Fox News struggles with the Las Vegas shooting

I really don't want to be talking about the Las Vegas shooting, given how many times we've had this same discussion.

I'm tired of it all. We won't do anything. We know we won't do anything. We'll just wait until the next mass shooting and go through it all again. Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station even uses the same post he always uses for these recurring events.

So what's the point?

Of course, I could say the same thing about hypocrisy at Fox News, couldn't I? What's the point? We know that they're hypocrites. They're struggling a bit here since the killer was an older, apparently-wealthy white man, that's all.

I'm fed up, I really am. But Trevor Noah does a good job with this.

Tina Fey at SNL after Charlottesville

I don't know why, but it feels good to know that other people are just as pissed off at the state of our country as I am.

The stupidity of comparing refugees to Skittles

This is funny, but that whole 'Skittles tweet' was just unbelievably stupid. Even if you can ignore the poor math, you could say the same thing about every immigrant group.

Are you descended from English, Irish, or German immigrants? Guess what? Some English, Irish, and German immigrants murdered people. So what?

This was simply bigoted fear-mongering for political advantage. It's embarrassing that America has even come to this. How could anyone support Donald Trump? I just don't get it.

___
Edit: Snopes.com relates an earlier version of this kind of comparison, only about poisonous mushrooms. That's not surprising, is it?

Donald Trump's secret terrorism plan

Funny, isn't it? After all this time claiming that he had a secret plan to defeat ISIS, Trump's plan turns out to be asking generals to come up with a plan (as if that hasn't been happening all along).

Hillary Clinton's election requiring bloodshed?

This isn't just some random lunatic, this is the Republican governor of Kentucky, Matt Blevin. Yes, he's the current governor of the state, threatening America with terrorism if we elect Hillary Clinton as president.

"If Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it's possible that we'll be able to survive? Would we ever be able to recover, as a nation? And while there are people who've stood on this stage [at the so-called Values Voter Summit of the Family Research Council, where Donald Trump also spoke] and said we would not, I'd beg to differ. ... I do think it would be possible. But at what price?

"At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood. Of who? The tyrants, to be sure. But who else? The patriots."

So, in order to "recover as a nation" from a lost election, we need blood - the blood of "the tyrants" (which is clearly a call for assassinating Hillary Clinton, but is convenient for shooting policemen, government officials, or anyone else you find easier to target, don't you think?), but also the blood of whatever terrorists attempt to carry out that murder.

Have Republicans completely forgotten that this is a democracy, that we vote to settle our differences because bloody violence is the alternative to accepting majority vote? And have they somehow missed the fact that there's going to be another election four years from now - and then four years after that and four years after that (not to mention mid-term elections)?

Of course, remember how Barack Obama was never going to allow another election? Yeah, hysterics is nothing new in the GOP.

One of the strengths of America is that losing an election doesn't mean losing your life. If you lose one election, you just work harder to win the next one. You don't start killing people. You don't even start killing people whom you think are "tyrants." (And note that we have laws which even the President of the United States must obey.)

Matt Blevin is ISIS. Oh, he's probably not going to start killing people himself. I'm sure he's too much of a coward for that. But he has no problem encouraging other people to engage in terrorism. (The leaders of ISIS don't blow themselves up in suicide attacks. They use dumb people for that.)

Indeed, when some of their least stable supporters decide to start killing people (and why wait until after the election?), Matt Blevin - like every other Republican leader - will wash his hands of it. You know that. I know that. Matt Blevin knows that. Oh, he didn't mean like... blood blood, right?

This speech is incredible, isn't it? But not unbelievable, not these days. The Republican Party has gone completely off the rails. Still, I never expected a current Republican governor to so blatantly incite violence like this. Is there no limit to how low the Republican Party can go?

We had a Civil War once, which killed more American soldiers than World Wars I and II combined (620,000 to 750,000 dead, with countless more maimed). Who knows how many civilians died? That Civil War took place because slave-owning Southerners would not accept the results of a presidential election. Does Blevin really want us to go down that road again?

