As much as it pains me to have typed that headline, I have to give credit where credit is due: Sarah Palin, scourge of truth, reason and decency, was on the money in her statement about the planned — and now canceled — burning of Qurans in Gainsville, Florida.

I would hope that Pastor Terry Jones and his supporters will consider the ramifications of their planned book-burning event. It will feed the fire of caustic rhetoric and appear as nothing more than mean-spirited religious intolerance. Don’t feed that fire. If your ultimate point is to prove that the Christian teachings of mercy, justice, freedom, and equality provide the foundation on which our country stands, then your tactic to prove this point is totally counter-productive…

…Our nation was founded in part by those fleeing religious persecution. Freedom of religion is integral to our charters of liberty. We don’t need to agree with each other on theological matters, but tolerating each other without unnecessarily provoking strife is how we ensure a civil society. In this as in all things, we should remember the Golden Rule. Isn’t that what the Ground Zero mosque debate has been about?

Who are you and what did you do with Our Sarah? On second thought, she did manage to slide in a reference to the Ground Zero mosque non-debate.

Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center kept on with his dangerous and nonsensical idea even after public criticism from General Petraeus (among others). In an e-mail to The Associated Press, Petraeus rightfully claimed that “images of the burning of a Quran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan — and around the world — to inflame public opinion and incite violence.” U.S. soldiers using Afghan civilians as target practice and keeping their fingers as trophies probably doesn’t help much, either, but that’s a story for another news cycle…

So Palin succeeds where Petraeus fails. Did she engineer this outcome using good-old-fashioned strategery? I can almost picture her working this out with Pastor Jones behind the scenes just so she could take credit. Wink!

Good job, Sarah, from all of us at The Contrarian. Just don’t get used to us saying it…

The year is 2015. Stylish New Yorkers have been forced to switch from Valentino and Dolce and Gabbana to shapeless abayas and face veils. Playgrounds have been gender-segregated, and the little girls don’t seem to be having much fun, forced as they are into miniature versions of what their moms and nannies are wearing. Bars and nightclubs have been converted into venues for the stoning of adulterous women.

Why? Because Sharia law has been enforced in the tri-state area. And it all began when liberals allowed a mosque to be built on ground zero…

Can you picture this devastating future coming to pass? I can’t, but it’s still a fun exercise to imagine what goes on in the minds of paranoid conservatives. (As if there was any other kind.)

As faithful Contrarian readers are surely aware, the “Ground Zero Mosque” is not, in fact, being built on Ground Zero, but rather the sanctified grounds of a Burlington Coat Factory. Henceforth in this post, I will not be using the term “Ground Zero Mosque,” which discerning intellects recognize as a convenient media fiction.

Among those opposed to the mosque, naturally, is Sarah Palin, whom Bill Maher aptly dubbed “the queen of faux outrage,” and who has referred to the area around the collapsed towers as “hallowed ground.” Were she able to see Manhattan from her house as easily as she can Russia, Palin would know that a strip club is also on this “hallowed ground.”

Several of the strippers Andrew Grossman interviews for “For Strippers Near Ground Zero, It’s Business as Usual Amid Mosque Uproar” have an enlightened attitude that, frankly, some of the foaming-at-the-mouth opponents would do well to emulate. As Cassandra puts it, “I don’t know what the big deal is… it’s freedom of religion, you know?”

Her colleague Chris, despite losing eight friends on 9/11 (all firefighters) and volunteering for the Red Cross, comments, “They’re not building a mosque in the World Trade Center… it’s all good. You have your synagogues and your churches. And you have a mosque.”

Beneath their pasties beat hearts of gold. And at least a passing understanding of the Constitution.

I have failed you, dear readers. I promised to journey into the heart of Glennbeckistan for “Restoring Honor,” or “Whitestock,” or “The Greatest Affront to American Ideals in History,” or whatever you wanna call it. Instead, I ended up watching it on C-SPAN and monitoring real-time reactions on Twitter.

The following was repurposed from my various statements made elsewhere; it should suffice as ongoing documentation of Our National Shame. (For extra credit, I implore you to read this lengthy but important article about how the Tea Party movement is underwritten by the elitist world-destroyers at Koch Industries.)

Lincoln Memorial, The National Mall, Washington, D.C., 8.28.10

“When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
-Sinclair Lewis

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Insane in the Membrane

One thing to understand right off the bat: there was not a single word of substance uttered at “Restoring Honor.” Yet the various speeches and pre-recorded video segments transcended your average jingoism and entered the realm of tailored mindwashing. Overall, the event had all the hallmarks of carefully staged cult propaganda. That it took place on the anniversary of the most stirring call to American virtue in our nation’s history is even more appalling.

