Keith’s Nov. 15 Special Comment responding to Ted Koppel’s WaPo opinion piece:  Olbermann, O’Reilly and the death of real news.

… I cannot prove it, so I’ll estimate it here and if I’m proved wrong I’ll happily correct it: but my intuition tells me I criticized President Obama more **in the last week** than Fox’s prime-time hosts criticized President Bush in eight years.

To equate this network with Fox, as Mr. Koppel did to accuse us of having our own facts is another manifestation of a dangerously simplified understanding of modern news. This guy says the moon is a planetary fragment orbiting the Earth; this other guy says it’s actually the body of the late Vince Foster have them both on and let them debate. It’s fair and balanced.

(video via Countdown | Read the transcript)

This clip from The Onion is from November 2009.  If someone had told me then that the GOP would have made the gains that they did in the 2010 midterms, I would not have believed them.

Actually, Republicans should consider Zombie Reagan for their leadership.  If I learned anything from the 2010 midterm results, it would be that the only demonstrably functioning appendage of the GOP is its propaganda/fundraising wing.  Whether or not they’ll be able to actually govern remains in serious doubt.

From the looks of their freshman class, the famed Republican unity-of-message, lockstep discipline is a thing of the past.  Their leadership is in for a frustrating experience, akin to what the Democrats dealt with during the last Congress (noteworthy exceptions being the complete lack of empathy, and despite the inherent contradiction, a lot more Jesus).

Zombie Reagan?  They could do worse.

(WARNING:  Some will find the video to be disturbing and/or offensive…)

Zombie Reagan Raised From Grave To Lead GOP

I saw this in my Chicago Tribune this morning and felt compelled to share.  This appropriate treatment of George W. Bush’s memoir is from Clay Bennett, editorial cartoonist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press.  More after the jump…

Once I tracked down the above, I was happy to discover it wasn’t Bennett’s only effort on the subject:

And that’s not all I found.  Bennett’s take on the 2010 midterm results is spot on.  He also has, not one, but at least two, absolutely brilliant tea party drawings.

I’ve been meaning to do a follow up on the below post for some time but haven’t had the chance.  For something more current (and more articulate) check out Bob Smietana’s new article at The Tennessean.  Here’s a snip from ‘Anti-Muslim crusaders make millions spreading fear‘:

JOHN PARTIPILO / FILE / THE TENNESSEAN

That’s how many dollars Emerson’s for-profit company — Washington-based SAE Productions — collected in 2008 for researching alleged ties between American Muslims and overseas terrorism. The payment came from the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, a nonprofit charity Emerson also founded, which solicits money by telling donors they’re in imminent danger from Muslims.

Emerson is a leading member of a multimillion-dollar industry of self-proclaimed experts who spread hate toward Muslims in books and movies, on websites and through speaking appearances.

Leaders of the so-called “anti-jihad” movement portray themselves as patriots, defending America against radical Islam. And they’ve found an eager audience in ultra-conservative Christians and mosque opponents in Middle Tennessee. One national consultant testified in an ongoing lawsuit aimed at stopping a new Murfreesboro mosque…

That ‘national consultant’ is the subject of the below.

Crossposted from Care2.com ~ Originally published 6 October 2010

AARON THOMPSON / FILE / GANNETT TENNESSEE

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan administration Frank Gaffney appeared in a Tennessee courtroom Monday, Sept. 27, to offer his “expert” testimony on behalf of four plaintiffs seeking an injunction to prevent the construction of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, commonly referred to as the Murfreesboro mosque.

From the Murfreesboro Post:

“I’m here to warn this community of seditious acts of Sharia Law,” Gaffney said.  “And that threat has trickled down to local governments.”

Gaffney’s testimony carried little weight with the Judge, the witness having clarified the true nature of his expertise to the court:

“I don’t hold myself out as an expert on Sharia Law,”  Gaffney told the court on the witness stand.  “But I have talked a lot about that as a threat.”

This is exactly what Gaffney is an expert at — scaring the crap out of people regarding a topic, on which, he is decidedly NOT an expert.

Two days after his court testimony, Gaffney went on CNN to discuss the Murfreesboro case with Anderson Cooper and Akbar Ahmed, former Pakistani diplomat, presently the chair of Islamic studies at American University (h/t TPMMuckraker).  In the below clip, Cooper starts with Gaffney, asking the  president of the Center for Security Policy to elaborate on the “red flags” signaling the onset of Sharia infiltration.

Gaffney’s opening was curious.  “Well, several were introduced into evidence during the court proceedings,” Gaffney told Cooper.  While such items may have been introduced into evidence, it doesn’t mean they’ll have any bearing on the Court’s conclusions.  And, as the Murfreesboro Post reported, much of Gaffney’s testimony was objected to by the County attorneys and their objections were subsequently sustained by the Judge.

What follows from Gaffney is the standard neoconservative misrepresentation of Sharia and overstatement of the threat, which, in Gaffney’s warped view, poses an existential threat to America by way of “stealth jihad.”

Watch the clip or read the CNN transcript for the details of Gaffney’s foolish paranoia.  Also be sure to read Rachel Slajda’s Sept. 23 TPMMuckraker piece recounting the origins of the neoconservative war on Sharia.  Here, however, consider Ahmed’s response to Gaffney on CNN as he puts the likelihood of Sharia replacing the U.S. Constitution in its proper perspective:

If every Muslim in the United States of America, which is about 2 percent of the population, wanted Sharia — which is not the case at all — even if they wanted it, could they impose it over a population of 98 percent who are not Muslim in a democracy?

In my country where I come from, Pakistan, 98 percent of the population is Muslim. There is no Sharia law. I’ve been a commissioner in charge of large parts of the country. Our laws are criminal and civil procedure codes derived from British colonial law which go to Westminster, which in turn has influenced the U.S. Constitution.

So the notion of Sharia being implemented in America with about 2 percent of the population, to me, is mathematically absurd.

(CNN clip via Media Matters Action)

The court battle over the Murfreesboro mosque is in recess until Oct. 20, but its outcome is a foregone conclusion.  The legal arguments presented by opponents of the project — that county officials didn’t provide sufficient public notice during the approval process — are baseless.  The whole sorry episode, much like the inflated controversy over the Park 51 community center in lower Manhattan, is sideshow propaganda from one group of clash-of-civilization types directed at another.  For a sideshow, however, as Glenn Greenwald, Greg Sargent, and Jonathan Chait argued last month, its pursuit could have significant, possibly dire, consequences for America.

Most concerning at present, though, is that Gaffney’s convoluted conspiracy spew, once relegated to the neocon fringe, is now treated as plausible.

Salon’s Joe Conason recalls Gaffney’s 2003 alarmism aimed at prominent conservative Grover Norquist and the Bush administration for “… engagement with Muslim groups that [Gaffney] and others [anti-Park51 crusader Pamela Geller among them] had identified as jihadist or radical.”  Few conservatives paid them any mind back in the day.  ”All that has changed since the inauguraton of a president whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was Muslim,” Conason writes, “because he provides a central focus for a politicized campaign against Islam…”

Now, potential 2012 GOP candidates for president seem content to wear their hatred of Islam on their sleeves.  Whether it’s Sarah Palin’s petty invocations of the president’s middle name, or Newt Gingrich’s steadfast adherence to the neocons’ fear mongering message, Islamophobia stands to be a prominent feature on the Republican policy platform for the foreseeable future.

Related on Care2:

• Tenn. Mosque Opponents: “Islam Is Not A Real Religion”
• Mosque That Was Hit By Arson Now Attacked Via Bureaucracy

Related Elsewhere:

• TIMELINE: Nine months of the right’s anti-Muslim bigotry | Media Matters for America
• Confronting Islamophobic Conspiracy Theories | The Plum Line

Apathy is no excuse!

A gigantic tip of my most enormous hat to Steve Benen and Bill Simmon, whose concept and film-making skills, respectively, resulted in the following clip.