Barack Obama

Fox News Compares Obama To Pope Francis – And Not In A Good Way

Posted by on December 5, 2013 at 10:33 am. 10 Comments :

Here it comes, folks. The Fox News sufferers of ODS (Obama Derangement Syndrome) are exhibiting advanced symptoms of ever greater severity. Their determination to demonize President Obama is returning to the absurdly elevated levels that characterized the last two elections when they portrayed him as a friend to terrorists and a foreign-born Marxist who hates America.

The latest in their cavalcade of lunacy is a report that compares Obama to Pope Francis with a headline feature, “Pope Francis is the Catholic Church’s Obama – God help us,” that is insulting to both of them.

Fox News

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The story, in predictable Fox fashion, assails the President as a weak, ineffective leader who naively panders to his enemies. What was less predictable is the attribution of the same failings to the previously infallible Pope. The author, Fox News editor and self-described Catholic, Adam Shaw, begins by declaring that the popular new Pope is already headed in the wrong direction and that “just as President Obama has been a disappointment for America, Pope Francis will prove a disaster for the Catholic Church.” That’s a pretty strong condemnation directed at God’s anointed representative on Earth. Either Shaw knows better about what’s best for the church than the Lord Almighty, or he just wants to exploit this matter to beat up on a president he and his bosses despise.

Shaw’s argument supporting this view loiters around feverish criticisms that the Pope is insufficiently dismissive of gays, contraception, and those churchly nuisances, the poor. He chastises the Pope by grumbling that “Francis thinks by talking vacuously about the poor, he will be respected.” What Shaw means by “vacuous” is the Pope’s remarkable exhortation on economic inequality that rebuked the idolatry of money and trickle-down economics (you know, like Jesus did). It’s a theme the President picked up on yesterday in his speech on the same subject, but what Shaw called “vacuous” Obama called “eloquent.”

“The Pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length. ‘How can it be,’ he wrote, ‘that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?'”

Shaw sums up his screed with a twin-barrel attack on both Obama and the Pope as confused and deceived dupes of some sort of covert socialist cabal:

“Like Obama, Francis is unable to see the problems that are really endangering his people. Like Obama he mistakes the faithful for the enemy, the enemy for his friend, condescension for respect, socialism for justice and capitalism for tyranny.”

There is nothing particularly new in Shaw’s offensive rhetoric. It is a rather typical example of the Fox News, right-wing disparagement of any advocacy on behalf of society’s less fortunate. Any public activism that doesn’t inure to the benefit of elite, wealthy individuals and corporations is looked upon as tantamount to Marxist tyranny in the eyes of modern Tea Party conservatives. And the opportunity to wrap their hostility in a blanket of feigned spirituality proved just to compelling to resist. God help us, indeed.

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Sen. Cornyn Responds To News Of A Nuclear Deal With Iran

Posted by on November 23, 2013 at 11:15 pm. 5 Comments :

I was gonna write up something funny about Republicans saying that the nuclear deal with Iran was an attempt by Obama to distract from health care. But reality beat me to the punchline – again.

John Cornyn

Why is it always someone from Texas? So John Cornyn, the number two Republican in the senate, thinks that this deal, that has been in the works for months, was concocted as a scheme to divert attention from a bad news cycle about the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). And furthermore, Cornyn is seriously asserting that President Obama somehow got Iran, Germany, France, England, Russia, and China to participate in the deception. If Obama could pull that off he would deserve to go down in history for that alone.

The agreement put together by Secretary of State John Kerry is a hardball deal that requires Iran to neutralize existing stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, abandon high-tech centrifuges, cease construction and operations at their plutonium reactor, and consent to intrusive inspections. Plus, it leaves most sanctions in place until Iran demonstrates that it is in compliance. It’s everything on our wishlist, yet this goofball thinks the whole thing is an elaborate distraction from a glitchy website.

I swear, it just doesn’t pay to try to do satire anymore.

