Stupid People with Top Hats

shlomi on November 6, 2008

One of the most irritating things about President-Elect Obama’s win is the number of entirely insane people with whom I must interact or read about.

Whacko nutjobs in Kenntucky (is anyone keeping track of their sanity, let alone literacy, statistics) planned on killing multiple minorities, capping things off by driving at Senator Obama dressed in tuxedos and top hats, firing fully automatic weapons. These 18 and 20-year old folks would be total idiots in my book — except they had access to the requisite weapons and had made plans. (Can anyone say: “neuter the idiots so they don’t breed?”)
A friend of mine talked about “cowboys” snatching white sheets off the shelves of local department stores. We’re here in Central Texas, see: land of the semi-rational and home of the ‘do what you want so long as we can’t bust you’ brigade.
Same friend talks about how terrible it’ll be “when” Obama gets shot.
I don’t know how to push love, trust and calm out past folks like this, but if we don’t, the Secret Service will certainly be chasing a legion of village idiots before things calm down. And acting uber-paranoid with the President Elect until we get all the easy nut jobs out of the way.
This friend — and a few others with similar views, talk about the race war and terror that would follow Obama’s assassination (g-d forbid!).
My question is this: is their fear, their hatred, their small-minded vision so pervasive so powerful that the next President of the United States  must worry about these lunatics? Or can be take a deep breath, concentrate on the realities of global warming, magnetoshphereic dissipation, and drive these false dybbuks of our generation aside long enough for truth to ring free?
I’d like to think we can rise above these idocies. But the Cheney/Bush regime has created early warning monsters that we would ignore at our own peril.

I Have Been Blessed to See This Day Come

shlomi on November 5, 2008

It’s a peculiarly Jewish custom to recite a blessing when encountering an incredible moment in one’s personal history. We have a blessing on seeing rainbows, awesome sights, and living to see yet another year’s holidays.

Today is a day of blessing. Blessing that we have seen the defeat of racism by truth. The defeat of fear and hate by trust and hope. Like coming upon a bridge over the Grand Canyon, ringed by double arcs of rainbows, this is a day for the United States to see a way through the darkness and weakness that have cloaked our country for the last many years.
Baruch Ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Ha’olam, asher kiddishanu ve’ki’imanu ve’higi’anu laz’man hazeh.
Blessed are you our master, god and king of the world, who has blessed us, sustained us and brought us to these times.

Palin’s America: A Nation of Small People

shlomi on October 20, 2008

There are different forms of evil. My post earlier today, in the form of official misinformation, was one. The picture to your left is another, more primitive one.

Sarah Palin talks the “pro-America parts of the country.” Her America (although her quote sources say a lot about her pedigree) is far different from mine. The problem with her rhetoric is that it spawns the kind of Balkan ‘stanism’ creating the splits we’ve worked for decades to heal. And in tearing at our nation’s scars, she, and the other fanatics of the right, are weakening the entire body politic, at a time it needs unity, not divisiveness.
Here’s another example of race and allegience in the radical Republican mind. Check out the image to the left, and then please click on the image to visit Cagle’s site and read the full story.
It’s been a disturbing day in terms of news. AndI hope, unfortunately, it disturbs you at least as much.

Shifting to as Serious a Topic

shlomi on September 24, 2008

The hanging of an effigy of Barack Obama at a Christian university brings into sharp focus one of the odder issues in this election. Obama is a self-confessed Christian, no less one than McCain.

Both are struggling with their actions as opposed to their alligences. Obama, with anti-abortion and other ‘leftist’ stances (even silly, made up ones). McCain has similar problems. Southern Baptists, the folks who evilly brought you Messianic Judaism [1] [2] [3] [4], aren’t quite happy with his less than Evangelical attitudes, although he’s been their best candidate even throughout the Republican primaries: even Mormon Mitt has a looser attitude than McCain, who has opposed same-sex marriage, civil unions, or even live-in partner rights to medical insurance.

Prejudice against a Black American, against a suspiciously non-Anglo Christian, are deep-rooted. The KKK is only one of the ugly cancers that have erupted from the skin of the American psyche. Much more common, and more subtle, are the Muslim insinuation against Obama, even going to the push-poll questions that mangle his name on purpose to slip suspicion and doubt into the vapid White American voter.

Nooses, effigies and other “subtle” signs don’t work in their stagers’ favor: Americans have had fifty years experience with understanding the real meaning behind these formerly powerful symbols. Unfortunately for the beleaguered McCain operation, these idiots play into Obamas, not his, hands. And the best thing McCain can do is either ignore them, or revile them: both of which strengthen the hand of the left.

As usual, the lunatic right, with its symbols bereft of contextual reality, come out the losers. I’d much prefer an articulate lunatic like David Duke than these fringe nutters: David, at least, made for good and focused press. These idiots are shades of the 1950’s. And we all know how that played out in the end.

The Anti-Christ is Here (Thank God!)

shlomi on August 11, 2008

Wow. I didn’t know I was rooting for the antichrist. I mean, as a Jew with a sharp tongue, I certainly _hope_ I’m rooting for the other guy. Just not that one. Whatever he stands for. Our people have no connection to ‘The Rapture,’ a construct of 19th century umm, passionate people. I disingenuously paused, because, again, as a Jew, the whole thing is hooey to me. We didn’t have a 1st coming, so the second one makes no sense. We have no hell, only the absence of being part of God. There’s no purgatory. No wacky ‘what SHALL we do with all these unbelievers.’ No fire, no brimstone. [Full disclosure: while Christianity is fully Thanotic (death- and afterlife-focused), Judaism does refer to this life as the ‘prosdor’ (literally: the hallway) and the next life as the room. But we Jews get do-overs in the form of reincarnation, and a chance for our souls to make right what we failed in previous lives.]

The Obama = Nicholae Carpathia idea is hideous. It’s hateful, paranoid, and smacks of all the things for which the KKK was and is reviled. The Nazis used fear of the Jew, the unknown, the other to kill my family. And the hateful, prejudiced, zealots aligned with the McCain campaign are using the exact same tactics now, in 2008.

Debate is great. McCain certainly presents a different set of options to Obama. I welcome discussions of substance, of the priorities, strategies and even tactics of the two candidates in solving our upcoming problems. But bringing religion into this is a wedge designed to scare the Evangelical, the dim-witted, or those that bought the last lie: that Obama is actually a Muslim. Not that that is wrong in any way! (I’d love to see a Muslim President! He’d be just as fair as Kennedy was, as a Catholic, in a majority Protestant country.)