Justin's Political Corner

You can’t say this wasn’t predictable, but the bigots at Fox News are flipping over President Obama’s decision to try Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, in a civilian court and grant him the same rights as any other American citizen.

Megyn Kelly, for one, seemed aghast yesterday to learn that the young man had been allowed to “lawyer up” and would now refuse to incriminate himself under the Fifth Amendment.

(Does it ever seem that the only amendment right-wingers hold sacrosanct is the Second?)

Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter laid out the Fox News position in detail last night and it quickly became apparent that the only standard of legal protection the two favored was whether or not they happened to like you.

Hannity was appalled to learn that the suspect had been given a Miranda warning and couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be tried as an enemy combatant. Coulter responded like the harridan we all love, asking, “Why not just shoot up the boat? If we’re not going to talk to him and get any information about the cell, about any foreign influence, they should have kept shooting when they caught him in the boat. Just give him an automatic death penalty there.” It wasn’t just the suspect that got Coulter’s blonde goat, either. What about the dead brothers’ wife?

Coulter couldn’t restrain herself, snarling: “She ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab.”

Coulter played the Muslim card again, tying the bombing to immigration generally. Oh, it was even worse than just this one Muslim terrorist, she insisted. Immigration in America was broken, our policy of us “assimilating immigrants into our culture isn’t really working. No, they’re assimilating us into their culture.”

Hannity ran with the idea, adding, ‘If people are coming from countries where perhaps they grew up under Sharia law, I think we can make a safe assumption that they have been radicalized.’” Yes, Sean, a safe assumption if you hate Muslims.

It was the same kind of statement people used to make when warning about the dangers of allowing Irish Catholics into this country if Hannity, a Catholic himself, had taken time to let that idea penetrate his thick skull and all the hair gel on top of it. Hannity finally summed up his respect for the U. S. Constitution and human dignity, generally, by saying of the wounded suspect, “I would waterboard him myself.”

Given such sentiments, it’s probably important to say that in the wake of the tragedy in Boston you don’t have to be a right-wing hater to believe that the actions of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother were craven and utterly reprehensible. That still  doesn’t mean we want to start trashing the U. S. Constitution.

In fact, it’s hard not to notice that folks on the right are only for “freedom” if others agree with every position they’re taking. Remember, for example, the furor Natalie Maynes of the Dixie Chicks aroused when she exercised a little freedom of speech at the start of the War in Iraq and said she was embarrassed to be from the same state as President Bush? That was before thousands of right-wing Texans decided they ought to secede from the union after the 2012 election.

You can find any number of examples of this type of thinking. If you utter the words, “Happy holidays,” around Sarah Palin, it’s not just a cheerful greeting. It’s part of some “war on Christmas” liberals are waging. Meanwhile, Palin and her pals believe that if they repeat the name “Barack Hussein Obama” often enough they can prove that Mr. Obama has no right to be President because he’s a dirty Muslim. Well, just check out Article VI of the U. S. Constitution. It states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust” under the laws of the United States government.

And how about the furor after 9/11 when Muslims tried to build mosques in various neighborhoods? Just because two million U. S. citizens happen to be Muslim that doesn’t mean right-wing defenders of freedom believe they should their exercise freedom of religion.

How about gay Americans? (The right would probably insist that they shouldn’t have to pass background checks if they buy guns over the internet.) When it comes to marriage equality the answer can only be discovered deep in the Bible—where a few verses in Leviticus trump every syllable in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Take a whiff of the smell coming from far-right circles today and you have a hint of the same odor of roasted flesh that once resulted from heretics’ burnings.

Any murderer, be it the man who rapes his neighbor and strangles her in her living room, the young man who walks into a school and sprays children with an assault rifle or attacks a crowd with a pressure cooker-bomb, fills us with revulsion. Still, we try to insure that all suspects are afforded legal counsel because in almost all cases we don’t know if the neighbor is guilty.

Like it or not, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an American citizen. He has the same right to counsel as you or I — or even Ann Coulter — would in a similar situation. He may be a naturalized citizen—but he’s no different, legally, than all the naturalized citizens who enlist and serve in our armed forces, or any of the many millions of  naturalized citizens who didn’t blow up innocent spectators at the Boston Marathon.