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Sarah Palin Joins The “Just Like Slavery” Teabernacle Choir

Posted by on November 11, 2013 at 4:55 pm. 15 Comments :

When republican critics get tired of calling President Obama a Muslim or a socialist or a Kenyan or a homosexual or a tyrant or a mad genius or an idiot figurehead or a Black Panther or a Wall Street lackey or lizard overseer, they generally just resort to comparing him to Adolf Hitler. However, lately a new unfounded and irrational insult has been working its way up the charts of the conservative hitlist, and has-been, half-term governor Sarah Palin is the latest to give it her rendition.

Palin: When that note comes due … and this isn’t racist … but it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.

Sarah Palin
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Palin was referring to the national debt, which she seems to believe is at risk of being sent to the International Collections and Captivity Corporation for redemption. While it was thoughtful of her to remind us that associating her remarks about the first African-American president with the historical scab of slavery isn’t racist, she nevertheless fails to grasp the intricacies of economics. But she does align herself with a growing congregation of noxious Tea Partiers who think that anything President Obama does that they don’t like is just like slavery. For instance…

  • Rush Limbaugh: Well over 50% of the American people don’t want [Obamacare]. And the Republicans are like ‘well we can’t do anything about it. The law’s the law, It’s the law of the land.’ Well, so was slavery one time, the law of the land.
  • Dr. Ben Carson: Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. […] In a way, it is slavery, because it is making all of us subservient to the government.
  • Sen. Rand Paul: Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? You’re basically saying you believe in slavery.
  • VA Atty Genl Ken Cuccinelli: “The founders knew how bad [slavery] was. We have other things in this country today and abortion is one of them.
  • Former Rep. Allen West: He does not want you to have the self-esteem of getting up and earning, and having that title of American. He’d rather you be his slave.
  • NH Rep. Bill O’Brien: And what is Obamacare? It is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act.
  • Glenn Beck: What do you think these federal jobs are all about? These federal jobs are not about helping anything. They are about getting people enslaved to the state.

Is this trend of comparing Obama’s agenda to slavery better than comparing him to Hitler? It’s a tough call. But many on the right may not mean it as an insult. There are some prominent conservatives who have publicly expressed their opinion that slavery was actually a pretty good thing. So perhaps this is just Palin’s way of complementing Obama.

Immunize Your Children Against The Dreaded Obama Virus, Says Fox News “Psycho” Analyst

Posted by on November 1, 2013 at 4:00 pm. 2 Comments :

It is now indisputable that the most maniacally demented crackpot on Fox News (since the excommunication of Glenn Beck) is the psychiatric member of their Medical A-Team, “Doctor” Keith Ablow. This ODS (Obama Derangement Syndrome) sufferer regularly violates the Principles of Medical Ethics of the American Psychiatric Association (Section 7.3) by forming medical opinions about people he has not examined and discussing them without approval.

Keith Ablow
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Ablow has previously manifested such acute symptoms as advocating the health benefits of gun ownership and political advantages of marital infidelity. He has even praised the Unabomber. Most recently he has taken to accusing President Obama of having a “victim” mentality that has turned him into “a force that is disempowering Americans.” The ravings of Ablow are rapidly devolving into what can only be described as avant-garde comedic performance art. It is such over-the-top idiocy that it can’t possibly be taken seriously.

Nevertheless, Ablow has a captive audience in the Fox News congregation of Tea-soaked dimwits. His latest op-ed for Fox has the alarming headline: “How to immunize our kids against Obama’s victim mentality.” It’s his third installment in the “victim mentality” series. He leads off by regurgitating a string of mythical affronts that Ablow’s imagination has distilled into pure lunacy. For instance, he brings up the old “you didn’t build that” canard that Republicans deliberately misconstrued. He falsely claims that Obama believes that “individuals, even if they have committed no crimes, shouldn’t own firearms.” He raises the IRS pseudo-scandal that in reality included both liberal and conservative groups. Clearly Ablow is using this bizarre psychoanalysis in an attempt to exhume phony political attacks that didn’t work the first ten times their were trotted out.

