Extremism, Bigotry, and Hypocrisy

What would you do or say if I were to begin this post with this:

Ladies and Gentlemen, let me tell you of monsters and monstrous wrongs. And let me tell you what these bloody monsters thrive on.
 

One might think I was about to perform a public service or, alternatively, go off on some crazy rant.  Either could be right, although with language as colorful and loaded as that, you'd likely lean towards the crazy rant.

OK, so then let's suppose I add this to the post:

Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Islamic monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Islam upon helpless government employees. Oh my, my, my, how "Papa's got a brand new bag."
 

If you are politically moderate, or at least politically ambivalent, you'd say that I was being both Extremist and Bigoted, and maybe a bit crazy.  If you were oriented towards the Left, you'd say that I was probably one of those paranoid Right Wing Nutcases who think Obama is filling the government up with Muslims in a secret plan to take over the country.  Those guys see boogie men behind every corner. Nobody should listen to them.

If, then, I go on to state:

What's Papa's new tactic? You're gonna just love this! These days, when ANYone attempts to bravely stand up against virulent religious oppression, these monstrosities cry out alligator tears in overflowing torrents and scream that it is, in fact, THEY who are the dispossessed, bereft and oppressed. C'mon, really, you pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers? It would be like the utter folly of 1960's-era southern bigots howling like stuck pigs in protest that Rosa Parks' civil rights activism is "abusing" them by destroying and disenfranchising their rights to sit in the front seat of buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Please, I beseech you! Let us call these ignoble actions what they are: the senseless and cowardly squallings of human monsters.
 

You'd likely say "Ol' Sarge has gone off the deep end.  When I started reading this Blog, I thought he would be reasonable, at least fair minded, but it turns out he's just one of those Nut Jobs I hear about all the time"  and you'd start thinking about not reading any further in this post, or think about never visiting the Blog again.

Now let's say that I then went on for a couple of paragraphs alleging terrible deeds, suspect motives, wrongs that needed to be righted, treatment that should be punished, and ended the post with THIS:

If these fundamentalist Islamic monsters of human degradation, marginalization, humiliation and tyranny cannot broker or barter your acceptance of their putrid theology, then they crave for your universal silence in the face of their rapacious reign of theocratic terror. Indeed, they ceaselessly lust, ache, and pine for you to do absolutely nothing to thwart their oppression. Comply, my friends, and you, too, become as monstrously savage as are they. I beg you, do not feed these hideous monsters with your stoic lethargy, callousness and neutrality. Do not lubricate the path of their racism, bigotry, and prejudice. Doing so directly threatens the national security of our beautiful nation.
 

You would stop reading this Blog, and you would be right to do so.  You would also probably discount anything I said in between the beginning and the end as racist, bigoted, extremist ranting and would be of the opinion that I should not be holding any position of responsibility, or be in any position where my views might affect the views of young people, the naive, or the easily led or have any position of authority or influence on government.  You'd be right about that, too.

Islam, like Christianity, is made up of a number of different sects, sub sects, and denominations, that have widely different views on a number of different interpretations of the Holy Bible.  One could not, for instance, fairly claim that Unitarians are exactly the same as the Westboro Baptist Church simply because both believe in the Divinity of Christ.  You could not fairly claim that Catholics are exactly the same as Methodists, even though the both adhere to the Great Commission of Christ.  To claim that all Muslims believe in violent jihad through terrorism is both Bigoted and Extremist.  Both George Bush and Barack Obama agree on this, and every time there is a terror attack in this country politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle will caution against coming to rapid conclusions---and rightly so (that is, of course those who will tell you the Tea Party Did It and, to be fair, those who immediately jump to the conclusion that it was Jihad (although if one was to bet on the most likely perpetrator, they'd place a bet on Left Wing Environmental Terrorists, but that's math not bigotry).

The problem is this.

“The armed forces are on the verge of falling apart,” Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, told me in an interview. Aside from proselytizing, he said, other problems include “sexual assault, suicides, lowering entrance standards and war weariness. They are in trouble, and the leadership is oblivious.” Sexual assault and proselytizing, according to Wilkerson, “are absolutely destructive of the bonds that keep soldiers together.”