In fact, the very presence of the Tsarnaev brothers on U. S. soil is the perfect example of what makes this nation great when we live up to our ideals. We give shelter to “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”

We don’t deal in torture.

We don’t deny human rights.

Or, at least, we shouldn’t.

In fact, whenever people are angry or afraid it is then we most need to restrain our worst instincts, to keep mobs from rising (we used to lynch black “rapists” if you remember), to guard against the instinct for summary justice.

Should we waterboard a suspect if we believe he has accomplices, for example, that there might be imminent threats to bomb a Red Sox game? What if he still doesn’t talk?

Should we cut off his right little finger?

The same logic applies to all sorts of crimes. Suppose a suspect in a kidnapping won’t tell police where he’s holding his victim. He has a little finger on his right hand, as well. And don’t we want to save the kidnap victim?

If we really want a suspect to talk, why stop with one finger?

The problem comes, first, from the gross cruelty and secondly from the fact that often suspects are innocent. Jews were feared during medieval times because it was rumored they killed Christian babies as part of their religious ceremonies. So you had pogroms and immolations. Our own ancestors in Massachusetts feared witches and in 1692, in Salem, sent nineteen innocent individuals to the gallows.

None of the suspects had lawyers. That’s a modern convention. And when one suspect wouldn’t talk they “pressed” him, allowed under law in those happy times, piling weight on his chest in an effort to force him to admit guilt.

He wouldn’t—and the weight killed him.

A more recent example might be what happened to Japanese-Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ironic, really—another bombing. Sixty-one years ago our grandparents and great grandparents reacted with anger and fear, just as we might do now, if we’re not careful. The Japanese were hated as a group then—just in the way the far-right hates Muslims today.

So what did we do?

In 1942 we removed 110,000 men, women and children from their homes, including 77,000 U. S. citizens, and stuck them in camps because they looked different and couldn’t be trusted. Eventually, thousands of young Japanese-Americans came out of these camps to fight for this country, including Daniel Inouye, awarded the Medal of Honor for taking out several German machine guns, and later a U. S. Senator from Hawaii.

Examples: 
1/ The Dixie Chicks, who correctly called out Bush, got lambasted hard by these same morons. OTOH, draft-dodging violent chickenhawk fake “Patriot” psychopath Ted Nugent gets a pass by them. 
2/ Many righties gloat on about “religious freedom,” but were opposed to Park51 (an Islamic Community Center) being built in NYC back in 2010 and Muslims in general. By “religious freedom,” they usually mean either Evangelical/Fundie Protestant or Conservative Catholicism. 
3/ Many righties love to call themselves patriotic, but are actually not so.
4/ They demand ID for voting (in the name of protecting against so-called “voter fraud”), but not for guns. 
5/ Many of them (or at least Neocons) support torture and loathe due process against terror suspects.

h/t: AddictingInfo.org

Fox News figures are dismissing the voices of the families who suffered in a mass shooting in Newtown, CT by claiming they’re being used and exploited by Democrats, discounting the efforts they have made to encourage Congress to pass stronger gun laws.

On April 11, the Senate overcame a Republican-led filibuster that tried to block the beginning of debate on stronger gun laws with a 68-31 vote. The impetus for the new gun proposals was driven by the December mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut that left 26 victims dead, most of them young children. President Obama had been urging Congress to act to strengthen guns laws in response to the shooting for some time.

According to several Fox News figures, Obama has been using the families of the Newtown shooting victims as props for a political agenda.

On April 11, Fox News host Sean Hannity called the effort to strengthen gun laws “naked exploitation of dead children and grieving families,” while his guest Ann Coulter said that Democrats are “play[ing] with these victims.” The previous night, Hannity stated that the president “is once again using families of tragedy as props for his agenda.” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said on his April 11 radio show that Obama is “using the Newtown families to push for background checks.” Fox News White House reporter Ed Henry similarly said on April 9 that “for the second straight day, the White House used the victims of the Newtown tragedy to make their case.” On his April 9 radio show, Fox News host Mike Huckabee suggested that taking some of the relatives of the Newtown shooting victims to Washington, DC on Air Force One to make their case for stronger gun laws was “an exploitation of those parents.”