In his previous chapter, Ablow asserted that if it wasn’t for Obama’s victim psychosis “dissolving the will of countless Americans,” there would be no poverty in America. But the new chapter is addressing the far more ominous danger that an Obama Virus poses to our children. And once again, Ablow assigns to Obama an almost supernatural power to impact whole societies by virtue of his omnipotent will:

“So it is time to immunize our sons and daughters against the president’s psychologically toxic rhetoric, which has the capacity to destroy the self-esteem of a generation of young people.”

Yikes! Sounds like the spell of Lucifer spreading across the nation like a poisonous cloud, enveloping the innocent and dooming mankind’s future to ruin. And Ablow’s response to this impending horror is an ingenious three step plan to shield our kids from Obama’s voodoo magic.

  1. Make it plain to one’s children, certainly those who are exposed to the news, that the current president and those he has selected to govern with him are attempting to convince them that they are not powerful and cannot be trusted to make good decisions.
  2. Make it plain to one’s children that the president’s belief that they are not powerful, inside themselves, as instruments of the vast power in the universe that fuels love and creativity and bravery, is completely incorrect.
  3. Tell one’s children that their journey in life cannot be about admiring how powerful our government is, but being thankful for how powerful their own gifts might be and serving those gifts by putting forth all the needed effort to develop them and share them.

In short, Ablow’s advice is for patriotic parents to convince their kids that the President is a beastly liar who is trying to sap their free will and self-worth. Sure, that won’t traumatize any young’ns. And they need to be made aware of Obama’s determination to beget “the subtle, chronic, steady erosion of their belief in themselves.” Well, Ablow did publish this on the day before Halloween, so perhaps that’s why he is trying so hard to frighten the children. Or perhaps he is just dickwad who thinks he can peddle his paranoid theories about why the otherwise good people of America voted twice for such a monster. Ablow says…

“At the time we elected this president, we were doubting ourselves. We had been traumatized by the attacks of 9/11 and too many of us wondered if we had done something to deserve the hatred of others. So we elected a man who symbolized all that self-doubt and, because he had resented America his whole life, he made us doubt ourselves even more. Tell your children all this.”

Not a single wiord of that made the slightest bit of sense. First of all, we didn’t elect Obama until seven years after 9/11. The first post 9/11 election returned George W. Bush to the White House. So should he be the target of Ablow’s wrath? Secondly, what psychiatric principle asserts that a population of citizens traumatized by terror would seek to console themselves by electing someone they regarded as resentful of the nation they loved?

It’s a theory that only a madman, obsessed with showering hatred on the object of his disgust, could seriously propose. And that is a pretty sound psychoanalysis of Keith Ablow and many of his colleagues at Fox News. They are so profoundly paranoid and seething with contempt that it’s a wonder they can tie their shoe laces without strangling the cat. And now they fear a virus outbreak from the White House with the potential to turn our kids into zombies if they aren’t warned that all their leaders are out to get them. And if you think that they aren’t building a case that Obama is striving to become the messianic cult master, then you haven’t read this yet.

Oh The Stupidity: Sarah Palin Wants Obama Impeached For Both Solving/Not Solving The Debt Crisis

Posted by on October 15, 2013 at 12:30 pm. 15 Comments :

America’s own rogue GOPachyderm, Sarah Palin, is such a consistent source of hilarity it seems impossible that she could keep up the pace any longer. But just when you think she’s exhausted her supply of inanity, she posts another Facebook column and reestablishes her crackpot bona fides:

“Apparently the president thinks he can furlough reality when talking about the debt limit. To suggest that raising the debt limit doesn’t incur more debt is laughably absurd. The very reason why you raise the debt limit is so that you can incur more debt. Otherwise what’s the point?”

What Palin is mocking as “laughably absurd” is known to those who have advanced beyond remedial economics as “the truth.” The point of raising the debt ceiling, which Palin goes out of her way to misunderstand, is to pay for debt already incurred. It does not, and cannot, authorize new spending. Only Congress can do that. So if Palin has a problem with the outstanding debt, she needs to take it up with John Boehner.

Palin continues by declaring that “It’s also shameful to see [Obama] scaremongering the markets with his talk of default.” I wonder if she would castigate the sainted Tea Party icon, Ronald Reagan, for saying (video here)…

“Congress consistently brings the Government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility. This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the Federal deficit would soar.”

