Semantics

 "The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life." Adolf Hitler -  February 1, 1933

Senator Richard Russell (1897-1971)

I got a rather nasty letter from a christo/republican colleague today, rubbing a little salt in my raw wounds. According to this friend, I have been scammed like Obama has scammed the country, yada, yada. Really funny stuff.

I sent him back this little tidbit from Focus on the Family which thinks that national programs to end bullying are a backdoor attempt to impose the dreaded gay agenda. To illustrate the love of his comrades.
Republican values in action.

As kids head back to school, conservative Christian media ministry Focus on the Family perceives a bully on the playground: national gay-advocacy groups.

School officials allow these outside groups to introduce policies, curriculum and library books under the guise of diversity, safety or bullying-prevention initiatives, said Focus on the Family education expert Candi Cushman.

"We feel more and more that activists are being deceptive in using anti-bullying rhetoric to introduce their viewpoints, while the viewpoint of Christian students and parents are increasingly belittled," Cushman said.

So if I follow this correctly, if your punk sissy son doesn't try out for the football team, or has a heightened interest in home or floral decoration, and my hormonally charged, sugar baked macho brat gets a hankering to punch his teeth in, it is merely an extension of a forgotten biblical precept probably found in Leviticus somewhere. So back off, you pacifist faggots. 

Anyhow my missive gave way to his response: 

Democratic Values. Robert Byrd    Great Democratic senator a family values kind of guy working his way up to the top of the Democratic party.!! Ku Klux Klan In the early 1940s, Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to create a new chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.[10] According to Byrd, a Klan official told him, "You have a talent for leadership, Bob ... The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation." Byrd later recalled, "suddenly lights flashed in my mind! Someone important had recognized my abilities! I was only 23 or 24 years old, and the thought of a political career had never really hit me. But strike me that night, it did."[10] Byrd held the titles Kleagle (recruiter) and Exalted Cyclops.[10] When it came time to elect the "Exalted Cyclops," the top officer in the local Klan unit, Byrd won.

Okay, Robert Byrd was a KKK member 70 years ago. Is that the best you got to illustrate the evils of democrats? Come again?

So he sends me this:

Todays Liberal Questionnaire  

Was Martin Luther King  a Republican?  Yes 

Was Tim McVeigh a Democrat ?            Yes

Did you have the correct answer?

This is a just one classic example of democratic liberal thought bending the truth. Hijacking  the Christian values of a Conservative Black religious leader and claiming them as there own 

And spreading a false propagandist image of a left-wing extremist radical atheist murderer as though he was a  conservative Christian.

Sure Robert Byrd was not a racist if another classic  example of the left bending the truth and revising history..

 BULLSHT!!

Martin Luther King was a conservative Christian!! and his bust is now in the oval office for Obama's  speech tonight saying the war is over!!!

This is laughable on its face, but deserves response. Most black people were Republican, the party of Lincoln, in the early sixties. The reason for this is that the primary opponents of desegregation were dixiecrats, principally the notorious Senator Russell from Georgia.

However, it is a gross mischaracterization to call King a conservative or paint him as a lifelong Republican. His father was a republican who changed sides, he supported JFK in the 1960 election after Bobby Kennedy's phone calls released him from jail after the October 1960 sit-in. King Jr. never endorsed either party. But his actions were not in any way conservative. He was against the Vietnam War, feeling that the money would be better spent on the War on Poverty. He was constantly challenging the dominant power structure, a decidedly liberal occupation. He championed civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance.  He fought against Jim Crow and for blacks' right to vote, desegregate and for basic human rights. In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" in 1968 to address economic justice. He marched on Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. King traveled the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created a bill of rights for poor Americans. Doesn't sound like a typical Republican to me. He prayed for a color blind society but was in no way lulled into thinking that he actually lived in one.


Political labels tend to shift allegiances over time and defy generalizations like my friend makes. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the southern Democrats deserted to the Republican party in droves.  So it is an Orwellian prance through the Looking Glass, where down equals up and black really means white to suddenly make the bald face assertion that Martin Luther King Jr. was a conservative, let alone a Republican.


Tim McVeigh is now a left winger in my friend's private opera. A democrat no less. The facts are that he was a registered Republican when he lived in Buffalo, a member of the NRA who left because he thought they were too soft on assault rifles, and later switched to the Libertarian Party, voting for Harry Browne in 1996. He associated with far right militias and was heavily influenced by the anti-Semitic writings of William Pierce, The Turner Diaries. He hated socialism, the conservative's bugaboo. He hung out at gun shows, not exactly your normal liberal tea party.


***


The upshot is that we are not speaking the same language and facts can be twisted any way we choose. It is like if I was to surmise that Hitler and McVeigh were Catholics nee Christians, so by association all Christians and Catholics are mass murderers and terrorists. The thinking is so simplistic and counter intuitive. You are a deck of cards. Shazamm!


Before I pulled the plug on Facebook I had the misfortune to read some Christian's statement that Jesus wasn't interested in the poor, Christianity had been hijacked somewhere along the way. She said that Jesus would have had more trouble with the rich being heavily taxed since the man from Nazareth had firmly stated that there would always be poor people around. And I always thought he came to administer to the weak and dispossessed. Nope. Creeping liberals, he came to administer the sword and engage in some serious smiting. Silly me.


**


Keeping my ear to the ground, I have heard from a lot of young conservatives lately, and the resounding message amongst the new libertarian Beck types is this: Government isn't here to make it fair for everybody. People should have the freedom to discriminate. It is part of an essential liberty that we have cast aside in the hopes of making a fairer world. Let the market sort it out. There will always be inequities and that is the way it is.


My feeling is that discrimination laws are necessary. It may not appear to be much of a problem if you decide not to rent to one black, jew, gay but if your whole neighborhood won't rent to the aforementioned, it is now an intolerable situation that requires affirmative remediation.


Kids today did not witness the separate drinking fountains of my youth and never saw the marches or horribly unequal schools that I did in the late fifties and early sixties. They want to believe the notion that the playing field is equal for everybody. That they are colorblind and that we all have the same opportunity to succeed. Why do I see that as wishful thinking?

Unfortunately I think that an over reliance on affirmative action and quotas have given a lot of white american males a sense that things went too far in the other direction and that they are the ones being discriminated against. If there is racism in America it's because blacks and mexicans keep bringing it up.  Trying to get over. I just don't think the charges hold up under inspection. Try to live in a black skin for a day. Look at their unemployment rate. I just got the cartoon above from my friend Don. There is a palpable anger towards minorities in this country. Saw one on Obama this morning so foul that I can't even print. 


Its a normal fallback to blame another group's success for your own shortcomings. But the oppressed white christian majority is taking things too far. It's tough times right now for every group with the exception of the super wealthy who have seen their personal income soar in the last ten years. It would be nice if we could stand together in solidarity instead of trying to pick straw men amongst ourselves to victimize.