Such an attitude does a disservice to the many Newtown families that want tougher gun laws in the wake of their tragedies. Several of the families appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes on April 7 to discuss what kind of gun violence prevention measures they would like to see signed into law, saying that universal background checks and a ban on high-capacity magazines were important. After the vote that broke the GOP’s threatened filibuster, more than 30 families of Newtown victims released a statement criticizing those who tried block an up-or-down vote on new gun legislation, saying that “[t]he senators who have vowed to filibuster this bill should be ashamed of their attempt to silence efforts to prevent the next American tragedy.”

h/t: MMFA

Before the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School took place, two things were predictable:

• that another mass killing was inevitable, given the increase in their frequency over the past year, and the fact that no measures had been taken to prevent them

• that right-wingers would see in such a dreadful event an opportunity to promote their paranoid vision of a perfect America as one where every citizen is armed to the teeth, and trembling in awe of their vengeful God

The bodies of the 27 people — most of them children between the ages of six and seven — killed by Adam Lanza on Friday, December 14,  had yet to be returned to their families when the right-wing noise machine went into gear, blaming public education and a purported dearth of firearms for the tragedy.

Yet, even as right-wing pundits continued to name gun control as a reason that the killer took so many lives, producers at NBC’s Meet the Press were unable to get a single pro-gun senator to appear on the show the Sunday after the tragedy. All 31 gun-loving senators who will have seats in the new Congress were invited, according to executive producer Betsy Fischer Martin. 

Here we offer seven examples of the stunning lack of compassion and twisted logic expressed by right-wing leaders in response to a slaughter of children by the son of a gun enthusiast.

1. Ann Coulter: Everybody should carry a concealed firearm.  The killings took place in the morning, and by 11:07 a.m., Ann Coulter, the publicity seeker whose big, bad mouth gives the little black dress a bad name, was touting concealed-carry laws as the answer to America’s massacre problem. Coulter’s first tweet on the subject came so soon after the killings, that there was no definitive count yet of the number of people who had perished:

Ann Coulter@AnnCoulter

Only one policy has ever been shown to deter mass murder: concealed-carry laws. - bit.ly/VGDNBo

14 Dec 12

Well, that seemed to do the trick for a woman who never found a tragedy she couldn’t exploit, for by 11:30, she tweeted this:

Ann Coulter@AnnCoulter

I’m on Hannity radio today, talking about the 1 public policy that provably reduces the incidence of, and deaths from, mass shootings.

14 Dec 12

And that, boys and girls, is how to work the Twitter machine for self-promotion on the backs of slaughtered children.

It’s not the first time that Coulter has expressed her love for guns in the wake of murder. At a Florida church in 2007, I heard Coulter describe the assassination of doctors who performed abortions as “a procedure with a rifle performed on them.”

[h/t The New Civil Rights Movement]

2. Mike Huckabee: Massacre the result of church-state separation.Apparently, former Arkansas governor and pastor Mike Huckabee thinks that if only the Constitution had been rewritten to allow for the mandatory worship of his God in public schools, the massacre would not have happened. It’s unclear from Huckabee’s remarks, made on the Fox News Channel’s Your World show (Huckabee also has his own show on the cable channel), whether he was saying that if only killer Adam Lanza had gotten religion during his public school education, he wouldn’t have killed, or if Huckabee was suggesting that God was punishing a public school for not allowing organized worship in the classroom.

“We ask why there is violence in our schools but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” Huckabee told host Neil Cavuto. “Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

Media Matters has the clip.

3. Bryan Fischer: God let massacre happen in public school because he’s not wanted there. The noxious radio-show host and spokesperson for the anti-gay hate group known as the American Family Association, put the blame for the massacre squarely on the Supreme Court, which outlawed organized public school prayer in 1962, as seen in this clip captured by Right Wing Watch.

“I think God would say to us, ‘Hey, I’d be glad to protect your children, but you’ve got to invite me back into your world first,’” Fischer told his listeners. “‘I’m not gonna go where I’m not wanted; I am a gentleman.’” Fischer continued in his imagined voice of God. So much of a gentleman is Fischer’s God that the Almighty would await an invitation before rushing in to protect 20 children from being gunned down. Thank goodness the police and firefighters who responded were so terribly rude.

4. Steve Deace: Killings caused by widespread child-murder by parents and a school assignment in France. The right-wing radio talker took to his Facebook page the day of the shootings to attribute them to a “culture of death” for which he used, as evidence, deceptively packaged examples, including “asking kids to write suicide notes in schools” and “allowing and subsidizing parents killing 4,000 of their own children each day.”

