Michele Bachmann and the End of Days

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A while back, it seemed to many of us that Michele Bachmann, surging in the polls and looking more and more like a viable contender for the Republican presidential nomination, was walking back some of her more extreme views, trying to appear less crazy than her (completely justified) reputation and, with extremists in the grassroots on board, trying to appeal more broadly across the party, including to the more moderate establishment, if not quite to independents.

Well, while she did indeed walk back a bit, she also launched full-throttle into the crazy, including by signing that bigoted (and utterly ridiculous) anti-gay, anti-porn pledge and by pushing the generally anti-science agenda of the GOP, particularly so-called "intelligent design."

All of which is nothing new for Bachmann. She has a long record of extremism, particularly with respect to her fundamentalist, theocratic Christianity. And the evidence just keeps piling up. Here's Think Progress:

Slate's Dave Weigel has reported an audio recording of Bachmann praying for the notoriously anti-gay ministry You Can Run But You Can't Hide, run by the radical preacher Bradlee Dean. Bachmann offered the prayer in 2006 (though the recording was uploaded in 2008). In it, Bachmann predicts, "We are in the last days," and says, "The harvest is at hand" — a Biblical allusion to the Rapture when some believe God will take saved Christians from the earth and leave the non-believers to face several years of torment and tribulation before the second coming of Christ.

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As Weigel noted, it's not terribly surprising that Bachmann is among those evangelical Christians who believe the end of the world is imminent. But it's still disconcerting that someone campaigning to lead America into the future believes that its days are numbered and millions of its citizens are doomed. Bachmann has toned down her religious rhetoric considerably since hitting the campaign trail.

Also jarring is Bachmann's belief that "nothing is more important than" converting people before the world ends. As she weighs in on critical debates like whether or not to let the U.S. default on its obligations, it's troubling that Bachmann is rooting for the apocalypse.

Disconcerting and troubling indeed. To say the least. Which is yet another reason why, viable contender or not, she shouldn't be let anywhere near the White House.

Ever. (Which may not be a long time, actually, not with the Rapture at hand. Right?)

Apocalypse fer sure

By Capt. Fogg

Well folks, here it is again. The doomsday circus is back in town and guess what's happening in the big top in less than three days - that's right, it's the rapture and we're all gonna die screaming! OK, maybe some of y'all are actually Holy Smoke Church members and won't have to sit here through the tectonic shimmy, the lakes of fire and all the other rides while Jesus, like some Mexican wrestler with a gruesome mask is gonna kick some infidel ass, but not yours, Mr. camo pants. You get to go to the magic kingdom. You'll have to leave the truck behind, of course.

Yes, May 21, 2011 is right around the corner and Doomsday, as it has been countless times before, is almost here. For perhaps the first time however, these prophets have recognized that there are a dozen time zones and so Saturday at 6:00 PM, starting at the International Date Line out in the pacific, the apocalypse will march across the planet at a thousand miles per hour - boy can those horses move! That means we'll get to watch it all on TV as that Titanium robot, or whatever Jesus comes dressed as these days. kicks hell out of Asia and moves on toward Europe. That will give a lot of people her in God's own US of A enough time to convert and yes, you can do it on line through Paypal.

Not me though, It's going to be months before the planet is cleansed of disbelief and animal life and since the righteous will no longer be here, I get to grab their trailers and second hand pickup trucks and ATVs and firearms and stuff and me and the other heretics can shoot guns and barbeque like Ted Nugent. It's gonna be a hell of a party -- as long as the beer don't run out before that lake of fire thing.

Anyway, the Rapture should hit the fan at my house at 7:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time according to God's infallible plan and I'll be watching it all unfold from poolside and I'll have plenty of ice on hand. Perhaps I'll live-blog the whole thing. Stay tuned.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Combating evil: What Islam and the Qur'an are really all about

Guest post by Hamid M. Khan 

Hamid M. Khan, an Adjunct Professor of Islamic Law at the University of Colorado Law School, is a Rule of Law Adviser with the U.S. Institute of Peace in Kabul, Afghanistan, and a fellow with the Truman National Security Project in Washington D.C.

