5 Christian Right Delusions and Lies About History

5 Christian Right Delusions and Lies About History

They’re not just delusional about science!

 The Christian right is most known for their denial of inconvenient science, but in many respects, they’re just as bad when it comes to the facts of history. After all, no matter what the topic, they know they can just make stuff up and their people will believe it. So why not do the same when it comes to political history? Here are five examples.

1. Joe McCarthy was a good guy. A new and extremely toxic myth is beginning to percolate in on the Christian right: Insisting that Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a paranoid alcoholic who saw communist subversives in every corner, was actually an upstanding guy fighting for God and country. In 2003, Ann Coulter published a book she claims vindicates McCarthy, but its impact wasn’t felt until 2010 when the Christian right members who stack the Texas State School Board tried to get the pro-McCarthy theories into Texas school books.

Christian right fanatics attempted to claim that McCarthy had been vindicated by something (wrongly) called the “Verona papers” (they’re actually named the “Venona papers”). There is a Venona project that has reputed historians who show that the Soviets did have spies in the country, but saying that means McCarthy was right is like saying I’m right to call your mother a serial killer because there are serial killers in America. Harvey Klehr, one of the experts working on the Venona project, denounced Christian right efforts to exploit his work to vindicate McCarthy, noting that McCarthy mostly just fingered innocent people in his paranoid haze.

The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. He remains a demagogue, whose wild charges actually made the fight against communism more difficult. Like Gresham’s Law, McCarthy’s allegations marginalized the accurate claims. Because his facts were so often wrong, real spies were able to hide behind the cover of being one of his victims and even persuade well-meaning but naïve people that the whole anti-communist cause was based on inaccuracies and hysteria.

That the Soviets spied on the U.S. is neither surprising—not even to liberals—nor indicative that the communist witch hunts were an appropriate response. The Christian right’s interest in rehabilitating McCarthy probably has less to do with readjudicating the anti-communist cause and more to do with their modern-day obsession with promoting paranoid liars in the McCarthy mold to leadership positions. If they can instill the idea that McCarthy was vindicated by history, it will be easier to argue that the current crop of politically powerful right-wing nuts such as Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz will actually “be proven right by history.” But McCarthy wasn’t and neither will they be.

2. What the Founding Fathers believed. For people who downright deify our Founding Fathers, the religious right is really hostile to accepting them as they actually were, which is not particularly religious, especially by the standards of their time. But David Barton, a revisionist “historian” whose name comes up again and again in these kinds of discussions, has spread the belief far and wide in the Christian right that the Founders were, in fact, fundamentalist Christians who are quite like the ones we have today. Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas confirms this, saying that Barton “provides the philosophical underpinning for a lot of the Republican effort in the country today.”

Barton has convinced the right to believe in their fervent wish that the Founders were religious and even theocratic with quote-mining and outright lying. He likes to whip out this John Adams quote: “There is no authority, civil or religious — there can be no legitimate government — but what is administered by this Holy Ghost.” Problem? Adams was summarizing the opinion of his opponents; that wasn’t Adams’ view at all.

Barton’s reputation took a hit recently. His most recent book, which tried to portray Thomas Jefferson as a “conventional Christian” who wanted a religious government, was so bad that even his Christian publisher decided to reject it.  But according to Politico, that’s just a small setback and Barton is quickly being restored to his position as an authority on history for gullible right-wingers. So that means his lies continue to grow and spread in right-wing circles—such as the completely made-up claim that the Constitution (which only mentions religion to insist the government stay out of it) is based on the Bible.

3. God’s protection. If you believe the lie that the Founders intended this to be a religious nation and that secularism is only a recent development, it’s not much of a leap to decide next that God, in his anger, has turned his back on the United States. And therefore that bad things are happening to us because he doesn’t protect us anymore.

You see this belief throughout the Christian right all the time. Every bad thing that happens is blamed on God removing his “hedge of protection” from the U.S. to punish us for turning our back on God in recent decades.School shootings. Global warming. Hurricanes. 9/11.

