Keep Your Eye On That Grand Ol’ Flag

Note: This piece first appeared on the Misfit Politics blog. But I still wrote it, so it’s going here too.

So this happened:

Beautiful, isn’t it? Gaze in marvel at the majesty that is Teh Won. Kneel, if you wish. Go on, no one will judge you. In fact, Chris Matthews is, as we speak, commissioning a pair of boxers based on this design, just so he can keep the thrills a-comin’.

(Kinda gives that “O” design a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?)

Yes, this piece of, er, work was on display above Florida’s Lake County Democratic Party headquarters for “several months,” until a cranky cadre of creaky old war veterans raised a stink and demanded it be taken down.

Now, this is just plain ridiculous: What would war veterans know about flag etiquette? And besides, local Democratic Party chairwoman Nancy Hurlbert said that they were just trying to show pride in our President! There is absolutely nothing whatsoever that is creepy about this flag!

h/t ChrissytheHyphenated

Uh, ignore that.

Besides, the stars on the U.S. flag are only symbolic of the fact that We The People, as represented by the fifty states, are the true sovereign power of this nation — it’s not like they’re important! Or that putting a visage in their place could be construed as a usurpation of….

Hmm.

Oh, wait! Ms. Hurlbert knows the answer!

Still, because it went unnoticed for so long, she said she has a feeling it’s “not about the flag.”

“It leads me to believe that it’s not about the flag,” she told Fox News. “Certain elements cannot accept Barack Obama as president.”

That’s it! It’s RACISMS!!! Cause, you know, veterans hate blue men! Don’t you remember Avatar? For heavens sake, people, WE HAVE IT ON FILM!

Well! I’m glad we cleared that up! And so, now, we can return to basking in the glory of our Dear Leader, genuflecting in the glow of his…of his…

GAAAAHHHHHH!!!! FASCISM!!!!!! HOW DARE YOU?!?!?!1?

A Congressional Testimony Actually Worth Giving

Dear Congress,

One of your committees recently heard the testimony of one Ms. Sandra Fluke, in which she used various sob stories, generalities, half-truths, and outright lies to demand free stuff. Of course, she presented her case in the guise of “women’s health” and “increasing access.”

Given that you were willing to hear her out, despite the fact that her testimony was more full of holes than the first draft of a B-movie screenplay, I see no reason why you shouldn’t hear me out as well. Like Ms. Fluke, I am also a woman; unlike her, I am not a professional activist, and I recently had to visit my local Emergency Room due in large part to an actual lack of access to a certain medication.

Let me backtrack for a minute. Back when President Obama was touring around the country in hopes of making the case that ObamaCare isn’t a giant festering pile of putrid garbage, he elucidated the following point as only a brilliant orator like him can:

Well said.

Rush Limbaugh Proves Today That He is the Better Man

Imagine with me for a moment that you find yourself in a public setting. There is a guy, standing in the center of attention, regaling everyone with tales of his and his friends need for safety gear in order to protect them from the various high-risk acts of asshattery they frequently engage in and are currently (and, though he doesn’t say so, needlessly) paying through the nose for. Over the course of the monologue, the speaker uses various lies, half-truths, and sob stories that stretch the very boundaries of logic itself — and he is doing this in the hope of forcing someone else to pay for his personal lifestyle, under the guise of “men’s health.”

Now imagine that someone stands up in the crowd surrounding this guy and says, “Shut the hell up, you moron! In fact, do us all a favor and remove yourself from the gene pool so you don’t pass on your clear mental deficiency to your unsuspecting progeny!”

We can all agree that what the second guy said is pretty rude, and in most cases uncalled for. However, given the context, his is by far the lesser of two offenses.

This imaginary scenario is analogous to the scenario we’ve found ourselves in lately, in which Rush Limbaugh used the words “slut” and “prostitute” to describe a woman, Sandra Fluke, who went before Congress in an attempt to force someone else to pay for her contraception. The appropriately-named Ms. Fluke, though apparently fully at ease publicly demanding subsidies for her private sex life, came down with a massive case of the vapors upon hearing Mr. Limbaugh’s comments. After being revived with smelling salts, she proclaimed, while fanning herself repeatedly, that Mr. Limbaugh’s comments were an effort to “shut her up.”