Or does he just want right-wing Christians to engage in ISIS-style terrorism as a more-or-less permanent part of American life, just random killings by disgruntled Republicans?

___
PS. Here's more about Blevin's speech from Right-Wing Watch, a project of the People for the American Way (an organization I highly recommend).

And FYI, here's the complete text of Thomas Jefferson's letter (written in France in 1987, before we even had a U.S. Constitution) about watering the 'tree of liberty' with blood. (Right-wing loons are very fond of a single sentence there. Note that Jefferson is talking about Shays' Rebellion, and given the current hysterics of the right-wing in America, I find it interesting that he also says, "The people cannot be all, & always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.")

Trump's assassination talk has a history behind it

(Raging Pencils)

Here's a follow-up article at TMP on Donald Trump's suggestion that gun nuts assassinate Hillary Clinton. Such remarks don't exist in a vacuum. There's a lot of recent history in which right-wingers push that insane idea.

Some excerpts:

“In anti-government circles, and even in hate group circles, where this idea of 'Second Amendment remedies' is not a joke, who knows how that is going to be perceived,” said Ryan Lenz, the editor of Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog.

“In reality, in the past, we’ve seen it being perceived as a sizable influx of support and validation for ideologies that, up until this campaign, had no place in mainstream political discourse,” Lenz told TPM. ...

... like the language Trump has deployed to discuss immigration, "rigged" elections and Muslims, his rhetoric around Clinton and the Second Amendment wasn’t born in a vacuum. Trump is perhaps the most prominent of a series of conservative politicians who've toyed with the idea that gun owners may need to resort to violence against an oppressive government.

In 2010, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) posted on social media "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" while pointing to a list of Obamacare-supporting lawmakers.

During her 2014 campaign, freshman Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said she believed in her right to carry guns to defend herself “whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”

Failed 2010 Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R-NV) warned that “if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.”

And Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s (D-FL) congressional challenger in 2009, Republican Robert Lowry, shot at a human-shaped gun range target with Wasserman Schultz’s initials written on it.

Brett Lunceford, a former professor who has researched the political discourse around guns, said these sort of remarks and actions feed into a belief that “the Second Amendment was put in place to overthrow the government if need be."

“[Trump’s] throwing a bone to that mythology, that, if the government is tyrannical, ‘Well you guys are the ones that can do something about it,’” Lunceford told TPM. “There’s this idea that they’re the ones that can stop tyranny. It’s not about self defense, it’s about defense from the government.”

Just think of how batshit crazy that is. It's basically the same thinking as in ISIS. It's terrorism. If you can't get what you want though voting - because you can't convince the majority that you're right - you just start shooting people.

That's how terrorists think. This used to be heard only in the extreme nutcase fringe of the right-wing. Now, it's mainstream Republican Party thinking.

We don't live in the 18th Century anymore, with "taxation without representation." These days, we do have representation. We have a democracy. If you don't like our government, you can change it - up to and including changing the U.S. Constitution itself.

But the trick is that you need other people to agree with you. You're not the dictator here. No one is the dictator. If you want to become president, you need a majority of people to support you. OK, OK, George W. Bush became president without that, so our system isn't perfect. But it's a hell of a lot better than terrorism!

In right-wing mythology, though, you have guns so you can shoot the police, politicians, and other government officials if you don't like the way elections go. How insane is that? Even their beloved 2nd Amendment doesn't imply anything like that, not even close. (Indeed, if you actually read it, "well regulated" is specifically written into the amendment itself.)

This is insane right-wing fringe ideology,... only it's not just on the fringe these days. It's being promoted by Republican senators, governors, and even by the Republican Party's presidential candidate. How crazy can these people get?

