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’ Sean Hannity and Todd Starnes portrayed restraints on proselytization as proof of the Obama administration’s purported “war on religious liberty in the military,” despite the fact that military policy has long prohibited unwanted proselytization.

On the May 2 edition of his Fox News show, Hannity claimed that a Pentagon statement reiterating the military’s longtime policy against proselytizing was proof of Obama’s “war on religious liberty.” Starnes added that Christians were “under significant attack” by the Obama administration, under which “we have seen a Christian cleansing of the United States military.”

In fact, the U.S. military’s anti-proselytization policy has been consistent among all religions, and it targets only disruptive activities. A statement released May 2 by Defense Department spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen clarified the military’s policy that “members of the military are free to share their faith as long as they don’t harass others.”

From the 05.02.2013 edition of FNC’s Hannity:

h/t: MMFA

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 hosted anti-Islam activist Steve Emerson to repeat the disputed claim that a Saudi student he named as a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings is slated for deportation, one of several claims that Emerson got wrong about the bombings this week.

Emerson, who styles himself as some kind of expert on terrorism and Islamic extremism especially, has a tenuous history with the facts. Indeed, his analysis of Boston is reminiscent of his blunders about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 — when his certainty that Islamic terrorists were behind the incident was exposed as false.

On April 16, C-SPAN hosted Emerson to discuss the Boston bombings. As Salon reported, Emerson cited “classified information” when he fingered a “Saudi national” as a possible suspect because, he stated, “the burns on his skin match the explosive residue of the bomb that exploded.”

A few hours later on Fox News, Emerson recanted, saying: “We’re back to square one in terms of suspects because the Saudi suspect has been ruled out.” Indeed, the Saudi student has been cleared of suspicion and according to law enforcement was never in custody.

But on Fox, Emerson continued to tie the bombings to “jihadists,” claiming that the “actual fragment, which were nails and ball-bearings” used in Boston are “a hallmark, by the way, of jihadist suicide bombings.” As The Daily Beast pointed out in response to Emerson’s incorrect musings:

[T]he Boston Marathon bombs don’t appear to have been suicide bombings at all, but just as he did in Oklahoma City, Emerson is attributing widely used modi operandi and ascribing it to Muslim terrorists. Just as Tim McVeigh and Anders Breivik might have been surprised to learn that only Middle Easterners seek to “inflict as many casualties as possible,” so too would Ted Kaczynski (an anti-technology zealot known as the Unabomber) and David Copeland (a British neo-Nazi known as the Nailbomber) be surprised to learn that putting nails in bombs as shrapnel qualifies them as “jihadists.” And actual terrorism expert Will McCants Tweeted a 2011 case where white supremacists had used ball bearings in a bomb.

Indeed, it is now being reported that two brothers who may be from Russia’s Caucasus region are believed to be responsible for the Boston bombings.

Despite it all, Fox News continued to host Emerson. On April 17, he appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to invent the conspiracy theory that the Saudi student he had named a suspect was going to be deported “on national security grounds.” Inforwars.com, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ website, latched onto Emerson’s report to claim this offered proof of an “attempt” by the administration “to cover up a possible Saudi connection to the Boston attack.”

What is revealing about all of this is the fact that the media treated Emerson as a credible expert despite his checkered history on terrorism issues. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) noted that immediately following the Oklahoma City bombing, Emerson claimed on CBS that the bombing had “a Middle Eastern trait” because it “was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible.” Emerson went even further,saying that Oklahoma City area is area is “one of the centers for Islamic radicalism outside the Middle East.”

While other news outlets have shied away from relying on his so-called expertise, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets have been enthusiastic promoters of his anti-Islam rantings:

• Emerson claimed President Obama “is not necessarily a Muslim,” adding, “I don’t believe that” but he is “pro-Islamist.”

• Emerson suggested that some level of Islamophobia is justified because “65 to 70 percent of all international terrorist attacks are carried out by radical Muslims, so there’s a fear based on that.”

• Emerson claimed Palestinian militants are in Mexico learning “how to dig tunnels that will evade detection in Gaza.”

• Emerson’s Investigative Project smeared a Muslim advocate for urging American Muslims to have an attorney present when speaking to law enforcement.

• Emerson joined other right-wing media figures in calling for more racial profiling of Muslims.

h/t: 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

Bill O’Reilly: “We Won The War On Christmas Battle.” During his Fox News show, Bill O’Reilly declared victory in the supposed “War on Christmas,” before claiming that other Judeo-Christian values were under attack. O’Reilly lambasted President Obama and the White House for empowering “secular progressives” to pressure school districts around the country to decide not to use terms like “Easter bunny” and “Easter egg.”

O’REILLY: More evidence that Judeo-Christian tradition is under attack in America. That is the subject of this evening’s Talking Points Memo. If you watch the Factor, you know that we won the “War on Christmas” battle. A few years ago some American companies ordered their employees not to say “Merry Christmas.” Remember that? We presented the facts to you, you told the stores you wouldn’t buy there. The crazy edict was quickly rescinded. Power to the people. But the war on Judeo-Christian tradition continues on in some public school districts. In 10 days it will be Easter Sunday. But in some schools you are not allowed to say the word “Easter.” On Long Island, the East Meadow school district, holding a Spring egg hunt — not Easter eggs, Spring eggs. Same thing in Prospect Heights, Illinois. Manhattan Beach, California. Flat Rock Elementary School in South Carolina, and a school district in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. No Easter. They are having Spring egg events. Moderated by a Spring bunny, at least in San Diego. I know it’s stupid. You know it’s stupid. But it’s happening, and there is a reason why it’s happening. Secular progressives are running wild with President Obama in the White House. They feel unchained, liberated and they are trying to diminish any form of religion. The goal is to marginalize religious opposition to secular programs. [Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor, 3/21/13]

Sean Hannity In 2011: “Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone That Some On The Left Are Waging A War On [Easter]” During the April 21, 2011, edition of his Fox News show, Sean Hannity teased a segment on progressives supposedly waging a war on Easter. During the segment itself, Hannity claimed groups like the Catholic League were “unhappy about how much disrespect is being shown towards the Christian faith”:

HANNITY: Now, Easter is one of the most important holidays for Christians. And as we are in the midst of Holy Week, some groups like the Catholic League are unhappy about how much disrespect is being shown towards the Christian faith.

Billo The Clown: still dumb as a rock.

h/t: MMFA