Wilkerson was speaking to me in an interview with former ambassador Joe Wilson and the head of the private Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein. They were on their way to a meeting at the Pentagon on April 23 where they would discuss religious issues in a group that included several generals and a military chaplain.

"Now, why is that a problem?" you might say.

Well, its because Mikey Weinstein is the man who penned those thoughts I block quoted above, but as you will see, I made two minor changes.

Exit question:

See if your answer here is the same as mine was.

This Is How Sick It Can Get

 

 

That's a political cartoon that was printed in the Sacramento Bee after the fertilizer plant explosion in the town of West (No, I won't link to that paper, and the image comes from another site---we won't be rewarding the Bee with hits so they can charge more for advertising).

It doesn't stop there.  The explosion occurred as Governor Rick Perry was touring Illinois to convince businesses to move from that State to Texas.  This was the lead paragraph in an Editorial that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on April 23:

Laugh all you want about Texas Gov. Rick Perry's campaign to recruit businesses from Illinois to the Lone Star State. We don't know whether Perry will succeed in prompting a commercial exodus from the Land of Lincoln to the land of droughts, fire ants and deadly fertilizer-plant explosions. Yet Perry's stunt is another serious wake-up call for Illinois politicians and the inhospitable business climate they've created.
 

This appeared in the Daily Kos:

The cause of the West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion that killed at least 14 and injured 200, as well as destroying dozens of buildings, is still unknown and the damage is still being assessed, but even without the full story known, plenty of toxic Texas politics has been on display. Texas politicians are eager for the federal disaster aid they voted against when it was New York and New Jersey that needed it in the wake of Sandy, and the zoning laws that let a school and homes be right across the street from a fertilizer plant should be a scandal. And it's become clear that, whatever the immediate cause of the explosion, the plant was a menace to its workers and the town, enabled by Texas-style weak regulation and oversight.
 

The New York Times writes this in a Op-Ed, which then reaches back to 1947 to find a similar incident:

The explosion in West, which killed at least 14 people, is now entering a dark pantheon of events in Texas, ones that will surely lead to debates in the state about government regulation and oversight — or the lack thereof. About what “public safety” really means, implies, entails. About Texas’ passionate history of pushing back at what some see as big-government intrusion — a trend that traces back to the regulation-free days of wildcatting in the oil patches.

The implication, of course, is that the business climate in Texas is responsible for the deaths and destruction.  The same folks who will stand on the bodies of dead children to achieve a political goal they've been after for 60 years , which would not have prevented those deaths now stand on the bodies of dead firemen to denounce a political philosophy they oppose.  These are, after all, the same people who, in the hours after the Boston Marathon Bombing, wanted you to think that the Tea Party Did It.

The cartoonist who penned that sick monstrosity above, posted a defense of it a couple days later.

The Texas chemical plant had not been inspected by the state of Texas since 2006. That's seven years ago. You may have read in the news that Gov. Perry, during his business recruiting trips to California and Illinois, generally described his state as free from high taxes and burdensome regulation. One of the burdensome regulations he neglected to mention was the fact that his state hadn't really gotten around to checking out that fertilizer plant. Many Texas cities have little or no zoning, resulting in homes being permitted next to sparely inspected businesses that store explosive chemicals.

He then went on to say, and I'm not kidding:

When I have to come up with these ideas, I can assure you that I am not really deliberately trying to be tasteless. I am not. What I am trying to do is make readers think about an issue in a striking way. I seem to have succeeded in this cartoon, one way or the other.

The question is whether it is tasteless or not.

My answer, respectfully, is that it isn't.

 In other words, as long as your politics is correct, its OK to be politically incorrect.

Concern over lax regulations is legitimate, although it should be pointed out right now that the nobody in the State of Texas advocates the reduction or elimination of Safety Regulations. Given that everybody says that a cause for the blast has not been fixed yet (which doesn't stop them from then telling you its the politics that did it) the best place to go for answers would be someplace not as partisan as the Sacramento Bee, New York Times, Daily Kos, or the Chicago Tribune.  So, even though I live in a State that is populated by people who are "Anti-Science", lets go to Scientific American's article regarding the explosion:

Why Didn't Regulators Prevent the Texas Fertilizer Explosion?

