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Obama vs. Tea Parties: Uvidenhed er styrke

Hvis du ikke læser andet i dag, kan du overveje at læse denne artikel fra New York Times:

It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies. […]

So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:

“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”

Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate.

On the Muslim deception, Limbaugh has sprinkled lie dust all over the place. “Obama says he’s a Christian, but where’s the evidence?” he said on Aug. 19. He has repeatedly called the president “imam Obama,” and said, “I’m just throwing things out there, folks, because people are questioning his Christianity.”

You see how he works. He drops in suggestions, hints, notes that “people are questioning” things. The design is to make Obama un-American. Then he says it’s a tweak, a provocation. He says this as a preemptive way to keep the press from calling him out. And it works; long profiles of Limbaugh have largely gone easy on him. […]

“I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That’s not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was “born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his father.”

Actually, he was born from two non-practicing parents, and his Kenyan father was absent for all of his upbringing. Obama came to his Christianity like millions of people, through searching and questioning.

Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.

Beck tosses off enough half-truths in a month to keep Politifact working overtime. Of late, he has gone after Michelle Obama, whose vacation in Spain was “just for her and approximately 40 of her friends.” Limbaugh had a similar line, saying the First Lady “is taking 40 of her best friends and leasing 60 rooms at a five-star hotel — paid for by you.”

The White House said Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha were accompanied by just a few friends — and they paid their own costs. But, wink, wink, the damage is done. He’s Muslim and foreign. She’s living the luxe life on your dime. They don’t even have to mention race. The code words do it for them.

Det lader til at være højrefløjens version af de tåbelige 9/11-konspirationsteorier, bortset fra, at disse propagandisters racistiske og intolerante karakter og Limbaughs og Fox News’ magtfulde position gør Tea Party-løgnene langt farligere. Hvor Limbaugh sår, høster ekstremisterne – senest ved det morderiske overfald på en muslimsk taxi-chauffør i New York.

I Danmark ville Dansk Folkeparti gøre det samme, hvis de havde kanalerne til det. Vi ser det allerede på Jyllands-Postens blogsektion, hvor den danske højrefløjs svar på Gøg og Gokke, de notoriske løgnere og islamomaner Kasper Støvring og Morten Uhrskov, der under stor applaus og mange skældsord fra de kommentatorer, der virkelig tror på, at Danmark er blevet overtaget af islam og følgelig gerne så alle muslimer eskorteret til grænsen, erklærer deres støtte til voldsfikserede amerikanske politikere og udspreder miskrediterede løgne om mosker på Ground Zero, og hvad ved jeg. Forskellen er endnu, at den slags endnu ikke har nogen platform i Danmark, hvorfor der ikke er nogen tænkende mennesker, der tager dem alvorligt.

Men dagen kunne komme. Hvis Pia Kjærsgaard havde et Fox News, ville hun bruge det, og det er en skræmmende tanke. Lad os håbe, at eventuelle forsøg i den retning vil blive afvist af en enig nation af know-somethings, som de komiske Alier Uhrskov&Støvrings løgne allerede bliver det af de mere tænksomme af Jyllands-Postens debattører.

Link: Building a Nation of Know-Nothings

Forskræmt vrøvl fra Dansk Folkepartis hofpsykolog

Dansk Folkepartis hofpsykolog Nicolai Sennels, der var ansat ved Københavns Kommune indtil han i strid med sandheden “kom til” at fremlægge sine egne synspunkter, som om de var hans arbejdsgivers, kommer med en af mere hysteriske udmeldinger i partiets kamp for at sænke den kriminelle lavalder:

Skal dødsensfarlige 12-14 årige have lov at gå frit rundt? Skal de slippe ustraffet for deres forbrydelser? […]

Skoler, institutioner, borgere, myndigheder og selv politiet og selvinstitutioner for kriminelle 12-14 årige oplever i dag en stigende børnemagt, som børnene på ingen måde er i stand til at håndtere, og som er direkte farlig for omgivelser.

Æh – dødsensfarlige 12-14-årige?

Nuvel, jeg vil give Nicolai Sennels så meget, at på en måde er vi alle dødsensfarlige, herunder også børn. Ray Bradbury skrev engang en gysernovelle, hvor morderen var en baby.

Men – ikke desto mindre: Hvis vores samfund virkelig trues af “dødsensfarlige 12-14-årige”, så har vi større problemer end kriminalitet. Men hvis vores samfund styres af hjernedøde populister, der nu vil kapre stemmer ved at ophidse pøbelens sanseløse vrede også mod småbørn, så har vi endnu større problemer end selv dét.

Nicolai Sennels er ude i et forudsigeligt ærinde, der, hvis en sådan sænkning af den kriminelle lavalder blev til virkelighed, ville føre til ubehagelige konsekvenser i form af større (!) kriminalitet og øget polarisering. Eller måske vi bare skal gå over (tilbage) til at hænge dem – for eksempel for “strong evidence of malice in a child aged 7–14 years of age”, som man gjorde i England indtil midten af 1800-tallet? Det er – om noget – konsekvensen af så bastant og forskræmt en frygt, som Sennels her forsøger at fremmane.

Somalia og en ubeskyttet kystlinje – hvem er ‘piraterne’ her?

Det igangværende “pirateri” ud for Somalias kyst begyndte, da europæiske og andre skibe begyndte at bruge de ubeskyttede somaliske farvande som skraldepand – samtidig med, at europæiske fiskere begyndte at tømme området for fisk, sådan som man også har gjort hjemme ved sig selv.

Nogle somaliske fiskere tager så initiativ til et selvbestaltet “kystværn”, som skal få indtrængerne til at forføje sig eller i det mindste betale en skat af deres tilstedeværelse – og straks hyler de vestlige medier op om “sørøveri”. Vi giver ordet videre til Johann Hari i The Independent:

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence”.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.”

Link: You are being lied to about pirates (via Boing Boing)

Sådan får man en terrortrussel at tale om

… man går ind på et ekstremistisk debatforum, skriver nogle gruelige ting, og så går man ud i medierne og citerer de gruelige ting, man selv har skrevet, som bevis på, hvor stor og overhængende truslen er.

Sådan kan man i hvert fald gøre, hvis man hedder Glenn Jenvey og er en højre-alarmistisk “terror-ekspert”:

For some time now, a self-proclaimed “freelance anti-terror investigator” named Glen Jenvey has been feeding stories to the media about on-line Islamic extremism, particularly in British tabloids (but also in the famous “Obsession” DVD). However, a blogger, Tim Ireland, has uncovered overwhelming evidence that Jenvey made bogus postings to Muslim discussion sites himself to create panics. Jenvey also boasts of having influenced the James Ujaama trial by releasing videos at strategic moments.

One high-profile British MP who has used his talking-points is currently in the process of repudiating him, and a number of journalists and others are possibly compromised by having relied (lazily) on his material. The link to my blog provides what I hope is a clear short introduction to the story, which highlights a lot about what’s wrong with the “old” media. Regards.

Link: Obsession Pundit Glen Jenvey in Meltdown (via Boing Boing).

Sarah Palin – professionel løgnhals

Rolling Stone har samlet en liste af 11 myter om Sarah Palin, suppleret med de hårde, verificerede fakta.

Det er lidt af en øjenåbner, især hvis man stadig har en eller anden forestilling om, at McCain er en gentleman, hvis ord man på nogen måde kan regne med:

1. THE MYTH: “She took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor and sold it on eBay. And made a profit!” — John McCain, at a campaign stop in WisconsinTHE FACTS: No one bought the jet online. It was eventually sold through an aircraft broker — at a loss to taxpayers of nearly $600,000.

2. THE MYTH: “I told the Congress ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ on that Bridge to Nowhere.” — Sarah Palin, convention speech

THE FACTS: Supported the infamous pork project in her 2006 run for governor, even after Congress had killed the bridge; derided its opponents as “spinmeisters.” Reversed her stance a year later — but kept the money, doling out the $223 million in federal funds to other pork projects throughout the state.

3. THE MYTH: “We … championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress.” — Sarah Palin, convention speech

THE FACTS: As mayor, employed a lobbyist who also worked for Jack Abramoff to secure $27 million in pork spending for Wasilla — more than $4,000 per resident. In her two years as governor, requested $453 million in earmarks. Alaska ranks first in the nation for pork, raking in seven times the national average.

Take note, punditokrater og andre!

Link: The Truth About Sarah Palin (via Boing Boing).

Irak: Vi gik i krig på en løgn – nu lyver de om løgnen

Vi er sikkert mange, der husker, hvordan den danske regering i 2002-2003 igen og igen slog på, at det var nødvendigt at gå i krig mod Irak, fordi vi simpelt hen ikke kunne leve med truslen fra landets masseødelæggelsesvåben.

Per Stig Møller udtalte i TV-Avisen, at krigen var nødvendig, fordi “nu kunne det altså være nok” med de masseødelæggelsesvåben, og folk der blev ved med at stille spørgsmål, gavnede i virkeligheden bare Saddam Hussein. Anders Fogh Rasmussen sagde, at “Irak har masseødelæggelsesvåben – det er ikke noget, vi tror, det er noget, vi ved”.

Men i dag er de alle sammen enige om, at hvad der ellers kan have været af gode grunde til at gå i krig med Irak, har masseødelæggelsesvåben ikke noget med sagen at gøre. Bortset fra Venstres løstgående Jens Rohde, der i Politiken langer ud efter Anders Fogh og andres svigtende hukommelse:

“Jeg har aldrig mødt et menigt menneske uden for Christiansborg, som ikke havde opfattelsen, at masseødelæggelsesvåben var den centrale grund til krigen. Det må man bare vedstå sig,” siger Rohde.

I en ny bog, ‘ Vejen til Irak’, som beskriver beslutningsprocessen bag Irak-krigen, træder Anders Fogh Rasmussens tidligere politiske ordfører Jens Rohde frem og fastslår, at masseødelæggelsesvåbnene var et helt centralt argument for at sende danske soldater til Irak – også selv om det ikke fremgik af regeringens beslutningsforlag.

“Det var den virkelighed, vi var med til selv at skabe i den måde, vi talte på. Det gælder både statsministeren, udenrigsministeren og mig selv. Alle sammen”, siger Jens Rohde.

You can say that again. Såvel den danske og den britiske som den amerikanske regering hamrede i de dage igen og igen løs med truslen fra Iraks masseødelæggelsesvåben, og hvor vigitgt det var at udskadeliggøre de.

Jeg ved ikke, om der var nogen, der rent faktisk troede på det (jeg gjorde ikke, og Colin Powell gjorde ikke, selvom han sagde noget andet), men de har grund til at føle sig noget så gevaldigt snydt. I dag har stats- og udenrigsministeren så travlt med at forsikre, at masseødelæggelsesvåben ikke havde noget med beslutningen at gøre, og forsvarsministeren overvejer endda, jfr Politikens artikel, at anlægge sag mod forfatterne til en bog, der siger noget andet.

Man kunne her retorisk spørge, om det er løgnen eller løgnen om løgnen, der er det værste. Men det er let: Det er ikke løgnen, der er det værste, men krigen, de mange hundrede tusinde cvile irakere, der er døde og såret siden invasionen – de mange hundrede tusinde civile irakere, hvis blod nu drypper Anders Foghs og Per Stig Møllers hænder.

At de nu lyver om den løgn, der førte Danmark ud i denne nyttes- og formålsløse krig, gør såmænd hverken fra eller til i det store billede. At krigen var nyttesløs, ikke har ført noget godt med sig og blev lanceret på en løgn – det er derimod humlen.

Update, mandag d. 29.: Engelbreth skriver også og lidt mere detaljeret om dette.

Hvor er der dog sikkert i Irak

Patrick Cockburn:

Last year US embassy employees in the heart of the Green Zone complained that they were ordered not to wear body armour and helmets if they were photographed or filmed standing beside John McCain because their attire might seem to contradict his claim that Baghdad was a safer place than was being reported. When Vice President Dick Cheney visited there was a ban in the Green Zone on sounding the siren which normally gives a few seconds warning of incoming rocket or mortar rounds. Cheney’s staffers thought the sirens’ menacing wail might suggest to American television viewers that all was not as well in Iraq as the vice president was claiming. In the case of Barack Obama’s visit on 21 July much of central Baghdad was closed down to guarantee his safety, deep though he was within the Green Zone. A friend called Gaylan had taken his car out to get its air conditioner fixed in the Karada district of east Baghdad when US troops stopped all traffic at 12.15pm. Caught in the torrid heat of the Iraqi summer, he and other drivers were not allowed to move again until six in the evening.

Ingen rører sig, mens operation photo op er i gang! I grunden utroligt, at det amerikanske militær vil lade sig misbruge til den form for “tryghedsteater”; mindre utroligt, at irakerne er trætte af en så arrogant besættelsesmagt og gerne vil have dem hjem.