The problem with this theory should be obvious: If God is turning away from America because we’re supposedly becoming more secular, then things were better back in the day. But when was this supposed Eden of American life supposed to have happened? During the Civil War? The Gilded Age of abusive labor practices? The Great Depression? WWI? WWII? Bad things are always happening, so the notion that they can only be blamed on God’s irritation with us sinners now makes no sense at all.

4. Roman civilization. The Christian right doesn’t just like to lie about our own history; they lie about other nations, too. A popular theory on the right is that the Roman Empire “collapsed” because growing decadence and liberalism caused people to, I don’t know, be too busy screwing to govern. It’s always a little hazy, but the formula is standard: Romans started having a bunch of sex, stuff fell apart, warning for America. Not a day goes by that you don’t hear this theory floated.

The problem with that theory is it makes no kind of sense. It’s not really right to suggest there was some kind decline in “moral values,” by which the Christian right means sexual prudishness, at all. Romans were pretty uptight.The rumors that they turned all perverted and debauched were made up by Christians trying to smear pagan culture. Rome didn’t really “fall” in the sense the Christian pundits mean, anyway. It was more a gradual decline of centralized power.

Anyway, the decline coincided with the rise of Christianity, which under the “God’s protection” theory means that God was punishing Rome for dropping paganism and adopting monotheism.

5. French revolution. One problem with characterizing the American revolution as Christian instead of secular is that there was another one shortly thereafter, built on the same basic ideals, that was undeniably secular due to the aggressive attacks on Catholic power. If the French were so secular, how could the Americans not be? The answer to the conundrum is to lie and claim there was some kind of gulf between the ideals of the French Revolution and the American Revolution.

Rick Santorum floated this theory at the 2013 Values Voters Summit, where he claimed the French revolutionaries were bad because they believed that rights and democracy stem from the social contract, instead of being handed down from God. Fair enough, though really the “reason” is probably closer to how they would have described it at the time, but where he goes off the rails is to insinuate that they were rejecting the values laid out by their fellow revolutionaries in America when they did this. In reality, the arguments of French and American revolutionaries are nearly identical, echoing philosophers like John Locke who were trying to construct an ideal of rights and freedoms that is frankly secularist in nature.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

Related articles

• 5 Christian Right Delusions and Lies About History (alternet.org)
• 5 Christian Right Delusions and Lies About History (rinf.com)
• Rafael ‘Ted’ McCarthy (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• The fallacy of the Republican “moderate”: Stop being nostalgic for the right (salon.com)
• Mario Piperni on the Brilliant Ted Cruz (seniorsforademocraticsociety.wordpress.com)
• Sen. Joseph McCarthy: American Hero? (atheistrev.com)

Ann Coulter’s Latest Brain Fart

Ann Coulter has a brain fart: “The shutdown was so magnificent, run beautifully, I’m so proud of these Republicans”

Crazy lady Ann Coulter said Monday night that Republicans were smart to shutdown the federal government in an attempt to delay or defund Obamacare. ‘Destroy’ would be a better word, since that is their motivation.

“This is why I think the shutdown was so magnificent, run beautifully, I’m so proud of these Republicans, and that is because they have branded the Republican Party as the anti-Obamacare party,” she told Fox News host Sean Hannity.”

http://www.rawstory.co…

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Ann Coulter Goes Off On Obama’s Gun Proposals: ‘Screw You! You Don’t Think We Care About The Children?’

Ann Coulter Goes Off On Obama’s Gun Proposals: ‘Screw You! You Don’t Think We Care About The Children?’

by Matt Wilstein

Sean Hannity invited Ann Coulter onto Fox News tonight to discuss President Obama‘s latest speech on gun violence reduction in Minnesota today.

The two began by mocking the recently-releasedphoto of Obama skeet-shooting, with Coulter saying she’s “waiting to see the photos of him taking birth control pills to show that he’s fighting the war on women.”

But what Coulter really wanted to talk about were the “lies” being propagated by the New York Times and President Obama: “If we want to do something to reduce these gun shootings all we have to do is for the American people to want to do something” about guns. She said that the real problem is that the ACLU and liberals are preventing any real action to happen surrounding the mentally ill.

