Sunday, November 19, 2017

What Fresh Hell? for November 18-19, 2017: The Great State of Prayerlabama




November 19 is International Men’s Day, Have A Bad Day Day and World Toilet Day, which pretty much summarizes life under Republican rule at both the state and federal levels.

Let’s begin with some of the Anointed of The Evangelical Republican God’s Tweets In Lieu of Church Attendance:
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The surprise is that the *resident would be surprised. He despises black male teenagers, and just days ago predicted he would not get enough sucking up for his trouble:



Ingratitude is everywhere in today’s conservatism. Mrs Roy Moore summoned one hundred white women to a pep rally for her husband; all insisted he would never do anything like he’s accused of to them.



The one in the middle- she with the welcoming Christianist manner- then gave an interview demonstrating what an idiot who thinks Jesus is rubber stamping her every word sounds like.

The voter, Martha Shiver, attended a “Women for Moore” rally Friday in the state Capitol in Montgomery, and she spoke briefly to MSNBC reporter Vaughn Hillyard.

“Well, I want to let him know that we’re 100 percent behind him, we believe in him and we just don’t really believe in all the slander that’s going on, and we want him to know that we’re 100 percent behind him,” Shiver said.

Hillyard asked if she believed the women who have accused him of pursuing sexual relationships with them when he was a prosecuting attorney in his 30s and they were teenagers, and the reporter asked Shiver whether such relationships were considered more normal back then.

“I think at a young age she may have pushed the issue and she got probably rejected, and now she’s saying that something that I don’t think happened,” Shiver said.

Hillyard again asked the woman if she believed Moore’s accusers.

“I think that they’re out for money, I think they’ve been pushed by the other people to say things that is not true,” Shiver said.

The reporter asked her to identify those people pushing Moore’s accusers to go forward, and the question seemed to catch her completely off-guard.

“Um,” Shiver said, before taking a long pause. “I wouldn’t really like to say that on TV. But I think, really, Luther Strange is probably behind a lot of this. I really don’t trust him, and I just don’t trust him.”

Hillyard asked what the event, where Moore’s wife spoke, was intended to accomplish.

“I believe in Roy Moore, all the way, 100 percent,” Shiver said. “We’re saying a prayer today, and we’re letting him know that this group of people is all for him, and that we’re 100 percent behind him.”


"I personally think he owes us a thank you. Have you noticed you're not hearing too much about Russia?"

I wish Mrses Moore and Shiver could have coffee with Garrison Keillor, who has also noted the fury of the faithful:
The triumph of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama's Republican Senate primary was a ray of sunshine for those of us who'd like to restore stoning to our legal system and remove the curse of profanity once and for all from our country. Scripture is very clear: "Thou shalt not swear." But God's chosen party, the Republican Party, has waffled on this issue, as it has on the issue of adultery and obedience to parents and observance of the Sabbath and the engraving industry. And that is why our country today is on the verge of destruction. The signs are everywhere. Judge Moore is the only man who dares say so. 
In Deuteronomy, God makes it clear that a rebellious child should be brought before the elders and stoned to death. It's there in black and white. We ignore these things at our peril. Establishment Republicans and a great many Christians have adopted the leftist "Let him who is without sin throw the first stone" approach to the law, which would produce utter anarchy -- sinlessness as a requirement for service on a jury -- and Judge Moore of Alabama is a prophet in our time, calling us to return to God's Word. 
Democrats are fine with the Beatitudes -- "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" and all that -- but blessing people is no substitute for upholding God's standards, and there are people in spiritual poverty who express that by taking the Lord's name in vain, or by shopping on Sunday, or disobeying their parents, or by coveting their neighbor's wife, and if we don't punish sin, then sin will overrun the nation, as it has done already. That is why Judge Moore is not a Beatitudes guy but a Ten Commandments man. The law is the law. 
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image." It couldn't be clearer. And our country is flooded with them. Currency, photo IDs, the Sunday rotogravure, high school yearbooks, television and movies, National Geographic. And the iPhone, an abomination to the Lord. Liberal theologians can try to talk this away but God has made it clear that when you print, or engrave, a picture, you are violating His law. You can draw or paint whatever you'd like, but when you make copies, your soul is in danger. Xerox, beware. 
Judge Moore has taken the high road on the issue of homosexuality. The establishment churches have turned a blind eye, and he has been a voice in the wilderness. But that is only one evil and there are a host of them, profanity being one of the most prevalent and insidious. 
We have weapons we can use in the war against profanity, if we choose to use them. The very same algorithms that produce graven images on iPhones can be reversed and used to detect cursing anywhere nearby. The phone can be programmed to sound an alarm and to send powerful electrical currents into the body of the malefactor and render him or her inert and insensate so that he or she can be handed over to the elders for stoning. Your establishment Republicans believe in light stoning, using handfuls of gravel, but Scripture is clear about this: we must use rocks so that the stoning results in death. 
If we create stoning grounds in the centers of our cities and we publicly execute those who are guilty of rebelliousness, adultery, engraving, shopping on Sunday and cursing, you will see America become great again, assuming you are not one who will be executed. 
Let us be honest here. There are too many people in this country. You know it and I know it. When we reduce the excess population by stoning and become a nation of 10 or 15 million, this country will be a paradise. You'll be able to drive and not languish in traffic. No waiting for tee times. Our enemies will be gone, all of them, bonked to death, and we will gain their homes and their wives and their cleaning ladies. It will be perfect.
At Crooked Timber, reviewing the new edition of Corey Robin’s book on modern American right-wingery, John Holbo considered the rages of the right this weekend:

It’s classic to say conservatism isn’t so much a philosophy (we don’t do blueprints!) as an even-keeled temperament. Conservative philosophy is mellowed by mature attachment to the way things are. It is anchored by deep roots, not blow-away paper plans. Think Oakeshott, “Rationalism In Politics”. The problem is that this is just wildly false. A penchant for conservative political philosophy is, to a very noteworthy degree, negatively correlated with the temperament that is supposed to be its hallmark. From Burke to Maistre, all down the line – Kirk and Buckley, take your pick – we really have a bunch of excitable types, romantics, remnantistas, lost cause nostalgists, rebels, oddball outsiders, hothead eccentrics, ideologists, inky pamphleteers and all-around oozers of the fanaticism of the convert until it slicks every surface in sight.

Conservatives think the Ticktockman has taken over, so they go all Harlequin. (If Everett C. Marm could have stayed home with Pretty Alice, lived a nice, quiet life, he might have. But that wasn’t really an option by that point.)

It sounds weird but it’s true by the numbers. G.K. Chesterton. Huge favorite of mine, as you’ve probably noticed. (Robin never quotes him. That’s a damn shame. He could be Exhibit A.) The story is always same: to journey in a circle and know home as a magical place for the first time. Very conservative theme. Meanwhile, every protagonist is a chaos farmer, and that’s Chesterton all over. Least. Even. Keel. Ever.

I’m saying it nine different ways, so why stop now? Conservatives are supposed to be the ones who, unlike leftists, don’t think all of life should be politics. Conservatives are supposed to have healthy work-life balance. But, if you actually just look and see – I thoroughly recommend the exercise! – conservatives tend to be utterly convicted that the personal is political. They blame the other side for making it so. But there just wasn’t ever a moment where there was, as it were, healthy conservative political philosophy, recognizable as such, and then leftists attacked and it got personal. Conservativism as philosophy is what happens only after leftist politics gets intolerably but unavoidably personal in the sense that it is felt to threaten some or other private hierarchy of power that rightfully should stand as a rock against it. Conservatives are born pissed, not placid.


And, as Josh Moon, an Alabama journo, wrote of another Moore “presser” the other day,

The Roy Moore saga has jumped the shark.

The exact moment this thing became too absurd for even Alabama is hard to pinpoint, but it definitely occurred during Thursday’s 20-person condescension-fest and press preachin’. Probably around the time they welcomed to the stage “The Activist Mommy blogger,” a middle-aged mother of 10 from Ohio whose expertise in Alabama political issues stems, apparently, from writing hateful things on a blog.

That was a wrap for me.

We’re officially at an impasse in this Roy Moore scandal.

Oh, sure, there will be more women who step forward with allegations — and maybe worse — but there is no ground to be made up either way.

Either you think Roy Moore is a holy Christian warrior sent by God himself to save this nation from destruction at the hands of equality and children’s healthcare, or you think that Moore is a self-involved, egotistical fruitcake who had a Wooderson-level affinity for high school girls.

There’s no middle ground anymore.

Thursday’s press conference, which was the equivalent of two hours of Moore supporters sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming “lalalalalala,” proved that much if nothing else.

Actually, let me correct one thing, because it 100 percent was NOT a press conference.

It was a Bible-off between a bunch of glory-seeking evangelists-for-hire, who spent 100 minutes coming up with insulting and demeaning ways to dismiss the claims of sexual abuse and inappropriate behavior that have been aimed at Moore.

That included one woman — and you’ll have to forgive me, but I didn’t catch the name of her blog — who announced that she only wanted to focus on “facts,” and then proceeded to state that the signature in Moore’s accuser’s yearbook was “obviously fake.”

Because of course it is.

Leigh Corfman, the woman who accused Moore of molesting her when she was 14 and he was 32, got no break, either. You would think a bunch of holy people might be slowed by claims of sex abuse against a child. But you would be wrong. They went right at her, with one speaker saying, erroneously, that Corfman’s mother called her a liar and with several others casting a wide net of doubt on any allegation made by Corfman or the other eight women.

