Tag: rush limbaugh

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In Hate We Trust

The Recent Spate of Outbursts Shift Spotlight Onto America’s Dirty Little Secret.

In Hate We Trust

Iowa 1968

One Day, as a second grader at Lowell Elementary School in Waterloo, Iowa, a ruckus was brewing as the class was dismissed for recess.  Shouts relayed through the swath of snott-nosed, chest-high playground denizens with phrenitic excitement.

“They’re Coming!, They’re Coming!”

Half the playground stampeded to the front of school to witness it’s newest enrollees.  I made my way over after the initial rush, curious about the hubbub, and saw a black mom and her two black children enter the school office.  Was that it? Didn’t seem like a big deal to me, but like the newest members of our south-end of town population, I was in the minority.

African-Americans lived in Waterloo, but were segregated to the north-end of town. There hadn’t been a black family at Lowell, and the reaction to their presence was nothing short of educational.  That was my introduction to racism and prejudice.

Small clicks of kids made horrible scary statements I hadn’t heard before.  Our newest Lowell brethren were left alone at playtime, except for me.  I’d already been the object of ridicule, being literally the first kid to wear bell-bottoms at school (not my choice) and hanging out with my friend Kim who was taunted and teased daily.  Kim wasn’t a popular boy’s name in 1968 Iowa.  I hadn’t yet given in to peer pressure, hell, I didn’t even know what that was.  Besides, we moved around alot in the early days so I wasn’t beholden to any long-term friendships yet.

I played with my new found friends because I liked them.  Kids are cruel, but the playing field is pretty even in the second grade.  If you’re encouraged to think for yourself, you’re miles ahead of the pack.

My parents were Jazz musicians.  Mom sang with Benny Goodman on a tour that included Ella Fitzgerald, Lionel Hampton and Hank Jones, along with many equally talented white musicians.  Frequent rehearsals at the house brought people of all sizes, colors and temperament into my consciousness, but differentiation was never based on race, it was solely on the content of their personality.

Being white growing up in the sixties with no attitudinal predisposition towards race proved to be enlightening and infuriating.  Because of my parents, I had the good fortune to decide for myself about this issue in particular, because my parents treated everyone like people.  Crazy, right?  Presumptive predication based on race, religion or politics was absent from my formative years allowing me the freedom to decide for myself.

As a white person growing up in America in the 60’s and 70’s you were exposed to n-word jokes, period.  Sometimes in hushed tones when people of color were in earshot, other times loud and clear as if it were a challenge, but always derogatory with the malodorous stench of underlying hate.

Presidential Election 2008

I may not be an expert in human psychology, but after decades in the hospitality industry, managing behavior on a larger scale, I’ve come to learn how to read a face and translate one’s vocabulary and inflection.  Couple that with my experience as a fundamentally unbiased anonymous observer in the American white culture, I know how to recognize racism, and the bad news is that this country is rife with hate-filled ignorance and intolerance.  It’s getting better, but it’s still present.

For years, the issue had been relatively buried, unless you regularly visited the Southern Poverty Law Center website, where they track hate groups. But the 2008 Presidential Election changed all that.  I think racists were caught with their pants down, because they never in a million years would believe a black man could be elected president of the United States of America.  To illustrate, check this stat from Compete.com on Stormfront.org:

Stormfront.org traffic surge

Stormfront is a white supremacist website.  Members of Stormfront would correct me here and describe themselves as white nationalists, but c’mon.  Semantics aside, all you need do is browse through the site.  As you can see, the traffic spiked in November, 08′ when Barack Obama won the White House and has slowly increased, reaching near November (2008) levels this August (2009).  My guess is September will surpass last November (I’ll try to remember to update). Similar traffic spikes were recorded on kkk.com, kkk.bz, kkklan.com, etcetera, etcetera.

Clearly the November 2008 election hit a nerve.

Unfortunate Update-

As predicted, web traffic increased substantially in September for stormfront.org in the month of September:

Stormfront Web Traffic - September

Bubbling to the Surface in 2009

In high school I dated a girl who originally hailed from Mississippi.  She told me she was afraid of black people. “What are you afraid of?”, I’d ask.  “That they’ll take over”, she answered.  “Take over what?”, I inquired.  “Take over the country”.