She continued, “Connecticut, Aurora, Tucson. These are crazy people. Everything they are telling you that they can do about guns is a lie.”

Coulter claimed that Obama’s big plan is to “demonize people that are legal gun owners. And Obama, look at him. He cares about the children,” she said sarcastically. “Screw you! You don’t think we care about the children?”

Hannity brought it all back to the mainstream media, who he thinks are focusing too much on the guns issue and not enough on stories that could be detrimental to Democrats, like the Sen. Menendez prostitution scandal.

Finally, Coulter weighed in on the announcement of a Republican super PAC set up to protect incumbents from Tea Party challengers. She agreed that “we do have to be careful to get candidates who don’t say stupid things.”

Watch video below, via Fox News:

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Warring Wingnut Warriors! | Far Right’s Continued Implosion

Wingnut Wars!

Dana Loesch Sues Breitbart Loons

Thanks to “wrenchwench”

How could a love so right go so wrong?

Tonight we have word of big trouble on the far right, as the Breitbrats begin fighting in earnest over the empire that Breitbart built: Talk Radio Host Dana Loesch Files Suit in St. Louis Against Breitbart.com.

I’ve been wondering why Loesch’s wingnut screeds haven’t been appearing there lately — now we know.

Conservative talk radio host and commentator Dana Loesch sued the owner of the conservative website Breitbart.com Friday, claiming that although her relationship with the news and opinion aggregating website had gone “tragically awry,” Breibart.cοm LLC refused to let her work for the company or anyone else, forcing her into “indentured servitude in limbo.”

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court here, seeks at least $75,000 in damages, as well as a judge’s declaration that her contract had expired.

The suit says that difficulties managing the Breitbart “media ‘empire’” or ideological conflicts or both had spiked the working relationship, creating a “increasingly hostile” work environment. When Loesch tried to terminate her work agreement in September, Breitbart refused and extended the agreement by a year, the suit says.

Here’s the legal document filed. Worth a chuckle!

View this document on Scribd

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Quotes from the The American Taliban

Quotes from the The American Taliban

Ann Coulter

“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.” “Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.” “Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity, as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of ‘kill everyone who doesn’t smell bad and doesn’t answer to the name Mohammed'”

Bailey Smith
“With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.”

Beverly LaHaye (Concerned Women for America)
	“Yes, religion and politics do mix. America is a nation based on biblical principles. Christian values dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office.”

Bob Dornan (Rep. R-CA)
“Don’t use the word ‘gay’ unless it’s an acronym for ‘Got Aids Yet'”

David Barton (Wallbuilders)
	“There should be absolutely no ‘Separation of Church and State‘ in America.”

David Trosch
“Sodomy is a graver sin than murder. – Unless there is life there can be no murder.”

Fob James (Governor of Alabama)
	“Behind this judicial wall of separation there is a tyranny of lies that will fall… I say to you, my friends, let it fall!” “A good butt-whipping and then a prayer is a wonderful remedy.”

Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church)

“If you got to castrate your miserable self with a piece of rusty barb wire, do it.” “Hear the word of the LORD, America, fag-enablers are worse than the fags themselves, and will be punished in the everlasting lake of fire!” “You telling these miserable, Hell-bound, bath house-wallowing, anal-copulating fags that God loves them!? You have bats in the belfry!” “American Veterans are to blame for the fag takeover of this nation. They have the power in their political lobby to influence the zeitgeist, get the fags out of the military, and back in the closet where they belong!” “Not only is homosexuality a sin, but anyone who supports fags is just as guilty as they are. You are both worthy of death.”

Gary Bauer (American Values)
	“We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There’s a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody’s values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe.”

Gary North (Institute for Christian Economics)
“The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church’s public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship.” “This is God’s world, not Satan’s. Christians are the lawful heirs, not non-Christians.”

Gary Potter (Catholics for Christian Political Action)
	“When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil.”