Think I’m exaggerating about the cult aspects?

If you listen closely (but not too close!), you’ll hear elements of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) in both the live and canned oratory. NLP is the get-rich-quick scam version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is actually sound science. CBT is simply the Western scientific confirmation of neurological plasticity, which has been beneficently described by Buddhists for many centuries. Buddhist practitioners employ certain techniques to their own minds to transform delusional thinking into an holistic comprehension of impermanence. Since thoughts are squirrelly and their origins not always obvious, there’s an emphasis on stillness so that the turbulent mind can settle and its essential characteristics considered. At this point, an experienced meditator can perceive subtle cognition without becoming attached to any single idea, concept or emotion. After a while, new thought patterns are established and existential strife is greatly diminished.

That’s the healthy, self-directed version.

In the West, similar strategies are used by Cognitive Behavioral Therapists to ameliorate the effects of certain pathologies in their patients. NLP, on the other hand, is endorsed by skeevy marketing dudes as a way to get gullible people to buy stuff. The former is a legitimate branch of neurophysiology, the latter a cargo cult science.

In mindwashing, the idea is to enhance a target’s susceptibility to a given idea or concept. Even before Scientology or pyramid marketing, political operatives and tent revivalists made surprisingly effective use semantic suggestion. Applied skillfully, those with positional power can plant rhetorical, emotional or ideological “seeds” with the subconscious permission of the receiver. To succeed, the operator must have a sense of the target’s value set and informational capacities.

It’s like the old-fashioned Jedi mind trick: softer noggins are the most susceptible, as are those under stress or experiencing collective turmoil. Clearly, the Tea Party is low hanging fruit. In the absence of once-stable ideological constructs (like manufactured consumer consent based on free market fantasies), these folks are putty in the hands of even a marginally-gifted communicator like Beck.

Josef Goebbels was adept exploiting these phenomena. Sarah Palin and her ilk get it. Barack Obama seemingly doesn’t.

Welcome to Bizzaro World

“Restoring Honor” was positively Orwellian; a true exercise in doublespeak. Up is down, left is right, bigotry is tolerance, aggression is compassion, reality is what they say it is, facts be damned. I mean, to not-so-subtly imply that the Framers were proponents of organized Christianity, and that Martin Luther King, Jr. would endorse the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Wow.

It’s not honor that needs restoring in this country, it’s a basic understanding of our history.

First of all, America was not intended to be a nation with fealty to either Rome or the Protestant Church of Europe. That’s the reason for the clearly articulated separation of Church and State, which has steadily eroded ever since the GOP made its pact with the Moral Majority and exiled the last conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley. Hey, didja know that Ronald Reagan — that camera-ready darling of the Religious Right — attended church far less than Obama, and regularly consulted soothsayers? Good thing he had cover from evangelicals in exchange for giving wedge issues a spotlight in the national discourse. Which turned out to be a great way to distract Americans from the hollowing out of the public sphere and the dismantling of the US labor market.

But back to our Founders. These fellas were hardly the kinds of Christians Pat Robertson would recognize. Most were Enlightenment-inspired Masonic Deists with radical notions of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality borrowed from the French, of all people. (For various reasons, the French Revolution came later; they had a far worse go of it).

Some of the Founders’ statements about Christianity are so brash that Palin, Beck, et. al would find them nothing short of heretical. Here’s a taste:

“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced.”
-John Adams

“The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion.”
-George Washington

“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”
-Ben Franklin

Even the Great Emancipator, whose marble effigy provided the backdrop to Whitestock, was unambiguous:

“The Bible is not my Book and Christianity is not my religion.“
-Abraham Lincoln

If you watched the rally, you’d have thought that these guys conceived the country as the first megachurch.

Glenn Beck is hardly an exemplar of Christ-like behavior. More like “Who Would Jesus Kill?” Apparently, the answer to that is Michael Moore. Here’s some Beck-style “honor” from 2005:

“I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it… No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus Do wristband, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,’ and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.”

You didn’t hear any of that kind of talk at the rally. But you did hear from MLK’s niece, a notorious campaigner against the rights of homosexuals, trotted out to demonstrate the Tea Party’s deep commitment to social justice. For everyone that isn’t gay. Or Muslim. Or willing to consider secular solutions to problems perpetuated by right-wing corporatocracy.