No, Ms. Fluke, they were not. His comments were an effort to introduce you to a concept that is sadly unfamiliar to many of my generation: shame. And you ought to be ashamed. Your entire argument is based on the idea that women are such moronic sex-maniacs that, unless someone else freely provides every form of birth control known to man, we’ll all be popping out babies like crack-addled Pez dispensers. It is you, Ms. Fluke, not Mr. Limbaugh, who has been demonstrating a clear case of misogyny and anti-feminism.

Obama Favors Students Getting Paid to Screw While Screwing Over Troops

The past fortnight has really been a microcosm of what Barack Obama is really about.

The media went off in an orgasmic explosion this morning, practically wetting themselves to jump on the “story” about Rush Limbaugh calling Georgetown Law student/professional activist Sandra Fluke a slut.

Now, in the interest of fairness, I will say that I think Mr. Limbaugh made a poor choice of words in the matter. The proper term for a person who expects his or her sex life to be subsidized by, well, anyone, is “whore.” But I digress.

Not one to miss a moment like this, our dear President reportedly called Ms. Fluke personally to make the sad, sad puppy dog eyes with her over the phone. (I guess asking her over for a beer would have raised too many eyebrows.) And in so doing, we find Mr. Obama yet again offering his Presidential condolences to someone who, in all actuality, owes us a massive apology.

I’m referring, of course, to what Sarah Palin brilliantly dubbed the President’s “naive apology to savages” in Afghanistan. For anyone who was stuck under a rock as these events unfolded, here’s the short version: Our troops in Afghanistan disposed of desecrated Korans – desecrated, I might add, by Taliban prisoners they were holding – in the manner proscribed by Islam, which is burning them. For our troops’ heinous act of respecting the religious traditions of a country in which people are still trying to kill them, there were riots in the streets and some of our troops were murdered by Afghani soldiers. In what has got to be the most dickless move of the 21^st century, President Obama apologized. And when his initial apology precipitated more riots and more murders of our troops, he apologized again.

What was the definition of insanity again?

Glenn Beck and the Race Card: Final Thoughts

I mentioned on Monday that I’d heard Glenn Beck’s interview with Michele Bachmann from that morning. What I didn’t mention is that I turned the podcast off shortly after that interview, out of anger at Glenn himself. And so I spent yesterday cooling off by focusing on other things — there was a new Angry Birds, and the Rug Doctor needed to make a house call. (No, seriously — I’m a terrible housekeeper with a four-year-old son, and carpets in military housing hoard dirt to the point that I’m surprised they don’t have their own show on TLC.)

But I kept an eye on Twitter, to keep tabs on Beckish happenings, hoping for word of some sort of, “OH, that’s why you guys are mad.” I’ve listened Glenn’s podcasts that are clearly marked as being on this topic. And in doing so I’ve come across this, which has also been making the rounds on Twitter.

Okay, Glenn — so Gingrich does, in fact, own the footie pajamas, and has been feeding us Tea Party types a sweet, sweet line of bull-pucky. THIS IS THE CASE YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN MAKING LAST WEEK. And I know you think you were making that case, but, I’m sorry, the race card garbage is only a valid argument if it were clear that we in the Tea Party not only knew about the footie pajamas, but had also thrown principles to the wind, gotten our own set, and were now happily using them as stocking stuffers, pocket Constitutions be damned — which, as you yourself have said, is clearly not the case.

Let’s be 100% crystal clear on this: You made an argument without bothering to understand the other side of it; you yourself made a concerted effort to destroy Gingrich’s  campaign rather than simply letting him destroy it himself; your tool in that effort was a deliberate use of a fun little piece of rhetoric that managed to both insult your listeners and bury your point. And then, when we got upset, your defense was, “I was just trying to wake you guys up, stop overreacting.”