But Palin hasn’t even begun to showcase her Olympian idiocy. Her Facebook drivel proceeds with a self-contradictory passage that begins by stating that…

“There is no way we can default if we follow the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4, requires that we service our debt first.”

Actually, what the Fourteenth Amendment (Section 4) says is that “The validity of the public debt of the United States […] shall not be questioned.” It is a controversial clause that many interpret as authorization for the President to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling at will. So it appears that Palin is advising the President to take matters into his own hands. But her next paragraph puts an end to that sort of thinking.

“Defaulting on our national debt is an impeachable offense, and any attempt by President Obama to unilaterally raise the debt limit without Congress is also an impeachable offense.”

Huh? Palin just got finished arguing that the Constitution demands that the President take any and all measures to pay our debts. Now she says that if he does so he is guilty of an impeachable offense. And just to lock in the crazy, she also says that not doing so is likewise impeachable. In Palin’s twisted reality Obama cannot glance sideways without violating his oath of office.

Shameless self-promotion…
Get Fox Nation vs. Reality. Available now at Amazon.

What is abundantly clear is that Palin wants to believe that whatever this President does is a justification for impeachment. Her perspective is so irreparably warped that it has lost any semblance of rationality. This is something that has been noticeable for quite some time with Palin, but what stands out as utterly incomprehensible is that there are still people who hang on her every word – including in the media. It’s a sad state of affairs, but one that is not irreversible. We just need to provide the proper educational support. So let’s start with something that Palin might be able to grasp.

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Cletus on Debt Ceiling

Does Fox News Think That Ronald Reagan Tried To Panic The Markets?

Posted by on October 7, 2013 at 10:12 am. 6 Comments :

This weekend’s edition of Fox News Sunday had a segment wherein the host, Chris Wallace, interviewed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. In the course of the interview Wallace addressed the government shutdown and the approaching debt ceiling crisis with this phony premise:

“This week both you and the president seemed to be trying to panic the markets about both raising the debt ceiling and the government shutdown, saying that they should be more concerned.”

Fox News

In fact, President Obama merely observed what every credible economist has said about the prospect of the United States defaulting on its financial obligations. It would throw the world economy into turmoil and inflate the U.S. debt by billions due to higher interest rates. Just the threat of taking such an irresponsible step would panic the market without Obama having to say a word. And Obama is not the only one who thinks so. Here is what the GOP’s sainted Ronald Reagan had to say about it back on September 26, 1987:

Reagan: Congress consistently brings the Government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility. This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the Federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations. It means we have a well-earned reputation for reliability and credibility – two things that set us apart from much of the world.

The hypocrisy of the Tea Party Republicans pretending to care about impacting the financial markets is monumental. Their own words (not to mention their actions) have been far more threatening than anything Obama has said. They have been saying for five years that Obama and his Marxist policies would bring the nation to ruin. They said he would destroy the economy and the country; that ObamaCare would bankrupt the nation and lead to civil war; that asking the rich to pay a little more in taxes, rather than putting the burden on the poor and middle class, would crush the recovery; that anything the President ever proposed would be a job killer and a disincentive to investment.

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Those predictions were about as accurate as last year’s Mayan end-of-the-world prophecy. The stock market is higher now than it was before the recession. The unemployment rate has dropped from 10.1 to 7.3 percent. And ObamaCare has proved to so popular that the demand crashed the government servers. Given the right’s record on forecasting the future, how can anyone take them seriously? Even the words of their idol, Reagan, don’t seem to diffuse their rabid Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Sorry Tea-Publicans: America Made Its Choice And ObamaCare Won In A Landslide

Posted by on October 1, 2013 at 9:06 pm. 7 Comments :

House Republicans have succeeded in shutting down the government, a goal they have had for decades stretching back to Grover Norquist’s famous and heartless yearning to shrink it until it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub.

