate seat–if not before–Obama began planning a run for the presidency. A humbler man might have waited until he had a little experience under his belt, but Obama didn’t want to wait.

During his primary run he repeatedly claimed to have already won the nomination. No sooner had he come in first in Iowa, then his minions at the cable networks and the Cheeto blogs were calling for Hillary Clinton to step aside so he could get on with the general election. Hillary managed to slow him down a bit when she won New Hampshire and went on to do well on Super Tuesday. But even as Hillary continued to win primary after primary in traditionally Democratic states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, Obama’s campaign continued to claim that he had already won.

Voting Clusterf_ck of mass proportions in Tampa

FIRST, this is what the Board of Elections reports for Hillsborough County, FL – 87% counted so far:

PRESIDENT/VICE PRESIDENT	Vote type summary	Precinct detail map
384 of 384 Precincts Reporting
Percent Votes John McCain (REP) 46.60% 228,323 Barack Obama (DEM) 52.40% 256,753

NOW, read this fromTBO.com and notice where they decided to skew the story and do the math:

My Voting Strategy: A Long and Winding Road

The only real valuable thing is intuition.
— Albert Einstein

I feel there are two people inside me–me and my intuition. If I go against her, she’ll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get a long quite nicely.

— Kim Basinger

If I had to summarize my voting strategy for Tuesday in one word, it would be “Intuition.” I’m going with my gut. And my gut tells me to vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin. I can hardly believe that I wrote that! For months, I’ve said that I would decide whom to vote for when I got into the voting booth. I could leave the top of the ticket blank or vote for Nader or McKinney. It has truly been a long and winding road that has led me to this decision.

I began to think of myself as a Democrat in 1960 when I was 12 years old. That year, I fell in love with politics while following the campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. Everyone I knew at school and most of my relatives were supporting Nixon. I felt strongly attracted to Kennedy–his youth and vitality, his eloquent speeches, and the fact that, if elected, he would be the first Catholic President. I’ve always been a bit of an nonconformist, and this time I followed my intuition. Finally, I “came out” as a Kennedy supporter. There were only two of us in my entire junior high school! On election night, I stayed up with my parents to watch the returns. We didn’t know until very very late that Kennedy had won–probably with a little help from his friends in Chicago.

My Voting Strategy – Democracy

Following the My Voting Strategy Series, here is my own:

E. B. White: Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.

George Orwell: In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Washington: As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.

Jesse Jackson: In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

John Bright: Demand the ballot as the undeniable right of every man who is called to the poll, and take special care that the old constitutional rule and principle, by which majorities alone shall decide in Parliamentary elections, shall not be violated.

My Voting Strategy

Hear Us Roar!

Our beloved blogmother has asked all of us Conflucians to “come out” and explain what we are doing on November 4th, and to choose a word that would summarize our NOBAMA position.

My word is “misogyny,” and I’m voting for the 30% Solution in order to begin improving the lives of women throughout this great country.

I wrote this post a couple of days ago about how John McCain is passing out Hillary-oriented flyers in Pennsylvania. Although many PUMA blogs have been focusing on the flyers’ explicit panders to PUMAcrats, very few people seem to have noticed this language from Senator McCain:

I share Senator Clinton’s goal of promoting women to more important roles in government. By the end of my first term, I promise you will see a dramatic increase in the presence of women in every part of the government. You have my word on it.

Just get your PUMA jaws around that and chew on it for a while.

Mmmmmmm. Tastes like feminism to me.

To further quote from the post:

When Barack Obama was asked by Hillary Clinton’s supporters if he would make a similar promise, he said no.

Senator Obama has shown nothing but contempt and scorn for Hillary Clinton and her voters. He thinks he can win without us, and to prove his obstinacy and lack of respect for her and what she represented, he refused to even vet her for the Vice Presidency and took every opportunity to spread the most disgusting lies about her and her husband.

John McCain, however, is committed to to advancing the 30% Solution, whether he calls it that or not. He had the courage to pick a female Vice President whom he knew would be subject to the same virulent misogyny that Hillary endured. He pays his female staff more than his male staff.

Between these two candidates, who has exemplified a more feminist attitude?