Donald Trump said exactly what he meant, and his supporters understood him very, very well: "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. But the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

No, he didn't come right out and tell people to shoot Hillary Clinton. Even Trump isn't that stupid. And he probably doesn't want anyone to shoot her before the election. He said it himself. If she's elected and can pick her judges, that's the time for assassination, that's the time for terrorism.

Meanwhile, he's just using that rhetoric for political advantage (which will backfire, I hope). His crazier supporters might not wait, but so what? All Trump cares about is winning. And that means he's become increasingly unhinged as it's clear that he's losing, and losing badly.

I can't predict what Trump will say next, because he just gets loonier and loonier. But what's next for the Republican Party? Will the GOP, too, just get loonier and loonier? Or if they're beaten in a landslide this year, will sane Republicans finally take back their party?

There are still sane Republicans, right?

(Nick Anderson)

Second Amendment remedies

(Tom Toles)

Donald Trump has said many stupid, crazy things during this campaign, but suggesting that gun nuts assassinate his political opponent tops the list, don't you think?

The Republican presidential nominee said of his Democratic opponent: "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.

"But the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

It's hardly even worth pointing out that Hillary Clinton has never suggested abolishing the Second Amendment. Obviously, it wouldn't make any difference if she had, since assassination is terrorism, not politics.

Since when can a candidate for President of the United States - the nominee of one of our two main political parties, no less - get away with suggesting assassination, just because the polls show that he's losing badly? How could anyone still support this guy?

Of course, this isn't completely new to the GOP:

This isn't the first time that a Republican has suggested drastic action against Clinton. In June, Trump delegate and New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro (R), who also chairs Trump’s veterans group, said that Clinton should be put on the firing line and be "shot for treason" over the terror attacks in Benghazi. The Secret Service launched an investigation into Baldasaro’s comments.

Earlier in August, longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone suggested that if Clinton wins a state like Florida — where she currently leads Trump in a head-to-head matchup, according to polling — then the election would be "illegitimate," in which case he promised a "bloodbath."

But this isn't just any random moron, this is the specific moron Republicans have chosen as their presidential candidate.

And now this particular moron, Donald Trump, has escalated the rhetoric, magnifying those threats of terrorism, by actually suggesting that gun nuts assassinate his political opponent. And make no mistake, that's exactly what he was saying, despite desperate attempts by Republican leaders to spin it otherwise.

If you vote for anyone other than Hillary Clinton in November, or even if you sit out the election entirely, you will be encouraging this kind of bullshit. We Americans need to take a stand.

And face it, the Republican Party will never change unless the party loses in a landslide. Anything less than that won't be enough. It needs to be a shocking loss, an overwhelming loss, with no possibility to spin it as anything else.

I remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I remember the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. I remember the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  That's not the kind of America I want. Do you?

I was unhappy when the five Republicans on our Supreme Court stole the 2000 election for George W. Bush. I was astonished when Bush was re-elected in 2004, after we already knew what a complete disaster he was. But I didn't shoot anyone. I didn't even suggest shooting anyone. And I would have immediately turned against anyone who did.

How could Donald Trump be happening in America? Have Republicans completely lost their minds?

(Mike Luckovich)

Muslims attend mass

After too much Donald Trump, I needed a little bit of optimism today. I needed to know that there are still good people in the world. So I was happy to read this little news story from the BBC:

Muslims across France have attended Catholic Mass in a gesture of solidarity after the murder of a priest on Tuesday.

Fr Jacques Hamel was killed in his church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen by two men who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

France's Muslim council, the CFCM, urged Muslims to show "solidarity and compassion" over the murder.

"We are all Catholics of France," said Anouar Kbibech, the head of the CFCM. ...

Muslims in Italy also attended Mass on Sunday. Three imams sat in the front row at Santa Maria Trastevere church in Rome.

Decent people can fight back against the bigots, against the haters, against irrational violence. I'm neither Christian nor Muslim, but so what? We don't have to agree about everything to stand up for a peaceful society with liberty and justice for all.

