October 13, 2010

Voting against their values


NYC based Standard Newswire bills itself as little more than a conservative news aggregator:

“Standard Newswire is a cost-effective and efficient newswire service for public policy groups, government agencies, PR firms, think-tanks, watchdog groups, advocacy groups, coalitions, foundations, colleges, universities, activists, politicians, and candidates to distribute their press releases to journalists who truly want to hear from them.”

What Standard Newswire truly represents though… is a never-ending source of quackery, wooism and Christian extremism. Occasionally I click over there to read some of their stuff for no reason other than the entertainment value. They solicit press releases from fringe groups and function as a purveyor of anything and everything anti-Obama, and anything from the extreme religious right.

The most recent press release, while shocking in nature is really only vaguely surprising considering the source (Houston-based, christianist-oriented, teabagger-funded, Patriot Pac.)

But even for the teabaggers this offering by Patriot PAC seems to be over the edge. Touting a bizarrely titled “Operation Black Storm;” the PAC has launched an effort focused on electing African-American Republicans.

“Today marks the beginning of the end of playing the race card to silence conservative voices and keep blacks voting opposite their core values.”

Question #1 – Exactly what core values have African-Americans been voting against?

“It’s finally time for our nation to get past racial barriers in politics, and with Operation Black Storm we intend to send a message to Washington that–above all–Americans of all backgrounds, colors, and decent faiths want their God-given right for SELF-RULE.”

Question #2 – Are we being led to believe that some faiths are decent while some not so decent?

Question #3 – What is meant by "SELF-RULE?"

Following the Patriot PAC link brings you first to a truly bizarre video comparing U.S. ex-Presidents to the likes of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez. One by one we see images of a century of Presidents, each with the word “progressive” superimposed, and some alleged sin detailed below.

Woodrow Wilson brought us the Federal Reserve System, FDR gave us the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson waged the War on Poverty, and Jimmy Carter fathered the Department of Education. A little faux pas slips in with the inclusion of Teddy Roosevelt, whom they claim supported eugenics. This is possibly a true statement, but I suspect the allegation comes from a controversial 1910 quote attributed to Roosevelt:

"Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world."

Whether that statement truly means that the ex-President (Teddy left office in 1909) actually supported eugenics is conjecture, but the fact that the allegation might not be correct isn’t really the funny part. The real problem for the loonies is that Teddy was a Republican, and the statement sounds so very much like the separatist oratory so often heard from the extreme right wing.

Next comes the piece de resistance, as the Sheppard Fairey multihued image of Obama’s profile fades in. Superimposed over the photo are the words, “The ‘progression’ continues.” This is followed by the usual wingnut list of Obama transgressions… healthcare reform, cap & trade, etc... but they screw up again by including the George W. Bush initiated TARP fund and the Wall Street bailouts, falsely trying to lay the blame for the dispised programs at Obama’s feet.

The video is ludicrous, but the outright lies, hatemongering and disingenuousness of it all is right up there with the best of Tea Party rhetoric.

The Black Storm list of African-American Congressional candidates are mostly unknown to me, with the exception of the Rev. Stephen Broden, who is running for Texas District 30 against incumbent Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson. Although Johnson is embroiled in a ridiculous scandal over awarding scholarships to ineligible friends and family, Broden is a Bible-thumping nut who would be less than useless in Congress. 

Johnson needs to go, but Broden is certainly not the lesser of evils.

Since I know Broden for what he is; an extremist, bible thumping, hell fire and brimstone, christianist wingnut… and we likely can safely assume that the other endorsees fall into a similar category... it seems reasonable to assume that those “core values” mentioned in the first quote are extreme fundamentalist in nature.

This wing of the teabagger right is dead set on instilling the fear of tyranny and associating Obama with evil. Now they are attempting to recruit traditionally safe Democrat votes into their fold. Something tells me the average African-American voter has a longer memory that that.

True tyranny lies in their desires to impose christianist “values” on a free nation. The Ronald Reagan quote mentioned in the video is correct in that regard…

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
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