Fish Fear Me

Myths of the Left: The Psalm 109:8 Lie

The generally despicable Think Progress once again shows how one can take the truth and with a little subtraction here and a little addition there, a dash of distortion and a dollop of ill will, create a nasty little bit of false propaganda about one's political opponents. In this case it is the meme that when some conservative Christians have prayed for President Obama's tenure in office to come to an end, what they are really praying for is Obama's death. Here's how they do it.

Apparently an email has been circulating since around the beginning of 2009 that tells people that it's okay to pray for Obama and it specifically cites Psalm 109, verse 8:

Let his days be few;

     and let another take his office.

There's certainly a degree of ambiguity to exactly what that means, but to turn that into something nefarious instead of a general wish for Obama to leave office requires attributing a level of malice to your average dedicated bible-thumper that doesn't pass the sniff test. They may not like Obama, but that's hardly evidence that they would violate the very first of the 10 Commandments they so earnestly try to follow and doom their mortal soul to Hell. No, to sell that to the general public is going to take a little more.

Enter the number one tool of our Wormtongues these days, Left and Right, which is to muddy the waters a bit.

You see, what they need to do here is get the rest of Psalm 109 into the picture, because it really is a  bit of a heavy duty call for God's wrath. Think Progress and others accomplish that in this case by simply dropping that little bitty ":8" and turning it into this:

Nick Sementelli at Faith in Public Life notes that Psalm 109, which is a prayer for the death of a leader, became a popular conservative meme after Obama’s election. The “tongue-in-cheek” prayer for the president was seen on bumper stickers. The relevant part of the psalm reads:

Let his days be few;

and let another take his office

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

May his children be wandering beggars;

may they be driven from their ruined homes.

May a creditor seize all he has;

may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.

May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

And viola! The "relevant part", as far as any consistently duped reader of Think Progress knows, is whatever they choose from the entire Psalm 109 and not just what was originally cited, the very specific Verse 8.

There you have it. After all, there's not much ambiguity to "May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow." Now some Think Progress writer can feel free to write a headline such as:

Kansas GOP House Speaker ‘Prays’ That Obama’s ‘Children Be Fatherless And His Wife A Widow’

...and progressives of the simpleton persuasion can eat it up and regurgitate it until it becomes another false and stupid brick in our political divide. 

At the end of the Think Progress post there is a mealy-mouthed attempt to tie verses 8 and 9 together, but the simple fact is the email in question did not cite Psalm 109, or Psalm 109:8,9. It specifically cited Psalm 109:8, and to say otherwise, no matter the contortions and distortions required to get there, is simply false.

Demonizing one's political opponent is not exactly new, nor does any one part of the political spectrum hold a monopoly on that as a tactic. I see it becoming more mainstream though, as this little calumny did in getting some MSM play. I'm afraid that we'll be seeing more and more of it as this election year rolls along. 

If You Are Poor...

...don't come to Minnesota, because we hate you. And not just the ordinary crazy hate. According to Susie Madrak it's the crazy AND evil hate:

War On The Poor: Minnesota Republicans Want To Bust Poor People Who Carry Cash

They're not just crazy, they're evil -- and un-Christian, should they have the audacity to claim otherwise. If only we could force them to live like this, they wouldn't last a week:

St. Paul, MN – Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.

It's the winters up here. Eventually they freeze solid our black little hearts. Or it could all be a bunch of BS.

Yeah, go with that last one.

Here's the real deal in a nutshell. Minnesota uses Electronic Benefit Transfer cards to distribute public assistance funds from several different programs. There are about 480,000 cards in use for food assistance and another 180,000 cards in use for "cash assistance" in the state. The cards function like a normal debit card, though the food program cards are limited to certain stores and certain products from what I understand. The cash assistance cards function like normal debit cards.

Last year one of our local TV stations did an investigation into abuses of the cash assistance cards and documented instances of people buying non-essential items such as alcohol and cigarettes. Also, out of 2 million transactions in the month of September last year, some 55,000 or so took place out of state. Their series of reports can be viewed at KSTP's site. The reports are probably somewhat sensationalized(I know, shock!) but predictably they rattled some cages and prompted renewed efforts to tighten restrictions on what the cards can buy and how much cash per month can be withdrawn.

You can read the bill at the Minnesota House website. The misinformation about restricting how much cash a person on welfare can carry comes from the effort to limit cash withdrawals to only $20 per month. There is nothing in the bill that even mentions the possession of cash.

And so another myth is born.

