I didn’t expect to be blogging on Sarah Palin this week. I’m disgusted by the attention she’s receiving by virtue of being a petty, vindictive, self-aggrandizing idiot . But when I saw this over at FDL, I knew I had to say something:

Quoth the wingnut:

I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.

That is, as Blue Texan at FDL points out, incredibly stupid. But that misses the larger issue: this is a clear dog-whistle to the most extreme and crazy of Evangelicals, because the whole “flocking to Israel” thing is code for “the Rapture and Tribulation are coming soon.” Palin is sending a clear message that she thinks the world is ending soon, and Jesus Christ will save the true believers.

We’ll need to watch closely to see if she gives hints on whether she thinks Obama is the Antichrist. I’m not kidding.

Bush was Evangelical, but Palin looks to be positioning herself as something more: a radical religionist who appears to honestly believe the world is soon coming to an end. And “Country First” John McCain would have put her one heartbeat from the Presidency.

I don’t have a joke here, folks. This should be absolutely terrifying to anyone who follows the Fundies.

I probably won’t be posting much in the future: the semester has me buried in work, and I just picked up Dragon Age: Origins.

I do have to note, though, that scumbag convicted felons/political hacks probably aren’t wise to lecture on the immorality of atheists. When your opponents need do nothing but refer to your biography to refute your thesis, you’ve made a tactical error.

Dear Wingnuts,

Please, please, please stop publishing lists of “Top Conservative ________.” Yes, they’re unintentionally hilarious, and yes, they’re misguided, and yes, their obsessive concern with ideological purity is creepily totalitarian. But that’s not why you should stop–if you stopped doing all those things, what would you feel countless pages at WingnutDaily and ClownHall? No, you need to stop because it’s been scientificially proven* that laughing too hard can cause one to “blow a funny fuse,” to use the technical term, and if I read one more of these lists, I won’t be able to laugh again for years.

Then I’d have no choice but to take you seriously, and frankly we both know you’re not up to that.

So please, stop publishing these lists. Do it for the laughter!

Kisses,

EB

*no it hasn’t.

So those of you with very strong stomachs can read this piece on “Football, dog fighting and brain damage,” which has a disturbing and important point to make about the substantial dangers football players face. That’s a worthwhile subject, and I wish everyone working to shed light on the dangers of the sport the best of luck.

But I have to say, I find the comparison to dog fighting which informs the essay to be repulsive. Malcolm Gladwell avoids making the implications of the comparison explicit, and carefully sidesteps drawing direct moral equivalence, but in my reading the implication is clear, and I don’t appear to be the only one.

So the question is, as Paul Campos asks, why is dog fighting more morally repugnant than football?

The answer, it seems to me, is simple: football involves adults who willingly engage in a high-risk livelihood. Dog fighting is a “sport” in which animals who have no choice are tortured for human amusement. Dog fighting is much more morally repugnant than football for the same reason gladiatorial contests would be. This isn’t just about level of potential injury, but about consent: professional athletes can give it, dogs cannot.

Before anyone suggests otherwise, I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t do more to protect athletes, nor that football doesn’t present some morally difficult situations. But it is quite simply no comparison to an activity where powerless beings are tortured for the amusement of those with the power. Yes, I know we can perform a class and race analysis of football, and I’m open to that. But highly paid professionals taking risks with their own health is simply not comparable to the horrors dog fighting visits upon dogs.

Honestly, I thought this sort of distinction went without saying, at least among thinking people. Maybe I was wrong.

Grab the popcorn and enjoy the wingnut freakout.

All three regular followers of this blog probably know that shit like this is my beat. Honestly, though, I don’t have anything to say about it yet: it’s obviously not worth taking seriously, and parody of it is impossible. So I’ll continue to chuckle at it in peace, and turn my attention to Pastor J. Grank Swank, Jr. I’ve learned two key facts from him.

1) Proper grammar and punctuation are the devil’s playground.

2) Obama isn’t only a secret Marxist Muslim, but he’s also most definitely not a Christian:

He claims to be Christian, for example, while tramping all over biblical ethics. One cannot be a Christian while applauding abortion. One cannot be a Christian while sanctioning sodomy.

I think if I believed in the deity Swank claims to believe in, I’d be more cautious about making my own declarations of who gets to be Christian. While I’ll grant that his book makes some strange and apparently contradictory claims about salvation, I missed the passage where it says “only those who force women to give birth and snoop around other people’s bedrooms may enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Maybe it’s in one of those minor prophets that no one reads.

Further, Obama as “Christian” does not know his Bible when telling inquirers during the presidential campaign to read the Sermon on the Mount to find out what Christ said about endorsing homosexual lifestyles. There is nothing whatsoever in Matthew 5-7 that refers to homosexuality.

Yeah, that stupid Obama! He doesn’t know what’s in the Sermon on the Mount. Oh, wait, what’s that?

Don’t worry, pastor Swank. I’m sure you’ll be absolved just as soon as the Conservative Bible becomes available. No doubt they’ll fix pesky passages like that one while they’re busy making the Bible pro-capitalist.

[h/t]

I give you Red State’s Erick Erickson, who is threatening to disband his police department rather than let police unionize.

Just toss that link to anyone who says wingnuts are about anything but helping the rich shit on everyone else.

We knew Bob Barr was nuts, but it seems he’s gone going for the rare triple-winger reverse. If he sticks the landing, he’ll be Palin’s VP nod.

This particularly irks me because of the many hugely important (and bipartisan) roles of the census.

In case you were wondering, by the way, here’s Barry Sotero’s latest Marxist Fascist plot in all its glory. We’ve reached so low that teaching children about a Constitutionally mandated program that benefits everyone is an evil child slave labor government spying evil school program.

I’m seriously about an inch from stocking up on dog food and garden supplies and hunkering down in Canada for a few decades.

I guess if you’re sufficiently turned off, there’s little chance of reproducing.

Gag.

If you’d like to be more charitable, you could assume that it’s just Judie Brown’s odious fundamentalism that warps her brain. But you’d be hard pressed to find anything but religious indoctrination that would lead anyone to say anything as stupid and immoral as this:

The entire travesty, from the television cameras to spectacle itself, goes beyond anything I have witnessed in my more than 65 years of life. In fact, while we all thought the appearance of President Barack Obama at the University of Notre Dame was a scandal, the very idea that he offered a eulogy in a basilica, while the real presence of Christ was in the tabernacle, is perhaps the most dastardly thing I have ever seen.

Brown is a rabid fetus-worshiper, so we shouldn’t be surprised that her values are a bit eschew. She seems to honestly believe that the Worst Thing EVAR is that women aren’t forced to give birth. Even so, she’s been around a while, so we might be able to help her come up with some examples of even more dastardly things she’s seen during her “more than 65 years of life.”

Examples abound, so I want your feedback: what’s the most glaring example of a “dastardly thing” in the last 65 years?