The Sliming of Amercian Conservatism by US Left Wing Media

…But You Will Never Hear a Peep About Black Churches!

The slandering of the American conservative movement has begun

By Tim Stanley TelegraphUS politics Last updated: September 5th, 2011

The slandering of the conservative movement has begun. For the past month, American newspapers have been awash with stories about the religion of various Republican presidential candidates. Michele Bachmann was portrayed in the New Yorker as a fanatical wingnut. Like Rick Perry, she has been labelled a follower of Dominionism – the belief that God gave Christians authority over all the Earth. Writing for the Daily Beast, Michelle Golberg compared Dominionism to fundamentalist Islam and warned that the GOP was engaged in an “all-out assault” on the separation of church and state. This Sunday, the liberal economist Paul Krugman’s grand thesis that the Republicans are now the “anti-science” party was republished in The Observer. By questioning evolution and global warming, Krugman says, the GOP has lost its right to rule.

Krugman’s article is a good example of what’s wrong with this hogwash reporting. It is true that Rick Perry called evolution “just a theory”, but who cares? He’s running to be President of the United States, not an eighth grade biology teacher. He will have no influence over what textbooks schools buy or what is taught in classrooms. His views on evolution are as relevant to the presidential race as the price of petrol in Timbuktu. The fact that they are shared by millions of Americans has done nothing to dent the country’s advances in science and technology. Nor are they any more irrational than the belief that Jesus walked on water or turned water into wine. Gospel stories are not only believed by many religious liberals, they are frequently quoted by Democratic presidential candidates. By the way, evolution is a theory. It is a theory constructed from individual scraps of evidence – a way of amalgamating observations into a grand design. Ergo: whenever the US deficit goes up, Paul Krugman calls for more spending – therefore we might theorise that he’s a drooling idiot. Remember: that’s just a theory, not a fact.

The assault on Dominionism is equally pernicious. In an expose piece in the New York Times, Bill Keller tells us that “I care a lot if a candidate is going to be a Trojan horse for a sect that believes it has divine instructions on how we should be governed.” He trots out the usual innuendos about evangelical Christians (they love slavery and hate evolution, and every church picnic climaxes in the ritual beheading of a transvestite). But he sneakily adds, “Neither Bachmann nor Perry has, as far as I know, pledged allegiance to the Dominionists.” Exactly. But doesn’t it make life more interesting to infer that they have?

Let’s imagine for a moment that Bachmann and Perry are Dominionists. Compare that wild and crazy faith with those held by two Democrats. Hank Johnson is the congressman from DeKalb County in Georgia and he’s a Buddhist. Specifically, he’s a follower of Daishonin Buddhism. Adherents gather regularly in large groups to sit cross-legged and chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo at a portable shrine. The idea is that if they say these divine words while visualising their deepest desires, they’ll get what they’ve always wanted. Like evolution, it’s just a theory – but it’s much, much more cool.

Harry Reid, leader of the Senate Democrats, is a Mormon. Many readers probably won’t know that because the mainstream media oddly doesn’t talk about it. It’s okay to call Mitt Romney a polytheist with twelve wives, but Reid is untouchable because he’s a Democrat. And yet it’s reasonable to theorise that the leader of the Senate wears the magic underwear associated with Mormonism. Is his belief that Jesus walked on American soil, anti-science? Geographers and historians would probably object.

Democratic presidential candidates regularly visit black churches, Nancy Pelosi has invoked her Catholicism so many times you might think she was a nun, and Barack Obama was married by a pastor who actively hates America. Yet Krugman suggests that only the GOP uses and abuses religion every election. More sickening is the innuendo that there is a uniquely violent subtext to conservative faith, as if every Right-winger wants to shoot an abortionist. There is no comparison between fundamentalist Islam and Dominionism: one kills and the other doesn’t. The conflation of the two is ugly and deceitful.

Michele Bachmann, A Midwestern Margaret Thatcher with added divinity?

Being Michele Bachmann

The terrifying truthfulness of the victor of the Ames straw poll

Aug 20th 2011 | The Economist

PRESUMABLY because both are attractive women, and she the lesser-known, the media used to disparage Michele Bachmann, who won the Ames straw poll on August 13th, as “Palin-lite”. That was always upside down. Whereas Sarah Palin was once flummoxed when invited to name the newspapers—any newspaper—she read, Mrs Bachmann, the third-term congresswoman from Minnesota, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that her favourite beachside reading included the work of Ludwig von Mises, a towering economist of the Austrian school. This column is even more impressed by her mastery of the 3.8m or so words of the ludicrous federal tax code. A lawyer who spent five years working for the Internal Revenue Service is not to be trifled with. When she says that the tax code is “a weapon of mass destruction”, she knows whereof she speaks.

If Mrs Bachmann’s cleverness was ever in question, the doubt should have been dispelled by her performance since confirming in June that she was running for the Republican presidential nomination. Before that she had attracted rather little national attention beyond the rapt circles of the tea-party movement. Her signature legislation, a light-bulb freedom of choice act, designed to protect the God-given right of every American to waste as much electricity as he pleases, had attracted more mirth than votes. In January she irritated the Republican leadership by insisting on delivering her own rebuttal, as creator and leader of the tea-party caucus in the House of Representatives, to Barack Obama’s state-of-the-union speech. It was an amateurish affair, in which she appeared to stare throughout at the wrong camera.

But how the lady has turned. Since joining the race for president she has exhibited a flair for organisation and a political cunning above the ordinary. If her victory in Ames was no great surprise—an evangelical Christian with hard-boiled pro-life, anti-gay-marriage credentials was always likely to prosper in the God-fearing cornfields of Iowa—her disciplined comportment as a campaigner has been. When, before Ames, Chris Wallace of Fox News asked her outright whether she was a “flake”, she refused to be baited, maintained an icy insouciance and, later, received a grovelling apology. A Newsweek cover picturing her with crazed eyes as “The Queen of Rage” probably did more damage to Tina Brown, the would-be saviour of that troubled publication, than to the would-be saviour of America, who affected to pay it no attention. Under attack in the debate at Ames, she coolly disposed of one of her main challengers, Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota.

Still, there is a reason why that “flake” question was posed. Mrs Bachmann has a record of making factual mistakes, repeating untruths and adopting preposterous stances. Though some of the mistakes have been mere slips, they were slips of a sort that a candidate who claims a close familiarity with America’s founding ought never to have made. At one point she said that the “shot heard round the world” had been fired in Lexington, New Hampshire (it was Lexington, Massachusetts); at another that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more” (wrong by almost a century). She claimed in 2008 that Mr Obama held “anti-American” views, and last year that his visit to India would cost taxpayers $200m a day, a fantastic number apparently plucked, unchecked, from Indian newspapers. She continues to maintain, preposterously, that Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit because Congress raised the debt ceiling. The opposite is true: the agency wanted more deficit reduction but expressed alarm at the spectacle of politicians like Mrs Bachmann turning the debt ceiling into a political bargaining chip.

Judgmental, moi?

Now that she is running for president, Mrs Bachmann is choosing her words more cautiously, especially on social issues. But she has had to resort to credulity-stretching gymnastics to explain past utterances. Did she become a tax lawyer against her own will because, as she once argued, it was a wife’s duty (see the fifth chapter of Ephesians) to be “submissive” to her husband, who thought it was a good idea? No, she says now, in an assertion that would dumbfound a lexicographer: to “submit” means to “respect”. Why in 2004 did she equate homosexuality to “personal enslavement”? “I am running for the presidency of the United States. I am not running to be anyone’s judge.” Such evasions are less than convincing. As a Minnesota state senator a decade ago, Mrs Bachmann made her opposition to gay marriage into a crusade that helped to build her political career. The clinic she set up with her husband Marcus (which she cites as evidence of her understanding of job creation) offered to make gays straight via the agency of prayer. Judgmental, moi?

Her liberal critics make rich fun of all this. But exaggeration, inexactitude and mendacity are the currency of politics. The voter who grumbles about these things is like the farmer who grumbles about the weather. If Mrs Bachmann is guilty of such sins, she is hardly alone. Indeed, her most potent weapon might, paradoxically, be the fundamental honesty that undergirds her positions. That is to say, people can tell that, unlike most candidates, what you see is what you would get: a strongly religious person; a moraliser; a diminutive figure who really does appear to have, as she boasts, a “titanium spine”; a conviction politician in an age when many convictions are feigned. A Midwestern Margaret Thatcher with added divinity, she stands primed to reverse the monstrous growth of the entitlement state, convinced that whatever short-term suffering this causes will nonetheless restore the moral fibre of America. Many Americans would no doubt vote for her if she made it through the primaries. But far more are likely to be frightened, which is why she probably won’t.

Michele Bachmann is Simply Smarter than Dopey Barack Obama

If the Liberal Press wants to see the Constant Flubber Extraordinaire it need look no further than Barack Obama, but they won't. Obama is too special to be fairly examined. Questioning Obama's smarts would be, well, a little racist? The same cannot be said about Michelle Bachmann, who is the target de jour of the left wing media. Some Michelle's are open to ridicule, others get a special pass because they are so special... How do I know that? Because I just saw the Morning Moron, pig-eyed, no lips, Joe Scarborough, failing to be funny but never missing an opportunity to be stupid, this time about Michelle Bachmann.

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• President Obama’s lack of experience with royalty was on full display today in England as he mistakenly began a toast to the Queen of England at the wrong time, resulting in “God Save the Queen” blaring over his words and no one getting to drink what was in their cups. Awkward. “And now I propose a toast to the Queen,” President Obama began in London today, but only got as far as “To the vitality of the special relationship” before “God Save the Queen” cut him off. He kept reading the toast, however, and finally raised his glass to her. No one drank out of their glasses afterwards, however. The Queen herself looked over at him with a hint of contempt (confusion?) in her face, while the other members of the royal family stood stoically around them.

• President Obama flubbed his remarks to troops at Fort Drum Thursday when he told the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division about the time he awarded the first Medal of Honor to someone not receiving it posthumously. The medal, he said, went to Jared Monti. The only issue is that Jared Monti died in service in Afghanistan, and did in fact receive the medal posthumously.

• St. Paul--Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has been criticized in recent weeks for her unintentional revisions of history, but on Monday President Obama revealed he could use a refresher course in American history as well. In an interview Monday with reporter Brad Watson of WFAA-TV of Dallas, Obama seemed to confuse the state’s current political history with its Democrat past. “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state,” Obama said, when asked why the President was so unpopular in Texas. In fact, since the Civil War and until 1980, the Lone Star state swung toward the Democratic candidate in 23 of 27 presidential elections.

• WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama sees his secretary of defense just about every day, but he still flubbed Robert Gates' name on Thursday. Gates was in the crowd for Obama's national security speech. Pointing him out, the president said "William Gates" was on hand. Perhaps Obama was thinking of Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire. The defense chief, who goes by Bob, was also misidentified at a Pentagon ceremony on Tuesday. Then, he was introduced as Ronald Gates.

Arlen Specter Shows His Verility to PA Voters

Arlen Specter single handedly with this audio clip reminded every Pennsylvania voter that he is old, pathetic and grumpy. Arlen has, as they say in Scotland, "not proven" that he is the man that Pennsy needs in Washington.

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Toomey Widens Senate Race Polling Lead

myfoxphilly

Republican Pat Toomey is continuing to show well in early polling for the 2010 Pennsylvania Senate race, according to Rasmussen Reports polling .

The former congressman, who is not yet being challenged in the primary, holds a 49-percent-to-40-percent margin over Republican-turned-Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter.

And polling also shows Toomey has a 43-percent-to-35-percent lead over Democratic challenger, Congressman Joe Sestak.

Those leads have doubled over the span of a month.

In the Democratic primary battle, Specter is ahead of Sestak by 21 points.

According to Rasmussen, just 41 percent of Pennsylvania voters favor the health care reform legislation currently before Congress, while 57 percent are opposed. Those attitudes are similar to the national average.

Favorable and unfavorable ratings for each candidate by poll participants have changed little over the past several months, which leads the pollster to say Toomey's improving prospects are likely due more to the political environment than the candidates.