It's not 1968

(Eric Gay, AP)

As bad as the latest news as been, it's not 1968, as Jonathan Chait reminds us:

In his January 2008 speech following his defeat in the New Hampshire primary — the one will.i.am set to music — Barack Obama insisted, “We are not as divided as our politics suggest … we are one people, we are one nation.” That conviction, to say the least, has been sorely tested during Obama’s presidency. It has been especially strained during a presidential campaign in which Republicans nominated a race-baiting demagogue for president. And last night, when a gunman murdered police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, it appeared to reach a kind of breaking point. In the feverish late-night heat, race-baiters at the New York Post, Breitbart, and Matt Drudge stoked a race war they clearly craved. It was 1968 again, more than a few observers said. Everything seemed to be coming apart.

But the old, tattered ideal of unity may be healthier than it seemed. The demonstration in Dallas was the very model of a functioning liberal society — a peaceful protest against police conducted under the protection of the police themselves. Even the most radical of the protesters deplored the shootings, and the police honored the right to protest.

Probing deeper, into more tender spots, one could even detect a formative consensus about the underlying cause of the protest: the routine violence by police against African-Americans. Videos of the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have not only galvanized African-Americans who have grown accustomed to the constant threat of police brutality, but they also shocked no small number of white Americans. ...

Among Republican leaders, the impulse to restore calm prevailed over the impulse to stoke racial hysteria. Paul Ryan praised the values of peaceful protest. Newt Gingrich -- Newt Gingrich! -- conceded, "It's more dangerous to be black in America. You’re substantially more likely to be in a situation where police don’t respect you." Even Donald Trump obliquely, and with a characteristically shaky command of the facts, conceded the need for some solution to police abuse: “The senseless, tragic deaths of two motorists in Louisiana and Minnesota reminds us how much more needs to be done.” Whatever Trump actually believed — the identification of Trump’s real convictions always being more art than science — he at least felt compelled to make some nod toward the perception that the police had gone too far. It was not inspiring, it was not ideal, but it was also more than one would have gotten from, say, circa-1968 George Wallace.

That's not to say that we don't have our George Wallaces, even today. Former Congressman Joe Walsh (Republican, Illinois) tweeted "This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you."

Meanwhile, the organizers of that Dallas protest, those "black lives matter punks," condemned the shooting in unequivocal terms. It was a peaceful protest, as guaranteed by our Constitution. The shooter appears to have been a lone, heavily armed crazy. We've certainly seen enough of those, haven't we? Is the fact that this one was black really significant in any way?

A reader at TPM describes 1968 this way. I remember it. I was still a teenager, far more concerned about myself than about the world at large, but I remember it. Despite the absolute hysterics about our first black president, we've progressed since then. Indeed, the fact that we elected a black president is a pretty good indication of that.

Sure, there are racists who gleefully predict a race war. Yes, there are lunatics in our country. And, of course, they're all armed to the teeth, thanks to the NRA, hysterical gun nuts, and cowardly politicians. But sane people still make up the majority in our country.

If you don't know how bad it's been, it's always easy to think that the current day is the worst ever. Indeed, I have people tell me that - people eager to predict the Christian end times, people woefully ignorant of history. It's not true.

The problem these days is that random lunatics can do more damage than ever, thanks to the ever-increasing availability of military grade weapons (and the capability of those weapons to kill large numbers of people). That's a problem we haven't been willing to address.

It's not just guns, either. As our technology improves, the ability of small numbers of people to kill vast quantities of other people also increases. There's always the possibility of truly horrendous acts of terrorism.

Unfortunately, it's not a problem that will ever be completely solved. At best, we can only try to minimize the incidents. Don't get me wrong. We should definitely be doing that. But we won't ever be 100% successful, no matter what we do.

But random lunatics aren't going to destroy our country. We have to do that. And despite everything - despite Donald Trump, despite Joe Walsh and the people like him, despite the hysteria on the right - I'm confident that we're going to survive 2016 just like we survived 1968.

