Sociopathic Fundamentalism: A Clear and Present Danger

Dinesh D'Souza's Sociopathic Fundamentalism.

By The Truth Forum Reporter  

Sunday Sep 19, 2010 4:58 PM EDT

At its core, fundamentalism is an uncontrollable quest for political power. Fundamentalists are individuals who are highly offended when the rights they themselves enjoy are extended to others. To be able to deny others their fundamental human rights, the fundamentalist needs power, lots and lots of it. Most fundamentalists really prefer a dictatorship because it presents them with greater opportunity to practice oppression. In a democracy, because the practice of universal adult suffrage where the rich and poor have only one vote makes it almost impossible to be blatantly oppressive, oppression is carried out in a more nuanced manner and the effort to manipulate and marginalize others requires a lot of creativity. The fundamentalists’ most creative approach is to engage in a lot of religious moralizing to give the appearance of seeking the common good.

This façade of morality confuses the unwary and makes them believe the fundamentalist is fighting their cause, when in reality the fundamentalist is their worst enemy. This is the deceptive manner by which fundamentalists gain the political power they need to carry out their acts of oppression. Dinesh D’Souza, who just wrote a hate piece in Forbes Magazine titled "How Obama Thinks," which is about President Obama’s supposed "anti-colonial roots," is one such fundamentalist, but with a different and darker side.

Dinesh D’Souza is a fundamentalist of a different and more vicious persuasion, and he makes no effort to be nuanced in his promotion of oppression. He is one who is not ashamed to be an oppressor and he makes no effort to hide his love of oppression of those he considers as "lesser" or "other." He loves oppression of others and is proud to admit it. How else does one explain his defense of colonialism which not only victimized Third World countries, but even the great America has been a victim of colonialism, or has Dinesh D’souza forgotten the Revolutionary War? Has he forgotten America’s Declaration of Independence? Does he not understand that the Declaration of Independence means independence from British oppression and colonialism? So in Dinesh D’Souza’s universe, anything anti-colonial is bad, and anything that is African anti-colonialism is even worse. He certainly doesn’t think that Africans deserve any freedom. So in one fell swoop he smears everyone who has ever fought for their freedom from colonialism and oppression, and the list includes America, and manages to denigrate Africa and Africans at the same time.

He accuses Obama of not having the American dream; that his vision does not square with that of the founding fathers. But it is he Dinesh Dsouza who does not subscribe to the American dream of freedom to become all that you can be. It is he who holds to the sick ideal that the colonialism is the greatest good. Has he never heard of Patrick Henry who said, concerning the fight for independence from colonial England, "Give me liberty, or give me death!?" He was a founding father. For an American who is originally a native of India, a nation which experienced some of the worst evils under British colonialism, where Indians were routinely subjected to murders and massacres bordering on genocide, it is extremely difficult to understand his romance with colonialism. As an oppressor, he appears to be of the mindset that his native country’s independence and by implication America’s independence from Britain is a bad thing. It’s a sad day indeed when the oppressed turns oppressor, but oppressors and fundamentalists exist everywhere. They are in all cultures and in every country. Dinesh D’souza ia a third world, third rate oppressor who is eager to demonstrate his love of oppression to his current masters by sanitizing and revising their history of oppression. He obviously has found one such master in Newt Gingrich, who surprise, surprise, happens to wholeheartedly agree with the inane vituperations of Dinesh D’Souza.

In his Forbes article, which took sleaze to a new low, Dinesh D’Souza digs deep into the gutter to "expose" phony connections between President’s Obama’s views on colonialism and those of his (Obama’s) father, whom he hardly knew. He then runs with his phony connections and weaves a mind-bending plot thick with innuendo, untruths and downright lies. Talking about the article on her show, Diane Rehm of NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show said in her Friday News Roundup of September 17, 2010 that, "Nothing has turned my stomach so much in recent years as reading that article." Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post described the article as "scurrilous." The dictionary defines scurrilous as "grossly or obscenely abusive or defamatory," and "using such language as only the license of a buffoon can warrant." Dinesh D’souza is a big buffoon and he has demonstrated his buffoonery by his scurrilous article.

Like his fellow travelers in the fundamentalist circuit, freedom is anathema, especially when sought by those they consider lesser creatures. That is why after the Haiti earthquake, Pat Robertson declared that it was tantamount to making a pact with the Devil for the Haitians to rid themselves of enslavement by the French. It is the very reason why a hate group like the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) is filing a lawsuit to deny peace-loving Muslims the right to build an interfaith center near ground zero. Only a fundamentalist organization like the ACLJ would subject the judicial process to the peculiar abuse of using the law to deny fellow Americans their fundamental human rights of freedom of association and worship, which includes the freedom to have a center that has already been approved by all relevant and appropriate authorities. What do the fundamentalists really want? If they had the power to do it right now they would intern all peace-loving American Muslims the same way they interned peace-loving Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the reason they are so angry is because they are unable to carry out their acts of oppression. Their actions prove this fact, and this is the very reason that fundamentalists crave power at all costs.

When these conservatives perpetrate their acts of foolishness, it would be nice if the administration could call them out directly once in a while, because when they don’t and instead embark on a campaign to assign blame to the peripheral actors in the dram, it presents an appearance of weakness and fear which emboldens the evildoers. As it was in the case of Shirley Sherrod, when this administration curiously blamed the media for the deeds of Andrew Breitbart, so it is in this case where the administration, once again, is blaming the media, this time Forbes Magazine for the evils of Dinesh D’Souza’s article. Why is Dinesh D’Souza not taken to task for his own article? Why was Andrew Breitbart not take to task for the malicious editing that produced the distorted Shirley Sherrod video? And why have Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich not been called out directly for the evils they have done and continue to do.

