Justin's Political Corner

President Obama’s most fevered critics have been waiting for a national “aha” moment since he was first inaugurated more than 50 months ago. Coming off an electoral landslide, Obama was instantly greeted by a mob-like movement on the far right that denounced him as a socialist and a communist. Excited conservatives quickly reached for Nazi rhetoric and imagery in an effort to convey the dark threat the Democrat posed to the country.

Amplified by Fox News and a well-funded right-wing media industry, the “grassroots” revolt was portrayed as a sweeping rebuke of Obama. But in truth, the raging critics occupied the loud fringes, a fact confirmed by Obama’s easy re-election.

Still, professional detractors have held out hope that at some point Americans would come to see Obama as they see Obama; as a monster of historic proportions who’s committed to stripping citizens of their liberties andgetting them addicted to government dependencies, like a drug dealer.

This week’s House Oversight Committee hearing into the Sept. 11 terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was supposed to trigger that “aha” event. It was supposed to be The Day Americans Turned On Obama. Indeed, Obama wouldn’t be able finish out his second term because the Benghazi revelations were going to be so damaging, Fox New’s Mike Huckabee told his radio listeners.  And Sean Hannity warned ominously that, “This is going to be a really defining, important week in the Obama presidency, and it’s not going to be a good week.” 

But none of that happened at the hearing. Instead of being the kind of “explosive“ Watergate-style hearing that Fox talkers prayed for, Wednesday’s hearing sagged under the weight of stubborn facts, and didn’t even reach the level of Whitewater hearings, which under Bill Clinton established the modern day mark for pointlessly partisan “scandal” hearings.

Not that it matters to the media players who produced the Benghazi hearings, though. Conservatives continuetheir Groundhog Day charade, reassuring themselves that the hearing was a hit and that scandal “bombshells” exploded on Capitol Hill. (They did not.)

The larger, common sense question that lingers though is, why? Why keep pounding a story so far into the ground that most news consumers can’t even make sense of the convoluted allegations anymore?

I think the explanation for the durability is that Benghazi serves as an all-purpose platform that allows the most hardened critics to project their anti-Obama madness. It allows them to spin their ugliest fantasies about the president and to depict him as a heartless traitor who chose to let Americans die at the hands of Islamic terrorists. It’s a way to condemn Obama for having a “reflexive impulse to blame, rather than defend, America.”

For the last eight months, Benghazi has served as a convenient vessel to ferry around the right wing’s Capt. Ahab-like obsession. Most often docked at Fox News, which has referenced “Benghazi” thousands and thousands and thousands of times since last September, the terror attack represents a way to feed that sinister fixation about the president being a Manchurian Candidate who let Americans die in Benghazi and “sacrificed American lives for politics.”

Benghazi mania is driven by a dark obsession with Obama that’s built upon the assumption that he’s capable of the very worst and incapable of anything good or decent. That the President of the United States does not deserve to sit in the Oval Office because his loyalties (not to mention his origins) are in doubt. Which is supposedly why he would abandon Americans to die in Benghazi.

Note some of the rhetoric this week, which portrayed Obama as unfit and un-American. From Fox News’ Todd Starnes:

And from talk show host Mark Levin [emphasis added]:

It’s just unbelievable that our country didn’t come to the defense of these men. It makes me sick to my stomach. It’s not a natural reaction if you’re a red blooded American. My God, send in the military! But no, we didn’t…. What the hell kind of commander in chief is that? Let me go further, what kind of an American is that?

What kind of American is Obama if he won’t protect citizens under attack?

Which is to say, Benghazi as it’s debated and presented today (and will be for months to come), isn’t just about Benghazi, or the four Americans who died in the attack or the dozens more injured. It’s about Obama and a blinding, uncontrollable anger that fuels his most dedicated foes, and their relentless, futile search for the American “aha” moment.

h/t: Eric Boehlert at MMFA

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

Hillary Clinton would be “the ideal Democratic presidential candidate in 2016,” sweeping her party’s primary and besting potential Republican candidates other than Chris Christie, according to the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling.

The secretary of state has a 54 percent favorable rating among registered voters in polling released Thursday, with 39 percent viewing her unfavorably. Among Democrats, those numbers were 79 percent favorable to 15 percent unfavorable.

She led a poll of possible Democratic primary candidates by an imposing margin, garnering a majority 57 percent support. Vice President Joe Biden came in at a distant second, with 16 percent, while seven other prospective candidates, including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, all failed to break 5 percent.

Clinton also would lead three possible GOP candidates — former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) — by margins of 14 percentage points. A matchup against Clinton and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whom she edged 44 percent to 42 percent, could be much closer.

The 2016 Republican primary may be a challenge for Christie, who tied for fourth among possible 2016 Republican nominees. Christie was more popular nationally with Democrats than with Republicans in the PPP survey.

Rubio was the most popular among Republicans, with 21 percent of GOP support, followed by Ryan at 16 percent, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 15 percent, and Christie and Bush at 14 percent each. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Texas Gov. Rick Perry all saw single-digit support.

