evangelical

NYTimes update on Norwegian madman: Sarah, are you watching, listening or reading?


“OSLO, Norway — The Norwegian man charged Saturday with a pair of attacks in Oslo that killed at least 92 people left behind a detailed manifesto outlining his preparations and calling for a Christian civil war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination, according to Norwegian and American officials familiar with the investigation.

“As stunned Norwegians grappled with the deadliest attack in the country since World War II, a portrait began to emerge of the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, 32. The police identified him as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, while acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.”

Calling Sarah Palin and Franklin Graham: can either or both of you demonstrate that this man’s beliefs differ from your own?

Will either or both of you do so?

Sarah, are you awake? Are you human? Can you feel?

Or do you think that, like Tucson, this has nothing to do with your rhetoric?

Can’t you see how much you’ve done to create a climate of intolerance and hate?

Well, maybe you can. Maybe you have. You’ve had nothing to say since the Norwegian catastrophe, but maybe you’ve at least Twittered about it, or had your Facebook ghostwriter draft a comment in your name?

Oops, guess not.

Here’s her most recent:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150246675673435

How about the rest of you “Christians?” Anything to say?

How come it’s racist, xenophobic, right wing “Christians” who go around murdering innocents in the name of their God?

When’s the last time a Buddhist slaughtered innocent people?

When’s the last time a Jew did?

Agnostics don’t leave a trail of blood behind them.

How come it’s organized religion–whether Christianity or Islam–that inspires hatred and violence?

“The Oft-Defeated” may be the stake Sarah drove into her own heart

No, I haven’t seen it, and now that I’m not going to use a viewing in Phoenix as the kickoff to the e-single that would have been Sarah Palin’s Arizona, I don’t intend to.

But it’s the same as reading Bristol’s “book,” or Levi’s upcoming “book”:  I don’t have to view or read to know how appalling these products are.

Many years ago, when I contacted the late William Safire to try to arrange an interview about his impressions of Teddy Kennedy, he courteously declined, saying, “I don’t kick ’em when they’re down.”

I’d feel the same way about Sarah, Bristol and Levi–The Unholy Trinity–except that they refuse to admit that they’re down yet, and mass media, as personified most recently by the revolting Jay Leno, keep them propped up, trying to squeeze the last dollar out of pretending to take them seriously, even as these unholy three try to squeeze the last dollar out of their Wasilla Hillbilly act.

See Leno disgracing himself here, and also enjoy Gryphen’s commentary. For once, the squalid Don Rickles was in his element.

Talk about marriages made in hell.

We can, however, cut the kids some slack. After all, Bristol learned only from her mother (certainly never at school,) and Levi (who still doesn’t have a high school degree) woke up one day to find he’d won the Impregnation Lottery, and why shouldn’t he try to make an easy buck, since he has no skills that would enable him to earn an honest one?

But Sarah is different.

In THE ROGUE, I write about Sarah’s close association with a Christian Dominionist leader named C. Peter Wagner, who founded an organization called Global Harvest Ministries.

Wagner’s goal–and the goal of Sarah Palin–is to end the separation of church and state in America, and to turn our country into a Christian Dominionist theocracy.

Before Global Harvest Ministries, Wagner co-founded, with Ted Haggard–later disgraced when it was learned he’d used crystal meth during homosexual trysts–an outfit called
the World Prayer Center, in Colorado Springs, CO.

As I write in THE ROGUE:

The center has been described in Charisma magazine as “a spiritual version of the Pentagon”—the command center for Wagner’s worldwide campaign against demons.

Trust me, you’ve never heard lunacy like this.