There are people who want violence. There are people who push violence. And there are people who will use violence for their own political advantage. But that's not America. Most of us are better than that.

Letter from an ex-Muslim

Wow! Just... wow!

President Obama stands up to Trump bigotry

Refreshing, isn't it? When did sanity become so refreshing?

But it's the age of Donald Trump. It's the age of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and many other Republican lunatics, who are encouraged by Republicans willing to use that insanity in order to advance their own political ambition, no matter what it does to our country.

Note my last post, where I pointed out Christian pastors who were praising the Orlando shooting. Well, the Bible does tell Christians to kill gay people. Like Muslim extremists, those Christian extremists take such primitive superstition seriously. Does Trump want to discriminate against Christians, too, then?

No, it's just bigotry. It's the unholy combination of bigotry and politics, that's all. Barack Obama has faced that for almost eight years now. He's got to be getting pretty sick of it, don't you think?

Trevor Noah addresses the Orlando shooting

These events are so sickening that I hate to talk about them at all, or even think about them. But what's especially sickening is that we never do anything about it.

Well, if a grade school could be shot up without America actually trying to do something about it, what would get us to take action?

Here's another perspective:



And re. that last video, check out what these Christian pastors say about the Orlando attack:

After 49 people were gunned down in an Orlando gay nightclub in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, pastors in California and Arizona praised the gunman for massacring “perverted predators” and “pedophiles.”

In Sacramento, Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church said the killer succeeded in making Orlando safer.

“Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?” Jimenez said in a sermon originally posted on YouTube. “Um no, I think that’s great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight.”

In the sermon, delivered just hours after the rampage on Sunday morning, Jimenez also said, “I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a wall, put a firing squad in front of them and blow their brains out.”

Tempe, Arizona preacher Steven Anderson also rushed to praise the “good news” that “there are 50 less pedophiles in this world.” ...

"The bad news is that a lot of the homos in the bar are still alive, so they're going to continue to molest children and recruit children into their filthy homosexual lifestyle," he said, adding the attack would be used to attack Christians and push gun control.

Maybe Republicans would like to ban all Christians from entering America?

Owen Jones: the terrorism in Orlando will fail

Great message, isn't it?

Rising xenophobia

In another incident of hysteria and xenophobia - as we've seen in previous incidents like this one - a blonde passenger on an American airlines flight became suspicious of her seatmate:

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse. ...

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

They might even have discovered that last year he was awarded the prestigious Carlo Alberto Medal, given to the best Italian economist under 40. That’s right: He’s Italian, not Middle Eastern, or whatever heritage usually gets ethnically profiled on flights these days.

Menzio had been on the first leg of a connecting flight to Ontario, where he would give a talk at Queen’s University on a working paper he co-authored about menu costs and price dispersion. His nosy neighbor had spied him trying to work out some properties of the model of price-setting he was about to present. Perhaps she couldn’t differentiate between differential equations and Arabic.

Yes, that brilliant American passenger couldn't distinguish mathematics from Arabic. Not that it would have mattered if this man had been writing Arabic. So what? Not that it should have mattered if he'd been of Middle Eastern, rather than Italian, ancestry. What in the world has happened to us?

You can read the whole story here. But it's completely insane. Like Donald Trump's candidacy, it's a triumph of hysteria, xenophobia, and irrational fear over sanity, courage, and common sense.

Actual Islamic terrorists must be laughing their asses off. This is exactly what terrorism is designed to accomplish. It works best on cowards, because cowards overreact. And what better way to destroy America than to encourage America to destroy itself? (They must be overjoyed at the rise of Donald Trump.)

It's bad enough that we have to take our shoes off before boarding a plane, because one guy tried - unsuccessfully - to explode his shoes. And it was certainly disgusting that we were willing to torture prisoners of war because we were scared (or because the Bush Administration wanted to justify their invasion of Iraq, take your pick).