But the attacks didn’t stop there.  

There were lots of shots at gay people and transgenders. Communists — and who knew we had so many — didn’t fare well. The media was full of fake news. Swamps were in need of draining. And everyone who has ever said a bad thing about Roy Moore was, of course, anti-Christian. That includes John McCain and Mitch McConnell, according to one guy.

This was not exactly a homegrown event, either.

One of the speakers was from Missouri. Another from North Carolina. Two from Ohio. One from Colorado.

This did not deter any of them from demanding that Alabama voters not be swayed by outside influences. I’m not sure I’ve witnessed a more complete display of community cognitive dissonance in my life.

It was all just so … pathetic. This room full of condescending, self-righteous bigots who profess to carry the word of a man who decried such hatefulness and division, all hired to stand before a microphone and say nice things about a man who may or may not have tried to rape a 14-year-old.

And here’s the worst part: That pathetic display will go over well with Moore’s base ultra-Christian supporters.

They don’t care about the facts or the details contained within those “fake news” Washington Post stories or the “lying” accusers who are only doing this because “Bernie Bernstein” from the Washington Post offered them $7,000 for damaging info on Moore.

Roy Moore and his cult are back on their political island, where they feel most comfortable. It’s them against the world — their faux Christian soldier leading them into battle against the forces of evil.

It doesn’t matter to them that none of this makes sense. Like when Moore refused to answer questions because no one was asking him about policy. This same guy has spent the last three months — after he admitted during a radio interview that he didn’t know what DACA is — dodging all requests for interviews and failing to respond to numerous questions about specific policy issues.

And not for nothing, but Moore also refused to debate his challenger, Doug Jones, because — and this is mindboggling — he and Jones have views that are too different. I sort of thought that was the point.

But his people don’t care. Roy Moore’s going to roll towards Dec. 12 with his base of supporters and see if it’s enough to win.

And no truth, honor or common decency is going to deter them.


In The Swamp- still fetid and full to overflowing- the *resident’s flat-earthers have been flooding the zone, filling the Sunday talk shows with talking points to take the heat off The White House’s selective condemnations. The best- and most improbable source- was out of Budget Director Mick Mulvaney:




Mulvaney: Moore Accusations ‘Credible’ But ‘I Don’t Know Who To Believe’



John Pavlovitz, the outspoken North Carolina minister, knows who to believe- and who not:

It’s hard to imagine a greater illustration of Christians losing the plot than when they defend predators. There are few bastardizations of the life and the message of Jesus, as complete and grievous as taking the side of rapists and pedophiles and genitalia grabbers—but this is where we are now. With the Evangelicals embracing Donald Trump and with those now rallying to the defense of Roy Moore, this is what we’re watching in America: the least of these being thrown to the wolves by the supposed shepherds.

In dog-and-pony, Bible-waving press conferences, in Scripture-affixed social media endorsements, and in pulpit-pounding Sunday sermons, we’re seeing professed people of Jesus willfully protecting the monsters, heaping shame on the accusers, ascribing virtue to their offenders—and passing it all off as redemptive, as something of God.


As the sending out of thoughts and prayers has become a more and more automatic response to the traumas of our day, a backlash has developed. And no wonder. After the massacre in Las Vegas, in which 58 people were killed and more than 500 wounded by one gunman in less than ten minutes, politicians lined up to say that now was not the time to rethink gun laws. It was, rather, a time for thoughts and prayers. This response to gun violence has become so routinized that the phrase “thoughts and prayers” has its own Wikipedia entry, which explains that thoughts and prayers are frequently offered in lieu of taking meaningful action.

The world is, after all, a place filled with evil against which our only defenses are hanging judges, for-profit prisons, and Biblically-inspired gun use training:


A man accidentally shot himself and his wife during a discussion on gun safety at a Tennessee church, police say. 

The 81-year-old took out his pistol to show another parishioner amid a talk about recent shootings at places of worship. 

Forgetting the weapon was loaded, he fired a single round, striking himself in the hand and his 80-year-old wife, who was sitting in her wheelchair. 

Both suffered non-life-threatening injuries, police said. 

The incident happened on Thursday afternoon as a Bible-study group met for a pre-Thanksgiving lunch at the First United Methodist Church in the town of Tellico Plains. 

A parishioner who only wished to give her first name, Mistin, told the BBC that the congregants had been talking about a Texas church massacre earlier this month. 

"The discussion of guns in churches came up," she said. "Should we have guns in churches, if people carry guns should they bring them to church?" 
She said one of the parishioners mentioned that he carries his pistol with him everywhere.

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