I lay it all out in THE ROGUE, but I can offer one brief excerpt here:

Members of Wagner’s Third Wave/New Apostolic Reformation are convinced that their prayers can literally destroy individuals whom they’ve identified as demonic. Among those for whose deaths they claim credit are Mother Teresa and Princess Diana.
Wagner taught his followers that a female mega-demon whom he called…“The Great Harlot of Mystery Babylon” lurked near the summit of Mount Everest…One of Wagner’s leading apostles in Mexico was a woman named Ana Mendez, a former witch in a Haitian voodoo cult…she led a team of twenty-six intercessors to Mount Everest in an assault she called, “Operation Ice Castle.” She and her elite force launched highly targeted intercessory prayers directly at the Great Harlot…Apparently, the prayers found their mark, killing the Harlot Queen.

This is the stuff Sarah believes and acts upon. But you won’t see it in the new movie about her.

Even so, the new movie is so awful as to be laughed off the screen by professional reviewers of all political persuasions.

See this from Politico (not exactly a left-wing site.)

Sarah encouraged this poor sap Bannon to spend his millions in an attempt to save her from her own banality, ugliness, and freaky Christian Dominionism.

That he fell flat on his face  has now become painfully apparent.

Not that there was any way he could have succeeded.

After all, when your subject is a sow’s ear (aka “The Great Harlot of Wasilla”), it’s tough to make a silk purse.

Sarah would have been better off keeping her distance from this farce. But by showing up in Iowa for its very first public showing, she tied her future to its credibility and its success.

As is now evident, it has neither.

Hoping for even more silk for her purse, she’s managed only to drive a stake–if not through her heart–at least through her own sow’s ear.

Yet one more defeat for “The Oft-Defeated.”

 

Is Bristol as bonkers as her Mom? With God on Their Side…

In an interview just published by Christianity Today, Bristol says folks don’t respect Sarah because, “She’s got a good family, she’s got a good husband, she’s got awesome support, she’s got God on her side, and I think people are envious of that.”

Hell, I know I am.

If I had God on my side, I wouldn’t have Levi’s publisher rushing the date of his ghost-written tripe to bring it out the same day as THE ROGUE in an attempt to hitch a ride on my coat tails.

But wait a minute: does this mean God is on Levi’s side?

And if he or she is, how can he/she also be on Sarah’s side–and Bristol’s?

Surely, God is not the sort to hedge bets.

If you really can bear to see how brainwashed Bristol has been by her mother and the Christian Dominionists who control her mother’s thinking–as I explain in great detail in THE ROGUE— you have to read the whole interview here.

By the end of it, you start think that God must be a member of Al Qaeda: otherwise, why would he or she have loosed such a blight as the Palins upon our land?

Meet the new Sarah Palin: Nikki Haley of South Carolina

As Sarah’s free-fall into political irrelevance accelerates, Bachmann has already replaced her as the right-wing Republican woman who might matter in 2012. But it’s Nikki Haley (pictured with Sarah above) who threatens to erase all memories of the Wasilla Weirdo.

[By the way, thanks to commenters and others who worry that nobody will care about THE ROGUE when it is published on September 20. Worry not. My publisher, Crown, is not concerned. In fact, the people at Crown are wildly excited about the book’s prospects, and growing more so every day. THE ROGUE contains enough startling new revelations–as well as my first-person account of what it was like to live next to Sarah last summer–to assure the sort of national interest that previous books about Sarah did not achieve. Major national media attention is already guaranteed, although I’m not permitted yet to get specific.]

But think longer term: Bachmann will burn out this year and next because she’s just as dopey and as enslaved to Dominionist Christianty as is Sarah.

Obama should be so lucky as to have Bachmann as his 2012 opponent. (No, he couldn’t possibly be so lucky as to have Sarah to wipe up the floor with next year: if he did, he might win all fifty states.)

No matter who it is, he’ll be reelected. Yes, you heard it here first. No matter how short the odds, bet Obama in 2012.

Current odds from Ladbrokes in the UK:

Barack Obama
1/2
Mitt Romney
5/1
Tim Pawlenty
12/1
Rick Perry
14/1
Jon Huntsman
20/1
Michele Bachmann
20/1
Sarah Palin
33/1
Rudy Giuliani
50/1
Herman Cain
50/1
Ron Paul
66/1
Newt Gingrich
66/1
Rick Santorum
150/1
Gary Johnson
150/1
Thaddeus McCotter
150/1

If you bet $1,000 on Obama to be reelected, you’d receive $1,500 the day after election day, 2012.
That’s a fifty percent return on your money in sixteen months.

