The day we celebrate

By Capt. Fogg

Of course the paper this morning contained the usual happy crap about celebrating FREEDOM as though we had either more of it or a better kind than Canada or most of Europe who have embraced the principles of democracy and the rights of man we seem to reject every Sunday as we yearn for the Divine Right of Government. What the day is about is political independence and independence from a government that denied us the right to parliamentary representation it was legally obligated to provide while requiring us to identify the king's right to be king with a state church. It was about our right to fair representation as citizens, as equal participants in government regardless of wealth and importance and heredity, and not about a tea tax.

As you watch the sound and fury of the fireworks, remember that the people selling themselves as patriots, the people talking about freedom in saccharine tones, really mean control by a powerful aristocracy allied with a narrow, sectarian interpretation of a certain religion.

"Blessed is the nation whose god is the Lord"  begins the full page full color newspaper insert payed for by the Hobby Lobby. It leaves off the next stanza: "the people he chose for his inheritance," which of course in that context means the Jews. It also mistranslates אשר־יהוה,  asher-Yaveh, as the lord, so those who think "Jesus is Lord" will think it means them. The arrogance and the dishonesty would be amusing if the intent were not so insidious, because our friends at Hobby Lobby, glowing like the face of Moses in their victory over secular law, have asserted their commitment to and aspiration toward a government Dei Gratia. They assert their version of the Bible as the best source of normative morality.

The flag-bedecked page is packed with references to Supreme Court decisions from the 1830s supporting the public schools as the place to pray and teach Christianity and out-of-context quotes from the very anti-religious founding fathers like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson about the Christian Bible being the basis of all true morality. (No mention, of course, of the Bible-backed, God-tolerated institutions of wife beating and slavery and rape and genocide and banishment of non-Jewish people from the Holy Land.)

No religion is about freedom, they are all about orthodoxy and uniformity of belief to the exclusion of other ideas and practices. Freedom of worship is not freedom to enforce religious orthodoxy or religious law on others. No religion is about free choice, democracy, or the inherent rights of man. No one in America has claimed the right to dictate your thoughts about divinity but religious organizations. Your prayers, your right to congregate and worship, are guaranteed against the influence of Hobby Lobby and our Constitution forbids our government to do what they insist is the right thing to do: establish and enforce some form of Christian doctrine as the law of the land.

If this be freedom, then freedom is slavery and the American Revolution against a divinely-inspired Christian king we pretend to celebrate today was not only fought in vain, but was blasphemy and an unholy act.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)

The terrible shock of reality

By Mustang Bobby.

Steve Benen examines the foolish inconsistency of the right-wing outrage over the plans to put terrorists on trial in civilian courts.

In 2002, the Bush Justice Department put Zacarias Moussaoui, an al Qaeda terrorist often referred to as the "20th 9/11 hijacker," on trial in a federal court near D.C. No one, at the time, said then-President Bush was putting American lives at risk or undermining U.S. national security interests with the trial. Despite the conservative apoplexy of the last week, the Moussaoui trial was simply considered appropriate and routine.

[...]

Likewise, let's not forget that Rudy Giuliani, one of the leading Republican attack dogs on President Obama, said he considered the Moussaoui trial a testament to the strength of our legal system and the American dedication to the "rule of law." Giuliani called the verdict "a symbol of American justice," and said the trial itself might improve America's standing internationally. After Moussaoui was convicted by a civilian jury, the former mayor boasted, "America won tonight."

This gets to the larger point that Jon Stewart made when he interviewed Lou Dobbs: if, as the right-wing talkers are proclaiming, Americans think the country is "out of control" and they're worried about what's going to happen next, why is it that all of this angst and concern is suddenly being expressed when we have a Democrat in the White House? Didn't these issues exist before January 20, 2009?