In the course of the debate there has been some dispute about whether the last election was a sufficient referendum on the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). Republicans persistently assert that the American people oppose the law and that it should be repealed to conform with their wishes. Conveniently left out of this argument is the fact that the law was passed with a super-majority in both houses of congress and signed by a popularly elected president. It later passed constitutional muster according to a conservative leaning Supreme Court. Finally, President Obama was reelected by a significant margin. And while polls about ObamaCare seem mixed, they rarely take into account that a fair percentage of unfavorable sentiment is actually people who think the law did not go far enough and would prefer a single-payer plan.

Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped the GOP from pretending that the election had nothing to do with ObamaCare and was not an affirmation of the people’s support. These Tea Party history revisionists might want to sign up for ObamaCare so they can get medical attention for their severely short-term memories.

Mitt Romney
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Mitt Romney had made repealing ObamaCare a key factor in his vain pursuit of the White House. He spoke about it on almost every campaign stop. And he did not mince words. Here are just a few examples of his pointed rhetoric:

  • If elected, I will repeal Obamacare on day one.
  • What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day if elected president of the United States. And that is, I will act to repeal Obamacare.
  • I’ve said that on the campaign trail, I think, every single day. Obamacare must be repealed –- in its entirety.
  • Our mission is clear: if we want to get rid of Obamacare, we are going to have to replace President Obama. That is my mission. That is our work. And I’m asking the American people to join me.

Apparently the American people declined to join Romney on his mission to repeal ObamaCare. Obama won by more than five million votes. And what is abundantly clear is that Romney had thrust the health care law into the forefront of the campaign. Anyone who attempts to dismiss the prominence of it as an issue is deliberately lying (I’m looking at you, Fox Nation). And if these comments by Romney are not convincing enough, he also produced an ad in the thick of the campaign blasting ObamaCare and making this promise: “Day One. Job One. Repeal ObamaCare.”

Just to reiterate – “Day One. Job One. Repeal ObamaCare.” That hardly seems like an issue that was an afterthought in the Romney Campaign. So America was presented with a choice that was focused on this very subject. They made their choice and now they are just beginning to discover the rewards of having made the right one.

That is what is so terrifying to the Republican Party. If they really believed that ObamaCare would be a disaster, they would allow it to proceed and fail, and then they would ride a wave of support into a senate majority next year and the White House in 2016. Instead they are putting up roadblocks, disseminating disinformation, and trying to persuade people not to enroll. Because they know that once people see what the program actually provides, they will not only be excited and grateful, they will lobby their representatives to expand it.

So remember that the more you hear Republicans slamming ObamaCare and trying to prevent its implementation, the more you know they are running in fear of a law that they themselves believe will be popular and will help millions of people. And if there is one thing Republicans hate, it’s helping people, because – you know – socialism.

Dumbass Doocy: Fox News Still Doesn’t Understand What The Debt Ceiling Is

Posted by on September 21, 2013 at 10:58 am. 23 Comments :

As the nation approaches another showdown over the raising of the debt ceiling, Fox News continues to prove that either they don’t understand economics or they are dedicated to misinforming their gullible viewers – or more likely, both.

On Friday’s episode of Fox & Friends, Steve Doocy and his couch potato pals reacted with surprise to President Obama’s remarks about raising the debt ceiling. The President correctly described the function of this routine economic procedure by telling the Business Roundtable what it actually entails.

“Obama: Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy. All it does is it says you’ve got to pay the bills that you’ve already racked up, Congress. It’s a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved.

Concerned that a succinct and coherent explanation might make Fox viewers aware of a small bit of reality (something Fox works diligently against), Doocy stepped up to make sure that his audience remained blissfully ignorant. He played two videos of Obama, one talking about the risks of high debt and the other advocating raising the debt ceiling. Doocy then said that Obama was talking about the same thing and had flipped his position. However, the debt is not the same thing as the debt ceiling. But this is a subject that is apparently way over Doocy’s head.

Doocy: So the first sound bite was from the president a couple of days ago at the Business Roundtable where he really got people thinking, “Did he just misspeak?” because he said essentially that raising the debt ceiling does not increase our debt. I know he studied law, and not economics, but increasing the debt ceiling indeed raises the debt.

Well, I know Doocy studied journalism at the University of Kansas and not economics, while Obama got a B.A. in political science from Columbia University and graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School, but Doocy clearly knows nothing about either economics or journalism. Raising the debt ceiling does not raise the debt one penny. Just as the President said, it merely authorizes the government to pay bills that Congress has already incurred.

Allow me to spell it out. Let’s say the national debt is $10 trillion and the debt ceiling is $9 trillion. If the ceiling is raised to $11 trillion so that it can accommodate the outstanding obligations, the debt is still $10 trillion. There is no change except for the fact that bills can now be paid which, ironically, would have the effect of lowering the debt. Failing to raise the debt ceiling would result in default which would cause the ratings services to lower the nation’s credit worthiness. That would increase the interest that we pay on the debt which, of course, increases the debt. Which is exactly what happened last year.

So Doocy, and most of the Tea Party right, have everything exactly backwards – as usual. There is only one real reason that Fox and the GOP are obstructing the debt ceiling increase, and that is to harm Obama by attempting to blame him for the economic debacle that would ensue following a default. And they regard the devastation that the American people would suffer as merely collateral damage. As evidence, take a look at this chart that I created a couple of years ago illustrating the Republican support for raising the debt ceiling until a certain event occurred:

Debt Ceiling

And the same dishonest, partisan, hackery is in full effect today.

Glenn Beck Takes A Commanding Lead In The Incoherence Olympics

Posted by on September 15, 2013 at 5:02 pm. 8 Comments :

To anyone who has been paying attention, Glenn Beck has never been one to put much emphasis on making sense when he delivers his hate-filled diatribes. Much more important to Beck is his focus on twisting unrelated sentence fragments into jumbles of conspiratorial nightmares that lead to the imminent extinction of all mankind.

Glenn Beck

Last Friday Beck applied the full force of his dementia to cast President Obama as a foreign entity who “doesn’t know who Americans are.” But his spiel was so disjointed and incomprehensible it has to be heard to be believed.



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Let’s break it down. Beck starts out just mumbling without even completing his psycho thoughts.

There is a great desire…..[He never tells us what the desire is]
And this is why I think this president has missed the opportunity…..{He never reveals the nature of the opportunity]
Because he doesn’t know who Americans are. Just like he doesn’t really…..[Really what? Who knows? He doesn’t say]
He’s not a sports fan. He didn’t grow up here…..[And that’s relevant why?]
And that’s not a slam on him or anything else…..[Gee, I wonder what would be a slam]
He didn’t grow up here. He wasn’t immersed in the culture.

This would be a good time to point out that Obama did indeed grow up in America. While he spent four years in Indonesia between the ages of six and ten, the rest of the time was all in the good old U.S. of A. Plus, he was an avid sports fan and participant. But the wild allegation that Obama’s alleged foreignness is connected to a phony aversion to sports falls apart in Beck’s very next sentence when he say “I grew up here. I’m not a sports fan.” So Beck’s theory is that Obama is not a sports fan because he didn’t grow up here, even though he (Beck) did grow up here but is not himself a sports fan. What on earth is his point?

Beck goes on to fling rhetorical feces at Obama that make no sense and have no basis in reality:

“But I am a fan of the history of the country. I grew up here. And I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that appreciated the heritage of the United States of America. He didn’t. He grew up in a family that hated the United States of America and he has been surrounded by people who hate the United States of America. That’s not a slam on him, that’s a fact. It’s just a fact. So you wouldn’t expect him to be anything else.

“This country gave him the opportunity to go from a guy who grew up in Asia, surrounded by people who hated the country, to become the President of the United States. Now, I do contend that he didn’t earn that. I do contend that he was selected – that he was chosen by the Soroses of the world. That he didn’t earn that. He gave a good speech that I don’t know if he even wrote. He was a good speaker. He was somebody that everybody knew that you’ll get away with murder because he’s likeable and he’s black.”

That’s the whole ball of wax right there: he’s black. That’s what irks Beck and his cadre of racist, Teabagging cretins. Beck projects his own hatred on Obama and dispenses loopy theories about a man who so detests a country that he spends his life in the service of it and succeeds in rising to lead it. Beck permits himself to believe that George Soros has magical and omnipotent powers that enable him to chose American heads of state, which begs the question, why doesn’t he just do that all the time?

