• “Plus, at a certain point you have to ask yourself, ‘What if there aren’t necromancers eating babies in real life?'”
• Anaheim. Not the deep South, or rural Pennsylvania, but Anaheim.
As that second link shows, I don’t think violent counter-protest is helpful, constructive, or good. But imagine the response — by counter-protesters and the media — if al-Qaida organized a rally in lower Manhattan. The parallel is inexact, of course, because in terms of body count and overall reshaping of American life and American history for the worse, the Klan has been a far, far worse terrorist threat than al-Qaida has ever been or could ever dream to be.
And yet playing footsie with the Klan — the actual God-damned Klan — is a matter of dispute among Republicans and conservative media commentators.
• Trump-loving New Hampshire state Rep. Susan DeLumas says the pope is the Antichrist. (The N.H. state legislature is too big.) “The Pope is the anti-Christ. Do your research,” she posted on Facebook. John Fea walks us through the footnotes of the 1560 Geneva Bible that DeLumas is basing this on.
Pope-as-Antichrist is so retro — like, 16th-century retro. All the cool kids (i.e., “Bible prophecy” hucksters) these days are predicting an Islamic Antichrist. That lacks even the flimsy Roman Empire/Roman Church pretext of the pope thing, and its utterly incompatible with any of the Bible passages they claim to support the idea. But if “Bible prophecy scholars” allowed a little thing like the utter incompatibility of their ideas with the Bible to stop them, then they’d never get anywhere.
• The Republican Party, 2016: “Nine Republicans Reject Naming Post Office After Maya Angelou.” Petty, incapable of even minimal governance, and no longer worried about trying not to look really racist.
That’s ugly when it comes to relatively trivial matters like the naming of post offices. But it’s not just about relatively trivial matters.
(Oh, and Ms. Angelou — deserving namesake of that N.C. post office — supplied the title for this post.)
• “Chris Christie has seen things. Things you wouldn’t believe. Things that would make your hair fall out and turn grey all at once. But he cannot speak of them. He can only stand there. …”
• “6 New Jersey Papers Call On Christie To Resign Over Trump Endorsement.” These are, surprisingly, Gannett papers — which makes me wonder if having six papers all print the same editorial wasn’t just done as a money-saving measure.
A Christie resignation won’t happen, of course, but if it did, then Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno would replace him. She’s the first-ever lieutenant governor in the state, which only adopted the office in 2009. That change means, alas, that we won’t see a fourth return of acting governor Richard Codey.
Codey, a state senator since 1982, has served as acting governor of the state on three different occasions — briefly after Gov. Christine Whitman resigned to become EPA administrator, then for two years after Gov. Jim McGreevey resigned, and then again for a month in 2007 when then-Gov. John Corzine was seriously injured in a car accident.
Despite never running for the office, and never being elected to it, Codey is probably the most popular New Jersey governor of the past 30 years. Why so popular? Well, because he’s not Whitman, or McGreevey, or Corzine, or Florio, or Christie …
• Ed Brayton highlights Rafael Cruz as the latest evangelical culture-warrior to simultaneously argue two contradictory things: A) America is a Christian nation with a Christian majority and a sleeping giant of hundreds of millions of faithful Christians; and B) Most people who say they’re Christian are not really, truly, real, true Christians. You can believe one or the other of those, but not both.
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