Foamer conflates United States with Biblical nation of Israel

One of the real wack jobs I follow is a guy who posts occasionally to a blog entitled (all caps, please) HELL ON EARTH. Today's post, in which he applies the standards to which Jehovah held the Old Testament children of Israel to the modern-day U.S., is typical.

Just one sentence, punctuation uncorrected (at least he got the hyphenated adjectival phrases right):

Turning towards an ungodly course of embracing sin such as the love of money, no-fault divorce, promiscuity, abortion and the asexual agenda, America has drifted far off its' God-set course.

Strange and even frightening as it may be to believe, this is the way true fundamentalists feel. Just as the Taliban apply the most reactionary interpretations of the Koran to Afghanistan, real Christian fundies genuinely expect the modern-day world to have the relationship to God as Israel did three thousand years ago -- as reported in the Old Testament, which they take as literal, historical fact.

I did like "asexual agenda." Not just homosexual agenda -- asexual agenda. I wonder what that's about.

There is no point in struggling against this mind-set, no hope of talking to them or attempting, however gently or violently, to re-educate them. They are as truly lost and left behind in the modern world as the poorest residents of ghettos or rural America, only they're capable of holding down jobs. And now (unlike before 1975) they vote, thanks to people like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, whose pawns they are.

Of course, this blog post -- my words, the one you're reading now -- is simply a mirror image. I'm no more capable of changing my mind about what I believe politically or, for that matter, religiously.

Dept. of Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry: The "Dragon Tattoo" fashion line

I almost choked on my Wheaties this morning when I saw an ad pop up on the side of Gawker for a "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" fashion line. I guess it's supposed to be for young women who want to emulate the title character, who is a punked out Rooney Mara:

For the record, the fashion line is like this:

Somebody please help.

A grown man gets a hard-on at Taco Bell

From an interview on Forbes.com with Twitter Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey:

On Twitter, “all of that following, all of that interest expressed, is intent. It’s a signal that you like certain things,” Dorsey says. In “promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts… you actually see introductions to content, to accounts or to topics that are deeply meaningful to you, because you’ve already expressed interest, you’ve already curated your timeline. And it’s a delightful experience."

 
Seeing "Promoted" (i.e. bought and paid for by advertisers) tweets in your timeline is delightful? No. Personally I haven't clicked on a single "Promoted" tweet.

I got to that interview after reading this blog post on Percolate, the purpose of which I have not been able to figure out.

Dorsey talked about capturing intent, which has been a big buzzword around marketing Google’s search advertising was coined as an intent miner. As I wrote then:

Twitter’s value is not about intent, in the classic funnel definition, it’s much more about awareness and interest: About exposing you to new products and services you didn’t know you were interested in. 

So Twitter isn't about people communicating with each other, doing journalism, or providing them a platform for expression, according to these geeks. It's "about exposing you to new products and services you didn’t know you were interested in."

Oh really. Isn't that always what the advertising industry says? Commercials are educational because they teach consumers about new products and services? But that's what we have reviews for.

Here's how I inform myself about a new product or service, starting from the moment I become aware of it.

1. I hear about something while reading an article, usually in a print copy of a newspaper.
2. If I'm interested, I'll search for more information by searching for reviews of it.
3. If I'm approaching actually buying the thing, I will go to the company's website and look at the product specifications.

No advertising in it at all. And no tweets, either.

Just before the holiday, I spotted this jaw-dropping review of Taco Bell on a website usually devoted to survivalism and predictions of economic catastrophe. Is it possible that a rational adult could actually write something like:

Let's just start with the obvious thing: the food. It is, of course, wonderful and full of varied textures: crunchy shells, robust meat, cold and fresh lettuce, stringy cheese, and all the fatty stuff that we love because it both satisfies and gives us energy. It arrives quickly, and its ready to eat, mostly with your hands, which is really how we all want to eat.

... But there’s more going on than just fun food. The company obviously puts a great deal of thought into the ethos of the restaurants themselves. The decor gives us things to look at that we don't see anywhere else. The colors are all those we associate with the Southwest, but not in a conventional way. The shapes are geometric and modern, with a daring flare that delights the eye and fires up the imagination. 