I personally, of course, do not endorse wagering in any form.

Nonetheless, you might be interested in Ladbrokes’ take on the GOP nomination:

Mitt Romney
11/8
Tim Pawlenty
4/1
Rick Perry
5/1
Michele Bachmann
7/1
Jon Huntsman
10/1
Sarah Palin
14/1
Rudy Giuliani
25/1
Herman Cain
25/1
Newt Gingrich
33/1
Ron Paul
40/1
Rick Santorum
66/1
Gary Johnson
66/1
Thaddeus McCotter
66/1

Rick Perry, who hasn’t even said he’ll run, is 5/1, while Sarah, slipping fast, is 14/1 for the nomination.

But let’s look beyond the easy money Ladbrokes is putting on the table. Let’s look to 2016, by which time Sarah will be only that bad taste you might burp up if you ate too much pizza last night.

The GOP/Tea Party/hot chick meme will still be out there. There will be no incumbent President.

Beware Nikki Haley of South Carolina. The New York Times has just anointed her as the future of the Tea Party here.

And the Haley piece was written by Kim Severson, formerly of the Anchorage Daily News.

So she knows how this stuff can happen.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY TO ALL WHO READ THIS BLOG AND COMMENT ON IT, AND ALSO TO ALL OF OUR TROOPS SERVING OUR NATION, BOTH HERE AND ABROAD, AND ESPECIALLY TO THOSE WOMEN AND MEN WHOSE LIVES ARE IN DANGER AS THEY SERVE IN WAR ZONES.

It’s not only Sarah Palin who cares about you.

Rhinestone Christian

Who do we know who is so utterly lacking in class, taste and true respect for the God she claims to worship that she could wear the belt pictured above at a public appearance in Iowa this week?

Hint: it’s neither Michele Bachmann nor Michelle Obama.

Answer can be found here at Gryphen’s Immoral Minority.

Bachmann Steals Sarah’s Thunder: Sarah Quits Again & Lets Her Take It


It’s tough to catch lightning in a bottle.

Equally tough to recapture the sound of thunder once someone else has spirited it away.

Sarah Palin’s endless, erratic dithering about her 2012 intentions has created a vacuum on the evangelical right that Michelle Bachmann has been quick to fill.

Who was all over the Sunday talk shows today? Bachmann. Suddenly, the press is all about her.

Just look at this.

Through her fear of engagement with America’s opinion-makers, and movers and shakers, Sarah has painted herself into a corner at which fewer and fewer people even bother to glance.

Bachmann has effortlessly slid into the groove that Sarah once occupied.

Suddenly, it’s Bachmann who is the “serious” female candidate for the GOP nomination.

Suddenly–or not so suddenly–Sarah has been shoved to the sidelines, from which her shrill cries can barely be heard.

I start the last chapter of THE ROGUE by writing:

The time has come to strike the tent.

That may seem like a strange thing to say in the last chapter of a book about the star performer of the circus. But no matter how much my book sales might benefit from a Palin presidential campaign in 2012, I sincerely hope that the whole extravaganza, which has been unblushingly underwritten by a mainstream media willing to gamble the nation’a future in exchange for the cheap thrill of watching a clown in high heels on a flying trapeze, is nearing the end of its run.

Someone who knows Sarah better than I do told me recently that the only thing that would propel her into the 2012 race would be a credible Michelle Bachmann candidacy. Because Sarah couldn’t bear to yield the limelight to another woman.

Yet it’s happened. I’d always thought Sarah would run for president because to not do so would destroy her credibility even among the cretins who would have supported her.

But she just didn’t have the guts, or the commitment, to do so. She’s always been a phony and a bully.