As usual, Beck can’t answer any of these questions. And his brain-dead followers will never even think of them. At this point, Beck’s dementia is so advanced that all we can do is sit back and be entertained – at least until he suffers a complete meltdown and explodes in a fiery ball of fear-dripping, Messianic goo. Let’s just hope he doesn’t take any innocent folks with him.

American Exceptionalism = American Supremacy

Posted by on September 13, 2013 at 1:04 pm. 4 Comments :

There has been a mini-furor swirling around part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s op-ed in the New York Times. It was mostly a fairly tame composition that called for reflection and diplomacy. However that didn’t stop right-wing blowhards from waxing apoplectic, seemingly outraged that Putin had the audacity to express himself publicly. And the height of his hubris, in the view of conservative thought-nannies, was his criticism of that stale symbol of superiority, American Exceptionalism.

Putin: It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

How can the theo-con rightists take issue with that? By doing so they abandon principles they ordinarily regard as core to their philosophy. Neither their spiritual idols nor their nearly spiritual fixation on the “Founders” can live harmoniously with the concept of exceptionalism. What would Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and its assertion that “all men are created equal,” have to say about this?

The truth is that American Exceptionalism is another way of saying American Supremacy. The campaign for such a concept is as repulsive as Hitler’s doctrine of a Master Race. The notion that one group of people, on the basis of their nationality, are better than others, is as odious as one group asserting superiority on the basis of skin color. The original meaning of the phrase had more to do with defining Americans as an “exception to the rule.” It was modern bigots who perverted it into an expression of overarching greatness.

Fox News

Not surprisingly, Fox News is leading the parade for American Supremacy, as they have done for years. This morning, Fox & Friends aired a segment that touched on Putin’s remarks (The segment was also featured as the lead story on the Fact-Free Fox Nation web site). But Fox legal analyst Peter Johnson, Jr., and host Steve Doocy were barely coherent as they slid over to a more general discussion of a Syrian intervention and how Putin’s commentary makes it more likely:

Johnson: What’s happening, and I don’t know if Mr. Putin wants to do it or not, but he’s provoking a lot of Americans into a position that maybe, maybe they should be in agreement with the President’s decision to strike Syria. […] If they keep it up, then they will push America to the brink of a Syrian attack. I don’t know if that’s the intended consequence or not, but that will be the effect.

If you had trouble making sense of that, you’re not alone. Johnson has somehow formed the opinion that Putin might want the U.S. to attack Syria. How he comes to that conclusion is puzzling, to say the least, and is nowhere in his comments. Putin, of course, has no incentive to support a strike on Syria and, in fact, has been vociferously against it. Indeed, his opposition was the central theme of the New York Times op-ed that Johnson and Doocy were discussing:

Putin: The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. […] Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria.

The one thing Putin left out of that passage was that amongst the many countries having a strong opposition to a strike is the United States. Polls show the American people want no part of another conflict in the Middle East. Putin’s words might just as easily come out of the mouths of Republicans like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and any random Tea Party pundit. And to top it off, lefties like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alan Grayson, and MoveOn.org are just as adamantly opposed.

To recap, before President Obama had responded to Syria’s chemical weapons attack, Fox and the right complained that he wasn’t doing anything. After Obama threatened to punish Assad with military force, Fox and the right complained that he was overstepping his role and violating the Constitution. When Obama announced that he would seek congressional approval for a strike, Fox and the right called him weak and vacillating. After the threat produced a new diplomatic course that would rid Syria of its Chemical weapons, Fox and the right accused Obama of following in Putin’s footsteps. In the end, a diplomatic solution that avoids military force, the outcome preferred by Fox and the right, is now achievable through the joint efforts of Obama and Putin. Therefore, obviously, Fox and the right have come out against it and are castigating both presidents for having succeeded in averting a new war.

Warning: Any attempt to find any logic or cognitive consistency in any of the above summation could result in a severe brain hemorrhage, loss of consciousness, and permanent cerebral disability.

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