I saw a comment on a prominent liberal blog calling the Beck event “a proto-facist rally to mobilize the brownshirts in defense of the fatherland.” While I’m not sure I’d go that far, the “support the troops” part of the show was completely out-of-step with the MLK-lauding. Unsurprisingly, it was Palin who tried to make the connection between the civil rights leader and those brave men and women who defend our nation. Here’s a response from that same liberal blog commenter: “Anybody who thinks King would have supported the current War on Terror really should read his wonderful 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech he gave at the Riverside church in Harlem. Is the military under attack? You’d think Obama was proposing to disband all branches of the armed services, the way Beck and Palin are carrying on.”

Reparation Nation

Having recently lost advertisers over having called the president a racist, Beck likely needed to put a more inclusive spin on his standard bile. But holding a funtime rally where fear-addled white folks can hear how Jesus is colorblind won’t magically erase the many things Beck has said about the threat of African-Socialist-Muslim enslavement. Here’s a few choice quotes you may have missed:

“This guy is not who he says he is. None of his bills, none of his proposals are about what he says they’re about. The health care bill is reparations. It’s the beginning of reparations. He’s going to give — if you want to go into medical school, the medical schools will get more federal dollars if they have proven that they are putting minorities ahead.”

“When the president was sitting there, or standing there, and he was talking about Native American rights in the middle of a tragedy, Fort Hood, it didn’t feel right. And it seemed, maybe to me, that he was even promising reparations.”

“Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill, are transforming America. And they are all driven by President Obama’s thinking on one idea: reparations… These massive programs are Obama brand reparations — or in presidential speak, leveling out the playing field. But, just in case the universalness of the program doesn’t somehow or another quench his reparation appetite, he is making sure to do his part to pay the debt in the other areas.”

“You were voting for — not change, but change, I think, in race. You were like ‘Hey, let’s put this behind us.’ I think a lot of people were there. They weren’t necessarily for his policies because his policies and everything else are — what are they?”

I don’t care how many persons of color you trotted out at your event, Glenn. What you’re saying is clear: the scary black man in the White House is coming to take your stuff and redistribute it to minorities.

All of this offends me deeply, because I’m a Patriot. I patriotically defend Americans from the forces of bigotry and ignorance. I patriotically defend those who are unable or unwilling to see how they are being manipulated from being preyed upon for profit. I patriotically defend the right for Americans to be non-religious. I patriotically defend Americans’ right to self-determination and to reject coercion by corporations that seek to limit individual choice and shirk civic responsibility. I patriotically defend Americans from state intervention in the sexual and reproductive decisions of adults. Most importantly, I patriotically defend Americans’ right to pursue happiness and contribute to the advancement of the ideals that made this country great.

I hope you will start calling yourselves Patriots: loudly, proudly and often.

If you live in America and currently draw breath, you know the country is in some serious straits. We’re out of work, facing dim prospects for economic growth and our towns and cities are literally falling apart. Then there’s the escalation of the culture wars, now starring an emboldened coalition of bigoted Christians, bigoted free market fundamentalists, bigoted hawks, bigoted isolationists and plain ol’ bigots.

About a year ago, Real Americans™ were rudely roused from a long, deep slumber. Imagine you’re having a pleasant dream where easy credit lets you park your Escalade in a exburban McMansion stocked with cheap goods made by exotic people in some faraway land that you will never visit, because the nice lady who cleans your house provides plenty of cultural exposure, thank you very much.

Suddenly, you’re shaken awake by Glenn Beck, who squats on your stomach wearing a red devil costume while poking you in the head with a little plastic pitchfork. “Wake up! Your government has just been taken over by a foreign-born Marxist-Muslim-Communist-Nazi!” the pudgy hobgoblin shrieks. “And he’s black!”

Then your 501K disappears, your husband loses his job at GloboChem and you’re forced to work as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Worse, you’re surrounded by brown people who have taken over several of the foreclosed homes on your block. Every night, robotic mariachi music blares from the property next door as you fret for the future. Whatever is happening to America, you don’t like it. Not one bit.

Only the local megachurch offers sanctuary. But for how long? The menu at the church Applebee’s is already in Spanish and English.

You want to crawl into a safe corner and wait until it all blows over. But Glenn says that’s not an option. You’re taxed into submission! The Constitution is being used to housebreak the Obama’s purebred puppy (it’s probably a French breed)! The Congress just made it so all brown people get free medical care, free college and bottomless refills at Hooters!

Jacked up on anxiety, you begin to congregate with other fear-addicts. The high is even more potent with a group. But it wears off too quickly. You need to maintain. At home, FOX News is now on around the clock. You listen to an audiobook by Sarah Palin while driving to pick up your husband’s unemployment check. The doctor’s office plays Rush Limbaugh as you wait to use your Medicare benefits on “restless leg syndrome,” which, having seen the TV commercial, you’re sure you have.