It is not the responsibility of the media to fight the administration’s battles. The media cannot be the opponents of any political party. They simply serve as an echo chamber to promote the views that are in the market place. The reason we have two political parties it so that each can promote its own ideas of governance and show the electorate why its own ideas are superior. When one side is assiduously unwilling to do its part, we get the exasperating scenario that currently exists where all we hear is one lone, unopposed viewpoint. That’s the reason the Republicans are running away with victory while remaining the most unattractive political group in the minds of voters. When a president cannot call a spade a spade, something’s wrong. When a president’s instinctive response to the antics of an oppressor is to immediately go into appeasement mode, then something is desperately wrong.

Originally published in the TruthForumReport Blog by The Truth Forum Reporter.

SALON

WEDNESDAY, NOV 4, 2015 02:55 PM EST

The GOP is a neo-Confederate party now: The South and the religious right have devoured the Republicans whole

To understand the insane 2016 campaign, you must understand the Southern, religious, anti-immigrant GOP base

LOU DUBOSE, WASHINGTON SPECTATOR

TOPICS: RACE, REPUBLICANS, THE SOUTH, RELIGIOUS RIGHT, TED CRUZ, DONALD TRUMP, EDITOR'S PICKS,ELECTIONS 2016, NEWS

(Credit: AP/Reuters/Chris Keane/Kevin Lamarque/Patrick Semansky)

When Lester Maddox was governor of Georgia in the late 1960s, he insisted that the problem with the state’s prisons was “the poor quality of its inmates.”

Maddox was a Democrat and an ardent defender of the Apartheid South, not exactly an American statesman. Yet his defense of Georgia’s prison system turns out to be a perfect metaphor for today’s Republican Party, created when political consultant Kevin Phillips realized that Nixon’s 43.9 percent, added to George Wallace’s 13.5 percent of the popular vote in the 1968 election, was the beginning of a coalition that would ensure a permanent Republican majority in the South. (Phillips has spent the second half of his life atoning for and writing about his Southern Strategy.)

To understand the posturing of the Republican candidates this year, you have to take into account the quality of the inmates––the Southern, conservative, anti-immigrant base that dominates the party Lincoln helped create to confront the nativism and anti-immigration politics of the Democrats and Know Nothings in the 1850s.

The candidates––not their backers and constituency-group leaders––got most of the media attention at last month’s Values Voters Summit in Washington because they are the candidates––and because their pronouncements, which range from deeply disturbing to utterly risible, are newsworthy.

When Ted Cruz implies that if elected, he will kill Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, that’s news. When Mike Huckabee promises to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to ban abortion with the stroke of a pen, because the unborn are fully fledged citizens of the United States (“None of your daughters and daughters-in-law called you up and said ‘Guess What? I’m going to have a blob of tissue.’”), that’s also news. As is Rick Santorum’s promise to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage “as between a man and a woman.”

As is, I suppose, Donald Trump’s truculent defense of Christmas. “I love Christmas. You go to stores now and you don’t see the word ‘Christmas.’ It says ‘Happy Holidays’ all over. I say ‘where’s Christmas?’ I tell my wife ‘don’t go to those stores!’ I want to see Christmas!”

The inmates

Where’s the market for political discourse of this caliber? It plays particularly with the constituency groups that make up today’s Republican Party.

The Values Voters Summit is an annual production of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins’s non-profit (and tax-exempt) foundation that for decades has been at the center of anti-abortion, anti-LGBT campaigns. During the presidential election cycle, its national and regional events are a magnet for candidates in pursuit of the Republican evangelical base. This year, roughly 2,500 attended the D.C. event.

“You’ve been amazing! And to have such a fantastic room!” Donald Trump said as he wrapped up his 30-minute “speech.” The Don Rickles, Vegas-style sign-off was pitch-perfect for Trump, even if waving his Bible in the air as he closed seemed contrived, and even if he had no idea of the second bananas who opened and closed for him.

Consider the Benham brothers.

Identical twins Jason and David Benham became Christian-right martyrs when the HGTV cable network cancelled their “Flip it Forward” reality show before it went into production.

The network had been careless in vetting its two stars. The twins’ father, the Rev. Flip Benham, is a virulent and confrontational anti-abortion crusader and anti-LGBT activist. The sons have followed in the father’s footsteps.

HGTV, an apolitical home-and-garden network, had been sold on a program that followed the brothers as they bought, remodeled, and flipped houses. Then network executives discovered some of David’s anti-gay advocacy, which might have made selling ads a challenge.

One example was a passage in an article the rowdier of the two twins wrote for a Christian publication:

In the Leviticus passage above it says that death is the consequence for homosexual sin. This is how detestable this type of sin is to God.

Benham did go on to observe that because “homosexual sin is covered by the blood of Jesus,” it will never again be considered a capital offense. But network execs decided that his anti-gay writing and advocacy was a reasonable justification to abort the reality program.

The “firing” catapulted the twins into a new career, their hugely popular two-man show booked by hundreds of Christian event planners. The brothers are handsome, virile, and charismatic. Their act plays off a gently mocking sibling rivalry, quibbling about who was the better player on their high school basketball team in North Carolina, or who is the harder-bodied Cross-X trainer.

On the Values Voter stage, they added to their routine a group of heroes in “the war on religion”––the Oregon couple who owned Sweet Cakes Bakery and refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple; Iowans Rich and Betty Odgaard, who refused to rent their wedding chapel to a same-sex couple; Baronelle Stutzman, the septuagenarian Washington State florist who refused to provide floral arrangements for the same-sex wedding of one of her longtime clients; Kelvin Cochran, a former Atlanta fire chief relieved of his duties after he had published a book in which he described “homosexuality, lesbianism, pederasty, bestiality,” as related forms of “biblically unclean sexual perversion,” et al.

Secular liberals are targeting only Christians, David said.

“I haven’t seen a Muslim baker gettin’ sued yet,”he said. “And I haven’t seen the imams and the clerics getting pressure to marrying gay couples.”

Indeed.

Redemption and the unredeemable

Martyrdom is one powerful Christian theme, redemption another.

Star Parker is a tall, imposing African-American woman given to stylish long braids. She, too, is in demand at Christian and other conservative political events. She has run for Congress, written books, and is a columnist whose work appears in right- wing news outlets.

Parker often prefaces her speeches (actually strident, high-decibel rants), with a short take on her CV: “I’ve been in and out of criminal activity, drug activity, sexual activity, welfare activity, until Christ reached out into my heart to reconcile me.”

Her focus is usually abortion and her performance is as Grand Guignol as political theatre gets. She tells a large Saturday morning crowd gathered in Northwest Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel ballroom that the nation is in a civil war. Committed Christians are the Union Army engaged in a campaign to free the unborn from secular forces that would have them aborted.

She describes in grisly detail excerpts of testimony from the trial of Kermit Gosnell, convicted of first-degree murder for killing viable babies at his West Philadelphia abortion clinic, by cutting their spinal cords with scissors.

“One baby was big enough to walk to the bus stop, and he slashed that little boy’s neck and tossed him in a shoe box,” she says.

There is a description of parts of “47 babies in a freezer that had to be thawed out like a TV dinner.” Then Star moves seamlessly to Planned Parenthood (never in any way associated with Gosnell’s private, for-profit Philadelphia clinic).

“Did Congress pay attention to Gosnell? See if there are any more Gosnells out there? . . . Planned Parenthood is still in business, the taxpayer-subsidized abortion business. And selling baby body parts.”

Owning an enrapt audience, she goes on.

“Homosexuals, now that they are married . . . are going to get their children right out of our foster care system.”

And on.

“Any Christian parent who has their child in one of those cesspools we call public schools is going to receive back a liberal.”

And on.

“A government that wants to retire our seniors through a taxation scheme called Social Security.”

Until I can’t go on and head out to Calvert Avenue to hail a cab.

But this road goes on forever and this party never ends––at this event, at CPAC, at Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom gatherings, at hundreds of venues and before tens of thousands of activists across the country, where the religious right, the Tea Party right, and the American Conservative Union, et al. convene.

The Benham Twins, Star Parker, Oliver North on patriotism, Gary Bauer’s account of every execution that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took the oath of office; Congressman Louie Gohmert on the prospects of impeaching Barack Obama.

Until it ends, the neo-Confederate, mostly white, Christian party that Kevin Phillips envisioned in 1968 continues as half of our republic’s two-party system.

This story was originally published by the Washington Spectator

Lou Dubose is editor of the Washington Spectator, and author of "Boy Genius," a political biography of Karl Rove.

NEWS & POLITICS

The Tea Party Is Dangerous: Dispelling 7 Myths That Help Us Avoid Reality About the New Right-Wing Politics

It may be fashionable to dismiss the Tea Party and its radical, right-wing pals, but we do so at our peril.

By Adele M. Stan / AlterNet

June 30, 2010

Few things are more confounding to liberals and progressives than the rise of the Tea Party movement, and the media’s infatuation with it. Just as we breathed a sigh of relief with the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th president, after eight disastrous years under the reign of Bush the Younger, in swept a furious wave of misanthropic pique.

Really, we shouldn’t have been surprised. Just as a recession hit of unprecedented force, yielding high unemployment, conservatives found themselves sidelined, Obama’s triumph coming on the heels of the Democrats’ congressional victories of 2006. That partisan change would have been enough to make conservatives ornery, but the cultural change represented by the nation’s first African-American president struck fear into the hearts of many -- especially after liberal San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to wield the gavel of the Speaker of the House.

The inevitable backlash against such a sweeping shift, shepherded by an array of corporate-funded entities, culminated in the creation of the Tea Party movement -- a dangerous brew of resentment and fear that threatens to roll back the majority the Democrats enjoy in the House of Representatives, and set the nation on a path to a right-wing government even more restrictive and regressive than that of the Bush era.

But bad economies create bad politics, notes economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. Economic downturns traditionally, over the course of history, usher in swings to the right, Krugman writes. The administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an aberration in this regard, and, perhaps, as Michael Tomasky suggests, in the course of American history. But since the Great Depression offers our most recent experience of severe economic crisis, its story is etched in the progressive mind as the narrative for how the nation naturally responds to economic catastrophe.

More than a year ago, Robert Reich warned of the vitriol we see today from the Tea Party movement, as well as its likely targets. “Make no mistake: Angry right-wing populism lurks just below the surface of the terrible American economy,” Reich wrote, “ready to be launched not only at Obama but also at liberals, intellectuals, gays, blacks, Jews, the mainstream media, coastal elites, crypto socialists, and any other potential target of paranoid opportunity.”

We must not make the mistake Reich warned us about; we ignore the emergence of the Tea Party movement at our peril. We are the ones they’ve been waiting for.