(Ed. note: This is Hamid's sixth guest post at The Reaction. You can find his previous posts here (on Pakistan), here and here (on Obama's Cairo address), here (on revolution in Iran), and here (on being Muslim in America). Yes, he's becoming a regular. -- MJWS)

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Last Friday's heinous attack on U.N. workers in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, which was prompted by the burning of a Qur'an by Florida Pastor Terry Jones, serves as a stark reminder that is all not well within Islam. As an American Muslim working to promote peace and stability in Afghanistan on behalf of the United States, I am appalled by the senseless violence instigated by those claiming to share a religious faith and once again leads to question how Muslims choose to uphold their own faith. 

Few Muslims quibble with the notion that the Qur'an is the word of God. Moreover, it is generally accepted that the Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad some fourteen centuries ago. While the Qur'an is found in book form today, it began as an oral tradition and hence, even to this day, millions of Muslims follow that tradition by memorizing lines from the original Arabic. Coincidently, the content of the Qur'an (which is about the size of the New Testament) largely remains a mystery to most believers since the original version is in sixth-century Arabic and more than 85 percent of Muslims today are not Arabic speakers. Moreover, even if one could begin to grapple with the Arabic, the Qur'an is filled with allusions, allegories, puns, and an unmatched poetic style. Consequently, Muslims will often turn to religious leaders to understand its content, leaders who often know little more than their fellow believers. Nonetheless, every believer bears personal responsibility for understanding what the Qur'an truly says. 

The Qur'an's contents, like other religious tomes, is varied. Despite notions to the contrary, less than five percent of the text is devoted to legal matters. Moreover, the most mentioned person in the Qur'an is the patriarch Moses, followed by Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary is mentioned more in than the Qur'an than she is in the Bible. In fact, the Qur'an takes pains to codify the tolerance of other faiths and repeatedly recounts how struggling for "true" faith has always been measured by those who have withstood ridicule and derision and remained steadfast. The reality is that most of the Qur'an is dedicated to the principles of mercy, compassion, grace, salvation, and love. However, this message is not for the edification of Pastor Terry Jones but for Muslims as a whole. 

During my lifetime, I have witnessed in horror as Muslims have taken to the streets in fits of rage to attack anyone and everyone, all in the name of "defending" Islam. Whether it's violence spurred by cartoons of the Prophet or publication of The Satanic Verses, or physical attacks on those who would disagree with Islam and its practices, the reality remains: not only have these Muslims willfully ignored the Qur'an, they have betrayed the faith they claim to uphold.

Islam, a faith comprised of over 1.3 billion followers, has endured for fourteen centuries and influenced the course of history itself. Islam's "golden age," where it was seen as a force for intellectualism, philosophy, science, and understanding, has today been eclipsed by puritans bent on reducing the faith to a series of simplistic notions, turning the Qur'an into an irrational legal code that promotes violence, authored by a bloodthirsty God.

Muslims need to accept that, inasmuch as they believe in the Qur'an and Islam, they would do best to uphold the Qur'an by living up to its central tenets: compassion, mercy, and tolerance. They need to accept that the best "defense" against the calumny of others is explained by the Qur'an itself: combat evil with good. Muslims need to demonstrate that Islam is found in more than just the Qur'an, that it is expounded by steadfastness and acts of goodness and love. And it should be remembered that, no matter what, evil cloaked in faith is never acceptable, especially to God.

The end is nigh!

By Carl

Lemme see... that gives me 51 days to drink...

An open letter to Newt Gingrich

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Dear" Newt:

How exactly could you have "a secular atheist country... dominated by radical Islamists"?

Do you not see the contradiction? Or are you just so deranged that you can't see anything clearly anymore, if you ever could?

And yet it's hardly surprising that you continue to sink into the morass of anti-Muslim bigotry. You were there fearmongering over the Park51 community center, and, like many in your party (e.g., Peter King) you choose to scapegoat Muslims as the dangerous anti-American Other.

But this isn't just anti-Muslim bigotry that you're tapping into. You said this at John Hagee's church in Texas. Back in 2008, John McCain refused Hagee's endorsement because of ugly remarks the extremist evangelist made about God sending Hitler to hunt the Jews.

"Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them," McCain said at the time. And yet you, Newt, happily appear at Hagee's side, praising him profusely for his inspiration and "dedication to serve."

Did you, do you, find Hagee's remarks offensive? What about Hagee's many other similar remarks? Or has your bigotry, directed mostly at Muslims, overtaken you?