Okay, fine. If you still think that your use of the race card was perfectly fine, then I move that we replace your alarm clock with a guy who will come into your room and wake you up by kicking you in the balls every morning. After all, you’re a guy who has a lot of important things to say, and we’d hate to take the chance of you sleeping in and missing opportunities to do good things.

Are you maybe starting to see where I’m coming from, here?

As A Matter of Clarification

My letter to Glenn Beck has kind of exploded in the last day (by my blog standards, at least), and the response I’ve gotten has been overwhelmingly positive.  I am grateful for everyone who has taken the time to read what I had to say, and I’m glad I can help put words to the frustration that a lot of us are feeling.

I want make my position on a couple matters abundantly clear, though, so there is no confusion — or, at least, as little confusion as possible.

Firstly, I am not a Republican, and therefore can’t even vote in the primaries. There is literally no one I can think of who cares what I think about the 2012 GOP lineup outside of a polite interest, and even that is a group of people I can count on one hand. I have been watching the primaries because I figure I ought to have a working knowledge of whoever it is I’ll be voting for come November. Do I have my opinions? Yes. But, again, no one cares.

Second: while I have, as stated, been “looking favorably” on Newt Gingrich of late, I am not on Team Newt by any stretch of the imagination. My choice of words when I talked about the “siren song” of his candidacy was deliberate — I”m very well aware that he could be saying all the right things out of a calculated cynicism that has no other purpose than duping people into voting for him. He’s a smart man, and has shown himself in the past to be a man of questionable moral character. So you could say that I’m not so much his advocate as I am willing to touch him with a ten foot pole.

I repeat: I do not have a favorite. My favorite announced back in October that she would not be seeking the nomination.

An Open Letter to Glenn Beck

Dear Glenn,

I know the odds of you actually reading this letter are slim indeed. I am, after all, a rather unexceptional twenty-eight-year-old housewife who can’t even keep a regular blog. And yet, I would feel remiss if I didn’t poke my head out of my hidey-hole and speak my piece.

You said on the air earlier this week that, at some point, you will have “really pissed off” each and every one of your listeners. I think that’s a fair assessment, but I find myself bewildered at the way that you seem to have heard in those words not a warning, but a challenge to be met before Monday.

Your radio show on Wednesday was less a talk radio program and more of an on-air head explosion about Barack Obama. It was also, to a lesser degree, about your incredulity at the fact that Newt Gingrich is leading among Tea Party voters — after declaring Gingrich and Obama to be essentially the same person, you asked what the hell we in Tea Party were thinking, and if our opposition had, in fact, all been because the Marxist-in-Chief is black.

That was about when my head exploded.

That was in Hour One of your podcast. I was so angry after hearing that most asinine of questions that I couldn’t even bring myself to listen to the rest of the show until the next day. When I did, I found to my relief that you did not make even the slightest allusion to race again, and was thoroughly happy to chalk up the aforementioned outburst as a temporary bout of insanity and move on.

And then I checked Twitter today.

I was enraged on Wednesday. I have since worked through it, and am now thoroughly in the Land of the Double Facepalm.

It’s not at all a secret that your preferred Presidential candidate is Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. And I understand that admiration can, at times, lead to imitation. But I think Bachmann’s “strategy” of saying a lot of smart things, followed by one excruciatingly, brain-meltingly stupid thing, followed by doubling down on that one stupid thing, is a page from her playbook you probably ought to have skipped.

The “Mormon Debate” and Why it Matters

I recently added Ali Akbar to my Twitter follow list. He is a Tea Party organizer who has recently (and publicly) invited both Morgan Freeman and Rep. John Lewis to attend a Tea Party so they can see what we’re all about. I admire his bravery, and so put him on my follow list. It was with dismay, however, that I saw him jump onto the “Decidedly not!” camp of the “Are Mormons Christians?” debate that has been rekindled most recently by the bigoted remarks of Pastor Jeffress at the Values Voter Summit.

I say “rekindled” because this is not a new debate. It is as old as the LDS Church and as tired as “your momma” jokes. And the answer has always been the same: Um, duh! Yes!