But this degree of hysteria is just ridiculous. Now an Italian economist can't even take a plane in America? Or anyone who speaks Arabic to a relative on a phone? Or any Muslim at all? (Or anyone who even looks Muslim?)

What has happened to the America I love?

Christian terrorism

Remember when we were shocked that Republicans supported torturing prisoners of war? Oh, we were so innocent back then, weren't we?

Now, they support terrorism. Christian terrorism. American terrorism. There is no other word for it. Republican candidates for President of the United States argue for deliberately killing innocent families. How is that not terrorism?

Ted Cruz apparently wants to nuke the Middle East. (Yeah, he's not honest enough, not man enough, to say it outright, so he just implies it.) How is that not advocating terrorism?

Of course, Republican audiences cheer for everything, no matter how evil it gets. Admittedly, Jesus was a big supporter of terrorism, wasn't he? Torture, too, as I recall.

Or was that the other guys? Gee, who nailed whom to a cross, again? (You know, that's something Republicans haven't suggested yet, bringing back crucifixion. I suppose it's only a matter of time, huh?)

But then, they're cowards. Terrorism works very well on cowards, because it gets them to overreact out of fear.

But you had me at torture. I was aghast enough at that. Americans torturing prisoners of war? Unbelievable! Oh, how little I knew. As I say, it was a more innocent time. Now, Republicans plan for America to become the world's foremost terrorist.

Deliberately.

PS. Note the last part of this, where Cenk Uygur says:

"Like the fundamentalist Muslims, these fundamentalist Christians believe in killing civilians. They don't have any problem with it at all. They just said it!  'We'll kill their families and we'll carpet-bomb their cities.

This is the kind of insane crap that Ann Coulter used to say, to be so over-the-top, to garner attention. Right? Now, it's become mainstream and gets wild applause at a Republican debate. So, understand who you are. You're in league with the terrorists. That's what terrorists do.

Terrorists say, 'We will kill their families and we will bomb them indiscriminately.' Republicans agree."

Ann Coulter used to be extreme. But when fanatics take control, you can never be too extreme. Ann Coulter is mainstream these days. So is Rush Limbaugh. How do you make a living being extreme when this is mainstream Republican thinking these days?

Seth Meyers: Obama on terror

I've never been a big fan of Saturday Night Live, but I always liked Seth Meyers when he was there. Still, he's really come into his own on Late Night with Seth Meyers.

I'm still disappointed that Jon Stewart is gone, and The Colbert Report, too. (Stephen Colbert on The Late Show just isn't the same) But Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore are pretty decent replacements, and better yet, John Oliver and Seth Meyers have been superb.

Amanda Marcotte does it again

Seriously, Amanda Marcotte is one of the most clear-thinking people on the internet. I don't think there's anything I've read from her that isn't perceptive and intelligent. She's just exceptional, all the time.

Obviously, I'm impressed. And here she goes again with "Liberals are not soft on, sympathetic towards, or defensive about Islamic terrorism."

First, she notes the two most recent mass shootings, at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado and at the office party in San Bernadino, and contrasts the reactions to each. Then:

To wit, conservatives are extremely defensive about the Planned Parenthood shooting, but clearly see it as a political “win” if the San Bernardino shooting was rooted in Islamic terrorism. Even more bizarrely, there’s a sense, particularly in right wing circles, that the opposite is true for liberals: That we somehow have reason to be on the defense if this shooting, as it looks like it will be, is an act of Islamic terrorism. ...

We’ve been down this road before. After the Paris attacks, accusing liberals of somehow being protective of or defensive of the teachings of ISIS became a popular talking point on the right. Republicans harped endlessly on the Democratic candidates for avoiding the inexact and needlessly provocative term “radical Islam.”

It’s part point-scoring, and part projection. After all, conservative Christians continue to blindly endorse radical rhetoric and beliefs that lead to Christian terrorism of the sort that we saw at Planned Parenthood, so they assume that the “other” side has a similar problem, just with Islam instead of Christianity.