One afternoon, right before a scheduled rebroadcast of Sean Hannity‘s “Freedom Concert,” you hear the clarion call. Glenn is summoning the True Believers to Washington. Freedom-loving patriots from across the country will descend upon Satan’s City for a historic rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I have a dream” speech!

You had a dream, too. One you’d love to get back to. But you can’t — at least not until the government is back in the hands of conservative, God-fearing men and women who understand that the country’s economic and cultural well-being is best served by massive corporations. They are the ones that create jobs! And they’d do more of it if only Uncle Sam would stop taxing them! Who cares that they’ve already outsourced American productivity to third world countries and have multiple offshore tax shelters. Never mind that they are accelerating planetary climate destabilization. Science is for sissies! Regulation is for socialists! All you need is Glenn and Jesus™ and maybe another Botox treatment. You’ve seen the way your husband looks at that teenage checkout girl at the Gas-N-Go.

Oh, look! Americans for Prosperity are offering bus and hotel packages! Your prayers have been answered!

By the way, I’m actually going to Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally next weekend. Expect live tweets and a post-event photo essay.

Anna knew she had to have some new shoes today, and Carlo had helped her try on every pair in the store. Carlo spoke wearily, “Well, that’s every pair of shoes in the place.”

“Oh, you must have one more pair …”

“No, not one more pair…Well, we have the cruel shoes, but no one would want…”

Anna interrupted, “Oh yes, let me see the cruel shoes!”
–Steve Martin, The Cruel Shoes

In the span of about two months, my footwear tried to kill me. My ordeal began when I spotted these very pretty sandals at Urban Outfitters maybe three or four months ago. They were strappy, inexpensive, and, I thought, made me look graceful and elegant.

The first mishap took place the morning of my sister’s graduation. I was rushing down the T steps of the Alewife station in Cambridge, and fell, scraping the skin off the tops of my toes in the process. I got up, and a minute later when the train came, rushed aboard with my parents. A few seconds later, I passed out in my seat, and awoke to my very worried mother calling my name.

The second accident was two days ago in Albany. I was walking down the steps of a restaurant, about to get on a bus bound for Boston, when I tripped again. Because I was wearing shorts, this time I scrapped the skin off my knees. I now look like a third-grader who got into a bike accident. Classy, right? And elegant.

But aside from sharing a few episodes of gracelessness, I have a larger point to make about the quality of women’s footwear (or lack thereof). One website, Women’s Issues Then & Now: A Feminist Issue of the Past 2 Centuries, blithely asserts that women have a myriad of shoes to choose from, as diverse as they are, in contrast to the Victorian era. True, women today are free to wear (gasp!) sneakers in a variety of setting, including, of course, the gym. But how many corporate settings are going to tolerate them for eight to ten hours per day? How many women are going to wear them on an interview? Or on a date?

As noted feminist George Carlin opines in When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops, “High heels. High heels that damage a woman’s feet, ankles and knees, but make her ass and legs look great, so how can you blame a guy for the occasional rape?”

The man has a point. In an article evocatively titled “High heel horrors! The hidden cost to your body of those crucial extra inches,” from a 2008 edition of the The Daily Mail, argues that there are health risks posed by heels. But the insidiousness hardly stops there. As author Pat Hagan notes, “High heels first became popular in the form of stilettos in the Thirties, but while heels used to be largely ‘special occasion’ wear, thanks to the success of shows like ‘Sex and the City,’ they have become de rigueur for every day.” I told you that franchise was evil…

No one is forcing women to wear heels. But fashion choices — from burqas to bikinis to fuck-me pumps — are rarely made in a vacuum.

And in case you were wondering about my own ill-thought out purchase, I simply threw them away. Giving them to Salvation Army would have been the opposite of charity.

What’s that old Chinese proverb/curse? “May you live in interesting times.” Mission accomplished.

You may have read about the Chrisitianist militia from Michigan that got hauled in for planning to blow up some law enforcement officials. I have no idea why they’re called Hutaree. Maybe it’s a toothless redneck pronunciation of “Huckabee.” From the official indictment:

According to the plan, the Hutaree would attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession [for cops previously killed by the group] with Improvised Explosive Devices with Explosively Formed Projectiles, which constitute weapons of mass destruction.

The militia is also known for their action-packed training videos. In one, they burn a UN flag and replace it with something that kinda resembles the Gonzo fist. Weirder still, they use a Sisters of Mercy track in at least two of their YouTube clips. (For those born on the wrong side of 1980, SOM was a goth band far more popular with pale sissies than gun-obsessed gov’t-haters.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiUtGgxyibc

And if that’s not enough, check out these Hutaree wedding photos featuring members of the clan slinging assault rifles while dressed to the nines in combat fatigues.