With Clinton and Biden excluded from the Democratic field, 40 percent of primary voters were undecided. Cuomo and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts took the top places, with 19 percent and 16 percent respectively, with O’Malley, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer trailing.

h/t: Huffington Post

Dear Mr. Huckabee,

We all share in great sorrow and grief from last week’s horrific events in Newtown, CT. I would like to think that it was overwhelming sadness from the loss of life that led you to state on Friday that the reason behind the mass killings of first graders and their educators was we have “systematically removed God” from public schools. I would like to think profound sorrow and shock were the reason for your misguided remarks. Unfortunately, cynicism leads me to believe that you made such statements for political posturing or perhaps to keep up with the conservative radio shock jocks.

Regardless of your motivation, I want to suggest that you visit your local public school before passing such judgment in the future. If you visited a neighborhood elementary school like Sandy Hook, or any public school for that matter, you would see that God’s presence and the teachings of Jesus Christ are well represented by the works of the people in those buildings. Now perhaps His presence isn’t seen in the way you want – there aren’t readings from the Bible (or any other religious texts for that matter) and the Ten Commandments aren’t posted in classrooms (nor are the Pillars of Islam, actually), but His presence and teachings are instead practiced, demonstrated, and felt. You see, Mr. Huckabee, if you visited the schools you quickly denounce for removing your symbols of God, you’d find that His work actually takes places there every day.

For many students, that public school you deride is their only constant; their only refuge; their only normalcy. Like educators across the nation, my elementary school principal husband and his staff work daily with homeless children, hungry children, abused children, broken children. He and his staff feed their bodies, characters, minds, and souls. They do it every day. They do it for little pay and they do it for lousy benefits. They do it despite the disrespect they sometimes feel from parents and the public. They do it in the face of disdain from politicos that claim they’re fleecing taxpayer money and don’t contribute revenue to the economy. They do it even as they’re called “union thugs.” Educators are God’s workers – there’s no other reason to think a person would endure so much to receive so little.

These educators, aided by school support staff and parent/community volunteers, are God-given, Mr. Huckabee. Through them God’s miracles happen every day. Through education, God’s children are provided a shot at a better life. In my state of Texas, 25% of children live in poverty (the statistics in your home state of Arkansas are similar). For some of these children, these educators are the only chance they have of breaking the poverty cycle. In those Godless government schools, they have a chance at a better tomorrow. The school is a place where they can not only explore their life’s dreams, but be provided the tools to achieve those dreams. It is the tireless men and women of the school systems that will give them those tools.

And these educators wear many hats – not only do they educate and lead, they serve as role models, protectors, life coaches, and cheerleaders. They’re in loco parenti. They’re friends and counselors. Unfortunately, some in Connecticut even served as human shields – coming between bullets and six year olds. If serving children and the community in this way isn’t the work of a higher power, I don’t know what is.

Perhaps your efforts would be better spent, Mr. Huckabee, not in trying to bring your particular brand of religion into schools or dictating how God should appear in a classroom, but instead supporting public schools and the work He does through them. Education budgets have been slashed nationwide. Our students learn in over-crowded classrooms with outdated technology. Our teachers are being pushed out of the profession by unrealistic accountability systems and the profit-driven thirst to change classrooms into testing factories. Our state legislatures are bowing down to special interests seeking to privatize our education systems – turning a noble profession and public commitment into little more than a profitable pick for a hedge fund manager. Through systematic defunding, the decline of critical thinking skills to make way for rote memorization to pass the next benchmark test, and the political prostitution of public education for profit, the war on education is clear and ongoing. God’s work through these schools and educators is under attack, but your concern is reciting scripture in the classroom. Really?

Mr. Huckabee, why are you and other sanctimonious detractors more concerned that educators don’t lead children in prayer instead of sharing concern for the many challenges that schools and impoverished children face daily? Why are you saddened that children aren’t taught Biblical parables instead of uplifted by the miracles that occur in schools every day? If you don’t see God in the efforts and works of schools and educators, I’m afraid you’re not really looking.

You see, Mr. Huckabee, schools don’t need to preach the Gospel or read the Bible every day to bring God into the classroom. He never left.

Sincerely,

PTA Mom

Mike Huckabee and anyone parroting the “God and school prayers have been kicked out of the schools” lie is an idiot.

h/t: Kimberly Burkett at EducateForTexas.Wordpress.com

Social conservative heavyweight James Dobson dedicated his radio show this morning to discussing Friday’s shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and like Mike Huckabee and Bryan Fischer, concluded the shooting was caused by Americans “turning our back on God.” Specifically, he believes there are consequences to women getting abortions and marriage equality:

DOBSON: Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I’m not talking politically, I’m not talking about the result of the November sixth election;  I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God.

I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me and we have killed fifty-four million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition.  Believe me, that is going to have consequences too.

And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us.  I think that’s what’s going on.

 As Hemant Mehta has pointed out, religious venues are no safer from such tragedies, so the exception Huckabee, Fischer, Dobson, and others anoint for themselves is a mere fabrication of superiority.

James Dobson, shut the fucking hell up!

H/T: Zack Ford at Think Progress LGBT

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

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee attributed the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom. 

“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. “Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

“[W]e’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability — that we’re not just going to have be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before, you know, a holy God in judgment,” Huckabee said. “If we don’t believe that, then we don’t fear that.”

From the 12.14.2012 edition of FNC’s Your World with Neil Cavuto:

Zip it, Mike Fuckabee!

H/T: Benjy Sarlin at TPM