Sadly, it’s not just conservatives who make this asinine assumption, either — there’s a certain arrogant, pseudo-liberal type of atheist who also seems to think that liberals are somehow more sympathetic to or protective of Islamic terrorism than Christian terrorism. After the Paris attacks, Bill Maher, while grasping that it’s probably unwise to bomb blindly, still sneered, “It was probably not the Amish,” as if liberals were suggesting otherwise. Sam Harris went even farther, echoing Ted Cruz’s rhetoric about how Christian terrorism isn’t even really a thing, and assuming that the only reason liberals support the Syrian refugees is that we’re blind to the threat of Islamic terrorism.

This has gone on long enough. It’s time to say it straight: Just because conservatives believe there’s some kind of global battle between Christianity and Islam doesn’t mean that liberals have to agree, much less that they take the “Islam” side of that equation. On the contrary, most liberals see fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam as categorically the same and categorically illiberal in their shared opposition to feminism and modernity.

This goes double when it comes to the fringe actors in either faith who become radicalized and turn to violence to impose their theocratic views on the unwilling. Liberals understand that there are theological and political differences between the different kinds of radical fundamentalism that lead to terrorism, but we are keenly aware that people who pick up a gun in the name of God have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of us.

What liberals object to is the conservative tendency to erase all distinctions between the relatively few Muslims around the world who have violent views and the majority of Muslims who, whether they are conservative or not, do not agree with ISIS or Al Qaeda’s distortion of Islam. ... Just as it’s important to maintain these distinctions when talking about Christianity, it’s equally important to keep these distinctions in mind when talking about Islam.

There’s nothing in that logic that suggests that liberals have some secret googly-eyes for demagoguing radical Muslim fundamentalists, anymore than we love Pat Robertson. On the contrary, we tend to see them as basically the same kind of misogynist, homophobic authoritarians who hide behind God to get their way. To suggest otherwise is not just dishonest, but irresponsible, since it can hinder the very diplomatic efforts we need to keep people alive.

Great, isn't it?  I'll go further. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. As an atheist, I don't particularly like that, any more than I like the fact that there are 2.2. billion Christians or 1 billion Hindus.

I don't agree with any of them. But they don't have to be my enemies. We disagree, but so what? With freedom of speech and freedom of religion, you're allowed to disagree. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that disagreement is a good thing. If you never speak with anyone who disagrees with you, how could you ever have confidence in your own beliefs?

It would be stupid - incredibly, astonishingly stupid - to make 1.6 billion people our enemies without having a very, very good reason for it. Why would we be dumb enough to do that?

And who wants it? Well, Islamic terrorists want it, for one. But why would we do what they want? That just makes no sense whatsoever.

Right-wing Christians want it, too. Both groups of fanatics want to see this as a war between Christianity and Islam. But why in the hell would we sane people want to go along with that? I just can't imagine that kind of mindset.

I sure as hell, as an atheist, don't want to make it a war between atheists and believers. We're heavily outnumbered, for one thing. For another, we can do just fine with freedom of speech and freedom of religion. And for a third, we'd destroy everything we want in a civilized society if we tried to outlaw religion - even if we did have that kind of power. The whole idea is just... stupid.

If this is a war, it's a war between civilized people who accept - even treasure - freedom of speech and freedom of religion and those people who want to force their own beliefs on everyone else. There are Muslims on both sides of that war, just as there are Christians and Hindus and, yes, even atheists.

Furthermore, as a practical matter, it's a very good thing for American politicians - especially at the highest levels - to bend over backward making it clear that this isn't a war with Islam. Thus, there's a very, very, very good reason why Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, among others, try to avoid terms like "radical Islam," even though the terrorists themselves push the idea that they're fighting for their religion.

After all, why in the hell would we be stupid enough to do exactly what our enemies want?  ISIS and Al-Qaeda alike want to convince the world - and especially the 1.6 Muslims in the world - that their terrorism is a matter of defending Islam from the Christian West. I can't even imagine why we'd be dumb enough to help them.

Except that right-wing Christian fanatics also want to push that idea. And right-wing politicians see a political advantage in pushing it. (Note that these are the same people who used racism for political advantage, too. Nothing is too low for them, apparently. Their political ambition trumps everything else (pun intended).)

Of course, that's the other thing. Republican politicians and propaganda mills like Fox 'News' also see a political advantage in claiming that liberals are soft on Islam. Face it, Republican politicians do everything for political advantage. Well, all politicians do that to some extent. But for the Democrats, there tend to be limits. Democrats at least put America above their own political advantage.

I don't know what's wrong with Bill Maher and Sam Harris. But they're not politicians, and they only speak for themselves. And just because you're smart about some things, that doesn't mean you're smart about everything - and certainly not that you're right about everything.

Heck, even I've been known to be wrong occasionally. Well, once or twice, at least. Not recently. :)

Anyway, I'm not wrong about Amanda Marcotte, am I?

When fascism comes to America

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis

I know that Americans are notoriously ignorant about history, but... this ignorant? And this cowardly, too? How did Americans get to be such hopeless cowards? I don't get it.

Incidentally, in that video clip, Trump says he "wouldn't rule it out." But don't let that give you the wrong impression:

So on Monday he's saying he'd "strongly consider" shutting down mosques. And then just a day later he's saying he'd "absolutely" close them down. With his Muslim ID card and database, Wednesday he said he wouldn't rule out creating such a system. By the end of the day he was telling NBC News he would "absolutely" create such a system.

In the Republican Party, crazy isn't enough. You have to be crazier than the other guy. If you're a Republican politician, you don't want to be seen as a 'moderate' when it comes to destroying America's freedoms, because sure as hell there will be someone even crazier than you are to steal your thunder.

This is a Republican?

This is a Republican? Yeah, this is a Republican. I'm impressed. And I can't imagine when I last said that about a Republican politician.

I expect this kind of clear thinking from Elizabeth Warren. I don't expect it from any Republican.

___
Edit: This guy ended up voting for the bill to keep out Syrian refugees. So maybe he's a more typical Republican than it seemed.

Planned Parenthood faces domestic terrorism

From TPM:
The president of NARAL, a prominent national abortion rights group, issued a blistering statement on Friday criticizing the press for devoting insufficient attention to a string of recent arson attacks at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country. ...

Hogue’s full statement is below, courtesy of Media Matters.

Make no mistake: we are witnessing acts of domestic terrorism at health care facilities across the country, targeting women who seek medical advice and the doctors who are brave enough to counsel them--in the face of repeated, violent attacks and daily threats. But, instead of treating these incidents as the real and present danger to innocent civilians that they are, Congress is inviting anti-abortion extremists to testify at hearings, the Department of Justice has yet to announce a full investigation, and the news media remains silent. Where is the outrage?

Women can and will continue to make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives, despite murders, bombings, arsons and intimidation by those who will stop at nothing to deny women legal abortion services. We have to remember that just six years ago a doctor was gunned down in the pews of his own church in the name of this extremist movement and against a backdrop of tolerance for the radical views.

The media need to report these incidents as what they are: domestic terrorism. By staying silent or failing to discuss this new wave of attacks on health clinics in the context of anti-abortion extremism, the media is giving extremists the cover to regressively and violently attack women, their access to health care, and the medical professionals who provide it. We call on the DOJ to investigate the recent arsons, showing that our legal system will not tolerate and further assault on women, clinic escorts, security personnel or medical staff, and the news media to hold the government accountable for keeping Americans safe from harm.

Why don't the media cover Christian terrorism the way they cover Islamic terrorism? Maybe it's that Islamic terrorism is both financially rewarding and politically beneficial to many Americans?