After a somewhat heated exchange on Twitter, Mr. Akbar assured me that the assertion throughout the larger Christian community that Mormons are not Christian has nothing to do with the basic definition of the word (i.e., a follower of Christ), but is instead basically a bunch of religious academics who have gotten together and decided that, in order to be considered “Christian,” you must adhere strictly to areas of their doctrine; and some of these areas are ones in which The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints doesn’t disagree with so much as we just have a different understanding of them. He also expressed his amazement that we Mormons fight so hard for the Christian label.

As we all know, brevity is the soul of Twitter, while, at times, verbosity is the soul of me. My rebuttals would not fit in 140 characters very well, so I will put them here.

Firstly, while I appreciate Mr. Akbar’s assertion that the “not Christian” label is a purely academic one and is not meant to give the impression that we Mormons don’t believe in Christ, that argument simply doesn’t pass the smell test for me. If that is the case, call us nontraditional Christians or something of that nature. Tammy Bruce is a woman who is not only not a Mormon, but is deeply distrustful of organized religion in general. Perhaps it is this distance that allows her the clarity of perception she has shown in this matter as she has discussed it on her radio show over the past week. To paraphrase Ms. Bruce: The name of the church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They believe in the Jesus; therefore they are Christians, and to say otherwise is just silly.

Revisiting Yesterday

I’m not trying to be an insufferable geek here, but the following quote from Alexander Hamilton (Federalist #1) really has been running piecemeal through my head since I woke up this morning:

I am well aware that it would be disingenuous to resolve indiscriminately the opposition of any set of men (merely because their situations might subject them to suspicion) into interested or ambitious views. Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable–the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears. So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists. Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

For those of you who have a difficult time with 18th-century English, let me simplify: Not everyone who opposes you or does something of which you disapprove, however ardently, is a dirtbag; conversely, not everyone who sides with you is an angel.

I have admitted before to having been a Useful Idiot for the Left, one of the unfortunate side effects of which is a diminished confidence in one’s own mental capacity. Well, at least in terms of decision-making — the underlying theme of the Left seems to be along the lines of, “We’re so smart that we need other people to tell us how to live our lives.”

At any rate, this particular facet of my past means that it is difficult sometimes for me to be confident in my own choices and/or worldview, especially in the face of people I admire or out-and-out bullies. And in the last day or so, I’ve seen arguments that counter my stance from both. And, because of this, I have seen fit to clarify and temper my stance.

A Note to My Fellow Palinistas

In the spring of 2010, I was able to go visit with my family in Utah. At one point during my visit, my dad and I were talking, and he brought up the topic of stupid politicians. I agreed, and then he followed up with an example — not of our then-Speaker-of-the-House who had just recently said that we needed to pass a bill to see what was in it, not of our “Orator-in-Chief” who can’t string two coherent words together without a teleprompter, nor the chronically idiotic Vice President.

No, his next words were a mocking, “I can see Russia from my house.”

I was immediately furious. It was hard, after seeing a woman I greatly admire being gleefully maligned again and again and again by dishonest press and bloggers, to hear my own dad saying the same sorts of things.

Now, as you can probably gather from that exchange, my father is not a Sarah Palin fan — he pretty much believed all the bad things said about her, not out of malice, but out of a deep-rooted (and, for his part, well-earned) cynicism.

He’s not a fan of hers. But he is a fan of mine. And when my temper had cooled a bit, he gently took me aside and explained something: The moment I had gotten angry about what he had said was the same moment that I had lost the argument.

As with most — most — things, my dad was right. Think about it: if the person saying that sort of anti-Palin garbage was just an insufferable douchebag, then he wins because he visibly upset you. But if the person saying those things is simply someone with a different opinion (or working off of bad information) then they can easily conclude that the reason you’re so touchy on the subject is that there really is something ugly there. And if it’s someone making a joke, the impression you leave is of a raging asshat whose sense of humor had long ago been blown off in a boat explosion. Getting defensive in such a way that you give your emotions free reign is a lose-lose-lose proposition on your part.

I tell you this for a couple of reasons: 1. To illustrate that I know exactly what it’s like to lose my temper on Sarah Palin’s behalf, and 2. To illustrate the point that doing so is thoroughly counterproductive.