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Christopher Hitchens gets to the heart of it with these words from a Slate column titled “White Fright:”

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

Mr. Fish doesn’t need words.

And take a look at this video that was embedded in the Hitchens column. 

This guy looks like he’s trying to be Benjamin Franklin, but he’s no Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was enlightend.  This guy is not.  Neither are most of the other people interviewed in this video.

Al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center towers, not Muslims.  But the members of al Qaeda are Muslims!  They follow the teachings of the prophet Muhammad and worship the Islamic god Allah! 

And that’s supposed to be the reason for halting the development of a Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero?

Are you familiar with the Army of God?  It’s a Christian terrorist organization that’s responsible for attacks against doctors that perform abortions.  In 1998, Eric Rudolph, one of their members, bombed a clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.  The explosion killed a security guard and maimed a nurse.  Because the Army of God is a Christian organization, shouldn’t we use the same logic the anti-Ground-Zero-Mosque people are using to ban all Christian churches built near medical clinics that perform abortions?

And what about Fred Phelps?  Because Westboro Baptist Church is made up of xenophobic, homophobic, Jew hating, Catholic hating, Muslim hating followers of Phelps, then aren’t all Christians, regardless of their interpretation of The Bible, tainted by the hateful actions and beliefs of the members of Westboro Baptist Church?   If they are, then Christian organizations should be banned from building churches or community centers anywhere near the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. or any memorial to a slain homosexual.

These are just two examples of this game that anyone can play, including Jon Stewart, who did a fine job connecting Fox News to terrorism last night.  The point is that just as the followers of Christ are divided into hundreds of sects and denominations, some of which are hateful and violent, so are the followers of Muhammad.

As William Dalrymple pointed out in a column for The New York Times earlier this week, the Muslim group that plans to build the mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is lead by Abdul Rauf who is:

…one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra.

Dalrymple points out that Sufis are despised by Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, and that the Pakistani Taliban has attacked Sufi shrines with suicide bombers and rockets killing dozens of worshippers.

Sounds to me like Rauf and his followers are our allies in this “war on terror,” not our enemies.  Are we to deny them their right to freely practice their religion anywhere within our borders?  I don’t think so, and neither does the mayor of New York City or the neighborhood association that approved the mosque project.  But many Republican politicians are against it.  They love this conflict because it gives them yet another issue they can use to drive a wedge between conservatives and liberals. 

Just what is it with Republicans?  Why are they against religious freedom? Why are they against local control of commercial lands?  Why are they against the U.S. Constitution?

Why do Republicans hate America so much?

This is the first in a what I am pretty sure will be lengthy series documenting the Far Right’s hatred of President Barack Obama.  Many of them such as Rex Rammell, Republican candidate for governor of Idaho,  just want to see him killed.

The first report comes from Timothy Egan’s blog for The New York Times:

A Republican candidate for governor of Idaho, Rex Rammell, was at a political barbecue last week when somebody brought up the tags used by wolf hunters, and then made a reference to killing the president of the United States.

“Obama tags?” Rammell replied, to laughter, according to an account in The Times-News of Twin Falls. “We’d buy some of those.”

In the Idaho of the past, jokes about shooting a president could sometimes be dismissed without consequence.  Indeed, the comment was buried in an initial news story about the gathering, and Rammell sloughed it off later, saying on his Web site that “Obama hunting tags was just a joke! Everyone knows Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue tags in Washington, D.C.”

Ha-ha. What a knee-slapper, these assassination jokes.  And besides, he couldn’t hunt down Obama with out-of-state tags. Get it? 

Idaho is known for it’s crazy, gun-toting bigots, so this report isn’t too surprising.  But a Republican candidate for governor jokes about buying a tag to hunt and kill Obama like a wild animal?  Really?  Wouldn’t any serious candidate respond by saying something like, “I think your comment is way out of line.  Likening President Obama to a wild animal that should be hunted and killed is extremely distasteful.  I disagree with his policies, but joking about killing him is not funny.  Next question?” 