The impulse to dismiss the Tea Party movement is understandable, especially given the kook factor (something that every grassroots movement has). The wacky signs, the crazy rhetoric about health care as some form of tyranny: How could this add up to a force able to defeat the massive coalition that led to President Obama's election?

Charles P. Pierce, writing at Esquire’s blog, expresses this view with his claim that the Tea Party movement isn’t really a movement at all, but rather “the kind of noisy paranoid lunacy that used to be stapled to lampposts, or hollered about by people you would avoid in the public parks.” Some of that is true, but it also feeds an attendant denial of the kind of damage such a movement -- or non-movement, in Pierce’s view -- can do.

Ultimately, the same forces that launched the Religious Right in the 1970s lurk behind today’s Tea Party movement, aided and abetted by Fox News, corporate-funded organizing groups and far-right players within the Republican Party -- forces which, taken in aggregate, constitute a sort of Tea Party, Inc. They have money. They have power. And they know how to get more of both.

Day after day, the themes favored by the billionaires and political operatives who mobilize the Tea Partiers are hammered with ruthless repetition not only by Glenn Beck and the rest of Fox News, but also by Rush Limbaugh and hundreds of radio talk-show hosts and right-wing syndicated newspaper columnists. And now those themes are finding their way into mainstream media as journalists feel compelled to address them in their reporting.

Over the course of the last 30 years, conservatives have held more years in power than liberals and moderate Democrats. But the men behind the right-wing fury don’t just want their power back; they want more of it than they’ve ever had before.

The right is patient, but it is not kind. Its leaders are content to take a long path to their goal of grabbing all the marbles. In the 2010 elections, they may win a few and lose a few, but in these two things they will succeed: moving both the civic discourse and the Republican Party further to the right.

Through the launch of successful primary challenges in key races for the U.S. Senate, they’ve introduced ideas far outside the mainstream of American political discourse: elimination of the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, the outlawing of abortion under any circumstances. These ideas have never before had the breadth of coverage granted by national media to important electoral contests. Absurd as they may seem now, they may seem less so if liberal governance fails to heal the economy.

As progressives and liberals seek to make sense of the Tea Party movement, a handful of myths have emerged to explain the wishful thinking about the movement’s supposed inability to gain the kind of power that could set us back decades. Some are excuses for inaction, some are fantasies born of denial and some are simple simple misreadings of the times. Here are seven emerging themes for not taking the Tea Party movement seriously, and why they are wrong.

1. The Tea Party movement is largely a creation of the media, which devotes too much coverage to the Tea Party's small constituency of malcontents.

There's little doubt that media hype has played a significant role in both the growth and coverage of the Tea Party movement. But that does not negate the potential impact of this anti-government tribe on American politics or governance, as Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum believes. Rather, the role played by media in amplifying the Tea Party message simply speaks to one means -- the major one, perhaps -- by which the movement has grown. And now media are beginning to internalize some of those themes in their own assessments of the Obama administration, such as the obsession with reducing the federal deficit in an economy that, if history is any guide, will require serious deficit spending to repair.

Those who count supporters of the Tea Party movement as a small cohort within the American populace often cite, as theAtlanta Journal-Constitution'sCynthia Tucker does, the finding from the New York Times/CBS News poll that Tea Party supporters account for 18 percent of the general population. If that's evidence of their irrelevance, than liberals may as well count themselves out of the realm of political influence: The same poll shows that liberals make up a mere 20 percent. (The survey did not offer a designation for "progressive," so it's presumed that liberals and progressives are lumped together.)

When it comes to the Tea Party movement, the media comprise the message, as much as carry it. The structural role that media play in amplifying, growing and maintaining the movement has elements that set it apart from other movements, due to the role played by Rupert Murdoch and his two flagship U.S. properties: Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

The personalities of Fox News and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journaldo more than magnify the Tea Party movement's messages; they are communications strategists that reinforce the movement's themes with cogent framing and clever wordplay, delivered incessantly across all forms of media in their purview and outside of it.

These media figures also function as movement organizers. Fox News targets the individual viewer and activist, repeating Tea Party themes relentlessly and spewing disinformation about progressives and the Obama administration, but also recommending courses of action, such as marching on Washington. Glenn Beck is Rupert Murdoch's community organizer. It doesn't matter to Murdoch how many advertisers Beck loses through his outrageous accusations against progressives or the White House; the deregulatory agenda Murdoch stands to gain through Beck's success with viewers could reap the media mogul billions more than the paltry millions to be gained through advertising on Beck's Fox NewsChannel show. (As the CEO of News Corporation, the parent company of Fox and WSJ, Murdoch's interest in deregulation extends to the financial industry, and just about every other industry in which his personal billions may be invested.)

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal editorial page carries the Tea Party message to elites, via columnists such as John Fund and Stephen Moore, who leverage their own perches at the Journal to appear, in the guise of experts, on television and radio news programs beyond the Murdoch empire.

The relentless repetition of Tea Party messages by Murdoch's minions, be they tropes about deficit spending or allegations of presidential ineptitude, seeps into the non-Murdoch media when they cover the controversies cooked up by Fox and WSJ. Even the New York Timesis displaying symptoms of psychological infection, as my colleague Joshua Holland points out.