Seven different agencies regulate fertilizer plants in Texas, but none has authority over how close they are to homes and schools.

Here's what we do know: The fertilizer plant hadn't been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. Its owners do not seem to have told the Department of Homeland Security that they were storing large quantities of potentially explosive fertilizer, as regulations require. And the most recent partial safety inspection of the facility in 2011 led to $5,250 in fines.

snip 

Who regulates these fertilizer plants? At least seven different state and federal agencies can regulate Texas fertilizer plants like the one in West: OSHA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the Texas Department of State Health Services, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas Feed and Fertilizer Control Service.

It should be noted here that the Texas agencies mentioned here are charged with monitoring air quality, environmental concerns regarding discharges of toxic materials, and truth in labeling for the contents of fertilizer containers respectively.

That's because regulating the other concerns that arise from the manufacture of fertilizer is a Federal responsibility, primarily that of OSHA and the Department of Homeland Security. And that's where things get really, really scary.

A U.S. congressman and several safety experts called into question on Friday whether incomplete disclosure or regulatory gridlock may have contributed to the disaster.

"It seems this manufacturer was willfully off the grid," Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-MS), ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement. "This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up."

There's more:

(CBS News) After 9/11, America realized that more than 4,000 chemical plants were sitting ducks for a terrorist attack -- tanks of lethal toxins were stored around many of our biggest cities. Five years ago, Homeland Security started a program to secure those plants. Half a billion dollars have been spent. But it turns out 90 percent of the most threatening plants have not even been inspected. Todd Keil was once in charge of this program and he told what he knows to CBS News.

"As the program stands today," Keil said, "it's not effectively protecting the American people from high-risk chemical facilities that may be vulnerable."

Keil was the assistant secretary at Homeland Security responsible for overseeing the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program, known as CFATS, from late 2009 to February 2012. He said he was so concerned about problems with the program that he asked for an internal review.

The review found that after four-and-a-half years and $480 million:  

~There had not been a single inspection of a chemical plant.

~No plant has a site security plan.

~The review also found "...a catastrophic failure to ensure personal and professional accountability."

"There were administrative missteps," said Keil. "There were management missteps, and there were substantive missteps, that just led the program down a path of failure."

It should be mentioned here that DHS is also the agency that would have been responsible for keeping Tamerlan Tsarneav from coming back into this country from the bomb making lessons he took in Chechnya.

So, the last State Inspection was 6 years ago, and that's supposed to be significant, but the fact that the Federal Agency charged with workplace safety hasn't visited the site since 1985 (I can do simple math just as well as Mr. Ohlman---that's 28 years), and the Federal Agency charged with regulating explosive chemical facilities hasn't inspected 90% of the plants that hold them in the 7 years its been in existence and didn't even know that the plant was there until it blew up isn't worth mentioning.  At least that's according to the people who want you to believe that the politics of Texas is what killed those people, and that gun owners don't care about dead children, and the Tea Party is a dangerous terrorist organization that inspires people to kill children with bombs in crowded public places.

There is one government entity in Texas that does bear some responsibility and and a very great deal of shame.  That would be the City Council of West, Texas.  The plant had been in the same location in 1962.  Back then it was out in the middle of nowhere a safe distance from a sleepy small town that was at the time not much more than a wide spot in the road.  In the intervening 50 years the town grew in that direction. They allowed homes, apartments and retirement facilities to be built around the plant.  They even built a school there, citing that the ease of connecting it to existing sewer lines argued for it rather than a location further away.

After My Previous Post Is This A Surprise?

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho -

Melaleuca and its CEO, Frank VanderSloot, have filed a defamation action against The Foundation for National Progress, which owns Mother Jones news magazine.

 

In a news release, Melaleuca said the move comes because the magazine “engaged in a malicious and reckless effort to damage VanderSloot’s reputation as a private citizen, businessman, philanthropist, and entrepreneur through the publication and promotion of several defamatory falsehoods” in early 2012 because VanderSloot had made a “sizable donation” to the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.

snip

“By ignoring repeated requests for a meaningful retraction or correction of the misinformation, the defendants proved their intent to distort the public record, to undermine public confidence in Melaleuca, and to create economic harm for VanderSloot, as well as to Melaleuca, its employees and its independent marketing executives,” according to the Melaleuca news release. “Failure to correct the falsehoods originated by the defendants have caused them to be repeated by countless other organizations, publications and blogs.”

