We just watched the 30 Rock where they show what the world looks like from Kenneth’s eyes and Tracey’s eyes, respectively.

I get the feeling that no matter what comes out of Barack Obama’s mouth, wingnuts hear some sort of harmonized devil-voice screaming a steady stream of liberal trigger words e.g. “ABORMOSEXUTANICALISMINISTALINEGROGANICOTIPEDOPHILADELICIOUSBLACTATING[....]MATRIARCHYHAILSATAN!”

I could have kept going with that. It was actually rather fun. But these people? Um, get a grip.

The commander in chief asked questions and stayed out of the way and let the Navy seals do their job.  Like when Captain Picard says “make it so”, he doesn’t do it himself and leaves “it” to the person in charge of “it”.

What part of that can’t the redblog brigade understand?  Oh, maybe, the part where they never did any time in uniform ... commanders command and lead, they know that they stick their hands into the gears of the machine they operate at their peril.

Of course the Red Blogs of Sewage don’t even notice that the rest of the crew is safe in harbor because the Kenyans like us so much.

Only the most subliterate moron could read the quoted passage from Obama’s address and take away that he didn’t talk about god or faith or anything properly religious at all but just said some namby-pamby PC crap about people getting together.

Of course, Obama’s address assumes that the listener has an elementary school grasp of world religions Which, frankly, I respect.  One of my favorite things about Obama is that he speaks to Americans as if we are adults.  I get that the right can’t deal with that, probably because they’re not really adults.  But, yeah…

Something tells me Rachel Adams doesn’t understand that Passover actually is a celebration of Jewish history.

So what if it was effective? It wasn’t badass like what Crittenden acted out in his bathtub.

FTW!

Yes, there’s nothing like a reference to armed force to really bring home the message of the Prince of Peace. I miss Dubya already.

“In the Obama worldview as expressed here, celebrations of Passover and Easter are oddly unrelated to faith”

“Tomorrow, Christians of all denominations will come together to rejoice and remember the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ isn’t a faith-based tradition?

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ isn’t a faith-based tradition?

Obama didn’t use the word “God,” silly?

How are conservatives to understand that our President is talking about God unless he uses that exact word?

OMG!  Obama is just a few weeks away from having live babies sacrificed to Baal on a giant alter on the front lawn of the White House!  He really is the Antichrist!  He’s the Whore of Babylon!  He’s Damian Thorn!

The proof is all right there:  He did not use the same wording in his Easter address that George W. Bush Jr. used…

Can things get any worse before Satan himself covers the whole earth with his leathern wings of bottomless evil and forever shuts out the light of God’s infinite love and smiting vengeance?

Is there any hope at all for humanity?  Can we expect salvation from a cruel and remorseless overlord bent on our physical and spiritual extermination?  Are there other grossly overblown apocalyptic phrases I can insert here?...

Tomorrow, Christians of all denominations will come together to rejoice and remember the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Even the resurrection of Jesus Christ is mentioned—by a professing Christian—as something to be rejoiced over and remembered as if it were the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

Is there some secret password Obama didn’t give to Rachel to indicate that Easter was more than just a birthday?  I’m not a Christian, so I don’t have access to the secret passwords and handshakes.

You know, the Anti-Christ would also speak of Easter in such benevolent terms.  Not that we’re accusing Obama of being the Anti-Christ or anything.  It’s just something to, you know, think about.

Is there some secret password Obama didn’t give to Rachel to indicate that Easter was more than just a birthday?

You might have thought that mentioning “resurrection” s matter-of-factly as if it were a birthday would qualify, but apparently not.

“You know, the Anti-Christ would also speak of Easter in such benevolent terms.”

Exactly!  In fact, the more benevolent and religious the terms used, the greater the proof of just how Anti-Christ-y he really is!

Truly, my brothers and sisters, we are living in the last days.  You better make your peace with God or suffer the fires of Hell forever!  The Pit awaits your immortal soul!...

The problem is that so many people are so mired in the we/they thing that they are incapable of speaking objectively about anything.

When Obama says “Christians of the world do this” and “Jews of the world do this” what they hear is someone equally speaking of other in both cases. Since they themselves can’t imagine NOT saying “We do this, and Jews do that” it must mean that Obama is distancing himself from Christianity as well as Judaism. Since only Judeo-Christian groups have any faith (and exactly to the degree that they agree with MY faith), by “saying” that he is neither Christian nor Jew, he is speaking without faith. QED.

It’s why they flip out when he says something positive about other countries, or why they can’t understand when he speaks about black people or white people in the third person.

It is the same thing that makes people glitch out when they absolutely want mandatory Christian prayer but are utterly opposed to letting a student volunteer an Islamic or Pagan prayer. On “principle.” 

You cannot speak in the third person about anything you believe in without dishonoring it. Or for that matter, you cannot do anything but evangelize your own beliefs, even at the cost of dishonoring someone else’s, without proving you aren’t a believer.

Besides, he’s black. You did notice that, right. Therefore, anything intelligent he says sounds like the teacher on Charlie Brown to most of these people - “Wa wa WA wa Wa wa wa.”