Progressives have no media structure that parallels Fox and the Wall Street Journal, and the nature of capitalism and for-profit media all but ensure they will not. Just because it features liberal and progressive program hosts and personalities, MSNBC is not a parallel entity to Fox NewsChannel. MSNBC is owned not by a progressive billionaire who seeks to impose the progressive agenda on the world. It is owned by General Electric, an immense corporation (and defense contractor). For GE, MSNBC is a profit center: the ideological bent of its liberal cable newschannel is the result of astute market research. Until MSNBC went liberal, there was a void in the market for a newschannel liberals could call their own.

Neither does the New York Times offer a parallel to the Wall Street Journal. It may have a largely liberal editorial board and op-ed page, but the New York Times is a paper of record for the nation on all manner of subjects whose readership includes elites of all sorts, not just the liberals who take comfort in the columns of Paul Krugman or Frank Rich. TheWall Street Journal, though national in scope, targets readers largely interested in business and finance -- the community that stands most to gain from a Tea Party triumph.

If anything, the media's role in fomenting and organizing the Tea Party movement is the number one reason to regard the movement as serious threat; not one to be used to dismiss it.

2. The Tea Party movement is not an authentic grassroots movement; it's the creation of astroturf groups.

Actually, no. The Tea Party movement began as an authentic grassroots uprising, the result of real, on-the-ground resentment against the government (for the bank bailout), the new African-American president and the falling fortunes of middle- and working-class white people in the devastated economy. Corporate-funded astroturf groups such as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth saw in this burgeoning resentment the means to undermine progressives and to pave the way for enacting an anti-regulatory agenda that could spell billions in new profits for corporations and the financial industry at the expense of everyday people. And so they got busy, initially organizing the discontented in opposition to the health care reform legislation passed earlier this year.

Blogger Stephen Markley exemplifies acommon strain of thought that this means that the Tea Party isn't a real movement, but that's just a matter of semantics. Whatever you want to call it, it does have real power and, at the ground level, comprises real people.

FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity organized the opposition to disrupt town-hall meetings devoted to the bill called by members of Congress in their districts, with FreedomWorks' Bob McGuffie actually offering a "how-to" kit on his Web site (PDF), Right Principles. Fox News hammered away, repeating lies about "death panels" for the elderly and abortion coverage in the bill. (At an Americans For Prosperity event AlterNet covered last August, personalities from either Fox News or the Wall Street Journal accounted for one-third of the 15 speakers on the roster for the conference plenary.) The organized Tea Party opposition helped to kill the public option, and created the pressures that yielded the current bill's sweet deals for insurance companies.

Columnist Cynthia Tucker would have you believe that the amplification by right-wing media of the contrived town-hall confrontations -- as well as subsequent Tea Party happenings -- render them to be so much hooey. "[I]ts loud, publicity-oriented antics draw news media attention, giving it more an appearance of clout than actual influence," writes Tucker. 

But health care reform never was the main event for these groups; it was simply the best issue on hand at the time to organize around. Because health care is so personal, it stirs the emotions, especially of those whose distrust of government and the president run so deep. The real deal for the astroturfers is regulation of any kind -- particularly of the energy industry, but including the financial system, telecommunications and the Internet.

Both FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity stem from a now-defunct group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, founded by David Koch, heir to the fortune of Koch Industries, the nation's largest, privately held oil and gas company. Today, Koch chairs the board of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. While FreedomWorks claims that it receives no Koch money, it promotes Koch's agenda.

The success of FreedomWorks, AFP and Fox News in mobilizing the Tea Party movement has brought an army of political operatives and lobbyists to the gates, and given rise to new entities, such as the Tea Party Express, an organization born of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC chaired by Republican operative Howard Kaloogian, who spearheaded the recall of Democratic Gov. Grey Davis in California. Taken together, I think of these entities as "Tea Party Inc.," distinct from the grassroots right-wing movement they often successfully mobilize.

For a whole class of K Street lobbyists, political operatives and dirty tricksters, the Tea Party movement has become big business, if this anonymous account, said to be written by a Republican political consultant, in this month's Playboyis to be believed. Whether or not the author inflates his own importance and that of the Tea Party PAC he says he was hired to advise, there is truth in the author's claims of co-option of the movement by the professional class of political manipulators. But that doesn't make the Tea Party movement any less dangerous.

3. The Tea Party movement cannot win general elections.

Well, the jury's still out on that one. In the race for Nevada's U.S. Senate seat, GOP candidate and Tea Party victor Sharron Angle is giving Harry Reid a run for his money, polling three points ahead of the Senate majority leader, according to the latest Mason-Dixon poll, which was conducted in early June. In Kentucky's Senate race, the most recent SurveyUSA poll shows Rand Paul running ahead of Democrat Jack Conway.

On the other hand, Tea Party darling Marco Rubio, the GOP nominee-apparent, is in a tight race against the now-independent Gov. Charlie Crist for Florida's U.S. Senate seat. Crist had the backing of the Republican Party establishment in the GOP primary, but ducked out of the party before the contest took place because he appeared to be headed for a loss of the nomination to Rubio, due to the latter's strong backing from Tea Party Inc. Now straddling the middle, Crist is now narrowly leading in his attempt to win the seat as an independent, versus Rubio (who now has no real competition for the Republican nomination) and likely Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek.

But, really, all this is beside the point. The threat posed by the Tea Party movement is less about the next election than it is about the long-term fate of the republic. In 2010, the Tea Party movement and its astroturf manipulators will win a few and lose a few in the general election. Those, like Huffington Post blogger Jim Taylor, who see the Tea Party as a minimal threat will likely point to those losses as proof of the Tea Party's insignificance. The real game this year is the one they've played in Republican primaries, where Tea Party candidates have impressively knocked out establishment GOP picks. The game is being played to push the Republican Party further to the right -- to take power from the hands of establishment figures such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and put it into the hands of Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., beloved by both grassroots Tea Party followers and the barons of Tea Party, Inc.