The details around the place add to the sense of adventure, but you don’t take note of them individually unless you are looking closely. The backs of the chairs all have a bell shape cut out in the steel. The lighting is not mainly in the ceiling but rather comes from orange hanging glass lamps in the shape of cones, and I was trying to think where I had seen this before. Is it like the knave [sic] of a chapel in a monastery in a Spanish mission territory? Maybe that’s it. I’m unsure but it conjures up something different. 

Hold on here. Perhaps you have already realized this and I’m slow on the take, but the whole Taco Bell experience is suggestive of that Spanish mission sensibility. That’s why the buildings are shaped the way they are. And, obviously, that’s the whole meaning behind the bell, and why it adorns the front entrance of the place. It’s a church bell! It taps into something deep and lasting in our cultural sensibilities, something that shaped our ancestors and their communities, and presents it all anew in our times.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is like something a 16-year-old would write for English class, if he's really hopped up on Adderall that day. But the author is evidently an adult. And it's like three times as long as that!

Maybe that's the kind of person those advertisers are talking about. Wow.

Dream of secrets

Epic dream in which I got into the habit of breaking and entering expensive houses and lofts in a Noe Valley-like neighborhood. I wouldn't take anything in these invasions, only relaxed among the nice furnishings while the owners were out. But then it happened that in one such burglary I took a sleepy four-year-old, and went for a walk at night around the neighborhood. When it came time to return the child to its home, I couldn't remember which rich house it belonged to, so I simply guessed. I deposited the child in the house I guessed it came from, and got away.

All the while, I was volunteering at a non-profit group run by a conservative woman celebrity, a Palin type. When news of the putative kidnapping came out -- not sure whether I had guessed the wrong house, or whether the child simply told the story to its parents -- even though the culprit was not yet known, the FBI was on the case and I felt they would soon find me out. I felt it was my responsibility to go and warn my employer, so I went and told her about the breaking and entering but not about the kidnapping. And she didn't connect what I had told her to the news at all. At the end of the dream she was called away to other business but gave me a look like "We'll talk about this later."

It's almost like the first half of a Patricia Highsmith thriller -- the lonely, aimless man who has a secret life, with much of the tension around whether and how he will be found out. Of course, since all such stories by Highsmith were allegories of closeted homosexuality, I wonder if such a story would still fly today. I suppose it would -- people are still full of secrets.

Hey, it's pride week

This TV commercial from the outdoors equipment retailer REI has a nice little crypto-lesbo moment that's impossible to miss.

Not sure how else to interpret it than "You may be out biking with your 'boyfriend,' but it's the lady bikers you really have your eye on."

Today's fake: Another 'lesbian' blogger revealed as straight male

Over the weekend a blogger who pretended to be a Syrian lesbian was revealed to be a fiction. Among the bloggers who looked into the hoax was Liz Henry, who in her investigation of "Amina" discovered that the supposedly Syrian woman was first brought to the attention of a wide audience on a blog called Lez Get Real. Digging in to this part of the story, Henry was the first to suggest that Paula Brooks, the author of the Lez Get Real blog, also might not be what she seemed.

A day later: She was right. The author of Lez Get Real, who said "she" was deaf and therefore had to communicate on the phone through her "father," was actually the man pretending to be the "father," 58-year-old Bill Graber.

"Holy CRAP," Henry tweeted. "I'm going to end up writing "Internet Lesbians for Dummies" aren't I? .. Or maybe do a video with Olivia Newton John singing 'Lez Get Fictional.'"

Graber: "I didn't start [Lez Get Real] with my name because... I thought people wouldn't take it seriously, me being a straight man." You think?!

But best of all:

In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with ["Amina" author] Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian.

Good times!
 

"Patriot" preacher can't resist bragging about how smart he is

I've posted about Chuck Baldwin before -- he's the crypto-facist Christian preacher who was more or less kicked out of his Florida church and decided, with great fanfare, to move his family to a remote corner of Montana because it is "more free."

Today he posted another dilly. I'm going to quote just the really funny parts.

• Montana is the new land of the free because it has no large cities, which are "the bane of freedom," though he doesn't explain the reasoning behind that.
• Idaho is a "great freedom-loving state" now, but as many liberals are moving to Boise, it may soon be lost "and go the way of Oregon and Washington."
• The people in Montana come out for his rallies, unlike the people in Florida. (He doesn't realize it's because Montanans have almost nothing else to do than go to tea party rallies.)
• God loves mountainous areas more than flat ones.
• The cold weather in Montana "keeps out undesirables: people who are comfort-oriented and not liberty-oriented!"
• Montana is a very peaceful state because they allow people to carry guns openly.

Of course, this summary doesn't do justice to his weird syntax, love of exclamation points, and the strange way he develops a theme.

What the guy is really doing is laying the groundwork for a run at governor. I hope he doesn't take the disappointment too hard.

Who's even crazier? Randall Terry. He's running for President -- solely so he can collect funds to air an explicit anti-abortion advertisement -- which all the networks will probably reject.

Crypto-fascist also has messianic complex

I've written previously about Chuck Baldwin, the former Baptist minister who moved his whole family from Florida to a rural Montana county filled with survivalist and Patriot Movement types. Of late he's been ranting about how churches that get federal 501(c)(3) tax exemption are somehow equivalent to Nazi collaborators. And today he emitted a real doozy, putting himself in the shoes of one of the "patriots" who fought and died at the Alamo in... what was it... 1836?

These were real men with real dreams and real desires. Real blood flowed through their veins. They loved their families and enjoyed life as much as any of us do. There was something different about them, however. They possessed a commitment to liberty that transcended personal safety and comfort. Liberty is an easy word to say, but it is a hard word to live up to. Freedom has little to do with financial gain or personal pleasure. Accompanying Freedom is her constant and unattractive companion, Responsibility. Neither is she an only child. Patriotism and Morality are her sisters. They are inseparable: destroy one and all will die.

It's like he doesn't even know what the famous battle of the Alamo even was. It was a bunch of shootists and bums who were hired by rich ranching and mining interests to pull territory away from Mexico. They weren't defending Liberty with a capital L. They were mercenaries.

But even if one accepts this Hollywood fantasy that the "defenders of the Alamo" were selfless patriots, saying "Patriotism and Morality and Liberty are inseparable: destroy one and all will die" sounds a little funny, since according to him those faithful patriots did not separate them, yet they all died.

Baldwin goes even farther:

Please try to remember the heroes of the Alamo as you watch our gutless political and religious leaders surrender to globalism, corporatism, and political correctness. Try to recall the time in this country when ordinary men and women had the courage of their convictions and were willing to sacrifice their lives for freedom and independence.

Okay... Just what is he asking "our political leaders" to do? Doubtless he wants them to go ahead and shut down the government and everything the most heated Tea Party first-term Congressman wants. Does he mean they should force that through, even if it means sacrificing their political careers to satisfy the far right's hatred of government? Is that the same thing as dying at the Alamo?

That's the thing about Baldwin. He spends so much time ranting about his political fantasies and tossing bombs at straw-man targets whom his readers couldn't possibly be interested in -- PETA, really? -- that he forgets to say what he wants, what he stands for. It's really kind of amazing.

Today, however, our national leaders are in the process of turning America over to the very forces that the Alamo defenders gave their lives resisting.

Who? Mexico? Ya really lost me.

Previously

Esquire, attempting to do for men what Cosmo does for women

A few weeks ago I started subscribing to the Esquire magazine website RSS feed in Google Reader, and I've been kind of dumbfounded by what I've seen there. Some very representative titles of articles:

• How to Eat Like a Man Anywhere You Go
• Why is Clint Eastwood Still The Man?
• What You Can Learn from Mad Men's Season 4 Style, a feature that includes tips such as "Your clothes begin to tell a story about your character, without overpowering it. ... Start seeing your shopping habit as opportunities to invest in your character's wardrobe" and "We ladies love a good vest because it defines your torso under the jacket. It looks rakish and cool when you pull off your jacket. Please do not scrimp on quality, though, and make sure your vest fits you perfectly."

What the fuck!? Why don't they just call the magazine Tips for Clueless Guys with Terminally Insecure Gender Identity?

That "Mad Men Style" feature alone is a masterpiece of insinuation, scorn, and impossibly high standards, written by a woman who apparently thinks men spend more time thinking about their clothes than they do about pussy. In other words, apparently Esquire is a magazine for closeted gay men.

Clint Eastwood, really?? They think 35-year-old men regard an 80-year-old as a role model?

Today's fakes: internet vigilantes who entrap and humiliate

This is one of those stories I learned about very late. It started when I saw a piece of news on c|net, but that's the end of the story. To start closer to the beginning, it seems there's a vigilante group called Perverted Justice. Started by a geek who wanted to act out his feelings of rage against an alcoholic father (according to this 2007 Rolling Stone article on the group), they began online flirtations with men, claiming to be underage girls, then publicized the hapless men's pictures and chat transcripts. This was so successful (successful from their point of view) that they began partnering with MSNBC on the show "To Catch a Predator," turning their online stings into a reality TV show. The show resulted in the conviction of over 200 men for attempted sex acts with underage girls, even though there never were any underage girls, just adults posing as girls for the sheer purpose of entrapping would-be molesters.

If these tactics sound dubious to you, the D.A. in a Dallas suburb would agree -- he refused to press charges against two dozen men who were netted by these antics after one of the men who was ensnared (but who didn't even show up at the house of the supposed jailbait), a prosecutor in a neighboring locality, shot himself.

Okay. So along the way, one of the people who became angry at the tactics of Perverted Justice was one Bruce Raisley. He embarked on a campaign to publicize and embarrass the organization, leading the founder of Perverted Justice to retaliate by posing as a woman -- not even underage this time, but using the same flirtation tactics which had proved so successful -- and getting Raisley to leave his wife and show up at an airport with flowers ready to meet his internet love. The P.J. founder sent a confederate to take pictures of the hapless Raisley, and then posted them on its website with the taunt: "Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man... He has no one. He has no more secrets... Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us."

Well, that would piss me off, all right. And Raisley was so angry that he downloaded some software and launched botnet attacks on several websites, such as Rolling Stone and other publications which had reported P.J.'s trick on him. And today, to bring this to a close, Raisley was convicted of computer crimes and faces ten years in prisons and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Here is a more detailed story.

The Perverted Justice group (archive of stories about them here continues its antics. As far as I can tell, they've never been accused of a crime or suffered any negative consequences as a result of their activities.

There's crazy and then there's certifiably insane

One of the more truly insane blogs I follow is The Vatic Project, which regularly posts anti-Semitic economics-related rants and other forms of paranoid fantasies about the state of the world. Just another dot on the spectrum of collapsitarian nuttery, this particular dot pretty far out on the spectrum. Today he -- whoever it is -- posted something and included an introduction, as he often does. A preface of sorts. And this preface is priceless.

They do not want this one up. Taking control of my cursor again so I can't put it up. So do not know when you will get this. I was trying for today, but it may not be til later when I can do this without the messing around. Be patient, ITS GOING UP NO MATTER HOW HARD THEY TRY, I AM FULLY AND UNEQUVICALLY STUBBORN. THIS MEANS YOU NOW HAVE TO READ IT, BECAUSE THEY ONLY DO THIS ON INFO THEY DO NOT WANT OUT THERE.... SO GET THIS OUT THERE ALL OVER THE PLACE. THANKS. Its about waiting til I get a different shift. hehehe.

It appears that its the OFFICE OF INTERNATIONAL TREASURY THEY DO NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT. SO PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THAT AND DIG EVEN FURTHER SINCE THEY SEEM TO HATE THAT ONE WHICH IS WHERE I GET THE WORSE MESSING OF THE CURSOR.

Wow, "they" must really not want it up on the internet -- whoever "they" are -- because no sooner did I click on the link than I get a "Page Not Found" message. It Really Makes You Think, Doesn't It??!?

For those really interested, here is a screenshot of the feed from Google Reader from which I pulled his text. I was able to get only a couple of the lines of the actual article, but it's the preface I love.

Nutbag of the month: special 9/11 edition

Of course, a discussion of right-wing Christian nutbags would not be complete without mentioning Terry Jones, the "pastor" of an organization in Florida called the Dove World Outreach Center. (Despite its name, which makes it sound like the visitor center of a soap factory, it is a "tiny church," according to the New York Times.) Jones is the fellow who wants to burn copies of the Koran on Sep. 11.

Today's story in the NYT on the man and his plan draws attention to the fact that one of his justifications for the act of burning a Koran is a "never-reported story" of an attack on Christians by "radical Muslims" during the Balkan war in the 1990s. "Never-reported story" is the NYT's way of saying "completely made-up bullshit;" this is clear when the writer goes so far as to say:

To a reporter who worked in Bosnia during that war, the story Mr. Jones told on Wednesday sounds very like the kind of fictional tales of wartime atrocities against Christians that were cited by Bosnian Serbs and Croats at the time to justify the well-documented massacres of Muslims that did take place — like the murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys buried in mass graves around Srebrenica in 1995.

The story goes on to say that Jones is not just one more Florida cracker (like Chuck Baldwin); he and his wife led a church in Cologne, Germany until two years ago. And it gets weirder after that.

There's always someone more conservative/crazier/foamier

Reading conservative blogs and news for research purposes, I came across this doozy, which says that "some libertarians" believe foamers like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are secret "neocons... conning the Tea Party."

Here's all the salt you have to throw at that bird:

1. The assertion that Beck and Palin might be secret "neocons" is laid to someone called Pastor Chuck Baldwin. Who is he? See below.
2. In the universe of the Ron Paul cult, a "neocon" or neoconservative is just another big-government interventionist who wants to interfere in their lives. Thus, to suggest conservative demagogues like Beck and Palin might be secret "neocons" is tantamount to calling them false prophets and potential traitors (indeed, "Judas goats") to the Libertarian movement (which Paulites feel is the only proper approach to conservatism) and the US as a whole.
3. The poster goes on to defend and praise Beck and Palin.
4. Most comically of all, the poster's main allegiance seems to be to the "Tea Party," ignoring (or simply ignorant of) the fact that the "Tea Party" organization is nothing more than a collection of front groups funded by Texas billionaires (as reported last week in the New Yorker).

This guy Chuck Baldwin is a real piece of work. From his Wikipedia page: "Baldwin supports lessening U.S. involvement in the United Nations, reducing U.S. income taxes and repeal of the Patriot Act. He would withdraw troops from Iraq, seek to end illegal immigration, and enforce stricter immigration laws. Emphasizing "America's Christian heritage", he supports the gold standard, the right to keep and bear arms, homeschooling, and pro-life legislation such as the Sanctity of Life Act." And that's his Wikipedia entry -- his own blog is even more hilarious:

Speaking of Hillary Rodham, I predict that she will replace Vice President Joe Biden BEFORE the 2012 elections. I've said that in private for many weeks, and now say it in this column -- remember, you heard it here. The Clinton-Bush Crime Syndicate (CBCS) needs Hillary in the White House badly, and Obama has readily accepted a subservient role in the criminal affairs of CBCS (for very profitable reasons, no doubt).

In other words, a nutbag pretty much on the scale of the guy who took over the Discovery Channel building yesterday (permalink).

The strangest thing is that as far as I can tell the entire pro-Tea Party blogosphere is simply ignoring the New Yorker's piece. They require their Tea Party to be a grassroots movement, therefore it is, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Meanwhile the Ron Paulites, who predate the creation of the Tea Party, are all sour grapes, complaining they were the real conservatives all along and only they have the right answers.

It would be great if this division and infighting, this struggle for conservatism's mantle, translated into general confusion among the right wing when it came to the election in November. But it won't help the Democrats, because nothing will make any of these people vote Democratic, and there aren't enough third-party candidates to dilute the right wing. November will be ugly, people.

Japanese men just go on being lame-ass

Someone please tell me they're kidding: Japanese men ferry virtual girlfriends to beach town.

No, I don't think they're being ironic.

'Sovereign citizen' type files $38 quadrillion lawsuit

A Las Vegas man, claiming damages in a dispute over a piece of desert land, has filed a $38 quadrillion lawsuit against the landowner's lawyers, the Las Vegas Daily Herald reports. Among the amusing facts:

Anderson said the property has been valued $36 billion and asked for 12.5 percent of that value, $4.5 billion. He also asked for additional compensatory damages of four times that amount and punitive damages of 200 times the amount, which added up to $918 billion. In his initial complaint, Anderson said silence on the matter by the defendants would constitute a binding contract.

Silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract! Now that's the way to get things done. I guess a lot of people who wrote the President on various matters are owed some money and favors, if that's where we set the bar.

The key to this story is in the second sentence:

John Theodore Anderson, also known as John-Theodore:Anderson in his filings ...

See the weird punctuation? That's the sign of an adherent of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which I mentioned in my last entry. Basically they believe in alternate theories of American law, theories which lead to fantastic assertions like "silence on the matter constitutes a binding contract."

It's all very amusing -- unless you become the target of one of these wack jobs, I guess, and wind up with all kinds of liens and frivolous lawsuits filed against you.

King of Hawaii (the verb)

In researching my latest novel, I hit upon a gold mine of material just published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit whose main mission is to monitor and report on hate groups. Among the articles they published in the September issue of their publication Intelligence Report is a list of leaders of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which is a loose group of people with a magical belief in an alternate legal system. The most amusing profile contains this information:

A former tool-and-die maker, the man who writes his name as ":David-Wynn: Miller" — or, as he amusingly says it verbally, "David hyphen Wynn full colon Miller" — came up with his "truth language" scheme as a result of a frustrating court experience in 1988, when he was going through a divorce. In short, all truth language sentences used in court filings must begin with the preposition "for," contain at least 13 words, and use more nouns than verbs to be effective (he has claimed that only nouns have legal authority). David Wynn Miller considers himself a "Plenipotentiary Judge" in the Unity States of the World, and has named himself as the King of Hawaii, a feat he claims he accomplished when he converted Hawaii into a verb.

That is awesome! And this guy is not even a performance artist. God, I love this country.

It's August, isn't it

It's silly season, so we have choice articles like this on Salon.com: "Why I got the male Brazilian wax" job -- or, as the story says, the "brozillian." (That's different from a "brozillion," which simply means Brooklyn.)

It gets really good about halfway through, where we learn that people have all sorts of projections about the gender and power relationships between men and those who wax them. At first, "women were not comfortable with their husbands and boyfriends getting waxed by other men." So they hired women. But then the guys think it's too much like a massage parlor and start asking for extras. This leads to a hilarious incident at the Ted D. Bare Salon in San Jose, Calif:

Once, she was forced to taze a guy who wouldn't stop misbehaving. "He got really aggressive and kept insisting that I perform certain favors on him," she said. "So I tazed him in the thigh. He fell right off the table."

And it only gets better from there.

Previously: Ripped from the headlines

Today's fakes: deep-cover Russian spies (and maybe every bourgeois)

Those arrested yesterday as part of the Russian spy ring:

... were accused of spending years living undercover in American cities and suburbs, posing as ordinary couples working ordinary jobs, chatting to the neighbors about schools and apologizing for noisy teenagers. Their purpose, according to prosecutors, was to patiently penetrate what one coded message called American "policy making circles."

... Neighbors in Montclair, N.J., of the couple who called themselves Richard and Cynthia Murphy were flabbergasted when a team of F.B.I. agents turned up Sunday night and led the couple away in handcuffs. One person who lives nearby called them "suburbia personified," saying that they had asked people for advice about the local schools. ... Jessie Gugig, 15, said she could not believe the charges, especially against Mrs. Murphy. "They couldn't have been spies," she said jokingly. "Look what she did with the hydrangeas." (NYT article)

More than fifteen years ago, during the heyday of Queer Nation, I tried to write a short story for an anthology the theme of which was "Queers as spies in straight society." The notion was that queer people infiltrate and in some cases pass in straight society, and that we were uniquely qualified to report on that society as presumed members of it. My story was unsuccessful (I used the occasion to write about my father's funeral, but it just never worked as a short story) and in fact I'm not sure the anthology ever was published, but the notion of being an undercover spy is an exciting one, and somewhat reassuring for someone like me who has, like the deep-cover Russian spies just arrested, come to own a house, have a straight job, fit into bourgeois society, and otherwise resemble what I feared I would become, namely a middle-class consumer indistinguishable from my neighbors. How reassuring, how ego-stroking, to tell myself I'm not really a bourgeois, I'm really a spy.

His pleas for donations unsuccessful, manic Pentecostal admits 'I need a job'

John Burton, the manic Pentecostal preacher who often uses his blog to beg for money -- my favorite post being the one where he asserted that "believers live in an different economic system" and asked for dough so he could work on a book and spend the rest of the time in prayer -- has finally admitted: "I need a job."

I guess he found he didn't live in a "different economic system" after all.

'Radical Christian' wants to balance 'radical Marxist'

I've been following a certain Christianist nut, apparently a high school football coach who says he "walked away from public education in 2000" but last year "started a varsity football program at a local Christian High School" in Ohio. I know this because of his inimitable rant "They Don't Even Look Like Men," which he posted halfway through the season, in which he criticized his own players for their lack of aggressive attitude:

Our football team is driving me nuts. They are great young men, obedient and mannerly, the kind of kid you could trust with your daughter. But as my own high school football coach often said they need a little "piss and vinegar." They take the "turn the other cheek" attitude with them onto the field. Our Christian-culture has taught them that being "gracious in defeat" is Christ-like. I tell them being "gracious in victory" is more fun.

Maybe it is just me. I want them to be MEN. Our Christian-culture teaches them to be doormats. ... Someone, somewhere, determined that trading the old man for the new man meant losing your backbone. Heck, you can't even pass gas at a "men's fellowship" without being looked at as if you had just pee-peed on the Decalogue. Pastors are the worst. Any whiff of "Christian testosterone" sends them to their Joyce Meyer collection of sermons in an attempt to "soften" your rough edges.

Well, not for me. My new birth made me more manly, more courageous, and more willing to live life on the edge. I like guys with rough edges.

I quote this dick at length just to give you an idea where he's coming from. In addition to being a monomaniac on the subject of "Christian testosterone" (whatever that is, he elaborates by saying "Jesus was studly"), he also considers himself a political commentator, and in fact, he is running for Congress this year in the Ohio 18th. (Even his website is "coachdaveforcongress.com".)

And yesterday he wrote something that really clarified for me the thinking of the Tea Partiers, birthers, Oath Keepers and other whack jobs. Daubenmire writes:

We have a radical Marxist in the White House. We need a radical Christian in "The People's House."

There it is -- simplicity itself. Because this man (and, no doubt, the many thousands of his ilk) believes that the President is a "radical Marxist," they seek to balance his supposed pernicious influence by being radical conservatives. Whatever their belief is based on -- probably just the endless repetitions of this phrase by right-wing radio and TV commentators -- it justifies their own radicalism. It's a perfect, self-reinforcing system.

Daubenmire goes on to offer himself as a party leader -- the Tea Party, that is, not understanding that the Tea Party is not an actual political party. "I want to lead a movement," he says, saying his comrades need "someone who will grab a flag and run up the hill... 'Come on boys; let's go take our country back.' I'll build a team, lead a charge, and build their courage."

Then, toward the bottom of the essay, in his impatience to get the show on the road, he urges (emphasis mine):

Make a pick, take a stand, and put all of that energy behind one candidate. This is war. Stop worrying about hurt feelings. Pick a horse and let the internet do its job.

Let the internet do its job! What a strange thing to say.

But we needn't treat this fellow Daubenmire as being off the scale, just because he is clearly a whack job. Today Newt Gingrich, who threatens to run for President every four years and probably will this time around, said that Obama is "the most radical President in American history" who runs "a machine... a secular, socialist machine."

Gingrich, of course, is just jealous. He wishes he were at the controls of such a machine, not Obama; he would do things just as radical, if not more, but call his actions Main Street American values. Because anyone who doesn't agree with right-wingers, even the most radical ones, even the ones like Daubenmire who admit they are radical, is of course "radical."

Here's the thing. At least Daubenmire believes what he says; clearly, he is a true believer who jaws with a supporter if asked to take off his "cross hat." Gingrich is nothing more than a cynical, well-connected politician trying to make a comeback; he'll say anything. He's like Bush with brains; he doesn't need a Cheney, he only needs Addingtons and Yoos. So he mouths the right-wing verbiage of the season: no more "family values," now we're fomenting against "socialism" and "radicals."

And no, I wouldn't prefer Gingrich to Daubenmire, nor "Coach" to Newt. Both are abhorrent.

technorati: Obama,Gingrich, Tea Party