Because of John McCain’s desperate and deeply unpatriotic inanity, she got in over her head in 2008.

She’s been treading water ever since. Now she’s about to sink out of sight.

To switch the metaphor back to the circus, she’s skulked away from the center ring, conceding it to Bachmann without a fight.

A venal, lying, avaricious quitter she always was, and a venal, lying and avaricious quitter she’ll always be.

Goodbye, Sarah, “The Oft-Defeated.” We knew ye all too well.

Sarah Palin Can’t Possibly Go to Sudan Next Month

This devastated nation is in turmoil and anguish for reasons far too complex for Sarah to understand–or be interested in.

And it’s getting worse day by day, as NY Times reports here.

Admittedly, I don’t give Sarah credit for much empathy or integrity, and not even for having common sense.

But surely, even she will recognize that a money-making, self-aggrandizing, evangelically-sponsored jaunt in July to the most acutely suffering country on earth would be an unforgivable affront to human decency.

I predict, therefore, that even though she has publicly stated she plans to visit Sudan in July, she’ll cancel the trip.

Surely, she can find another way to enrich herself next month.  Even she wouldn’t seek to profit from the blood being shed by the helpless, defenseless and innocent victims of this most horrid of civil wars.

In fact, Sarah, here’s a personal request:  announce that you’re canceling your trip, and don’t give some phony excuse.  Just say, “There’s nothing I can do to help these poor people, and any attention paid to me being in their midst would only distract attention from their misery.”

Increasingly Desperate, Sarah Palin Supporters Pin Hopes on New Movie

As they see even what used to be her base losing interest in Sarah as Queen Esther–and as a presidential candidate–her shrinking hard core of unblinkingly blind zealots is praying out loud that the propaganda film made by one of their own can somehow overcome all that Sarah herself has done over the past two-and-a-half years to make herself irrelevant, laughing all the way to the bank.

The serious neo-cons, such as Kristol, Barnes and Krauthammer, whom she so successfully seduced in 2008, have abandoned her.

To them, she’s become a dirty joke they wish they hadn’t told.

Most of the Tea Partiers have given up on her, too, transferring their affections to Bachmann, while dreaming of Perry.

This leaves Sarah increasingly isolated, no more a “Mama Grizzly,” but a polar bear marooned on an inexorably shrinking ice floe (but one, she will assure us, that isn’t melting because of man made global warming.)

God used to open doors for her.  Now she needs a deus ex machina just to keep herself afloat.

The dwindling few who still proudly proclaim themselves as cult members see “The Undefeated” as their last best hope.

See this frantic call to arms–or at least to the box office–at The Daily Caller.

Or listen to the last gasps of the drowning at Conservatives4Palin, such as this and this.

As if a propaganda film could save her now.

For the record, Sarah Palin is not undefeated. She was not only defeated as McCain’s running mate in 2008, but she was defeated in her race for lieutenant governor of Alaksa in 2004.

“The Twice-Defeated” would be a more accurate title.

Not that accuracy has ever mattered to Sarah.

Palin Emails – Redactions = Zero

 

What a waste of media resources, and how predictable to anyone who paid attention to the fact that while almost 25,000 emails from Sarah Palin’s tenure as Alaska governor–but stopping before Election Day, 2008–would be made available for public consumption, almost 2,500 additional pages would be withheld.

And who decided what to withhold?  The state of Alaska.

And who is governor of Alaska today?  Palin’s fellow-evangelical Christian lapdog, Sean Parnell, who became governor only because Sarah quit in July, 2009.

Just the list of withheld emails was 189 pages long.

As conservative Paul Jenkins explained in the Anchorage Daily News last week:

It turns out state lawyers and folks in the governor’s office — where some, it turns out, worked for Palin but now work for Gov. Sean Parnell, who was Palin’s lieutenant governor — made the calls on those 2,415 emails. Not an impartial panel of citizens and lawyers, or folks lacking direct or indirect ties to the authors of the emails or any court. Just insiders.

