Rick Santorum has identified the true problem with America. He is launching his own crusade to stop the spread of Medieval smears (via Politico):
Rick Santorum launched into a scathing attack on the left, charging during an appearance in South Carolina that the history of the Crusades has been corrupted by “the American left who hates Christendom.”
Really…it’s about time somebody had the cohoes to not just attack, but to launch into a scathing attack on the evil leftist, Crusade-hating, eleventh through thirteenth century history revisionist element in our society.
“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical,” Santorum said in Spartanburg on Tuesday. “And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”
I know!!! I can’t tell you how often I’ve had to correct Christendom-hating leftists on their shallow understanding of the crusades. Their ignorance of the benevolent nature of the Crusades is leaving its stain on America.
I mean, it’s no wonder Congress has been unable to pass a budget. And that so many Obama appointees are stuck in the Senate confirmation process. Crusade confusion has caused banks to fail. And some say it played a big role in the Enron scandal.
He added, “They hate Western civilization at the core.”
An no greater an expression of hate is there than the spread of misinformation about the Crusades. Thank you Mr. Santorum for cleaning up that stain.
That’s the problem.
That, and The Scientists’ pernicious work on human-animal hybrids….
This guy is sooooooo, sooooooo totally ready for the Oval Office!
Rick Santorum makes Sarah Palin look presidential. That ain’t easy to do.
It’s easy to make fun of this, but underlying Santorum’s speech is something very ugly: Whipping up hate against people whose religion happens to be Islam and whose skin color happens to have Middle Eastern tones.
Obama’s Leadership Ratings Fall To A New Low
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
37% of Likely U.S. Voters now say the president is doing a good or excellent job as a leader.
Forty percent (40%) rate his performance as poor.
I’m one that thinks he rates in a new category, Pissed and Poor!
What Republicans Want To Cut
We all know there’s more to Republican budget cuts than simply cutting budgets. After all, the Great Recession and the deficits and state/local budget crises it spawned aren’t stopping Republicans from pushing tax cuts for corporations and wealthy people.
Instead of promoting fiscal austerity, Republicans are merely exploiting budget deficits and shortfalls to impose their own priorities. Here’s what Republican spending priorities don’t include:
Pell grants and financial aid for disadvantaged students.
Repairs to public housing for seniors and the poor.
Special education for students with disabilities.
Retraining programs for laid-off workers.
Funding for senior centers and youth activity programs.
Food safety inspections.
Yep, you get the drift — any government spending that helps ordinary (i.e., non-rich) people leave healthier, more productive, and better lives is opposed by Republicans and they’re salivating for a chance to use the economic crisis they created to eliminate it.
Why on earth would anyone vote for these people?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....ts24m.html
Stop speading Santorum.
lol
U.S. General Deployed Psy-Ops Against Senators
A three-star Army general used the Army’s psychological warfare resources to “persuade” visiting congressmen and senators to boost funding and troop levels for the Army’s military campaign in Afghanistan, and an Army lieutenant colonel who objected was “harshly reprimanded” by his superiors, MSNBC reports.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41.....tral_asia/
“U.S. law bars the military from using psyops on Americans, and every defense authorization bill explicitly prohibits the manipulation,” Rolling Stone magazine reported.
That general should be fired forthwith.
@3 That’s still four times as high as the public’s opinion of Republicans.
Holy crap–no pun intended.
I thought the jury had come back on the Crusades centuries ago. The “we” of the Crusades have been extinct for centuries in any case, and bear little relation to us.
Well, at least I thought that that had been the case.
@ 2 RR
They need a scapegoat. That is the fascist method. Find a boogeyman, vilify him in the press, rant and rave on the major news outlets about what a terrible danger that boogeyman represents to the safety of the Nation and Way of Life.
80 years ago it was the Jews in Germany and Russia. 60 years ago it was Communists in the United States. When communism inevitably failed, as all the real intelligent people knew it would eventually, the corporate militarists needed to find a new boogeyman to scare people with to continue their employment and cash flow.
Its the same as Henry Anslinger, who led the Federal prohibitionist operations, then replacing those efforts against alcohol with the propaganda and paramilitary efforts against marijuana.
This enables people who would otherwise have no forum, or platform to present themselves for election or leadership positions to continue maintaining their position of power and influence. Its all politics, rooted in the need to rationalize their own continued employment on the taxpayers dime.
It worked for Hitler, and Mussolini, and Stalin, and Franco, and Duvalier, and McCarthy. It works for every Congressman and Senator who goes to work for lobbying companies on the behalf of government contractors or Foreign Governments.
Even enemy Governments.
Now, it is coming out that the Pentagon PsyOps organization, specifically tasked with disseminating propaganda to enemy forces and civilians, built dossiers on and targeted US Senators and Congressmen and Western news outlets for their operations.
This is strictly prohibited by federal law. It is so illegal that it could be considered treason.
So, where do we find out next boogeyman when Afghanistan is done? Mexicans? Oops, already being done. Liberals? Already there. University Professors? Schoolteachers? Scientists? Artists? Government employees? Black folks?
These Fascists are twisting themselves into pretzels to maintain their own status quo, and it is destroying the Nation. They know it, and they don’t care. Because as long as it continues, they get to keep their jobs and push people around. They get to remain in Command.
Don’t forget who fought the Crusades on “our” side:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....ure=relmfu
why not focus on the people in power like obama and gregoire? they are doing outstanding work. just look at the polls. i could care less about santorum or palin. they have vote on legislation. obama and the democrats unfortunately do.
this is one of the saul alinsky tactics. identify a target, isolate and attack. its foolish and wont work.
@2, 13
Yup, indeed.
At the core of ‘conservatism’ is a stewing, angry, vengeful resentment.
It goes something like…
Evil liberals are denigrating Our Religion. Leftists are taking Our Money. Illegal immigrants are taking Our Government resources. Progressives are teaching Marxism in the schools, and the teachers are all driving Escalades because union goons have been working with Democrats to tax good Christian Republicans into poverty.
GOD gave us Liberty and The Founders enshrined these GOD given rights in Our Constitution. Liberal atheistic Progressives have been waging a crusade against GOD loving people through a holocaust of baby killing called abortion on demand, through GOD-denying evolution in schools, through public sector unions that are bleeding state governments dry. Billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are manipulating our economy and fueling progressive plans to destroy The Constitution and the GOD given rights contained therein.
Conservatives and Tea Party Patriots are the heirs to abolitionists, fighting a moral crusade against licentiousness, baby killing, union goons and Islamists. The Islams are the new Nazis, they started this fight on 911! and they want nothing less than a world caliphate with Good Christians either dead or dhimmi-fied. Their gutter religion is one of violence and war that denies Our Lord Jesus Christ as the One True Savior and Light of the World.
Good Christians like Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are educating the public about the dangers at our door. The liberal media smears them like they smear anyone who doesn’t toe the progressive line and send their money to a union or George Soros. The gay agenda destroyed this Good Christian, Mr. Santorum, but he’s roaring back speaking The Truth about the treats to our White Race and The Constitution.
Got it?
The primitive conservative psyche.
Wow…just…wow. Santorum is radiantly stupid. If the right wing would read some books instead of just banning/burning them, maybe they’d know what the crusades were about, or how the Earth is 4.5 billion years old not 6,000. Wow. Just wow.
He falls into the standard trap of anti-intellectuals (and 5 year olds) of thinking all positions are binary. You’re good or evil. The crusades were righteous and good, or evil and destructive. Life is vastly more muddled and complicated than that. Santorum has the intellect of a child. The crusades were a mess. It involved power, politics, money, trade, religion all mixed together in a pot and stirred.
Like all ‘wars’ (the crusades shifted between all out war and cold war like status over years) it’s complicated. But only a total moron like Santorum turns into a George W. Bush “you’re with us or against us” child like binary statement.
We need to elect some ADULTS for once and not these child like morons.
An example of how complicated this is…it’s not a simple east/west, good/bad thing. The “good” Christians almost destroyed western civilization during what you might know as the “dark ages”…the middle ages around the 5th to 15th century when nearly all knowledge was destroyed in the name of faith. How do we even HAVE any of our old knowledge (math/science)…most of it was saved by the Muslims, who at THAT time were having their golden age (7th-15th centuries) where they were the leaders of science and study in the world. At that time they were more open to other cultures and learning than the good western Christians. Times change. Now we’ve reverted again. And much (not all, but much) of the Muslim world has lost their drive for knowledge and science and has reverted to strict conservative forms of Islam, where Christianity in western Europe had it’s renaissance and new golden age…although there are plenty of Christians like Santorum that would like us to revert BACK to an old anti-intellectual anti-renaissance conservative Christianity too.
The only constant in the universe is change.
Or maybe you’re just with or us against us. (SIGH)
The same historians point out that the Muslims have been military expansionists operating under the guise of religion as well.
More importantly, the people who fried Joan of Arc were Christian and so were her followers. Should we blame the Muslims for just for the sake of consistency?
# 13: Don’t forget that in the 1850’s the “Know Nothing” party had just about as much to do with the demise of the Whigs as slavery did. The “Know Nothings” were led by anti-immigrants, anti-Catholics, and anti-Semites who argued that the American west just wasn’t big enough for anybody who wasn’t white, protestant, and who’s ancestors weren’t of English or Scottish origin. The bankers and financiers used them to deflect blame for the Panic of 1856, which hit the west rather hard. By the 1860 election they at least had enough sense to rename themselves the American Party, but they weren’t much of a factor in that election, as the politics of slavery were the big issue by then.
It’s kind of interesting seeing how the various Republican candidates for the nomination in 1860 tried hard to position themselves so they could receive the support of the Know-Nothings, yet at the same time appeal to the growing population of German immigrants in the mid-west. Many of those German immigrants were freeing warfare and political oppression as a result of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. They were well-educated (by 1850’s standards), mostly literate, and many of them were the trained tool-and-die makers which made the machinery which propelled America’s idustrial revolution.
There is a lot of similarities between the “know Nothings” and the modern-day Tea Party folks, and I’m not just talking about the name.
It is rather incredible the amount of historical revisionism the Republican/Tea Party folks are trying to foment. On some Civil War discussion boards, there are quite a few folks there trying to argue that slavery wasn’t so bad, the war was about tariff’s and northern oppression anyway, etc.
We’ve seen on this board the folks who not only try to re-write recent history (blaming Obama, Carter, and Clinton for the 2008 economic collapse which occured under the Bush Presidency), but even trying to re-write the history of the Federalist/Jeffersonian political clashes of the early 1800’s.
I guess it was only a matter of time before they got to the crusades. Personally, I think the best defense the Christians can make for the Crusades is to simply say: “It seemed like a good idea at the time…”
Of course, the big problem was that at the time, all armies were essentially mercenary armies, and the only way to pay for them was to offer them a big cut of the loot if they won. This didn’t tend to make for a war based on Christian virtues. The Crusaders even sacked Constantinople, a Christian fortress-city which invited them in as guests.
Caption: Rick Santorum’s speech was a blow to ‘Little House on the Prarie’ reenactors everywhere.
That picture of his family fucking hurts.
@24 At first I thought it must be photo-shopped to look really weird. If not, then good fucking Lord, what on earth have they done to those kids?? Far better to have been beaten every day than to go through whatever they’ve been through.
It’s time to redefine child abuse to include whatever the fuck happened to them.
I’m beginning to think that there is no lubricant in santorum. It is just a plain ol’ shit-stain, plain and simple.
I think the little girl just learned how to use Google. And realized it will be three more years before she can legally get married in Alabama and change her last name.
You know, if you’re going to criticize someone for their fact-challenged historical revisionism, it really helps if you don’t commit the same sins yourself.
As a medieval historian, I just can’t let the nonsense in #19 go by unchallenged:
What do you expect sp…wrote:
Those awful medieval Christian monks! How dare they “destroy all knowledge” by painstakingly copying (by hand, no less!) and preserving classical and medieval works in those vile scriptoriums and libraries of their horrid, knowledge-hating monasteries!
And those terrible medieval Christian clerics in their knowledge-hating universities! How dreadful that they left us the legacy of higher education!
What do you expect continued:
To be serious for a moment, how we have certain classical texts and some medieval advances (algebra, for example) is indeed due to Muslims having preserved some classical texts that were lost to the West and making advances of their own. But Western civilization knows of these things today primarily because medieval Christians (especially clerics) in turn embraced, preserved, perpetuated, and advanced that knowledge themselves.
History is complicated, and people (not just politicians) have always sought to twist it to their own advantage and agrandizement. “First take the log out of your own eye” and all that…