Of course they did. But the reason the wingers didn't shriek and carry on was because it was their guy who was in charge and to raise any concerns about how he was handling the job or question his motives was disloyal. And no matter how rotten the economy was, no matter how bureaucratic and expensive monopolized healthcare was, no matter badly the education system was crumbling before their eyes, no matter how incompetent the government was at providing disaster relief, and no matter how many people were dying in a war that had been instigated against a nation that never raised a hand to us, they were comfortable in the knowledge that the president was one of them. Even if he was comfortably numb, he was a known quantity, and everything was going to be all right -- it's Morning in America -- so no matter how terrible reality was, it was better than the great unknown: that Other Guy who might not even have been born here will take away your guns, turn your kids gay in the military, and tear down the Jefferson Memorial to replace it with a mosque. Or something; that's what they keep telling them on the radio, anyway.

What's piteously ironic is that if we had had that kind of mindset in 1776, we'd still be a British colony. The teabaggers who think they're emulating the Spirit of '76 by demonstrating against the tyranny of our government are actually trying to maintain the status quo that we had when things were rotten. Picture Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck railing against the rabble-rousing John Adams, the agnostic Thomas Jefferson, and that secular humanist Benjamin Franklin who wanted to rebel against the system and replace it with a dangerously experimental form of democracy; talk about a radical socialist plot. No matter how insidiously oppressive the British colonial government was, it was still safe and secure as opposed to the scary adventure of going -- literally and figuratively -- into the wilderness of the New World or, at the very least, trying to make things better for everyone, not just the rich white guys who didn't want to pay their taxes.

The worst thing that Barack Obama did was tell us that not only were things not all rosy, it was going to take some hard work and sacrifice to make things better. After eight years of an artificial high, reality is a terrible shock.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Top Ten Cloves: Things that would be different if Paul Revere made his famous ride today

By J. Thomas Duffy

News Item: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

10. Ride would have to be approved by U.N. Security Council

9. They would now use unmanned drone planes in the Battle of Lexington Green

8. There would likely be a court-injunction, brought by the SPCA, as to how Revere was treating his horses

7. If he made ride while Bush was the Commander-in-Chief, he would have Revere detour, and ride into Iraq

6. If he made ride under the Obama Administration, right wing would pound Obama, charging, again, hanging around with terrorists and rabble-rousers

5. NRA would issue propaganda that, if they let Revere make his ride, the government would be trying to take away all the muskets

4. Since the lanterns would likely be electronic, ride would be sponsored by Eveready batteries and drum-banging rabbit would follow him all the way to Lexington

3. Paul Revere could save himself the hard ride and use Twitter -- The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming! (and, in only 49 characters)

2. The Red Coats, worn by the British, would become the new wave of hip-hop fashion

1. The whole ride, and battle, would be on YouTube before the end of the day




(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

About those tea parties

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Andrew Sullivan is absolutely right about those Fox News-promoted right-wing mobfests known as "tea parties":

These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.

This from "a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power." (Read his entire post -- it's an excellent attempt to figure out what the hell the "tea parties" are all about. He's "still befuddled.")

And Think Progress, in a similarly valuable post, is also right that these "tea parties" aren't grassroots events "rising up spontaneously":

Fox News isn't the only right-wing organization involved in building up these so-called "grassroots" events. The tea parties have been heavily backed by corporate lobbyists. The principle organizers of many of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, and Newt Gingrich's American Solutions. The groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests.

The tea partiers and their cheerleaders would have us believe that what is happening now is as revolutionary as what happened way back when in Boston. Which is, of course, sheer nonsense. Today's tea parties are nothing more than contrived outlets for manufactured right-wing populist rage. To suggest otherwise, and to buy into the right-wing spin, on Fox and elsewhere, is to diminish the significance of the American Revolution and to sully the very purpose of America as an experiment in democratic self-rule and as a bulwark against tyranny.

Once again, as we see so often on the right, those supposedly fighting for America, these "patriots," are actually, unwittingly or not, working to undermine it.