“You might have thought that mentioning “resurrection” s matter-of-factly as if it were a birthday would qualify, but apparently not.”

rea, we all know that the Reichwing owns (Christian) religion, so unless a person is a Conservative, their use of religious imagery, concepts, or wording is a sign they’re up to no good, whereas a Conservative using the same language, no matter how cynically, is just expressing their deep commitment and belief in God…

The resurrection isn’t faith, it really happened because it says so in the Bible.

Faith is talking about how you know that God told you to bomb Iran.

Is there some secret password Obama didn’t give to Rachel to indicate that Easter was more than just a birthday?  I’m not a Christian, so I don’t have access to the secret passwords and handshakes.

Actually, you pretty much nailed it right here.

The difference between Obama’s address and Bush’s address is that Obama doesn’t tend to phrase everything in Evangelical dogwhistles.  Of course there’s also the small matter of Obama’s tan and lack of a proper WASP surname (or a daddy who was a WW2 profiteer).  But mostly it’s the lack of MegaChurchese.

“Of course there’s also the small matter of Obama’s tan and lack of a proper WASP surname…”

I suspect strongly that if he was a Conservative, all of a sudden those things would be endearing and not alienating.  See Jindal, “Bobby”, for example…

When Obama says “Christians of the world do this” and “Jews of the world do this” what they hear is someone equally speaking of other in both cases. Since they themselves can’t imagine NOT saying “We do this, and Jews do that” it must mean that Obama is distancing himself from Christianity as well as Judaism. Since only Judeo-Christian groups have any faith (and exactly to the degree that they agree with MY faith), by “saying” that he is neither Christian nor Jew, he is speaking without faith. QED.—Lymis

QFT.

Also, from a purely editorial standpoint, Bush’s segue into talking about the armed forces was terrible.

“Is there some secret password Obama didn’t give to Rachel to indicate that Easter was more than just a birthday?”

Is the password/code maybe that he didn’t use the word “birthday” at all? You know, because “resurrection” doesn’t mean “birthday”? Is she really that stupid or is she just acting?

Didn’t matter what he said, really.  I love Lymis’ comparison with the adults in Charlie Brown world.

On the other hand, I am glowing in the awesomeness that was the Easter celebration in SF’s Dolores Park.  Drag queens, awesome bands, tons of nearly-naked people in funny hats and blasphemous costumes, all topped off with the annual Hunky Jesus contest.  Awesome!  Did anyone else go?

Because I have some masochistic tendencies in my online media consumption, I occasionally peruse the Current Affairs message board on stltoday.com, the online version of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

And that place is a special kind of crazy.  The board is mixed company politically speaking, but heavily populated by people so far to the right they almost make Freepers seem salient and rational.  It’s rather interesting to watch, as the overall ideological bent is decidedly more conservative than liberal, but not so much so that there are no liberals there whatsoever.

Anyway, the pirate thing is the focus of numerous threads, and prior to yesterday’s events, it was mostly “Obama is soft on pirates” tripe.

Now today, one douchebag commenter is spamming up the board with threads like, “Obama - War Criminal?!”:

When the pirates allowed themselves to be towed by a United States Navy vessel they were effectively prisoners of war or at the very least enemy combatants and subject to every right granted them under the Geneva Convention.

Obama gave the order and United States military personnel executed them on the high seas without so much as a sham of a trial.

Has the remaining pirate - the child of 16 - been given so much as a glimpse of legal counsel? Since he is under age in US Courts, have his parents been contacted or has he even been given a guardian to represent him?!

Defend “That One”.

This same asshole was posting comments the other day questioning Obama’s capabilities as CiC for not taking out the pirates right then and there.

God, I really wish a Jim Jones would emerge amongst these people and produce the same results at their teabagging parties on Wednesday.

DTG, I’m not even sure they can be tried in US court ... it seems that a certain (cough) president and his republican henchmen refused to make the US a signatory to the Law of the Sea treaty.

That “war criminal” stuff has to be sarcasm. How could an organism of more than one cell be blind to the sheer ridiculousness of first calling an Obama a pussy because the captain wasn’t rescued instantly, then calling him a criminal because armed pirates were killed when the captain was rescued?

That “war criminal” stuff has to be sarcasm.

It was.  The asswipe is trying to create a false parallel between Obama authorizing the actions taken by the Navy SEALS in the rescue of the captain, and George Bush’s illegal rounding up and torturing of brown people who say bad things about the United States.

Basically, he thinks he’s being clever and accusing liberals of using a sort of IOKIYAD logic, except umm… he’s comparing two different things which aren’t remotely alike in any way, shape, or form.

Because it’s a lot easier for wingnut shitheads to say something like that versus saying something like, “I was wrong, Obama was monitoring this situation and giving the military clearance to take the necessary actions to bring the captain to safety.  Sorry I am such a huge bag of douche.”

There’s another, fairly subtle distinction between the two statements that is kind of cool (if you like Obama, and especially if you’re Jewish and like Obama).

Bush said:

This week, people around the world celebrate Passover and Easter. These holy days remind us of the presence of a loving God who delivers His people from oppression, and offers a love more powerful than death.</blockqoute>

This statement kind of conflates Passover and Easter and Judaism and Christianity, which is a really common practice, under this whole “Judeo-Christian” label. A lot of Jews find this really annoying and a form of cultural appropriation (not all of them - Dennis Prager has made promoting the term “Judeo-Christian” his life’s work). It’s supposed to come off as a form of tolerance, but it’s tolerance of the “I’ll tolerate you as long you conform yourself and your identity to my pre-conceptions and expectations” school.

But it’s a really subtle example of that kind of thinking, one I probably would not have even recognized if I didn’t have Obama’s statement to contrast with it.

Obama said:

<blockquote>These are two very different holidays with their own very different traditions. But it seems fitting that we mark them both during the same week. For in a larger sense, they are both moments of reflection and renewal. They are both occasions to think more deeply about the obligations we have to ourselves and the obligations we have to one another, no matter who we are, where we come from, or what faith we practice.

See how he did that? He still draws out universal messages that are consistent with each religious tradition, but he respects the fact that they are actually, you know, different.

Ack! HTML fail. But I think you can see what I meant to do.

I think I know someone who celebrates Passover and Easter. And I had a co-worker whose mother wanted her to marry someone jewish so they would have more holidays to eat at. But in general isn’t the right word “or”?

It’s nice to have a literate president.

Lots of people celebrate both, especially a secular Easter with brunch and candy baskets. I grew up with that (and secular Christmas) because my mother grew up (nominally and culturally) Catholic and wanted to do those things with us, and we had a whole family with grandparents and uncles who celebrated those holidays and my Jewish father has a serious thing for jelly beans, especially the black ones. But if the Weekly Standard is giving Bush credit for putting God where he belongs, I don’t think all the Jews having quiche and mimosas and chowing down on chocolate bunnies are really what they have in mind with that “and.”  You are correct that “or” is the much more appropriate word.

I think Obama made one more horrific mistake, from the perspective of fundamentalists: nowhere did he say that God exists.  Note how Bush’s speech clearly comes from the perspective of a person who takes for granted that God (namely the Christian God) is real and present: “These holy days remind us of the presence of a loving God…”  Such a statement presupposes the existence of said God, and simultaneously makes it perfectly clear, through the use of first person singular and plural, that the speaker is one of the believers.  In short he sounds like a preacher.

Obama, on the other hand, tends to use the third person, along with other markers of what most of use likely recognize as academic-style speech.  I (and I would guess most of you folks) find that comforting and familiar.  Perhaps we hear it as an indication of nuanced thinking, objectivity, a habit of researching topics before saying something about them.  I suspect that many fundamentalists recognize the exact same markers—Obama as egghead, right?  But for many of them, the associations are not positive.  What we might call ‘nuanced thinking’ is rather wishy-washiness or indecisiveness; ‘objectivity’ becomes lack of commitment to morals or good ideals.  Many seem to value gut instinct and ‘heart’ over a nerdy obsession with data or information. 

I guess the more I read through it, the more I see that Obama may very well be using ‘dogwhistles’ of a sort—but they’re for progressives and true moderates, not fundamentalists.

The thing about Obama is he knows how to do subtlety and get a lot of symbolism into a small space. Remember the Persian New Year’s message he sent to Iran? I was reading some analysis of that, and he did not just one, but like, four things, that had never been done before by a U.S. leader, and they worked together in some interesting ways. Like, he didn’t try to drive a wedge between the government and the people but took them both together. However, he sent the greeting on the Persian New Year, which retains strong Zoroastrian elements that the Islamic Republic has tried to stamp out. And the poet he quoted is the author of the Persian national epic, but also a symbol of Persian resistance to Arabic/Islamic hegemony. And there was more that I don’t remember, but seriously, it is indeed great to have a literate president.

The funny thing about those quotes is that Obama sounds, there, to me, very much like the speakers at my Anglican church! Certainly he doesn’t come off sounding like an avowed atheist, with the way he speaks of people “remembering the resurrection of Jesus Christ” as if it’s something that actually happened. So I think you’d have to go into it believing that he was anti-Christian to get that out of it. And yes, I loved that he drew distinctions between Judaism and Christianity but honoured both of them and drew parallels, too.

I will take a man who speaks kindly of my religion and equally kindly of my neighbours’ religion or areligion, and a vice-president who calmly and quietly practices his faith but doesn’t yell about it, over Bush’s Christianese and clumsy attempt to make the war seem related to Easter, any day.

“He really is the Antichrist!  He’s the Whore of Babylon!  He’s Damian Thorn!”

He’s clearly more an Adam Young.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens

witless: When we were house hunting, we saw this bizarre little shack for sale on Crowley street. I told the husband that if we lived there, I was buying a black Bentley with flame decals along the side.

I think he decided we couldn’t afford the novelty of living there. :D

The rescue of the hostage captain was a perfect “Cats fuck over mice” operation. Some pirates killed, no hostages killed. It doesn’t get any better than that.

“Cats fuck over mice”?!? Paste it into google and become a carrier for the latest meme.