 

snip

 

“I support freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but regardless of their political leanings, publications have the responsibility to base their commentary in fact, not fabrication,” VanderSloot said. “The press has no right to publish falsehoods about people they seek to destroy just because they disagree with them. In the complaint, we've limited the damages we are seeking because this suit is not about money. We’re asking the justice system to correct the false public record, and to hold the press accountable for their falsehoods and to help spare future citizens from this sort of intentional, malicious harm.”

 

Calling people Gay Bashers is the new way to call them Racists.  Its the slur du jour so to speak. 

 

That was back in January.  Mother Jones filed a motion to suppress the suit.

 

Friday, a judge denied that motion.

 

(IDAHO FALLS, ID) – A state judge has given the OK for a lawsuit by Melaleuca CEO Frank VanderSloot against Mother Jones magazine to continue. Attorneys for the Idaho businessman will now be able to question four employees of the national magazine in an effort to assist in helping to determine jurisdiction in VanderSloot’s defamation suit. Judge Darla Williamson in Boise made the decision filed earlier this month in Bonneville County. Depositions will be taken from the following magazine employees: reporter Stephanie Mencimer, editor Monika Bauerlein, CEO Madeleine Buckingham, and Robert Wise, the magazine’s online technology director.

 

 

 

As Long As We're Asking These Kinds Of Questions

You'll get these kinds of answers.

Barney Frank asks:

"I wonder how the right wing in America feels about being aligned with al-Qaeda," Frank continued.

Well, Barney, about the same as you feel about being aligned with a domestic terrorist

Family Research Council (FRC) officials released video of federal investigators questioning convicted domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins II, who explained that he attacked the group’s headquarters because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified them as a “hate group” due to their traditional marriage views.

“Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups,” Corkins tells interrogators in the video, which FRC obtained from the FBI. “I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that.”

The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard reported that Corkins, who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, said in court that he hoped to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the guard.” As Bedard explained, “the shooting occurred after an executive with Chick-Fil-A announced his support for traditional marriage, angering same-sex marriage proponents.”

In other words, its a bunch of horse hockey.

Something To Think About The Next Time A Terrorist Attack Happens.

Multiple news outlets are reporting that older brother spent six months back home in Russia last year.

Multiple sources confirmed Tamerlan went to Russia for a prolonged period last year. It's unclear what he did there, but Fox News is told that the bombmaker who made the Boston devices would need practice to build a device with a viable detonator.

He also had a wife and three year old baby.

It now seems likely that this man left his family behind for six months so that he could learn how to kill the children of other people, then came back here and taught his brother how to do it, too.

This is the kind of person you accused Tea Party members of being.  This is the kind of person you accused me of being.


Heavenly Father, please forgive him---all of them.  They are led astray by the World and people in it who have more regard for thier political aims than they do for thier Soul.  Help them to see that, and lead them towards a better path.  Give me the strength, courage, and wisdom to be helpful you in that task.  Please forgive my initial anger at this.  Thank you for the strength you gave me that kept me from responding in anger.

In Jesus' name.

Amen

Boston: The Tea Party Did It

At least, that's what some folks seem to want you to believe.

This piece right here pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole thing.  You can go look at it and not bother to read any further if you want.  We're on your nickle here, I'm just a fat old guy with an opinion.

There's no doubt that some folks want the perpetrators to be their favorite boogie man.  Others trot out the same names everytime something like this happens. They will breathlessly tell you that this is the same kind of thing Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph have done, failing to mention Ted Kaczynski or Floyd Lee Corkins II.  In this particular instance, they note that the 15th was Patriot's Day in Massachusetts and Maine, as well as the day our taxes are due.  On that one thin thread of information, they hang a nationwide conspiracy of middle aged tax protestors and Christain Homeschooling soccer moms blowing up the countryside.  Some of them are doing this knowing that they have nothing to actually prove anything of the sort but are taking shots at the other side for some future political gain , others will do it to validate their feeling that politics is a battle of Good vs Evil (and they are the Good Guys, so the ones they disagree with are Evil and likley responsible for most Evil acts) rather than a disagreement between people on how to run the country.  Others are just plain ignorant or easily led by others. 