Now that we've dispensed with the nonsense, I think there could be some issues with the bill and how practical things such as the $20 monthly limit are. But why the hysteria? Do the Susie Madrak's of the world actually believe the stuff they spew out there or is it just a tool to get the natives all ramped up? And note that when I write "Madrak's of the world" I mean her type across all political persuasions. I used to have Gateway Pundit linked on the side bar but deleted that site a few years ago because he does the same exact thing from the conservative side. 

I tried my biannual "get into a dialogue at a progressive site" on the issue and it was entertaining as a way to knock back some beers, but pretty much a disaster on the dialogue front. I'll spare you the details, but I did stumble across an attitude about public assistance that absolutely astounded me. 

After admitting that the possession of cash limit was a crock, what came back was the $20/month cash withdrawal limit was too small to be practical(maybe a valid point), and criticism of any restrictions at all on how public assistance funds were spent by the recipients. You see:

"It's their money."

That's not a joke or exaggeration. The attitude was that once the state distributed the money the recipients should be free to spend it how they wish. Booze, smokes, gambling, tattoos...who are we to judge? They're poor. Give them money and stop whining about how they spend it you Rethuglican assholes. I kid you not.

Now, I don't think we should demonize people who need public assistance and I would bet that the majority spend the money on necessities as intended. Abuse does happen though, and we should have the right to exercise reasonable control over how public assistance is used in order to limit that abuse. It should not hinder the proper use of such assistance and it should not be insulting or abusive to recipients. But to make it taboo to even talk about it strikes me as ridiculous to an extreme.   

I also don't think it's too helpful for some people whom those particular progressives supposedly want to help. One path to poverty is substance abuse. Do we really want to make it easy for people to slide back into that with public money? How about the guy who smacks his wife around when he's had that six-pack that I was accused of being cold-hearted about? 

And I always thought of the anti-smoking effort as being more of a left-wing thing. Now they want us to pay for them for the poor? I thought they were "death sticks." Is the left trying to kill the poor now?

Puzzling.

Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

Your meaningless statistic of the day, brought to us courtesy of the author, one Ezra Klein:

And in the aggregate, of course, the business community spends much more than the unions — in 2010, business groups spent $1.3 billion, while unions spent $93 million.

This is one of those statistics we will see over and over and over that turns out to be just another myth of community-based reality. Why? Just follow the link directly above and see the prominently displayed disclaimer(emphasis mine):

The broadest categories that CRP uses to analyze the contributors of campaign cash are shown below. Business interests as a whole contribute far more money to candidates and political parties than do labor unions or ideological groups. Of course, business is a much bigger category than the others. However, business contributions tend to be overstated. Because CRP uses employer/occupation information to categorize donors, and because just about everyone works for a business, contributions from members of labor unions and ideological groups are often classified under business.

So, for example, a GM union worker's contribution gets classified as a business contribution. Then doesn't that sort of thing render that category somewhat meaningless as a measure of "business contributions"? 

Looking beyond bullshit artists and their meaningless statistics, further efforts at national campaign finance reform are doomed to fail because they are treating the symptom and not the disease. It's like giving a man with lung cancer a cough suppressant.

The problem is not money in politics, that's just the symptom. The disease is the enormous and growing power of the federal government to tax, spend, and increasingly regulate huge sectors of society. Of course people are going to want to influence those things, and they will spend money to do that. The more powerful the government, the more money that will be spent to influence that government. It's not rocket science. 

You want to reduce the influence of campaign contributions? First, reapply the 10th Amendment limits to the role of the federal government. Then dramatically simplify the tax code. Finally, end all payolasubsidies to industries and the pernicious market distortions that they create. Do those three things and we really would clean up government.

Hahaha...I know. It's almost like the politicians aren't sincere about that in the first place.

They're Not?

I kind of figured that Greg Sargent's connection to reality was a little tenuous, but this takes the cake:

One of my favorite right wing fantasies has it that Democrats are broadly convinced that the vast majority of Tea Partyers are closet or overt racists. You hear this so often that it often seems as if some folks wish this were the case.

The latest example of this genre: A mini-tizzy is brewing on the right over a new book that suggests Obama himself may harbor that view. As the Drudge headline put it: "BOOK: Obama Says 'Race' a Key Component in Tea Party Protests."

Good grief. All one has to do is google "tea party" and "racist" to get around 2.1 million examples of Democrats, leftists, and even some Republicans screaming bloody murder about how racist those damned tea partiers are. I've been hearing it for two years now and to deny that is just stupid. Here are just a couple of examples from today:

• But one upshot is going to be a redoubling of efforts to prove the GOP isn't racist.
• And how quickly we've forgotten the overt racism while looking to justify the more subtle examples.