Just wondering -- you know, because you may be running for president and are widely considered, including by the media, to be a leading Republican.

Rather insincerely,

Michael Stickings

Cowards and conservatives: Much ridiculous ado about Ron Schiller, NPR, and James O'Keefe's latest right-wing scam

By Michael J.W. Stickings

There has been much ado today -- I'm late coming to this, but I haven't been feeling well -- about NPR being caught in yet another gotcha sting by right-wing activist James O'Keefe and his ironically-named Project Veritas.

Basically, if you haven't heard the details yet, NPR executives Ron Schiller and Betsy Liley had lunch with two men posing as representatives of the so-called Muslim Education Action Center Trust, a fictitious philanthropic organization backed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The group, the two men said, wanted to give $5 million to NPR because, they said, "the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere." During the lunch, Schiller went off on Republicans and conservatives, saying, for example:

-- "The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian – I wouldn't even call it Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of move."

-- On the Tea Party: "It's not just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America, gun-toting. I mean, it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people."

That's about it. O'Keefe got it all on video, and now the story's flying around the Internet, with the anti-NPR ire of the right ramped up to new levels of vitriol.

Let me address the above comments first:

-- The Republican Party is indeed socially conservative and deeply theocratic. On the whole, it seeks to impose right-wing, fundamentalist Christian "values" on the country. One might object to Schiller's assertion that such evangelical fundamentalism isn't "Christian," but Schiller is right.

-- Schiller does somewhat misrepresent the Tea Party. While there are indeed racist elements in it, it is for the most part an anti-tax, anti-government, hyper-libertarian movement.

Undeniably, there are xenophobic and anti-Muslim strains in the Republican Party, significant if not dominant strains, but they are to be found more among the paleo-conservatives (and some neoconservatives), as well as within the party "establishment," not really, or at least not exclusively, among the Tea Partiers. (Rand Paul isn't really the problem here, it's more the likes of fear- and hatemongers like Pete King.) Still, the Tea Party is overwhelmingly white, pro-gun, and "middle" American. It may not be as racist as Schiller suggests, but it's certainly scary.

Okay, so what else did Schiller say?

-- "What NPR did I'm very proud of. What NPR stood for is a non-racist, non-bigoted, straightforward telling of the news. Our feeling is that if a person expresses his or her personal opinion, which anyone is entitled to do in a free society, they are compromised as a journalist. They can no longer fairly report. And the question we asked internally was, can Juan Williams, when he makes a statement like that, can he report to the Muslim population, and be believed, for example? And the answer is no. He lost all credibility and that breaks your ethics as a journalist."

I didn't necessarily think Williams should have been fired on the grounds that what he said crossed the line -- though I certainly would have supported firing him for his long record of being a shoddy pundit -- but it's not like Schiller said anything outrageous in defending NPR's decision.

-- "I think what we all believe is if we don't have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air... it's the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn't have female voices."

And? There is widespread anti-Muslim bigotry in America right now, most of it stoked and espoused by the right, and there should indeed be "Muslim voices in our schools." That doesn't mean that "our schools" should be Muslim, though conservatives are also stoking fears of a Muslim takeover and the imposition of Sharia law, just that Muslims in America are part of the American fabric.

-- NPR "would be better off in the long run without federal funding."

This was perhaps the most controversial thing he said, but only because it contradicts NPR's official position. If it's just his opinion, so what? He should have avoided talking corporate policy, and shouldn't have spoken for NPR given his dissenting view, but that's an error of judgement, nothing more.

So can we move on? Conservatives will make a big deal of this, but they were already anti-NPR, and, as far as I'm concerned, Schiller's remarks don't amount to much.

Well, let's address a few points first:

-- NPR has commented officially on the matter already:

The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept.

We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for.

Mr. Schiller announced last week that he is leaving NPR for another job.

In other words, NPR was not about to take the money, quickly distanced itself from Schiller's remarks (going so far as to call them appalling), and further distanced itself from Schiller, who had already announced that he was leaving NPR to take a job elsewhere.

-- I am actually somewhat appalled the NPR called Schiller's remarks appalling. Again, is what he said really so bad, so outrageous? Fox News people, including on-air personalities, say far worse all the time. NPR has different (i.e., higher) standards, obviously, but it seems to me that NPR is going too far the other way, trying to defend itself from any and all possible association with partisanship. And for what? For the small amount NPR takes in federal funding every year?

-- NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation) said Schiller's remarks were "deeply distressing to reporters, editors and others who bring fairness, civility and respect for a wide variety of viewpoints to their work every day." They may have been, and may still be -- how should I know? -- but Schiller was a fundraiser and was not involved with NPR content. So it's not like it was an editor or reporter, or executive responsible for such matters, was caught saying such partisan things.

-- Schiller himself has already apologized:

While the meeting I participated in turned out to be a ruse, I made statements during the course of the meeting that are counter to NPR's values and also not reflective of my own beliefs. I offer my sincere apology to those I offended. I resigned from NPR, previously effective May 6th, to accept another job. In an effort to put this unfortunate matter behind us, NPR and I have agreed that my resignation is effective today.

Again, why this embarrassing self-flagellation? Were his remarks really "not reflective" of his "own beliefs"? So what? And whom exactly did he offend? Republicans? Tea Partiers? Anti-Muslim bigots? Why does he need to apologize to them? Perhaps he should have apologized to NPR to openly objecting to corporate policy, at least in terms of federal funding, and perhaps he should have admitted that he spoke too freely, but more than that was hardly necessary.

And yet here he is, along with NPR itself, issuing one big mea culpa while conservatives point fingers, sneer, and gloat.

Please. Does he have no self-respect? Does NPR have no self-respect? Do we liberals have no self-respect?

I'm sick and fucking tired of the double standard. Conservatives can say whatever the hell they want, going so far as to promote extremist views on every media channel they can get hold of, but liberals have to bend over backwards to apologize for even the slightest hint of bias. It's truly and utterly pathetic.

And, in this case, it's coming from a guy who was already on the way out! (And a cowardly NPR just kicked him out the door sooner.)

-- As John Cole puts it in his usual blunt way: "The latest scoop from the wingnutosphere is that some former NPR fundraiser thinks that the teahadists are nuts and that the GOP has been hijacked by crazy people. This is being spun as some grave sin, when in reality it should be met with a resounding -- 'No shit.'"

My thought exactly.

Playing politics with the Tucson tragedy

By Nicholas Wilbur

Nobody doubted the depth of denial that would gush from Rush Limbaugh's radio studio following the murderous rampage in Tucson this weekend. The "vitriol in politics" became a primary focus of the national media almost immediately after the news of the shooting broke.

Those who had made references to "second amendment remedies" and "firing machine guns" and "violent revolution" were targeted for contributing to the hate-filled rhetoric that has marked the past two years of political discourse. Having defended most of the Tea Party and Fox News celebrities who led the march against Democrats in November by riling their base and inciting the masses to join this new wave of "activism," Limbaugh, among many others, was put on the defensive.

Before his broadcast, I ignorantly maintained a sliver of hope that as one of America's most popular political personalities, Limbaugh would join the bipartisan movement to condemn both the savage murders and the extremism that has taken over this country. Instead, he demonstrated general ignorance of mass media's influence by denying the persuasive power of celebrities and excused the tone of politics by pointing fingers at the "liberal" media for "politicizing" the Tucson shooting as some sort of bizarrely-contrived Democratic conspiracy.

The attempted assassination of a politician is as political as it gets, but a Democratic Congresswoman taking a 9-mm bullet in the head at point-blank range wasn't enough to deter the almighty Limbaugh from accusing the left of political opportunism.

In a rant that should be remembered only in the history archives of national radio as the beginning of a giant's end, Limbaugh lambasted the left for capitalizing on a tragedy and criminalizing all Americans by anticipating the assassination as a means for pushing through a political agenda.

"I guarantee you," he said, "that somewhere in a desk drawer in Washington, D.C., someplace, in an FCC bureaucrat's office or some place, the government machinery will be in place to take away as many political freedoms as they can manage on the left. They already have it in place... just waiting for the right event for a clampdown. They have been trying this ever since the Oklahoma City bombing."