George Bush Sr. (President of the United States)
“I don’t know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

George W. Bush (President of the United States)
	“I don’t think that witchcraft is a religion. I wish the military would rethink this decision.”* “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.” “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”
	*Comment about Wiccans in the military

Henry Morris (Founder, Institute for Creation Research, died 2006)
“When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data.”

J. B. Stoner (White Supremacist) (1924 – 2005)

“We had lost the fight for the preservation of the white race until God himself intervened in earthly affairs with AIDS to rescue and preserve the white race that he had created…. I praise God all the time for AIDS.” “AIDS is a racial disease of Jews and Niggers, and fortunately it is wiping out the queers. I guess God hates queers for several reasons. There is one big reason to be against queers and that is because every time some white boy is seduced by a queer into becoming a queer, means his white bloodline has run out.”

James Dobson (Focus on the Family)
“Those who control the access to the minds of children will set the agenda for the future of the nation and the future of the western world.” “State Universities are breeding grounds, quite literally, for sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV), homosexual behavior, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, alcoholism, and drug abuse.” “Today’s children… They’re damned. They’re gone.”

James Kennedy (Center for Reclaiming America)
	“The Christian community has a golden opportunity to train an army of dedicated teachers who can invade the public school classrooms and use them to influence the nation for Christ.”

James Watt (Secretary of the Interior)
“We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand.”*
*Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan Admin. Responsible for National Policy regarding the Environment

Jay Grimstead (Coalition on Revival)
	“We are to make Bible-obeying disciples of anybody that gets in our way.”

Jerry Falwell (1933 – 2007)

“We’re fighting against humanism, we’re fighting against liberalism…we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today…our battle is with Satan himself.” “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah’s chariotters.” “The Bible is the inerrant … word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.” “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” “If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”

Jesse Helms (Senator R-NC, 1973-2003)

“The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian.” “All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction.” “Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping and murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.” “Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches.”

Jimmy Swaggart (Jimmy Swaggart Ministries)

“The Media is ruled by Satan. But yet I wonder if many Christians fully understand that. Also, will they believe what the Media says, considering that its aim is to steal, kill, and destroy?” “Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.” “Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it…Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory.”

John Ashcroft (Attorney General)
	“Civilized people – Muslims, Christians, and Jews – all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.”

John Whitehead (Rutherford Institute)
“The [Supreme] Court, by seeking to equate Christianity with other religions, merely assaults the one faith. The Court in essence is assailing the true God by democratizing the Christian religion.”

Joseph McCarthy (1908 – 1957)(Senator, R-WI, 1947-1957)
	“Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic Atheism and Christianity.”

Joseph Morecraft (Chalcedon Presbyterian Church)
“Nobody has the right to worship on this planet any other God than Jehovah. And therefore the state does not have the responsibility to defend anybody’s pseudo-right to worship an idol.”

Joseph Scheidler (Pro-Life Action League)
	“I would like to outlaw contraception…contraception is disgusting – people using each other for pleasure.”

Kay O’Connor (Kansas Senate Republican)
“I’m an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women today, we wouldn’t have to vote.”

Keith A. Fournier (Catholic Way)
	“We need a legal strategy which protects the rights of those of us who hold Christian convictions which will afford us the opportunity to contend once again for the mind of this culture.”

Laura Schlessinger
“I want to coin a phrase here, and I don’t mind help. What would be the communication version of “ethnic cleansing?” Because that’s what in particular the homosexual activists try to do.”

Lester Roloff (1914 – 1982)(Texas Homes for Wayward Youth)
	“Better a pink bottom than a black soul.”*
	*Roloff opened a chain of homes for “wayward” youth in the state of Texas; he was later jailed in 1973 and again in 1975 for child abuse due to the punitive punishment techniques used in his homes. He was then specifically given permision to re-open his homes by Governor George W Bush.

Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin
“George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God.”

Pat Buchanan (Presidential Candidate)

“Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.” “There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The “negroes” of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours.” “Rail as they will about ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism.”

