The Orange Calf Gets Messianic

 

Axios does it's usual top line look at the Malignant Loser as a "Christian," beginning with a reminder:

Trump was neither a regular churchgoer nor prone to displays of faith before running for president. His 2016 campaign produced a series of memorable gaffes as he courted the GOP's evangelical base.

• At the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa in 2015, Trump said he had never asked God for forgiveness and called Communion his "little wine" and "little cracker."
• In an interview with Bloomberg the following month, Trump repeatedly refused to name his favorite Bible verse — calling it "very personal."
• In a speech at Liberty University in January 2016, Trump cited a verse from what he called "Two Corinthians" instead of "Second Corinthians," drawing laughter from the crowd and mockery from his GOP rivals.

Since those days, he's become even more transparently risible in his devotion to a book he never opened and a religion he never practiced:

On the 2024 campaign trail, the religious undertones employed by Trump and his allies have grown more apocalyptic — even messianic — as his legal troubles have mounted.

• In one video shared on Truth Social and played at Trump's rallies, a narrator's voice booms: "On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a caretaker.' So God gave us Trump."
• On the first day of his New York civil fraud trial in October, Trump shared an AI-generated courtroom sketch depicting himself sitting next to Jesus.
• This week, Trump posted a message he said he received from a follower: "It's ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you."

However, he's preaching to a choir of fellow hollowed- out hypocrites, who betray the religion to which they claim adherence:

64% of Republicans view Trump as "a man of faith," according to a November poll by Deseret News — more than his former vice president and vocal evangelical Mike Pence.

Ha!  Their "faith" is focused on the Orange Calf, the most un- faithful person, in every sense, that they could have chosen to follow.   He's their temporal Moses, leading them to the Promised Land of white Christian nationalism. The rest of us should never have had any doubts about this cohort's "faith," except in its fealty and devotion to the Orange Calf, forever and ever, amen.

BONUS: Don't miss this article today in Salon.com on the blindness of Trumpist "evangelicals".

(Image: Thomas Levinson / Daily Beast/ Getty Images)

Monday Reading

We have some suggestions this morning that we think you'll find interesting. As always, the full articles are well- worth going to at the links.

David Nakamura and Ashley Parker look at Putin puppet Donald "Rump" Trump's trip to Asia as proof that, with Rump's withdrawal from the Trans- Pacific Partnership in particular, the U.S. is now "America alone":

But on the 295th day of his presidency — during a trip to the region where the trade pact was most vital — a competing narrative emerged. Trump’s “America first” slogan has, in many ways, begun to translate into something more akin to “America alone.” 

As the president’s motorcade wove up a mountain road Saturday to a regional summit in the Vietnamese city of Danang, news broke that the 11 nations that had once looked to U.S. leadership to seal the deal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership had moved on without the United States and announced a tentative agreement among themselves. 

It marked a stunning turnabout that foreign-policy analysts warned could further erode U.S. standing at a time when China is embarked on a major economic expansion and further undermine global confidence in the United States’ ability to organize the world around its own liberal values.

Liberal values? From someone who wants us to believe Putin's version of election meddling versus the entire U.S. intelligence community? This trip was a complete bust in all aspects, from Rump getting his fragile ego massaged while getting played in the most transparent and laughable ways, to getting sidelined with no trade deals, to the aforementioned backstabbing of the American intelligence community, to his playing footsie with violent Philippine human rights abuser Duterte. Well done, "f*cking moron."

Our friend P.E.C. drew our attention to a great long- read article in The Atlantic by Kurt Anderson, "How America Lost Its Mind." From the magical thinking and love of conspiracy theories, to the related abandonment of empirical and critical thinking ("post- truth" and "alternate facts") by vast numbers of Americans (not sparing the left, by the way), Anderson examines the past 50 years and identifies when the right became unhinged and why:

One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian. The party is the American coalition of white Christians, papering over doctrinal and class differences—and now led, weirdly, by one of the least religious presidents ever. If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics? [snip] 

Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades. [snip] The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.