Are there racists in the various Tea Party organizations? Almost certainly, just like they are in the NAACP, both major parties, and probably pretty much any organization of a certain size. Racism has no boundaries when it comes to ideology or race and it can take many forms. In general though, I don't think most Americans are racist whether they are in a Tea Party or not.  

When individuals say or do racist things we should to call them on it, of course. But I'm not going to take ownership of that racism if it turns out that the racist associates with some legitimate group that I am in. And I'm going to resent it like hell if somebody tries to make me. Wouldn't you? I thought we had given up things like stereotyping and collective guilt and punishment. 

I guess not, no matter how hard Greg Sargent tries to wish that reality away. 

Straw Men

Do you think Paul Krugman actually believes this?

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

How about this guy, do you think he really believes this?

In 2010, we have a different environment. An ideology that treats all taxation as theft — as illegitimate, coercive, perhaps even morally equivalent to violence — is now sufficiently prominent that it effectively renders policy ideas that involve use of resources by government and potentially even redistribution impractical. 

Krugman at least starts with a real belief in property rights before completely distorting that into some parody of "let them eat cake." Steve Waldman's "sufficiently prominent" ideology from the second link is just a complete fantasy. There are, of course, cranks out there who really do believe that all taxation is theft. They are not statistically significant let alone prominent in any way. 

If anything actually is sufficiently prominent in this country it's the level of taxation. According to an interesting website called US Government Revenue, the estimated GDP for 2011 is $14.6 trillion and governments at all levels in the US will take in $4.6 trillion. In addition, the feds will borrow and spend an additional $1.2 trillion. That's an awful lot of "impractical."

If this is what the "reality based community" is going to bring to the table for the next couple of years then President Obama and Democrats in general are in serious trouble politically. You cannot win with a base that is either completely dishonest or completely batshit crazy and at the same time very vocal about it. Especially considering that the general public is paying more attention than ever and the mainstream media controls less and less of the narrative with each passing week. 

Monday Stuff

Well, I too would like to know what really happened here, even if the White House Press Corps doesn't seem to care:

Allegations that the Obama administration behaved thuggishly in putting together its Chrysler rescue package aren't going away. Right now we're at a kind of impasse, with conflicting accounts that need to be resolved before we will know exactly what happened.

I don't care what party they belong to, no administration should feel comfortable doing that, if in fact they did. Whatever happened to "Truth to Power"?
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The Twins had a tough series to watch against KC this past weekend. I was thoroughly enjoying a six-inning no hitter by Scott Baker yesterday until he completely collapsed in the seventh and gave up five straight hits. The night before it was four walks in the eleventh that did in the Twins. Painful stuff. I thought my eyes were going to start bleeding Saturday night and again yesterday when Baker's relief allowed four more runs to score. Not a good weekend for the Twins middle relievers. On the upside, Joe Mauer returned with a bang, going 7-10 including a home run in his first plate appearance. Good to have you back, Joe.
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This just in from the crock-o-shit department:

New video evidence has surfaced showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military's top chaplain in the country to "hunt people for Jesus" as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population. Soldiers also have imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, the two dominant languages of Afghanistan.

Oh bullshit. If you carefully watch the report from Al Jazeera's James Bay he shows no evidence that any proselytizing to Afghans actually occurred. No evidence that bibles were actually distributed. In fact, the military says that they were not, and until I see actual evidence to the contrary I believe them. I also believe that the quotes were indeed taken out of context and that when soldiers were told to spread the faith that would be, shock of shocks, among their fellow soldiers, not Afghans.

This is just a bunch of distorted facts that can do nothing but inflame people, wrongly, against the US and the sort of thing that gets people killed. James Bay has just proved to me that he is not a credible reporter, he's a scumbag. And Jeremy Scahill and all of the lefties lapping up this crap instead of turning their brains on are tools and scumbags too.

More: I know I shouldn't name call, but I get so damn angry about the type of shoddy(if not outright enemy propaganda) journalism noted above, and just as angry at the people who so uncritically accept it at face value. At best it is careless, at worst it is deliberately deceitful. And there may be very real consequences to our troops and allies in Afghanistan and around the world. That should be obvious to anyone since the Koran flushing nonsense of 2005. When people obviously don't give a shit about that and fail to exercise even a little skepticism before passing on potentially inflammatory stories like that one, well yeah, that kind of does make them a tool as far as I'm concerned, and pretty much a scumbag too.