Pat Robertson (Christian Coalition)

“The Islamic people, the Arabs, were the ones who captured Africans, put them in slavery, and sent them to America as slaves. Why would the people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers?” “Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different…More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.” “When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together.” “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” “You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.” “I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.” “[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers.” “[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism –everything that the Bible condemns.”

Paul Cameron
“I think that actually AIDS is a guardian. That is I think it was sent, if you would, about forty years ago, to destroy Western civilization unless we change our sexual ways. So it’s really a Godsend.” “Homosexuality is a crime against humanity.” “Causes of homosexuality include: ‘sex with animals'”* “Unless we get medically lucky, in three or four years, one of the options discussed will be the extermination of homosexuals.”
*Paul Cameron was discharged from the American Psychological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association due to his unethical practices and biased research regarding Homosexuals; however his work is still referenced by many fundamentalist organizations as credible.

Randall Terry (Operation Rescue)

“I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good…Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.” “Our goal must be simple. We must have a Christian nation built on God’s law, on the ten Commandments. No apologies.” “I don’t think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like – and if you have babies, you have babies.” “When I, or people like me, are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we’ll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed.” “There is going to be war, [and Christians may be called to] take up the sword to overthrow the tyrannical regime that oppresses them.”

Jerry Vines (Southern Baptist Convention)
“They would have us believe that Islam is just as good as Christianity. Christianity was founded by the virgin-born son of God, Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, the last one of which was a nine-year-old girl.”

Rick Santorum (Senator R-PA, 1995-2006)
	“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [Gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything!”

Robert Simonds (Citizens for Excellence in Education)

“As the church watches from the sidelines, the ungodly elect atheists and homosexuals to school boards and legislatures to enact policies and laws that destroy our Christian children and discriminate against Christian families.” “Atheistic secular humanists should be removed from office and Christians should be elected…Government and true Christianity are inseparable.” “We’ll take away their power and their money. Money comes from students. We’ll break their backs by taking 24 million kids out of the public schools.”

Robert T. Lee (Society for the Practical Establishment of the Ten Commandments)

“Raising your children under Americanism or any other principles other than true Christianity is child abuse.” “You do not have the right to be wrong, regardless of what any man-made or demonic charter says.” “Democracy originated in the mind of a rational being who has the deepest hatred for God.” “Do you realize that the only thing that gives democracy existence is sin? The absence of democracy is perfect obedience to god.” “The best way to insure the earth is never over populated is for sensible and righteous governments to clear all forms of atheism and heresy.”

Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004)(President of the United States)
“For the first time ever, everything is in place for the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.”

Roy Moore (Former Alabama Judge)
	“If they want to get the Commandments, they’re going to have to get me first.”* “Worship With Your Vote”

Rush Limbaugh
“Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” “If you commit a crime, you’re guilty.” “There is only one way to get rid of nuclear weapons… use them”

Star Parker (Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education)
	“Anybody that believes in separation of church and state needs to leave right now.”

Tony Evans (Promise Keepers)
“The demise of our community and culture is the fault of sissified men who have been overly influenced by women.”

William Rehnquist (1924 – 2005)(Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court)
	“The ‘wall of separation between church and state’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”

Michael Savage (Savage Nation)
“Oh, you’re one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How’s that? Why don’t you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it.”*
*Statement made on live national television

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Raving Lunatic Harpy Ann Coulter: ‘Our Blacks Are So Much Better Than Their Blacks’

TPMMuckraker

Ann Coulter: ‘Our Blacks Are So Much Better Than Their Blacks’

Jillian Rayfield

November  1, 2011,  1:29 PM29243

If you were waiting for Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity to weigh in on the Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations — and what they mean for racism, sexual harassment and America — you’re in luck.

Appearing on Hannity’s show Monday night, Coulter agreed that the Cain story is a “high-tech lynching,” adding that “it’s coming from the exact same people who used to do the lynching with ropes, now they do it with a word processor.”

She continued that liberals are “too dense” to see the “many wonderful qualities” about Herman Cain, because “all they see is a conservative black man.”