To the feeble minded, that’s what this is about.  Reading through the mangled, incomplete and frighteningly evil thought processes displayed by some of the posters on stormfront, it becomes very apparent that a streak of disbelief, hate and paranoia has grappled the short and curlies of these confederate sympathizers.

As of this writing, President Barack Obama has been in office for a little over 8 months.  His appointees are multi-cultural.  Mr. Obama won the popular vote of the citizens of this great country, in addition to an overwhelming advantage in the electoral college.  Republicans and former Bush appointees serve on his cabinet.  President Obama has repeatedly sought bi-partisan support and central to his victorious campaign was the idea that we as a nation could achieve our mutually beneficial objective through cooperation and intelligent discussion.

Unfortunately for us, there are biggots who have enough money to sabotage the progress we’re making.

One need only google Rush Limbaugh racist quotes, and 462k results appear.  Mr. Limbaugh has made  millions of dollars defiling his fellow man.  But Rushbo is an entertainer, a clown, the motive behind anything he says is advertiser dollars.

A more complicated case is Rep. Joe Wilson. Joe has apologized to the  President, and has been politically backpedaling since his disrespectful outburst on Sept. 9th, 2009.  But he’s a politician.  He’ll say whatever.  Joe is a member of the “Sons of Confederate Veterans”.  Joe was one of only 7 state representatives in the state of South Carolina to defend the confederate flag.

The confederate flag is the defining symbol of the confederacy.  The core belief of the confederacy, the motivation behind secession of the states involved and the civil war was the right to keep indentured servants.  To own human beings as a commodity.  To treat human beings as a possession, like a cell phone.   How much effort do you expend when you lose your cell phone? As much as your child? As much as a close friend?

Defending the confederate flag is like flipping off Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and human decency. There’s simply no place for it in intelligent society.

The white supremacists, separatists, nationalists or whatever want segregation.  Good luck. Segregation from what?  We all inhabit the same shrinking planet.  We all depend on the same resources and all have the same needs.  Go ahead and create your own putrid colony, but you’ll eventually have needs that supersede your resources.  Then what?

I don’t understand it.  When I break it down to it’s lowest common denominator, where’s the benefit in that position?

What would be the logical progression of secession or racial segregation?  Which state in the union is completely self-sufficient?  How long after splitting our gloriously diversified and interdependent nation into multiple individual nations  would war erupt?  How many wars would there be, and who gets the tanks?

It’s a ridiculous proposition.

And let’s face facts, if you found yourself in a life threatening situation, and at that precise moment if there were only one person in the world who could save your life, would it matter what color they were?

peace.

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The Muslims Are Taking Over

The fever-pitched paranoia and dis-information campaign organizers must be pleased.

The perversion of common sense continues as an increasing number of nimrods (informal def.) dismiss their own intellect for the destructive rantings of self-aggrandizing bigots.  Glenn Beck and Dick Armey are taking credit for mounting the divisive lather of hysteria witnessed on 9/12/2009 in Washington DC.  All that was missing were the nooses and men in white robes with white pointy hats.

The Muslim Population in the United States is 0.8%.  (see here) According to IslamicPopulation.com, the percentage of muslim population in North and South America is 1.06%.

Where in those numbers do you see the “Muslims Taking Over” as decried by an uninformed protester at the “homage to ignorance” rally on Saturday, 9/12? This daft and utterly baseless claim is a result of the alarmist tactics and irresponsible use of the media by those whose singular goal is higher ratings and increased revenues. But this antagonistic, albeit accepted approach will come at a price.  Press  reports confirm a politically motivated increase of intolerance, obstinacy and violent behavior.  How is that productive?  The only purpose for relaying disinformation in that manner is to provoke the ugly side within us.  Again, how is that productive?

  • FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, event organizer, was caught lying about the attendance of this non-productive hate-filled gathering by inflating the number by about 30 times the actual estimate.  Obviously an effort to garner recruits by ridiculously puffing up the numbers.
  • Sean Hannity blatantly lied, falsely claiming that President Obama called insurance execs “bad people”.
  • Rush Limbaugh authoritatively blamed Barack Obama for the financial meltdown exactly one day after he was elected president.

Any thinking person would recognize the obvious ploys of these social detractors, but unfortunately that’s not what we’re dealing with.

This is what happens to a culture whose collective head has been softened up by approximately 60 years of television commercials, soap operas and the unchallenged use of deliberate false information in order to confuse and persuade the lesser and lazier among us.

If you only look to the right when crossing the street, one of these days you’ll end up pavement patè.

If you’re going to hold contempt for someone, maybe it should be the ones who encourage contemptuous behavior.   You owe it to yourself, your country and to those who bravely fight and have fought for your right to speak freely, to at least consider other view points before making a final decision.

Think with your own mind, not the one you borrowed from TV.

peace.

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Death on Two Legs – The Progression of Incitement

Spread Hate, Destroy Property, Kill people – The Authoritarian Dynamic*

Death on Two Legs - The Progression of Incitement

The quotes below represent a small sample of the conscious, or otherwise, incitement campaign by self-agrandizers who suck the brains out of millions of overly impressionable eyes and ears.

Stan Lee wrote –  “With great power, there must also come great responsibility.”  It’s a narrative caption on a Spiderman comic book.

It’s also an appropriately illustrative application of Mr. Lee’s wisdom given that the characters quoted below are cartoonish in almost every way except, of course, for the excruciating socio-physical bile they produce.

Of particular note; the LaRouche Organization, who takes credit for creating and distributing posters of President Obama with a Hitler mustache and other Nazi-related defamatory literature directed at the President at local town hall meetings, actually sides itself with Nazi ideologically.   Their Anti-semitism, minimizing of the holocaust and position that Nazi war criminals should NOT be prosecuted is well known.  But now they’re using Nazi imagery to vilify?  And what was WWII about anyway?

In the historical words of Joseph Welch –  “Have You No Sense of Decency”.

The perversion of common sense.

Below are a couple entertainers who are selling ad space, writers (sic) selling books, religious zealots adrift in a chasm of misinterpretation and a few bona-fide wack-jobs.  It would be comical if they didn’t have so much influence (tragically) over so many whose confused complacency prevent them from researching the twisted allegory of the irresponsible and agendized rhetoric these demagouges  incessantly spew.

RUSH LIMBAUGH:
Rush Limbaugh
  • “I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”
  • “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.”
  • “Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.”
  • “The seasoned citizen population is well aware of Obama’s Cash for Caskets program with them in the caskets.  In fact, ladies and gentlemen, we told you about the VA Death Book last week.”
  • “I want him [Obama] to fail.”
  • “Obama is terrorist attack number 2; Obama is the follow-up to 9-11.”
GLENN BECK:
Glenn Beck
  • “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy — over and over and over again — who has a deep seated hatred for white people or white culture, I don’t know what it is . . . I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people. I’m saying he has a problem, this guy is, I believe, a racist.”
  • “They think they — and they — they — you know what? At this point, gang, I’m not sure, they may be able to because they are so far ahead of us. They know what they’re dealing against; most of America does not yet. Most of America doesn’t have a clue as to what’s going on. There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America, and the way it is done, it has been done through the — the guise of an election, but they lied to us the entire time.”
  • “When you enlist in the U.S. military, you have take an oath that says you’re gonna support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies – foreign and domestic – we talk a lot on this program about the foreign threats – maybe we should spend some time tonight on the domestic one….the physical threat may be developing domestically as well,”
MICHELLE MALKIN:
Michelle Malkin
  • “I have to tell you, in general, I’m skeptical of anything that has Bill of Rights tacked on to it”
  • “Why didn’t Obama save every child from drowning? Why just one? This myopia stems from his old, outdated liberal-elitist sensibility which states that the only drowning child worth saving is the one who has the connections and the wherewithal to be in the general vicinity of America’s so-called Swimmer-in-Chief.”
  • “Debate” Ezra Klein? What a perverse distraction and a laughable waste of time that would be. And that’s what they really want, isn’t it? To distract and waste time so they can foist their agenda on the country unimpeded.”
KARL ROVE:
Karl Rove
  • “Just get me a f**king faith-based thing. Got it?”
  • “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,”
REVEREND WILEY DRAKE:
Wiley Drake
  • “Imprecatory prayer is agreeing with God, and if people don’t like that, they need to talk to God,” Drake told host Alan Colmes.
  • “God said it, I didn’t. I was just agreeing with God.”
  • Asked if there are others for whom Drake is praying “imprecatory prayer,” Drake hesitated before answering that there are several. “The usurper that is in the White House is one, B. Hussein Obama,” he said.
  • Colmes later pressed Drake to ensure he had heard the preacher right.
  • “Are you praying for his death?” Colmes asked.
  • “Yes,” Drake replied.
  • “So you’re praying for the death of the president of the United States?”
  • “Yes.”
REVEREND JOHN HAGEE:
John Hagee
  • “God caused Hurricane Katrina to wipe out New Orleans because it had a gay pride parade the week before and was filled with sexual sin.”
  • “All Muslims are programmed to kill and we can thus never negotiate with any of them.”
  • “The End Times — Rapture — is imminent and the U.S. Government must do what it can to hasten it, which at minimum requires: (a) a war with Iran and (b) undying, absolute support for a unified Israel, including all Occupied Territories.”
LYNDON LAROUCHE:
Lyndon LaRouche
  • “As for ‘Jewish culture’…it is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim.”
  • “have declared war against Obama’s so-called health care reform because it is a direct copy of the policy Hitler declared in October 1939, when Hitler issued the order for euthanasia against those determined, by a board of medical experts, to have ‘lives unworthy to be lived.'”
  • (New Solidarity, August 22, 1978) that the Zionist Lobby is “the most visible of the internal enemies of the United States–and of the human race–at this specific moment. Every policy it is currently pushing is pure evil….”
  • (“New Pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism,” New Solidarity, Dec. 8, 1978) that the 1.5 million Jews whom he concedes died were the victims of “the Nazi policy of labor-intensive ‘appropriate technology’ for the employment of ‘inferior races,’ a small fraction of the tens of millions of others–especially Slavs–who were murdered….” (In other words, LaRouche denies there was any deliberate gas-chamber extermination campaign against the Jews.)
SEN. JOSEPH MCCARTHY:
Joseph McCarthy
  • “Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.”
SARAH PALIN:
Sarah Palin
  • “I’m the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can’t.'”
  • “I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that.”
  • “Barack Obama pals around with terrorists.”
DAVID DUKE:
David Duke
  • “Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races. This goal must include freeing of the American media and government from subservient Jewish interests.”
  • “These Jews who run things, who are producing this mental illness – teenage suicide… all these Jewish sicknesses. That’s nothing new. The Talmud’s full of things like sex with boys and girls.”
  • On Michael Steele’s appointment to RNC Chair-
  • “I am glad these traitorous leaders of the Republican Party appointed this Black racist, affirmative action advocate to the head of the Republican party because this will lead to a huge revolt among the Republican base. As a former Republican official, I can tell you that millions of rank-and-file Republicans are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore! We will either take the Republican Party back over the next four years or we will say, “To Hell With the Republican Party!” And we will take 90 percent of Republicans with us into a New Party that will take its current place!”
ANN COULTER:
Ann Coulter
  • “If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.”
  • “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.”
  • “The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it’s yours. That’s our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars — that’s the Biblical view.”
  • “What I find so deliciously amusing and so vastly hypocritical about this whole Asshole-in-Chief incident is that Obama’s rescuing this poor boy from drowning is completely at odds with his uber-liberal-facist policies of deliberately impregnating unsuspecting women just so they can be forced to undergo abortions.”
DICK CHENEY:
Dick Cheney
  • “On the question of so-called torture, we don’t do torture. We never have.”
  • “I think the evidence is overwhelming that the EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques) were crucial in getting them to cooperate,…”
  • “In Iraq, a ruthless dictator cultivated weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. He gave support to terrorists, had an established relationship with al Qaeda, and his regime is no more.”
  • “I’m very proud of what we did”