I Googled “suicide note school assignment” and found one example — in France. Since Deace had published a blog post about the French story on his Web site, it’s safe to assume that’s what he was referencing, and it’s difficult to see the impact that would have had on a killer who attended school in Connectict.  

For Deace’s assertion of 4,000 killings of children by their parents per day, we could find no evidence. 

. Glenn Beck: Killings caused by soul problems. Taking to his Twitter stream, Glenn Beck was quick to tweet, at 12:24 p.m.: “Our communities are suffering and it is because of the ever expanding lack of self control & personal responsibility.”

Tweeter Val Farrelly replied: “It’s nothing to do with self control and everything to do with a lack of gun control.”

Another Beck gem about the shootings: 

Glenn Beck

• ✔

@glennbeck

It is not the gun. It is the soul.

14 Dec 12

6. Larry Pratt: Making schools gun-free zones caused the problem. The executive director of Gun Owners of America, a far-right group allied with the militia movement, makes a leap of logic by claiming that because the massacre happened in an school designated as a “gun-free zone,” that the absence of guns in Sandy Hook Elementary School must have caused the problem.

Despite the fact that Pratt once addressed a group of white supremacists and advocated for the creation of militias in the U.S. based on the model of anti-communist Guatemalan death squads, the USA Today Web site gave Pratt a big megaphone to its millions of unique viewers (23 million in May 2011, according to the company’s media kit), the day after the Sandy Hook tragedy, in the opinion section of the site. 

There, Pratt asserts: 

Hopefully, the Connecticut tragedy will be the tipping point after which a rising chorus of Americans will demand elimination of the gun-free zone laws that are in fact criminal-safe zones.

One measure of insanity is repeating the same failure time after time, hoping that the next time the failure will turn out to be a success. Gun-free zones are a lethal insanity.

As AlterNet reported in 2010, Pratt told a rally of gun owners at the Washington Monument that the Oklahoma City bombing was but a battle in a war between the citizens and the government.

7. Louie Gohmert: If only Sandy Hook principal had an assault rifle, everyone would have been saved. Speaking to host Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, the Republican congressman from Texas let loose with this, as transcribed by the Huffington Post:

“Chris, I wish to God she had had an M4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out … and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids,” Gohmert said.

The M4 is the rifle favored by the U.S. military; you can view its specs on the site of its manufacturer, Colt. Yeah, that’ll fix everything.

h/t: AlterNet

For obvious reasons, the American conservative movement has long been dogged by accusations of racism and racial insensitivity. From their famed Southern strategy to their determined efforts to suppress minority voting via phony voter ID initiatives to their race-baiting Obama attacks, conservatives have made clear their opposition to a tolerant, multicultural America. In fact, much of their electoral strategy relies on scaring older, white voters about blacks and Hispanics taking over “their” country. 

So it’s not uncommon to hear a prominant conservative, even one who holds elected office, make patently offensive remarks. Yet some occasionally hit an unimaginable low. This week, it was revealed that Republican Rep. Jon Hubbard has published a book in which he wrote that “[T]he institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise. He defended his book on Wednesday,telling the Jonesboro Sunthat he still believed slavery to be a blessing because it helped blacks come to America. Yes, he praised slavery. And when given the opportunity to backpedal, he doubled down. 

You may think that this does not occur often. You would be wrong. Here are a few other prominent conservatives who have suggested slavery was not all that bad.

1. Pat Buchanan. In his essay “A Brief for Whitey,” Buchanan suggested that slavery was a net positive, saying that,“America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”

2. & 3. Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. Bob Vander Plaats, the leader of the arch-conservative Family Leader, a religious organization that opposes same-sex marriage, got GOP presidential candidates Bachmann and Santorum to sign his pledge asserting that life for African Americans was better during the era of slavery: “A child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”

4. Art Robinson. Robinson was a publisher and a GOP candidate for congress in Oregon. One of the books he published included this evaluation of life under slavery: “The negroes on a well-ordered estate, under kind masters, were probably a happier class of people than the laborers upon any estate in Europe.”

5. Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson. Peterson is a conservative preacher who articulated this bit of gratitude: “Thank God for slavery, because if not, the blacks who are here would have been stuck in Africa.”

8. Trent Franks. Franks is the sitting congressman for the second congressional district in Arizona. As shown here, he believes that a comparison of the tribulations of African Americans today to those of their ancestors in the Confederacy would favor a life in bondage: “Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery.”

9. Ann Coulter. Known for her incendiary rhetoric and hate speech, Coulter was right in character telling Megyn Kelly of Fox News that, “The worst thing that was done to black people since slavery was the great society programs.”

10. Rep. Loy Mauch. This Arkansas GOP state legislator has found biblical support for his pro-slavery position. He wrote to the Democrat-Gazette to inquire, “If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?”

h/t: Mark Howard at AlterNet

Back in July, Eagle Forum Collegians hosted their 2012 Annual Leadership Summit at the Heritage Foundation where Rep. Michele Bachmann delivered a speech warning of the Muslim Brotherhood’s supposed infiltration of the U.S. government, her baseless pet cause. Bachmann told attendees that the Obama administration’s meeting with an Egyptian lawmaker, who was vetted by the Secret Service and both the State Department and Department of Homeland Security, was part of a string of “outrageous, unbelievable actions on the part of the administration to allow influence by the Muslim Brotherhood at the highest levels of power: the State Department, the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI.”

She then attacked the media for “saying we’re going after individual personalities and that we’re being mean to Muslims.” But Bachmann did in fact specifically name individuals, including Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and other Muslims serving in the administration as part of a witch hunt denounced by Democratic and Republican leaders alike, including the Republican Speaker of the House and the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Bachmann went on to explain that “every day I’m in trouble for something, who cares, who cares?”

Later, the Congresswoman suggested that attendees read “everything Phyllis Schlafly has ever written,” calling her an “absolute genius,” and also recommended books by extremist commentator Ann Coulter and disgraced pseudo-historian David Barton.

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

After women’s health advocate Sandra Fluke delivered a speech about reproductive freedom in a primetime slot at the Democratic National Convention in September, a number of prominent conservatives, many of whom are women, attacked her with sexist, personal insults. “Feminism weeps as Fluke and other DNC women get on their metaphorical knees to beg for government to take care of them,” tweeted conservative MSNBC host S.E. Cupp, just after commentator Ann Coulter tweeted, “Bill Clinton just impregnated Sandra Fluke backstage.”

A month later, as Fluke relaxed on an Obama for America bus Tuesday afternoon, she took a few minutes to reflect on the fact that some Republicans can’t stop insulting her.

“I’ve read some of it, but not all of it. Much of it is just as sexist and as problematic as some of the things we saw earlier in the year,” she said in a phone interview with The Huffington Post, referring to the incident in which Rush Limbaugh called her a “slut” on his radio show because she advocates for contraception coverage. “It can be frustrating. I certainly don’t want to be a polarizing figure, and I don’t try to say things that are polarizing — I just try to say why these are important to my generation and to me, and evidently that’s upsetting for some people to hear.”

The slurs that are coming from women, she said, are particularly disappointing to her.

“I think, unfortunately, that women are not immune from being sexist or misogynistic,” she said, “in the same way that being a person of color doesn’t mean you’re not racist. It’s unfortunate, and I wish women would stand with each other. I certainly try to stand with other women whether I agree with them politically or not, because when we have a lot of these strong public voices attacking someone personally in this way, it gives everyone else in society permission to do that as well.”

Despite the personal insults, Fluke said the attacks that frustrate her the most are the ones that mischaracterize what she is advocating. When she attended a congressional hearing on the contraception mandate, she was planning to testify on behalf of a fellow law student who needed the birth control pill to alleviate her ovarian cysts, but couldn’t afford it because the school didn’t cover it in its student plan. But Fluke’s conservative opponents have characterized her as the poster child for government dependency and accused her of wanting taxpayers to pay her to have sex.

“Think about this, a 31, 32-year-old law student who has been a student for life, who gets up there in front of a national audience and tells the American people, ‘I want America to pay for my contraceptives,’” Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) said at a campaign event. “You’re kidding me. Go get a job. Go get a job, Sandra Fluke.”

Fluke said the argument that contraception coverage is about taxpayer funding is “factually incorrect and designed to mislead people.”

h/t: Laura Bassett at HuffPo