The ones I feel are nearly as bad as the people who pulled the trigger on those bombs are the ones who know that have no proof, but are laying blame or voicing insinuations in order to further a political agenda.  Their goal is to get you to associate any act of terror with those with whom they have a political disagreement so as to affect your vote---even if in the end it turns out not to be true.  In my mind, this is nothing other than trying to get you to hate someone based on stereotypes and innuendo, and that's Hate Speech as far as I'm concerned.  I also see it as a tacit admission on thier part that they can't win the political argument based on facts and logic and feel they have to rely on Hate to achieve thier goals.

Let's examine the last time a pressure cooker type bomb was found in a crowded city square.

It was May of 2002, and a Nissan Pathfinder was noticed to be smoldering in the middle of Times Square.  Subsequent investigation found and disarmed a bomb made from gasoline, propane, firecrackers and simple alarm clocks — also included eight bags of a granular substance, later determined to be nonexplosive grade of fertilizer inside a 55-inch-tall metal gun locker, which was the pressure vessel in this case.

When it was announced that the police were seeking a middle aged white man who had been videotaped at the scene, ans Mayor Bloomberg made an offhand remark on Katie Couric's show

Law enforcement officials don't know who left the Nissan Pathfinder behind, but at this point the Mayor believes the suspect acted alone.

"If I had to guess, twenty five cents, this would be exactly that," Bloomberg said. "Homegrown maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything."

Some folks actually started saying that it would be "irresponsible" not to speculate that the perpetrator was a Glenn Beck fan.  While another took the fact that the license plates on the Pathfinder were from Connetticutt and created a Tea Party conspiracy.

It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren't looking. That's possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone nut job or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car's license plates were stolen.
 

This genius went on to further state that it was pretty much silly to think that it could be anyone else.


Sensible analysts of the event piont out, convincingly, that no branch of the Taliban, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan, has demonstrated either the intention or the capability of striking in such as fashion. (Emphasis mine, SV)

Sensible analysts of the event piont out, convincingly, that no branch of the Taliban, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan, has demonstrated either the intention or the capability of striking in such as fashion. (Emphasis mine, SV)

And the fact that the suspect, videotaped, is a white male in his 40s, hasn't deterred our vast team of terrorism talking heads from describing the operation as part of the jihad. Of course, it could be that some offshoot of the jihadist movement recruited a white bread American to do its bidding, and it could be that the man shown in the videotape is not the culprit at all. But, as in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, when self-appointed experts blamed Muslims only to find out that it was a Gulf War veteran named Tim who did it, there has once again been an unseemly rush to judgment.

And a respected college professor would state

I think the politics of this incident will turn heavily on who is found to be responsible. If, as seems unlikely, the bomb is linked to south Asian or Middle Eastern terrorists, questions will again arise as to whether Homeland Security is doing all it can do to keep us safe. If, as I believe much more likely, the bomb was placed by a right-wing lunatic, it seems to me that questions need to be raised as to whether the right wing media bears some responsibility for stoking the delusions of such people through its relentless and often unfounded attacks on the Obama administration and the federal government. We need to consider whether it isn't time to return to responsible, ethical, journalism. (Emphasis  mine again, SV)

And other Left Wing Bloggers would make statements like this one:

All speculation at this point, but if I was to place a bet on who did this, I’d go with someone whose sympathies are probably more Tea Party than Taliban.

Of course, in the end it turned out this way.

But, there are those that will insist that the attack was likely the work of "Right Wing Nutcases". I suppose the guy who wakes up every morning saying that it will rain today feels vindicated when it finally does, and will continue to do it even in the face of how many times he got it wrong.

For those folks, I'll raise the following data point:

The only other time a nail bomb was intended for use by a political organization in this country was by the Left Wing Weather Underground headed by Willam Ayers, a political ally of and donor to President Obama, when thier plans to set off a nail bomb at an EM Club dance failed because the bomb makers blew themselves up.

So the track record established thus far for nail bombs is that they either come from Left Wing Poltical or Islamic Terror organizations.

Like the lady said

"See how that works?"