Anderson also scores the rise of the post- Fairness Doctrine right- wing media conglomerates and the advent of the internet that enabled "full Fantasyland" in politics.  It's a really comprehensive dive into what took us to where we are today, and also offers Anderson's thoughts about what can be done at this point.

Finally, we always like to recommend the link round- up pulled together by fellow blogger Infidel 753 for its wide- ranging and eclectic mix of topics. Check it out.

Saturday Morning Reading

The topic this morning is the Grand Old Pedophile party.  As always, please go to the links for the full articles.

Charles Pierce leads us off:

The fact is that Roy Moore is very much who the Republicans are. He is representative of a fanatical splinter of American Protestantism that has accounted for a great deal of the success enjoyed by modern conservatism and the Republican Party for over four decades, and there always has been dark sin at the heart of that success. 

The rise of what used to be known as “the religious right” did not begin with the legalization of abortion. That’s a nice story that the various Bible-banging charlatans would like you to believe. No, the institutions that would nurture and produce the religious right were the white-only Christian academies and universities that sprang up in the South as part of the massive resistance to desegregation—the churchgoing end of that strategy. The religious right was not born out of opposition to Roe v. Wade. It was born out of opposition to Brown v. Board. 

There was always something wretched in its founding that invariably asserted itself in our politics. Dishonesty and camouflage were its primary sacraments. As part of their bargain with these people, Republicans and conservatives agreed tacitly to overlook these things, and so they became accustomed to overlooking everything until, today, alleged pedophilia of the most grotesque sort is the latest thing to be overlooked in the cause of tax-cuts and the restriction of women's reproductive rights. (our emphasis)

You could easily argue that the roots of this complicity go back many decades more, back through when a resurgent KKK cloaked itself in religious symbolism, through the Jim Crow era, all the way to this country's founding. The party labels changed, but conservatives were always the most culpable.

Speaking of conservatives, we have a few who want the Grand Old Pedophile party to die.

Jennifer Rubin:

If there is a single idea animating Trump’s GOP, it is that “blood and soil” (or race and religion, if you prefer) — not the American creed (“All men are created equal…”) — is the defining feature of the United States. Whatever else that is not white and Christian is foreign, alien and a threat to “real America.” Whether in day-to-day politics, foreign affairs or domestic policies, there is no right and wrong, only them and us. That’s Trumpism in a nutshell. The Republican Party’s inability to immediately and completely separate itself from and denounce Moore is the predictable result of this thinking. 

I would like to think that Americans have gotten a good look at this Frankenstein-esque party and will repudiate it in 2018 and 2020. I still carry the belief (bolstered by Tuesday’s election) that most Americans have not lost their minds and souls.

Rubin wants a new "conservative" party to replace the GOP. A question for her: what would keep that new party from devolving exactly the way the current conservative party devolved, through shameless and dishonest pandering to the worst instincts of those Americans who have come to internalize the bullshit they've been fed for over 40 years?

Rubin's fellow neo- con Max Boot joins the chorus:

This episode is the sorry culmination of two trends that have disfigured the conservative movement beyond all recognition: contempt for the facts and desire to win at all costs. Republicans are increasingly reliant on “alternative facts” manufactured by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, which claim that global warming isn’t real and neither is the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee. The real scandal, they tell us, is the Steele dossier paid for by the Democrats in an attempt to uncover Trump’s Russian connections. Or is it the evidence-free claim that Obama supposedly wiretapped Trump?  

In the final analysis, no indictment of their candidate will convince the faithful. As Trump once said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Or, more to the point, Roy Moore could molest a 14-year-old girl and not lose votes. Because for Republican partisans, their opponents are “the forces of evil,” and anything is preferable to that. Even Donald Trump. Even Roy Moore. So in ostensibly fighting evil, Republicans have become complicit in it. 

This is a party that does not deserve to survive.