He continued: 

Here you have a 22-year-old kid, a dopehead – marijuana – just genuinely insane. Irrational. And the first thought – the desperate hope that the losers in November of 2010 had – was that they could revitalize their political fortunes because of this unfortunate shooting of a Congresswoman in Arizona. That was the most important thing to them, and that to me is sick. You know that they were rubbing hands together. You know that they were e-mailing and calling each other on the phone saying, "Ah-ha, this might be the one. This might be the one where we can officially tie it to these guys and shut them up and shut 'em down." They want you to believe that sadness was on the order of the day, and I'm sure it was, but... they couldn't help themselves. They just couldn't help themselves. [Emphasis added.]

Not surprisingly, Limbaugh was short on the details of exactly how Democrats would go about utilizing this event for their own political ends. But thankfully, there is such a thing as daily news to pin facts to the allegations made by the pill-popping millionaires on the right who see nothing but conspiracies in every gesture of every Democrat in the country.

According to The Hill, the first freedom attacked by the left is the right to use violent language against elected officials. After waiting more than a decade for a right-wing nut to shoot a bullet through the brain of a politically moderate member of Congress, Democrats finally had the opportunity to go for the jugular of America's constitutionally protected political liberties. So what did they do?

They proposed a bill – like socialistic opportunists will – that would make it a federal offense to use language or symbols that threaten or incite violence against a member of Congress or a federal official – a protection, it should be noted, that is already provided to the president.

The alleged aim of this proposed legislation is to quell the violent language that has become so common in American politics, but below the surface it's pretty obvious that Democrats are targeting right-wingers, Tea Partiers, and extremist conservatives in general – "to shut them up and shut 'em down," just as Limbaugh predicted.

The second "political freedom" Democrats are seeking to revoke is the right to carry high-capacity magazines like the one used by the Tucson shooter this weekend. This law actually isn't new; it was in place for a decade but expired in 2004. After seeing one man gun down twenty people in a matter of seconds with a clip that would have been illegal six years ago, Democratic lawmakers in D.C. thought it might be timely to re-implement the ban.

"The only reason to have 33 bullets loaded in a handgun is to kill a lot of people very quickly," Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) said in a statement Monday, according to The Hill. "Before 2004, these ammunition clips were banned, and they must be banned again."

What they're really doing is taking our guns away, and Republicans will see to it that this doesn't happen – as they did in 2008 when Democrats proposed a reauthorization bill. It died in committee.

And lastly, what Democrat-imposed unraveling of the Constitution would be complete without the infringement on First Amendment rights?

According to several news reports, the Arizona state legislature is giving the federal judicial system the finger by going against an appeals court ruling last year that upheld the First Amendment rights of church members in Kansas who had taken to protesting funerals of military service members.

The congregants of Westboro Baptist Church believe any unnatural death is the manifestation of God's wrath against American society for its tolerance of homosexuality. They planned to protest the funeral of 9-year-old Christina Green, one of the six victims of Saturday's shooting, but will be unable to now, as the state legislature has barred Westboro from coming within 300 feet of the funeral.

God sent a "soldier veteran" to Tucson on Saturday, Rev. Fred Phelps said in a YouTube.com video posted after the shooting. "Congresswoman [Gabrielle] Giffords, an avid supporter of sin and baby killing, was shot for that mischief... God avenged himself on you today, by a marvelous work in Tucson. He sits in the heavens and laughs at you and your affliction. Westboro prays for more shooters, more violent veterans, and more dead. Praise god for his righteous judgments in his Earth. Amen."

It is truly sickening... how far Democrats are willing to go in order to push their agenda down the throats of America's patriots.

This is what "democracy" is all about for liberals – violating "political freedoms" by denying people the right to threaten an elected official, banning assault weapon magazines, and stomping on the First Amendment rights of church-going Kansans who want to picket the funerals of victims killed in a failed political assassination.

This is what Democrats do when they lose midterm elections – they upend the Constitution and attempt to unravel the very fabric of this country in order to "revitalize their political fortunes" by capitalizing on tragedy.

Probably most of the nation can agree with Limbaugh when he says, "to me that is sick."

Westboro Baptist Church members protest at Elizabeth Edwards funeral

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Would it be rude of me to write that the members of the Westboro Baptist Church, including those few who showed up to protest at Elizabeth Edwards's funeral on Saturday, can go fuck themselves?

No? Alright then.

They have every right to speak their minds, however small and bigoted, but they can still go fuck themselves.

I'm sorry, or not, but I just don't think there's a more appropriate way to put it.