Witness Kentucky, where the Tea Party-backed Rand Paul knocked off McConnell's pick, Trey Grayson (remember him?), in his own state's open U.S. Senate seat. The backing of Rand Paul by Tea Party, Inc. -- the constellation of Tea Party consultants, astroturf groups and the DeMint machine that operates at the national level -- was strategically designed to weaken McConnell's leadership credentials.

Even if the Tea Party dons fail to win more than a handful of races with the candidates they've backed, they'll likely consider election 2010 to be a success for their purposes. In addition to weakening the GOP establishment, they'll have organized voters, compiling new lists of energized voters ready for use when the 2012 presidential primary season begins.

4. The Tea Party movement is actually good for the Democrats, because they look reasonable by comparison.

This is actually a variation on item No. 3, and it's just as short-sighted. A recent proponent of this theory is Nevada Democratic strategist Dan Hart. Sure, the apparent craziness of Harry Reid's opponent, Sharron Angle -- who wants to end Social Security and the Environmental Protection Agency even as she accepts the support of right-wing "Christians" who want to replace the U.S. Code of Law with the Book of Leviticus -- may make Reid look all the more reasonable by comparison, but many voters aren't feeling very reasonablethese days. "A rebellious electorate embraces crackpots, and crackpots with certificates of election make public policy," Rutgers University Professor Ross Baker told Politico's Jonathan Martin. 

But say the Democrats do benefit in 2010 by comparison with the candidates of Tea Party Inc. In the meantime, the Tea Party movement and its astroturfers continue to shift the Republican Party further to the right, and that's bad for everybody.

5. The Tea Party movement is destined to burn itself out.

I expect it to go on strong as long as Obama remains in office -- and it's quite possible that the present administration will be followed by the election of a right-wing Republican. Either way, if the Tea Party movement fades post-Obama, asAmerican Prospect's Mark Schmitt predicts, its effect on America's political landscape may last for generations.

The Tea Party movement does not represent a new sentiment or set of ideas in American politics; it is merely a new expression of what was once called the New Right, which grew out of the failed 1964 presidential campaign of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz. The men who formed the New Right also created the Religious Right, plucking the late Rev. Jerry Falwell out of the closed universe of Southern Baptists to front a national political organization called the Moral Majority. That organization had much to do with electing Ronald Reagan, long considered to be something of a political joke, to the White House.

The Moral Majority existed for a mere 10 years, but gave birth to a movement that continues to shape the Republican political landscape and holds the keys to the GOP's get-out-the-vote operations.

6. The Tea Party movement is disorganized and has no leader.

Those invested in diminishing the movement's importance point to its lack of organization and lucidity.

But those are exactly the reasons it remains so dangerous: anybody with a paranoid claim that seems plausible in the right-wing universe can pick off a portion of the movement, and with some money and moxie, mobilize a throng of foot-soldiers for his or her cause.

The mobilizer could be corporate-backed astroturfers, Rupert Murdoch's media empire, or a one-note organization such as the so-called constitutionalist Oath Keepers (an organization of people either currently or formerly serving in the armed forces and law enforcement who pledge to defy enforcement of laws they deem to be unconstitutional).

As certain commentators deride the Tea Party movement as being too disorganized to impact electoral politics on a wide scale, right-wing leaders, seeking to tap the rage and resentment that underlies this populist movement, are using the 2010 mid-term elections to organize for 2012 – a presidential election year. The right’s old hands – men such as Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, and Richard Viguerie, known as Ronald Reagan’s “postmaster general” for his direct-mail operation on behalf of 1980’s unlikely presidential candidate, are already on the ground, compiling databases and organizing local Tea Party groups to do electoral activism.

Campaigns that seem ridiculous to in-the-know political observers can provide the basis for potent voter mobilization efforts. Just witness the 1988 presidential campaign of Rev. Pat Robertson, whose losing bid for the Republican nomination yielded a data-mining bonanza that formed the basis of the Christian Coalition – the organization that laid the groundwork for the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” which in turn set the stage for George W. Bush’s ascension to the White House.

7. Tea Party supporters are all stupid, crazy or ignorant.

Except they're not. 

According to an April New York Times/CBS News poll, the percentage of Tea Party supporters with college degrees substantially exceeds the percentage of those in the general population (23 percent, compared with 15 percent for the general public), while 33 percent of Tea Party supporters attended college without obtaining a degree, compared with 28 percent of the general public. They may be less educated than liberals, but that doesn't mean they're dolts.

When people find their notion of reality upended by actual events (say, the near-collapse of the economy of the world's wealthiest nation, in which you happen to live), they reach for explanations that don't contradict their fundamental principles (such as a belief in so-called free markets, or the equation of capitalism with democracy). This is the classic recipe for both scapegoating and conspiracy-theorizing.

But as Chip Berlet, an expert on right-wing populism, writes in theProgressive, "[T]here is no social science evidence that people who join right-wing movements are any more or less crazy or ignorant than their neighbors. While some have psychological predilections for authoritarianism and tend to see the world in overly simplified us vs. them terms, the same predilections can be found on the political left. This is also true with belief in conspiracy theories."

Time to Get Real

Minimizing the force and impact of the Tea Party movement does nothing to defeat it. No amount of ridicule will stop it. If progressives want to save the republic from the hands of the old New Right, they will have to sell their core principles to a public that is not much in a mood to buy anything. It can be done. But it will require a serious, sustained and strategically designed effort that is based around something more than launching progressive primary challengers to establishment Democratic candidates. That's the start of a long-term effort to make the Democratic Party more progressive, but it doesn't begin to meet the structural challenges posed by the Tea Party movement. Without a plan to meet regular Americans through their local media, or a way to articulate progressive goals as a plan of enlightened self-interest, progressives could see their moment slip away, carried on the winds of resentment.

___

Help AlterNet keepour reporters in the field, digging and keeping tabs. Field investigations cost money to travel and cover the maneuverings of the mobile and growing Tea Party movement.To make sure we can pay for our investigations, we immediately need $30,000 to pay the bills and keep our people on watch in the field. This project will operate at a high-intensity pitch through the fall election.Help us out, please.
 

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief.

MADMIKESAMERICA

9 Sinister Ways Fundamental Christians Interpret the Bible

About Michael John Scott
Mr. Scott is a political junkie, and animal lover. He is also a U.S. Army veteran, career law enforcement executive and university professor. In addition he happens to own MadMikesAmerica which means he can write anything he wants, and often does.
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The Christians are convinced the apocalypse in just around the corner.  According to biblical bullshit this end times event is when the Jesus will come floating down from “heaven” and scoop up all those who are “born again” and condemn straight to hell those who do not, regardless of their backgrounds and personalities.  In other words if you ain’t born again it doesn’t matter if you spent your entire life doing good things you would still be condemned while the murderer who has accepted Jesus as his “personal savior” will ostensibly get to enjoy the wonders of heaven.  What a load of nonsense and here’s more:

This article originally appeared in Alternet:

Christians may be a super majority in the U.S. They may control the U.S. Congress and, as we all were reminded recently, the Supreme Court. But that hasn’t stopped Bible believers from preparing their children for martyrdom. Web resources abound for church youth leaders who want to make sure their young charges are ready when the lions come for them. Titles include, “Expect to be Persecuted” “Persecution Equals Reward” and “Adventure Game—Persecution of Christians and Paul of Tarsus.”

Stuff Fundies Like is a blog by and for people coming out of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist tradition. Recently one former Baptist told how his high school youth group had been divided into two groups, assigned to play the roles of persecutors and martyrs. In 2012 a youth pastor in Pennsylvania made international news by staging the kidnapping of his young charges to help prepare them for the horrors to come.

The Christian persecution complex is absurd. Modern American Christians are not persecuted or under attack.  But for Christians who are truly concerned about hostility toward their faith, I have a bit of advice: Don’t be evil. And don’t let your co-religionists get away with being evil either.

No, really.

In the book of Matthew, Jesus gives his disciples a lot of contradictory advice. Modern day followers pick and choose, but one piece that often gets ignored is this: Be harmless as doves. This advice is not only profoundly moral; it is profoundly self-protective. Far fewer people would be entertaining themselves with fantasies about lions if more Christians took this little nugget seriously. A huge part of the antagonism that even moderate Christians face from outsiders is due to the fact that too many devout believers claim a righteous mandate to say and do things that are truly horrible.

Let me spell it out.

1. Opposing protections and rights for children is evil.

Thanks to the influence of biblical Christianity, the U.S. stands alone with Somalia in failing to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Why? Because the Bible instructs parents to hit their children, among other things. Laws that give rights to children go head to head with biblical texts which say in no uncertain terms that children are the property of their fathers, to be punished or even killed in accordance with the father’s religious beliefs and other priorities.

When a Muslim father in Tunisia recently burned his 13 year old daughter to death for walking home with a male classmate, Christians were rightfully appalled. What many fail to acknowledge is that their insistence on elevating religion above universal ethical principles, human rights, and secular laws regularly costs children their lives, not just children with Muslim parents governed by Muslim theocracies, but also children with Christian parents in towns across America.

2. Denying young people accurate information about their bodies is evil.

The U.S. government just spent a decade and a billion dollars on failed abstinence-only education programs concocted by Bible believers who live in some delusional world where prohibition works and virginity is next to godliness. Thanks to their influence, straight-faced educators tell teens that a girl who has had sex is a licked lollipop. Instead of medically accurate information and thoughtful conversation about intimacy and childbearing, teens get promise rings and slut shame.

The result? Here in the U.S., more than one in four girls gets pregnant before she turns 20, often with heartbreaking multigenerational consequences for women, children and whole communities.More than half of girls who give birth during high school drop out, permanently. Only two percent ever graduate college.

3. Demeaning and subjugating women is evil.

When it comes to dignity and equality for women, instead of acting as moral torchbearers, Bible believers have been at the back of the pack for generations, along with conservative factions from other Abrahamic traditions ranging from Islam to Mormonism. The American Quiverfull movement, “complementarianism,” theexpulsion of Southern Baptist women who were making inroads into the clergy, the Mormon Patriarchy’s threats to excommunicate women who seek equality, the Vatican’s decision to crush nuns who thought poverty was a bigger problem than abortion . . . Need I say more?

4. Obstructing humanity’s transition to more thoughtful, intentional childbearing is evil.

“If a woman dies in [child]bearing, let her die; she is there to do it.” So spoke Martin Luther. But beyond the horrors of women dying after days of labor or bleeding out after unwanted childbirth, lies the incontrovertible evidence that children, families and whole communities do better when parents can plan their families. As one medical student put it, “The failure of any sect to support the benefits to humanity that could be obtained through the use of contraceptive technology is blasphemy.”

If evidence-based compassion—the intersection of truth and love—was at the top of Christian priorities, hunger and destitution would be vastly diminished because millions of mothers would be able to plan and prepare for their babies. But for two generations, Christian patriarchs have been fighting against public health advocates every step of the way. In June alone, Christians in the U.S. congress voted to slash family planning aid by 25 percent, and the five Catholic men on the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the “religious freedom” of corporations is more important than the right of working women to care for their health and their families.

5. Undermining science is evil.

Science has been called what we know about how not to fool ourselves.The discovery of empiricism and falsification—a method of inquiry that forces scholars to ask the questions that could show them wrong—is what has differentiated modernity from the Middle Ages. It’s the reason most of our children don’t die before hitting the age of five. It’s the reason broken legs heal straight, sky scrapers don’t collapse, and our houses are warm in the winter. It is what alerted us to the fact that our carbon consumption has become an existential threat.

But the scientific method has also become an existential threat to Bible belief. We know now that the Genesis creation story is myth, neurotransmitters rather than demons cause mental illness, mandrake roots and dove blood don’t improve female fertility or cure skin diseases, and the cognitive structures of the human mind predispose us to certain kinds of religious belief.

It may boggle moral credibility that believers intent on propping up the Bible would sacrifice humanity’s best hope of beating the enormous threats we face, threats like resource depletion, food and water shortages, climate change, and rapidly evolving superbugs. But if there’s any overarching theme to Christian history it is this: the end justifies the means.

6. Promoting holy war is evil.

What first flipped my bit, what transformed me from an agnostic into an outspoken full-time antagonist of Bible worship was a conversation with my Evangelical relatives about the Iraq war. From the vantage of my relatives and my childhood church “family,” George Bush needed no diplomatic or cultural expertise; he was Born Again. He didn’t need to seek input from his earthly father about the invasion, because he asked his Heavenly Father. Besides, Jesus is coming soon and war in the Middle East is predicted in the Bible. That makes it not only inevitable, but—in a manner of speaking—desirable.

Evangelical Christians have spent tens of millions of dollars funding the “return” of Jews to Israeland settlements in the West Bank “as it is written in the scripture”—with the perverse expectation that their presence will one day cause blood to flow in the streets as high as a horse’s bridle.

7. Abusing and killing queers is evil.

The Bible’s clobber verses may be open to interpretation, but the fact that those verses have caused centuries of suffering is not. For much of American history, the common term for queer was the biblical “sodomite,” implying that gays are so offensive to God that they pose a threat to society as a whole. Thanks to Christian missionaries, African and Latin American queers also have now lived for centuries now under the threat of violent death. As progressive Anglican Gay Clark Jennings observes, “There is no getting around the Bible when searching for the origins of the homophobia that is rampant in many African cultures. What’s more, Europeans and North Americans bear much of the historical responsibility for this sad state of affairs.”

It would be bad enough if we were simply talking about history. But homophobic American Christians, thwarted at home, have turned to inciting oppression in Uganda and Nigeria where their hatred still finds fertile ground.

8. Destroying Earth’s web of life and impoverishing future generations is evil.

The book of Genesis may say that only man is made in the image of God and that God gave man dominion over everything that grows or walks the earth. The book of Matthew may say that the return of Jesus is imminent and that his disciples shouldn’t worry about tomorrow, which will take care of itself. The book of Revelation may teach that this world is just a prelude to streets of gold.

But some of us think the lives and loves of other species have moral weight of their own. And some of us think that the intricate web that gave us birth is both precious and precarious, and that the wellbeing of future generations matters. And we think those verses in Genesis and Matthew and Revelation reveal more about the hubris and flawed humanity of the Bible writers (and of Bible believers) than they do about divinity.

9. Trying to suck vulnerable people into your poorly researched worldview is evil.

It’s one thing to latch onto the supernatural worldview you were raised in or the one that first triggered for you some radically cool temporal lobe micro-seizure or similar altered state. But then failing to do your homework before using your position of adult American privilege to foist your religion on kindergarteners, or families who live in desperate poverty, or people who just got hit by a natural disaster—in other words people who trust you because you are older or richer or more powerful or have more access to the very information that you have failed to use—now we’re talking about a violation of ethics. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.

Really.

Some reader is bound to say that without God anything goes and so as a nontheist I have no basis for calling anything evil. A short snarky retort has been making its way around the internet: If you can’t tell right from wrong without appealing to an authority or a sacred text, what you lack is not religion but compassion. The long answer, meaning the evidence showing we really can recognize evil and good without gods, is available in neuroscience, sociology, developmental psychology, and in the lives of individual atheists including the Dalai Lama.

I realize that many Christians are not Bible believers, but rather people who glean through the Christian tradition to claim what seems timeless and wise. I also realize that most Bible believers aren’t trying to do harm—in fact the opposite. I know because I’ve been there. But, when you treat the words of our Iron Age ancestors as if they flowed straight from the mouth of God, you end up putting your life energy, whether you see it that way or not, into bringing back the Iron Age.

The Iron Age was a time of incredible brutality—tribalism, warfare, destitution, disease, murder, misogyny, sexual slavery and superstition of biblical proportions. Most of us would rather not go back, thank you very much. Christians who want a better future are welcome to join in the inquiry and teamwork it will take to get there, and many do. For the rest of you: please forgive the fact that your Iron Age fantasies trigger some of us to experience wry Iron Age fantasies of our own.

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