Does anyone detect a smell of fish?

Notwithstanding that the state announced in advance that more than ten percent of the emails would not be disclosed, MSM–even including The Guardian, from England, descended on Juneau in a state of mindlessness that can only be likened to mass hysteria.

As readers of this blog will know, I don’t have much truck with Greta Van Susteren, but her description of this as a “colonoscopy” was apt.

Sarah can only be relieved by the result: no malignancy found.

Of course, in a colonoscopy, the patient doesn’t get to hide ten percent of the area under examination.

To me, the most disturbing aspect of this whole overblown farce is that those assiduous protectors of Palin’s privacy, who redacted ten percent of the emails, did not bother to cross out personal contact information for anyone who’d emailed the governor’s office with criticism of Sarah.  As first reported by PoliticusUSA,  Alaskan citizens who exercised their right of free speech now find their email addresses, telephone numbers, and home addresses made available to the same sort of vigilantes who came after me last summer for merely moving in next door to her.

Let us hope that no harm–even in the form of threat or harassment–comes to anyone whose privacy has been invaded by Palin loyalists who retain government positions in the Parnell administration, and who were responsible for setting critics up as targets.

Will MSM call Parnell to account for this lapse?

Don’t hold your breath.

Now that they’ve come up empty in their frenzied quest for scandal, representatives of MSM will retreat as quickly and quietly as possible, asking the editors who put them on this cold case, “What were you thinking?”

The answer is, they weren’t thinking. They were hoping for a quick hit, a tabloid headline that could parlay the public’s ongoing obsession with all things Palin into website hits that equal advertising dollars.

It used to be only the supermarket tabloids that operated in such a fashion.

Now we witness the singularly unedifying spectacle of The New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, MSNBC, and even the Guardian hanging out their tongues in the hope that a tasty crumb might fall from Sarah’s table.

Sorry, folks. Move along, nothing to see here except a governor who was sensitive to criticism and worried about her public image as (see CNN) “she pushed to get landmark oil and gas legislation through the statehouse; [while] demanding that Exxon finish paying damages for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.”

There could be no stronger validation for the point of view (which, by the way, I don’t agree with) expressed by Joshua Green in the current issue of The Atlantic that Sarah was a strong and progressive governor before being blinded by the national limelight and running off the tracks.

The emails bolster Green’s argument in “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin” that:

“As governor, Palin demonstrated many of the qualities we expect in our best leaders. She set aside private concerns for the greater good, forgoing a focus on social issues to confront the great problem plaguing Alaska, its corrupt oil-and-gas politics.”

Or, as Molly Ball writes in Politico:

The emails from her governorship, released Friday, brought back the memory of a long-lost Palin: the popular, charismatic, competent woman of the people.

That’s like going in for a colonoscopy and being told that not only is your colon fine but you’ve got no cavities.

Nor could there be better advance advertising for Steve Bannon’s upcoming cinematic hagiography, “The Undefeated,” which will receive national release on July 15.

Note to MSM: Be careful what you wish for. Especially if it’s going to be redacted.

Schaeffer in HuffPo: Todd perfect example of “good biblical wife”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Divorce rumors are swirling again in the supermarket tabloids, but let’s not forget how much Sarah needs the husband she’s turned into an obedient lapdog.

As Frank Schaeffer points out here, Todd has become just another prop–available to build Sarah’s fences, carry her bags (she can’t do it with BlackBerries in both hands) and to turn up for photo ops.

More seriously, Schaeffer reminds us of something I stress in THE ROGUE:  to the evangelical right, Sarah is not merely a politician who espouses their views on social issues, she is “the new Queen Esther,” who will “take back” America.  They remain convinced that “God had chosen her to confound the wise!” as Schaeffer writes.

The extreme Dominionist religious right is the ninety percent of the Palin iceberg we don’t see, as she dazzles secular media in black leather.

Let’s hope our ship of state is not the next Titanic.