I’ve been in the Denver airport many times but I somehow missed that some of the murals in that airport promote Satanism. If you enjoyed watching Glenn Beck walk around Manhattan finding obscure hidden symbols of communist mischief, you’re gonna love watching William Tapley point out all the Satanic symbols at the Denver airport.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin is the Christian right’s favorite Jewish theocrat. He goes on the air with Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn and many others and says one idiotic thing after another. Here he is on the air with Glenn Beck arguing that liberalism is a “twisted and diseased pathology” that leads to — what else? — Hitler!
Rafael Cruz went on the air with Glenn Beck and spewed some lies and stupid. He claimed that the media is the “ministry of disinformation” with an “evil agenda” and that Obama never uses the phrase “by their creator” from the Declaration of Independence because “socialism, Marxism requires that government become your god.”
Remember Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Saddam Hussein’s information minister who declared on camera that there were no American troops in Baghdad while American troops waved from behind him standing by their tanks? Jeffrey Kuhner of the Moonie Times does a remarkable impersonation of him.
Glenn Beck’s The Blaze website is trying its hand at Biblical exegesis, with predictable results. They have an article entitled Fact Check: Does the Bible Really Condone Stoning? The answer, of course, is clearly yes. It does so over and over again. So what else is there to say? Well, there are weak excuses and contradictory explanations to be offered. The first one is “Well sure it does, but Muslims are even worse.”
Rick Perlstein has a fascinating article about Claire Conner, who grew up with parents who were two of the original members of the John Birch Society. She’s written a book called Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is holding a Stone a Heathen event on Monday to call attention to International Blasphemy Rights Day and raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night project. It’s a clever fundraiser first done at the University of South Carolina where people can buy water balloons and “stone” an atheist, with the money going to charity. Billy Hallowell of Glenn Beck’s The Blaze tries to understand the event.
After David Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies was pulled from the shelves by its publisher, Thomas Nelson, because it was full of false claims and distortions, he got Glenn Beck to publish it and now the Worldnetdaily is pushing it on their website — and predictably telling lies about why it was pulled.
I have argued many times before that the Tea Party movement is little more than the reemergence of the paranoid far right, in the style of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society, as a major player in American politics. I’ve noted that what Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1963 in The Paranoid Style in American Politics applies quite well today. Kim Messick argues much the same thing at Salon.com.
You may remember the right wing absolutely freaking out about pro-choice protesters allegedly bringing jars of urine and feces to throw at the Texas state capitol when the legislature was trying to pass harsh anti-choice legislation. “Police confiscate jars of suspected urine and feces,” screamed the headline at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze. And the Hot Air blog. And RedState. And the National Review. Turns out it was all nonsense:
Rich Lowry, the towering mediocrity who sees starbursts whenever Sarah Palin winks at him, has a column at Politico analyzing why Ted Cruz gets criticized so strongly. Mixing up his best stew of privileged frat boy persecution complex and juvenile political analysis, he decides that it’s all because he’s a “traitor to his class” because he’s a conservative who came out of elite educational institutions. Oh, and we just don’t like him because he’s so smart.
Glenn Beck had John Hagee on his show the other day and Hagee told him that America must support Israel because “we’re so indebted because, if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have the Torah, which most of our laws come from; all of Western society comes from the Torah.”
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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