I’ll bet you are thinking the next quote will be about how he apologized for making such a stupid, hate-filled remark.  Not gonna happen.

“I will not apologize for making an innocent comment,” said Rex Rammell, Republican candidate for governor of Idaho.

NewWest: “….why won’t you step up to the plate and say I never should have said that?”

Rammell: “I’ll tell you the main reasons why I won’t apologize, it’s because of the over the top comments by the GOP leaders. That infuriates me. They’re the ones….because of their condemnation of a simple comment taken out of context I refuse to apologize. If you want to blame someone for me not apologizing, you blame Otter, Simpson, Crapo, Risch and Batt.”

TV reporter: “So you haven’t apologized.  I’m not sure where you’re at on this, you did say you were sorry…”

Rammell: “I am not sorry for saying the comment; I am sorry that everybody took it incorrectly.”

You see, Rammell says it wasn’t his fault.  It was the Republican Party’s fault, and he’s not apologizing to anyone for “joking” about how he’d like to buy a tag to hunt and kill Obama.  So what does Rex Rammell, a man of “courage, integrity and honor” think about all the attention he’s received since his hateful comment:

“Hopefully, if there’s people in Idaho that didn’t know me, then they’ll know me now. I think I’ll come out of this much better off.”  (link)

Well I hope that the people of Idaho are smart enough to send this wacko on his way so that after the primary election, instead of hunting for Obama, he’ll be hunting for a job.

It’s HOT in Seattle.  Today’s high will be in the nineties again, and tomorrow’s high is projected to climb over one hundred degrees.  We Seattleites are not used to extended hot, dry spells.  Most people don’t have air conditioning in their homes, because it’s not something that would get much use.  I would have appreciated having it last night though, and I’ll wish I had an air conditioner tonight.

Because this isn’t really a weather blog, I must have some other point to make.  Oh yeah… I watched Do the Right Thing last week.  That is a movie that I highly recommend.  The movie takes place on a very hot day in Brooklyn, and as the day gets hotter and hotter, race relations heat up.  

Race relations has been one of the ongoing topics of fervent discussion since Henry Louis Gates was arrested for being agitated in his own home.  So maybe if you are so inclined, what you ought to do today is read Eugene Robinson’s column and then later this evening go find a cool spot in your house to watch Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

Stanley Fish wrote the best column about the two big stories last week:  Henry Louis Gates getting arrested in his own house, and the ”birthers” ludicrous claims that Obama was not born in the U.S. and is illegally occupying the White House as president.

Yes, it’s about race.  This country is still full of racists, and we still have a problem. 

Here’s an excerpt from the column that ties together the two incidents:  No matter how convincing the evidence of Obama’s Hawaiian birth is that Chris Mathews waves in the face of the birthers, it will never be enough to convince them of his authenticity; and it couldn’t be the white cop that was wrong for arresting a black man at his own house, it had to be the irritable black man’s fault because he doesn’t really belong there anyway.

Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?

He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers.  The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.

Read the whole column here.

In some cases, yes:

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white – or a rape.”  Richard Nixon, January 1973.

Right… Rape comes in second to a baby conceived by the interracial union of a black and white couple.  You know… like the union that begat Barack Obama.

See?  In some circumstances, even Republicans can support abortion.

Read about the newly released Nixon tapes in The New York Times.

While watching this morning’s news I saw a clip of Rush Limbaugh calling Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist.

Media Matters has the full quote from Limbaugh’s radio show:

“…she’s an angry woman, she’s got a — she’s a bigot. She’s a racist. In her own words, she’s the antithesis of a judge.”

Really?  Of all the people who could attempt to get away with saying something like that, Limbaugh would be last on the list.  I guess that kind of makes him the antithessis of an informed political commentator.

The Conservative Political Action Committee has chosen a Big Fat Idiot as the recipient of their Defender of the Constitution Award.  Tomorrow night at their annual conference Rush Limbaugh, the bigoted hardline-conservative mouthpiece for the GOP, will deliver the closing speech and then receive his prize.  They couldn’t have picked a nicer guy.  I mean really, only a great statesmen and defender of the Constitution can come up with stuff like this:

Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.