God Bless America!

I think those skeletons are Petite Petes! I like it even better thinking that they are both male. This picture gives me an idea for what to do with the hideous chandelier in the dining room here. I’ll make it into a tiny skeletal Cirque du Soleil vignette! Like if a bunch of calaveras decided to become acrobats and aerialists.

• Giant flying condom!

• “Auto” erotica. Get it? I don’t know what that guy’s deal was, but there is an identified car fetish: mechaniphilia.
• Who wants a man rub?
• You are invited to the penis puppet party. No, not those penis puppets.
• This sucks. (Get it?) Growing up in rural Vermont I’d often hear rumors about men using the milking machines for sexual gratification.
• Better machines than this.
• More music industry conspiracy creativity.
• Caution: do not fall into the cauldron. P.S. Good Christians don’t hunt ghosts.
• “Bananas-for-sex cult leader on the run“
• Strange ailments: latah and Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
• WTF? Is there a sideshow crime spree going on in Wisconsin? (I didn’t find that on a novelty page, it was a serendipitous find during a non-Picayune related forensics search.)
• Roosten? Henock?
• How many Facebook pages does a dead serial killer/cannibal really need?

That’s all I got, kiddles.

I love you. Please be good to each other.

Molly

If I’d been a smarter person, I’d have gotten into cybersecurity back in the 1990s. It’s a cash cow, for sure. Let’s face it, the national security industrial complex is the only guaranteed growth sector for the US, and the federal government will no doubt continue parceling out huge chunks of cash to private companies with the expertise to engage in avant-garde digital warfare. They don’t even have to be good at it. Just pull the dump truck up to the Fed at noon on Wednesday and get your multimillion dollar meal ticket.

Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t invest in safeguarding our digital infrastructure. I just have doubts that the American education system can churn out trained specialists at the rate that select Middle Eastern countries, India or even China can. When it comes to internet technology, we’re on the road to third world status. Don’t believe me? Just look at deployment, speed and competition in the domestic broadband marketplace vs. globally.

But I digress. In terms of cybersecurity, it seems what you don’t want to do is advertise your methods. Yet that’s exactly what the Obama administration is planning on by revealing its strategy for protecting the nation’s public and private computer systems.

Today, Team Obama plans to declassify a major portion of the National Cybersecurity Initiative — a Dubya mandated “secret effort to harness the nation’s defensive and offensive strategies for protecting commercial and government networks.” Seems like exactly the kind of thing you want to share with, say, Iran!

Look, I applaud the administration for (selectively) following through with its campaign promises of transparency. But is this really the place to do it?

To be fair, the declassification will only include our techniques for protecting America’s networks, not the cloak-and-dagger offensive maneuvers. Don’t you feel safer? Amazingly, Obama’s point man here, Howard A. Schmidt, says that letting the rest of the world in on our digital state secrets is exactly the point: “The C.N.C.I. was shrouded in a lot of classification,” Schmidt says. “The president has said very specifically that we need to make sure the administration is transparent with not only the American public but with an international audience as well.”

Guess where they’ll be publishing this info? Why, WhiteHouse.gov, of course! I’m thrilled that the president’s home page has a cleaner GUI than Facebook, but there’s more to this whole online business than smart design.

Besides transparency, the move is meant to inspire greater private-public collaboration. “In order to be successful against today’s cybersecurity threats,” Schmidt says, “we must continue to seek out innovative new partnerships — not only within government, but also among industry, government and the American public.” What’s a little subcontracting between cronies? It worked out great in New Orleans and Iraq. And who hasn’t wanted to see cloud computing behemoth Google get cozy with the NSA?

Thing is, the government could do all of this perfectly well without tipping our defensive hand to an already insecure planet. When CIA wants to plant an asset in deep cover at an American company doing business overseas, they don’t put an ad on Craigslist. They go to the corporation and work out an arrangement so that “Fred Smith” can be gainfully employed at said corporation while securing the contents of a Saudi Arabian McDonalds’ dumpster and writing a report every third Tuesday. That’s just how this shit works.

I still think that Obama has plenty of opportunities to be an effective and strategically savvy president. I’m banking on year three.

CNN is reporting that Great Britain has released the largest collection of UFO files to the public. I skimmed through some of them this morning via the BBC and found many fascinating stories.

Although I am not a UFO buff, it is still fascinating that governmental bodies keep records of these sighting regardless of validity.

OK. You were great last night, and you’re a great person, but… I have to go.

From BigFatWhale: