Category: Awards

"The attorney's name is Mohammed, first name Sohail — Sohail Mohammed," – Powerline's Scott Hinderaker, about a judge recently nominated by New Jersey governor Chris Christie.

The judge's flaw? Defending those innocents swept up in the police sweep after 9/11. It seems to me that integrating American Muslims into civil institutions and society is critical to defeating Islamist alienation. And yet many of today's conservatives seem incapable of seeing any Muslim as anything but a threat. Here's the opening sentence of the post that Hinderaker links to:

New Jersey, the Garden State, has just taken its first step toward becoming the Sharia State, with Governor Christie's nomination of Sohail Mohammed, an attorney to detained terrorist suspects, to a Superior Court judgeship in Passaic County.

Now look who they are aiming for: Chris Christie! One of the more successful, popular and appealing Republicans out there. If he is the target for a Muslim-Under-Your-Bed scare, then no one is safe.

“No one should be fooled. Any Republican representative or senator who votes to raise the debt ceiling is voting to continue business as usual, to expand warfare, welfare, foreign aid, bank bailouts, and all the other criminal enterprises. Forget talk of the Tea Party, fiscal conservatism, some face-saving agreement with the Democrats. It is a sell-out, a pledging of allegiance to the Pentagon-CIA-Fed-bank-Wall Street regime that runs this country. Shame,” – Lew Rockwell.

"Just because the dots between violent rhetoric and violent actions don't connect in this case doesn't mean you can afford to ignore the possibility — or, as many fear, the inevitability — that someone else will soon draw the line between them…. Now that the right has proved to the world that it was wronged, this would be a good time to prevent the next tragedy from destroying its political momentum. Despite what we eventually learned about the shooter in Tucson, should the right have really been so shocked that many feared a political connection between the heated rhetoric of 2010 and the shooting of Giffords?" – Joe Scarborough.

My only caveat is that we don't yet really know the full background to Loughner's mental illness.

So far, the paranoia and conspiracy theories dominate – but they also dominate the atmosphere of the far right. And when a mentally ill young man complains of the "Broken United States Constitution", or regards legal tender as illegitimate “I did not pay with gold and silver!”, some of this nuttiness has penetrated. It didn't come from nowhere. And the critical point from the very beginning was not that Loughner was some kind of trained militia member killing a foe, but a mentally unstable person who, because he is mentally unstable, might be susceptible to extreme rhetoric from authority figures.

"Never has such arrogance been combined with such utter incompetence and weakness in the White House. The result? We have the single worst President in American history and his first term's not even over yet," – John Hawkins, RightWingNews.

The Corner had few reactions to last night's speech but all of them were effusively positive. Fox's pundits seemed more impressed than CNN's. At some point, conservatives will realize that Obama is the liberal they can talk to. Maybe this horrible week can lead to an actual dialogue between Obama and the GOP that could, I don't know, actually address our national problems with solutions both sides can compromise on.

Yeah, I know I'm getting carried away …

"Yeah, and Frank, this is very unusual for our country because despite a person’s ethnic background or religious background, when a war begins, we’re all Americans. But in this case, this is not the situation. And whether it’s pressure, whether it’s cultural tradition, whatever, the fact is the Muslim community does not cooperate anywhere near to the extent that it should," – Congressman Peter King, the new chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, speaking with conspiracy peddler Frank Gaffney.

The Muslim father of the undie-bomber, the Muslim father of the Portland bomber, and the Muslim vendor in Times Square must have slipped King's mind. Truly we live in Fox's World.

A reader writes:

Don't be too reassured; Pat Buchanan also penned this in WorldNetDaily yesterday. It's full of the same crap you've been arguing against for the last few days.

A reassuring exchange between two conservatives:

[JOE] SCARBOROUGH: I am just saying though, I mean, God, you’ve worked for two presidents. Would you not be in there if you were working for Sarah Palin right now, saying, go out and say it had nothing to do with this shooting, but you understand that it was irresponsible, and you’re going to be more careful moving forward. Wouldn’t you give her that advice if you were her aide?

PAT [BUCHANAN]: Well, I certainly would. I would give everybody the advice to tone down the rhetoric and get away from military and the armed metaphors and things that a lot of us have used in campaigns, especially at a time like this. You know, I sure would Joe.

This is a fascinating insight into Palin's mindset. The mature response would have been, I believe, a public statement that expressed, as she did, shock at the act of violence, and sincere regret that, while she intended no such thing, she can see why this kind of tactic is worth giving up. But that would mean taking some responsibility. She cannot. She simply does not have the maturity.