“The difference between Los Angeles and yogurt is that yogurt comes with less fruit.”

“He is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act. … This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.”–on an ad by Michael J. Fox endorsing Claire McCaskill for Senate for supporting embryonic stem cell research.

“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation…I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of the need to blow some steam off?” –on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

“I’m just watching Sen. ‘Dick Turban,’ ah, Dick Turban is doing his — from Illinois — he of Club G’itmo fame. Ha! I wish Roberts would have shown up in the Club G’itmo T-shirt today.  Maybe, maybe a Club G’itmo java coffee cup, just for Dick Turban. Ah, but anyway, Dick Turban.”

“It’s called Operation Chaos. The dream end, I mean, if people say what is your exit strate… strategery, the dream end of this is that if this keeps up to the convention, and we have a replay of Chicago 1968, with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that, that’s the objective here.” — On the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James.  Godspeed.”

“Let me leave you with a thought that most honestly summarizes my sentiments: I love the women’s movement…especially when I am walking behind it.”

Thinking ahead to next year… Who would want the award after it was given to Rush Limbaugh?  Ann Coulter is the only other person I can think of that would be worthy of such a “prestigious” award.

And I thought that the writer of the first comment on the post below was a racist.

Well I guess there are sick racist sons of bitches and their are professional racist sons of bitches.  Sean Delonas gets paid for the offensive stuff that gets published in the New York Post.

And if you are overly generous with your giving of “the benefit of the doubt” and think maybe Delonas is making fun of Congress, the “author” of the Stimulus Bill, the New York Times points out that:

The cartoon was on Page 12 of Wednesday’s edition, next to the paper’s Page Six gossip column. On Page 11, the reverse side, was a photograph of President Obama signing the stimulus bill into law in Denver.

If you want to see some more of this man’s fine work go here.

Oh, and Sean Delonas’s website is “temporarily unavailable” for some reason…

According to the latest Pew Research poll they are:

The good news for Republicans: You are happier than Democrats. You always have been, and you probably always will be.

Never mind that your presidential candidate is sinking in the polls while your president plumbs historic depths of popular scorn and your free market squeals for intervention while your Wall Street investments evaporate. You are not just happier than the other guys, but more of you are very happy, according to new survey results published Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The pollsters were in the field asking about happiness this month, when economic news was gloomy for everybody and presidential campaign news seemed especially baleful for Republicans. Yet they found 37 percent of Republicans are “very happy,” compared with 25 percent of Democrats; 51 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats are “pretty happy”; and 9 percent of Republicans are “not too happy,” compared with 20 percent of Democrats.

The partisan happiness gap — unbroken for nearly 40 years — is impervious to electoral ups and downs. It has something to do with worldview.

“I’m very happy,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and a Republican. “When I was 12, I realized the world was not organized around my desires and wishes. The problem with guys on the left is they never figured that out at age 12. And they’re just irritated the world is not organized around their vision. This makes them grumpy.”

Chris Lehane doesn’t sound grumpy. The Democratic consultant is on the phone from San Francisco: “My guess is if [Pew] checked the cross tabs out in California, we’re all pretty happy out here. The wine is still good, the food is fresh, the people are beautiful.”

But seriously, Lehane said, if Republicans are more happy, it’s because they care less.

“The typical Republican is happy coming home to a 62-inch television, pulling out a fine bottle of cognac or scotch, putting his feet on the table and enjoying the fruits of his labor, but not caring what’s going on in the world outside their living room … and their gated community.”

Hard-core liberals are the happiest liberals, and hard-core conservatives are the happiest people on Earth. Self-certainty is like a happy pill. The bumper sticker may declare, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” but the guy behind the wheel is overjoyed.

Check out this video of hardcore Republicans lined up for a McCain rally.  Watch this ignorant, racist, lying throng of Republicans wallow in their happiness as they accuse Obama of being a Muslim terrorist baby killer: