Islamic Subliminal Messaging

Here's something I'll bet you didn't know. I didn't know it either, and I consider myself something of an expert on "subliminal messaging".

Remember this from the 2008 and 2012 campaigns?

That was, as you know, the official logo for the Barack Hussein Obama campaign.

Well, it turns out that this wasn't just a logo. It was a subliminal Islamist message!

At least according to Professional Wingnut and Bloviating Blowhard Michael Wiener Savage and his guest, the maybe-kinda-sorta "former terrorist" Walid Shoebat:

“What is the symbol or campaign logo of the Obama administration?” Savage asked. “What are these Obama bumper stickers? Let’s see, a blue crescent over fallen red and white stripes. What is the crescent? Is that not the symbol of Islam? And the blue stripe over the red stripe represents the states that vote Democratic red over the states that vote Republican blue, and so he now unites them under the banner of Islam.”

Jesus, wake up America!!! It's right in front of your face!!!

As the author of the story says, somewhat sotto voce, maybe Wiener Savage ought to take another look at that logo...

["Obama logomark" designed by Sender LLC. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia]

What Is an American?

It would appear that Obama Derangement Syndrome not only applies to the president, but also his entire family.

There's an email circulating amongst the wingnuttery to the effect that "Harvard-educated" Michelle Obama, welcoming newly-sworn-in citizens at a naturalization ceremony, claimed that none of the so-called Founding Fathers, signers of the Declaration of Independence, were "born in America".

Smart people (i.e., readers of this blog) know that this is technically true, since if they were born in what later became the United States of America before July 4, 1776 (which they would have to be), they were not "born in America". They were born in various colonies of the crown, which made them British citizens.

And, yes, let's put aside the inconvenient fact that people from the other 34 countries in North and South America -- two whole continents! -- are also "Americans" and some of them are kind of resenty when we say we are "the Americans"...

But that hasn't stopped the wingnuttery from trying to make a Big Fucking Deal of it, trying to portray "Harvard-educated" Michelle as an idiot -- notice how that anti-intellectual-elite mindset only applies to Liberals? I can find absolutely no dismissive mention from the wingnuttery of the "Harvard-educated" Ted Cruz.

So what is an American? I'll let Bill Murray 'splain that, in this clip from Stripes (1981):

Polygamy: It's God's Plan

Okay, let's talk about that whole "one man one woman" thing. Despite the history-denying hypocritical Mormons and their support of California Prop 8 with that very slogan, the entire Right Wing is up in arms over the "destruction of marriage" by Teh Gay.

Usually I consider it beneath me to comment on this (yeah, right), but I read something today, AFA Hopes To Save Marriage From The 'Forces Of Evil' on RightWing Watch, that kind of peckered up my interest, so to speak:

The American Family Association placed a full-page advertisement in today’s edition of the Washington Post, in which the group warns the Supreme Court not to “bend what God designed merely to suit the desires of man, knowing that you do so at the expense of children, perhaps even civilization itself.”
The AFA’s Fred Jackson, who was guest-hosting “Sandy Rios In The Morning,” hailed the ad’s “forceful message” to the court and claimed that gay marriage undermines what God established in the Garden of Eden about 6,000 years ago.
“So for at least 6,000 years, people have understood marriage as between a man and a woman and it is only fairly recent history and certainly in this country have the forces of evil attempted to change all of that,” Jackson said. “It is absolutely amazing — one of the saddest facts is how many denominations, church denominations in this country, have succumbed to this pressure.”

Yeah, I know, "Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve". I get that. But what I don't get is this: "for at least 6,000 years, people have understood marriage as between a man and a woman". [emphasis added]

There's obviously a typo in there, since it should read "a man and women". Even a casual reading of the so-called Word of God, the "Holy Bible", shows that polygamy was not only tolerated by God but accepted as no big deal, if not actively encouraged. See What the Bible says about Polygamy for a few of the references to multiple wives and "concubines" in The Book.

One of the main arguing points that the wingnuttery pops up with regularly is that legalizing so-called Gay Marriage (or, as we over here in the Reality-Based Community call it, "marriage") is that it will lead to any number of "icky" things -- like polygamy. For some reason polygamy is generally number one on their list, followed closely by Rick Santorum's celebrated "man-on-dog sex" and so on down the increasingly-disgusting line.

But we need to take a step back here and look at this. Despite it being given a bad rap by child-raping assholes like Warren Jeffs and others in Fundo-Mormon and other cults, is there really anything fundamentally wrong with it? I'm open to all the usual arguments -- it demeans women, it removes too many fecund pubescent girl-children from the breeding pool, etc. etc., but if three (or more, in any combination of genders) people want to set up a household together and have the legal and contractual advantages of "marriage", why shouldn't they?

Interestingly enough, ironically enough, if the agenda for so-called "religious freedom" gets through the state legislatures and through congress, the unintended-consequence backlash may be more than the Religious Right has bargained for. For example: "My particular religion demands that I must strictly follow the practices outlined in the Old Testament. I can't eat shellfish, I can't plant my field with different crops, I can't wear two kinds of cloth, but I can and do have multiple wives. You say I can't do that? Sorry, Charlie, but The Law says I can..."

As I said the other day, be careful what you ask for -- you just might get it.

Barack Obama the Finger Jihadist

Here's an image that's making the rounds of the wingnuttery, especially on a site called American Thinker, the very title of which, given its overall content, is an obvious oxymoron:

Yep, that's our Jihadist-in-Chief Barack Hussein Obama giving the "Islamic Gang Sign" of the one-finger salute. (No, not THAT finger, dirty-mind!). It's the "distinctive and well-known" Islamist index finger salute to Allah (blessed be his name), so Obama can let the leaders of the African nations know that secretly he is with them.

But if that is the case, then what are we to think about this?

OH MY GOD!!! It's worse than we ever thought!!! Yeah, we "get" the Billary Clintons -- that goes without saying. But sweet Jesus, Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, George W. Bush and for fuck's sake, is that Ronald Reagan???!!!

I hate to be all smug about this, but it all goes back to those goddam hippies. Check this out:

Yes, that is none other than Mister Natural, who happens to be my personal guru, and just look at that fucker. He's doing it too!!!

OMFG, we are SO fucked!!!

The Whole Story on Bowe Bergdahl?

In this 15-minutes-of-fame world, where we want it all and get it now and instant gratification takes too long, the story of Bowe Bergdahl is so yesterday that a lot of people won't even recognize his name.

Bergdahl was the US soldier in Afghanistan who somehow wandered off from his remote outpost and was taken prisoner by the Taliban. Five years later he became the subject of intense scrutiny when his release was engineered at the exchange rate of five-to one for Talibani prisoners of war detainees held in Guantánamo.

It's an extremely interesting story, and Robert Young Pelton has written a lengthy but incredibly detailed article on it, "Finding Private Bergdahl", over at Vice.

Because the details of Bergdahl's leave-taking and the five years he was held captive are still not clear, and because his name and his face bear a more-than-passing resemblance to those of the traitor/Islam-convert/terrorist Nicholas Brody, the former US prisoner of war held in Iraq, in the HBO series Homeland, it was easy for the nonthinking wingnut media to conflate Brody with Bergdahl and paint him as a traitor as well.

They are still at it. A Google search for the words "Bowe Bergdahl traitor" yields nearly 80,000 hits, the vast majority of them from wingnut sites. You know, the usual suspects: World Net Daily, Breitbart, Western Journalism Review, et al.

Will we ever know all of the details? Probably not, but Pelton's article likely comes the closest to describing the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl's disappearance and the Byzantine governmental -- and non-governmental -- machinations behind his ultimate release.

The Sovereign Citizen Movement, the Turner Diaries, and How They Destroy America

I was looking through that list from The Southern Poverty Law Center that I linked to in yesterday's post, and something kind of jumped out at me.

There is something called The Sovereign Citizen Movement, taken up by a pack of lawless morons on the right with the belief that they are not citizens of any states, but are "sovereign" unto themselves.

They refuse to pay taxes, refuse to license their vehicles, refuse to get Social Security numbers or drivers' licenses, or pretty much any of that avalanche of normal personal identity papers that come tumbling out of your wallet when a cop asks for them.

The are, indeed a bunch of wackos. And they are a large bunch -- over 100,000 hard core members and another 300,000 around the periphery. Many of them have already been sentenced to long prison terms for tax evasion, but that fact has only served to make them martyrs in the movement.

They are also known for stockpiling weapons and ammunition, plus the chemicals and other necessities to build various types of bombs.

So what we have is a large crowd of unhinged Rambo-wannabes who seem to think they can successfully overthrow the government of the United States by armed insurrection.

The fact that they are out there, that they believe in this shit, and that they seem willing to put their plans into effect, that some of them are willing to die for their belief in this pile of porcine excrement is scary. It is so scary, in fact, that something called National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, an academic study group out of the University of Maryland, has cited a survey of law-enforcement officials and agencies across the United States and concluded that the movement was the single greatest threat to their communities, ranking above Islamic terrorists and jihadists.

One of the "Holy Writs" of the movement in a 1978 novel called The Turner Diaries, written by William Luther Pierce (former leader of the white nationalist organization. National Alliance) under the pseudonym "Andrew Macdonald".

It has somehow slipped out of copyright, so you can get a copy of it for FREE at The Internet Archives at this location, in a variety of formats.

When you see the format you like, e.g., "epub", just put your mouse on it, right-click and choose "Save Link As..." You will be able to place a copy on your computer in a location of your choice and then open it with any standard e-reader.

It's definitely worth reading, just a much as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is worth reading -- it is another one of their "source documents", also available free from the same site in the same formats.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

An Open Letter to Obama Haters: You Just Wasted Ten Years of Your Life

Thanks to bernardpliers over at The Daily Kos, here is Dear Obama Hater - You Just Wasted A Decade Of Your Life:

Lots of you  continue to get unhinged emails from people on Facebook, your drunk uncle, and various Tea Party relatives. Here's a gentle response to them....
Pretty soon Obama will be gone and you will have to face up to the fact that you will have lost a whole decade of your life passing around conspiracy theories and whipping yourself into a frenzy of hatred.  All of you lost friends, severed relationships with family members, and some of you even lost your job or your marriage due to your unhinged behavior.
You lost that decade wailing about Obama the gay Communist Muslim narcissist dictator who was going to let the UN invade America and various hoaxes like "death panels," birth certificates, and the "Ground Zero Mosque" (remember how you wasted two years of your life over that?).  Just think of what you could have accomplished if you hadn't wasted all that time.  You could have gotten a college degree, you could have written a book, you could have run your first marathon, you could have built a boat and sailed it around the world. You could learned to speak another language - oh wait, you never would have done that.
You kept waiting for Obama to be impeached or for the GOP candidates to "take off the gloves." But they never did because your favorite stories were hoaxes, and the GOP can't impeach or win the White House based on hoaxes. No doubt you were waiting for someone, anyone,  in the White House to be indicted or arrested, like all those people under Nixon and Reagan and Bush, but no dice.  
Many of you will never recover from this experience.  Physically, your health is no doubt worse for having lost a decade watching television and whipping yourself into a frenzy of hatred. Your ability to reason is probably permanently damaged, and nobody really wants to listen to your opinions anyway. Yes, you can successfully annoy the waitress at the diner, because she can't run away from a customer, but that doesn't mean she agrees with you. Some of you will be going into nursing homes because people gave up on you a long time ago and nobody can stand to listen to one more day of you babbling about Saul Alinsky (who died in 1972, by the way).
Some of you have no doubt suffered financially from all the time you wasted hating Obama.  But some of you have actually done very very well under his "anticapitalist," "communist," "dictatorship." You do know that the economy usually does much better under Democrats, right? And that the best four years of job creation in the last 50 years was under Jimmy Carter, right?
The next two years would be a good chance to start making amends to your families and trying to rebuild relations with people in your life.  Yes we know there's another election in 2016 and you'll be falling down the next rabbit hole of insanity, but try to leave your families with a few memories of you acting like a normal human being.
And the next time there is a GOP president, just remember that there will be fatal embassy attacks under the GOP president, just like the dozens of fatal embassy attacks that occurred under previous Republican presidents.  Except Democrats won't be working themselves into a frenzy of conspiracy theories when it happens, they won't be cheerleading for the terrorists, and they won't be trying to overthrow the US government every time something happens.

I'm taking the unusual step of quoting it in its entirety. I think it's that important.

Baracktose Intolerance

I'm sure you've seen this already, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to present this Daily Show clip on the wingnuttery's intolerance of Barack Obama:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

A Facebook for the Fringe

I wasn't aware of this until I just saw it on the Fossicking blog, but the wingnuttery under the aegis of, who else, Glenn Beck, are fighting back with their own version of Facebook. It's called Freedom Connector, and it says you can "use FreedomConnector to connect with Tea Party activists and other conservatives taking action for less government and more freedom".

Check it out. Know thy enemy. Here's what Melissa of Fossicking has to say about it:

The site functions as a social network for like-minded Tea Party supporters/ members. From what I can gather, the site was launched on the 14th of February and is run by FreedomWorks – a conservative Astroturf organization.
According to Glenn Beck, he wants to take the tools that the socialists and communists and radical Muslims (progressives and terrorists) have been using, and in turn use them for good. FreedomConnector is the answer.
However, a peek at the Privacy Policy or Terms of Service and you’ll see that your “private” information is not so private, but owned by the website – including photos and activity carried out on the site.
The homepage of the site gives the first and last name of its members along with their geographical location. The site goes even more in depth by allowing a search for other members by issues, congressional district, state or county. You even have the option of directly linking your FreedomConnecter profile with Facebook or Twitter.
This is no different than most online services, but for a political organization with a platform of smaller government and less control over the lives of Americans – this is just plain weird.
I promise George Soros didn’t pay me, either directly or indirectly, to post this.

Okay, there you go. You can even check out what's happening in your own county and see who is your "enemy". I checked out the Thurston County page and saw a few people who say they had been facing us across the way at the Saturday rally. The people on the opposite side, the steps across the way, that you can see in the background of the photo, were "activists" from Glennbeckistan, teabaggers who are at least consistent: They don't taxes but they want all the services, and they don't want unions but they are perfectly happy to take the benefits that unions have provided them -- a working wage, the 40-hour week, etc. Check out some of the comments on their page.

Oh, and George Soros didn't pay me, either...

Santorum: "Crusades Not Aggression, Smeared by The Left..."

Just when you thought that they couldn't get any fucking crazier, Rick "Man-On-Dog-Sex" Santorum comes out with a doozy:

Rick Santorum launched into a scathing attack on the left, charging during an appearance in South Carolina that the history of the Crusades has been corrupted by “the American left who hates Christendom ... The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical,” Santorum said in Spartanburg on Tuesday. “And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”
He added, “They hate Western civilization at the core. That's the problem.”
After asserting that Christianity had not shown any “aggression” to the Muslim world, the former Pennsylvania senator — who is considering a 2012 run for the White House — argued that American intervention in the Middle East helps promote “core American values.”

Anti-historical???!!!! As in when you raise an army of avaricious "Christians" and invade another culture's homeland which is thousands of miles away from your own and you do this repeatedly over the course of a couple of centuries and you do this in the name of your god and you slaughter not only those heathen and nasty adherents to a "different" god but also a bunch of adherents to your own god who look and dress and smell different, that's NOT aggression?????

WTF??????

I mean, you can actually look this up in a couple of seconds and see that Ricky is as full of shit as a Christmas goose.

Jesus, and just the fact that Little Ricky Dogsex Santorum can spew it right out of his mouth to a knuckledragging crowd of awe-struck true believers tells me that as a nation, as a culture, we are fucked. No one has a sense of history any more, so anything that anyone wants to say about historical events, regardless of how many lies they contain, is swallowed whole by the Moron-American Voting Bloc.