“That’s why our blacks are so much better than their blacks,” Coulter said. “To become a black Republican you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow. You have fought against probably your family members, probably your neighbors, you have thought everything out and that’s why we have very impressive blacks in our party.”

The comments come in around the 4-minute mark:

http://videos.mediaite.com/embed/player/?layout=&playlist_cid=&media_type=video&content=1DQ5PM35BRTSS82M&read_more=1&widget_type_cid=svp

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Ann Coulter – Basking In Her Own (Self-Confessed) Ignorance of Science

More Coulter Stupidity on Evolution

by Ed Brayton

Not content to show her complete ignorance of evolutionary biology once, Ann Coulter doubles down with yet another screed that would get her flunked by a competent high school science teacher. She begins with this unintentionally amusing statement:

More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

And then she proves it by displaying her own ignorance of the subject.

Darwin’s theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the “fittest” to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.

Actually, most mutations are neutral. Coulter, and all of us, have hundreds of mutations in our DNA at the very least, and the overwhelming majority of the time they affect us hardly at all. In some cases, they cause serious disease. And in other cases they can aid in survival. This is not even remotely controversial. We see it happen in both the lab and the wild literally every day.

If we sequence a genome and compare it to earlier versions of the same genome, we can identify the specific mutations. Richard Lenski has done exactly that with a population of bacteria, which are particularly useful for such experiments because they reproduce so quickly. Not only can we see the specific mutations and their effects, we can watch a particular trait evolve over time as new mutations pile up on top of the old ones and create new pathways and new molecular structures.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record – for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)But that’s not what the fossil record shows. We don’t have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the “trade secret” of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have “secrets.”)

Ah, another dishonest quote mine. This one irritated Gould himself, who addressed the question head on when he wrote:

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists — whether though design or stupidity, I do not know — as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. The punctuations occur at the level of species; directional trends (on the staircase model) are rife at the higher level of transitions within major groups.

And indeed they are. In fact, Gould himself wrote a good deal about one of the transitions that Coulter questions, the evolution of whales from land mammals (not from bears but from Artiodactyls). Paleontologists have now found numerous transitional forms from land mammals to modern whales and they form a fairly complete series. Gould wrote in 1994:

“If you had given me a blank piece of paper and a blank check, I could not have drawn you a theoretical intermediate any better or more convincing than Ambulocetus. Those dogmatists who by verbal trickery can make white black, and black white, will never be convinced of anything, but Ambulocetus is the very animal that they proclaimed impossible in theory.”

Coulter continues:

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians, but paleontologists.

Another lie. It’s certainly true that there were scientific critics of Darwin’s theory, but the primary opposition came from the church. Thus, the famous debate between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce. What Coulter conveniently leaves out is that Darwin’s theory gained very rapid acceptance among scientists quite quickly because it explained such a wide range of data extremely well. And that continues to this day. Coulter doesn’t know any of this because she is as ignorant of the scientific literature on evolution as I am of auto mechanics. Unlike her, however, I don’t go around declaring that all auto mechanics don’t know a thing about how to fix a car or that the internal combustion engine couldn’t possibly work.

But things have only gotten worse for Darwin.Thirty years ago (before it was illegal to question Darwinism), Dr. David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said that despite the vast expansion of the fossil record: “The situation hasn’t changed much.”

To the contrary, fossil discoveries since Darwin’s time have forced paleontologists to take back evidence of evolution. “Some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record,” Raup said, “such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information.”

Another dishonest quote mine. What a shock that new evidence would alter explanations. This is, of course, one of the great strengths of science — and one of the great weaknesses of religion. More detailed information should modify our explanations, and in science they do.

The rest is more of the same, rote regurgitation of long-discredited creationist arguments. Ironically, the very man she quoted in her last ignorant diatribe on the subject, Michael Behe, accepts common descent and agrees that the fossil record clearly supports it. He just gives God a divine assist at the molecular level.

Related articles

• More Coulter Stupidity on Evolution [Dispatches from the Creation Wars] (scienceblogs.com)
• Not like a worm? (scienceblogs.com)
• More Coulter (theness.com)
• Not like a worm? (freethoughtblogs.com)

The Becking of Gabrielle Giffords

At Talk to Action, the veteran watcher of white supremacist and anti-semitic groups Chip Berlet writes, The Becking of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. An excerpt:

From a moral viewpoint Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is the victim of demagogues such as Glenn Beck and his allies at Fox News and in the Tea Party Movement. This is not about legal liability but about moral culpability. This is about a nation that has lost its moral compass.Some of us progressive writers have been warning about this dangerous trend for several years. This includes my colleagues Fred Clarkson, David Neiwert, Sara Robinson, John Amato, Adele Stan, and others. We blame right-wing demagogues like Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter and a culture that tolerates their vicious targeting of scapegoats.  Now the shootings have created a new word floating across cyberspace: “becking.” To be “becked” is to be held up as such an evil and destructive person that someone, somewhere, will interpret it as a call to eliminate that problem through violence. I made similar assertions after the murder of Dr. Tiller in a post at Religion Dispatches, “Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Doctor?”: Bill O’Reilly, King Henry II, and George Tiller” Here is what I wrote then: On the day Dr. Tiller died, May 31, 2009, Gabrielle Winant on Salon traced O’Reilly’s relentless campaign against the murdered doctor. Winant wrote that some of O’Reilly’s characterizations of Tiller replicated “ancient conservative, paranoid stories: a decadent, permissive and callous elite tolerates moral monstrosities that every common-sense citizen just knows to be awful. Conspiring against our folk wisdom, O’Reilly says, the sophisticates have shielded Tiller from the appropriate, legal consequences for his deeds.” So, concludes Winant: “O’Reilly didn’t tell anyone to do anything violent, but he did put Tiller in the public eye, and help make him the focus of a movement with a history of violence against exactly these kinds of targets.” The analysts at Media Matters for America have been forcefully arguing the case against the “Emerging Culture of Paranoia” and the role of “Right-Wing Media” in fostering a toxic climate in which violence is more likely. Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert, who suggested after the Tiller murder that “O’Reilly and Fox News will have more right-wing vigilantism to explain,” selected some of O’Reilly’s most egregious statements demonizing Dr. Tiller. … Hannah Arendt described the process of demagoguery leading to violence as it occurs in totalitarian regimes ranging from Hitler to Stalin. The demagogue frames the target, but leaves off a direct call for violence. But the message is clear. Unstable people often act first. Political ideologues, however, can be mobilized as the process continues to act as a group. Sara Robinson and I have been tracking the number of political murders since the inauguration of President Barack Obama. [See link below]. The people who “becked” Rep. Gabrielle Giffords began with a premise of dualism or Manicheaism, and then constructed a frame that uses demonization, scapegoating, and conspiracism to divide the world into a good ‘us’ and a bad ‘them’. … Following the shooting of Rep. Giffords we once again heard calls for civility and pundits pointing out that hateful rhetoric is aimed at Republicans and conservatives by Democrats and their lefty allies. This is true, and I do object to liberals who hurl buckets of mud as we on the left are being buried in an avalanche of shit from right-wing demagogues with national television and radio programs, websites, and newspaper columns. The comparison is true in the manipulated facts yet false in the claim of equivalence. Peter Daou writes about the bogus equivalency between right/left extremism in his post Gabriel Giffords and the rightwing hate machine.”The targeting of political scapegoats in our nation today is overwhelmingly coming from the Political Right. To claim otherwise is a lie easily debunked by even a modicum of research. A big lie. … We who must speak out are not faced with death here in our nation this week. We are faced with our visage in a moral mirror looking back at our conscience which is telling us that we must speak out against the crescendo of totalitarian demagoguery. We must oppose the becking of our society. How many more must die before we wake up and put a stop to this terrible trend?

^{Another important read on this subject is the 18-month-old Tragedy At The Holocaust Museum: Stand Up To Terrorism by Sara Robinson.}

^{See also Marta Evry’s The “Becking” Of America: How Right-Wing Media and Politicians Incite Violence at Venice for Change.}