While, again, we would heartily agree with this conclusion, we doubt that American politics would be without a right- wing party of hypocrites, bigots and nihilists for very long.

The Right's War On Christmas

Harold Meyerson talks about the spirit of Christmas -- and who really is at war with it --  in an excellent, must- read for this or any other season.  We're taking the liberty of excerpting a major portion of it here.  Meyerson first briefly recounts the Biblical story of Joseph fleeing from King Herod's Judea with Mary and Jesus, "a story that echoed the Old Testament's concern for strangers, foreigners and refugees."  He then poses a question:

Who’s really waging a war against Christmas in 2015? Secular multiculturalists who, stealthily and nefariously, have somehow rendered Starbucks’s coffee cups a tad less festive? Or the self-proclaimed culture warriors on behalf of traditional values, who demand we leave refugees — even small children, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) has made pitilessly clear — at the mercy of the latter-day Herods? Who condemn entire religions? Who fear and loathe strangers?

It’s been a banner year for fear and loathing, xenophobia and racism. What has made the year genuinely ominous is the emergence of fictions presented (often, but hardly exclusively, by Donald Trump) as facts that legitimize a sense of both grievance and hatred: New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11; the quarter-million Syrians that the Obama administration is planning to bring in; a wave of black-on-white homicide. Concoctions all, but credible enough to the sizable share of Republicans who also believe the president is a Kenyan Muslim. Fed by talk radio, Fox News and paranoid websites, millions of our compatriots dwell in a parallel universe of alternative realities. My colleague Dana Milbank has noted that the fashion among conservatives is to dismiss hard facts that clash with their alternative realities as “politically correct.” That’s Republicanese for “empirically correct” — verifiable by research, but at odds with the stories they’ve created to justify their rage. 

Such right-wing fictions have always hovered on the fringes of the body politic, but what has enabled them to go more mainstream is the sense of displacement — from their previous position as a majority race, a thriving class, a dominant religion — that is now widespread among the white working class Trumpites and the evangelical Christians flocking to Ted Cruz’s banner. The mission of right-wing media and pols has been to exaggerate some of that displacement (the threat to white America), play down other parts of it (the evisceration of blue-collar living standards by corporate America) and lay the blame for it all on minorities, foreigners, liberals, feminists, gays — you know the list.  [snip]

Enmities, and most certainly not love, have become the core of the right’s appeal and message this year, not just in the United States but also across Europe. They may well sweep Trump or Cruz to the Republican nomination; they have already infused the entire party with bigoted perspectives that will be hard to disclaim.

They are most surely at odds with the spirit of Christmas. Walls on the border, religious tests for admission, despising the poor — good thing Joseph and Mary didn’t have to encounter our modern-day defenders of the right as they scrambled from one country to another, desperate to save their son’s life.

It's too much to expect that this connection would ever be made by the supporters of Donald "Rump" Trump, Sen. "Tailgunner Ted" Cruz or any of the other demagogues, cranks and small- bore xenophobes and bigots running for the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid/ Shooter's Party nomination.  Their supporters are hunkered down in a right- wing "parallel universe of alternative realities" that's been created for them over decades by a cynical, pandering political structure (aided and abetted by a puerile, cowardly "mainstream media").  They're angry (at the wrong people), aggrieved (for the wrong reasons) and fearful (of the wrong things), and the sad fact is they're not coming out of their parallel universe into the one the rest of us know.

Keeping Track Of Number One And Number Two

In his continuing series "Nuremberg Comes To...", here's your Republican "presidential" front- runner, in Michigan:

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Donald Trump used vulgar language as he attacked Hillary Clinton during a rally on Monday night, saying her use of the restroom at the last Democratic debate was "too disgusting" to talk about and that in 2008 she got "schlonged" by Barack Obama when he defeated her in the Democratic primary.

Standing before a crowd of 7,500, Trump recounted how Clinton was seconds late to the Democratic debate stage on Saturday night following a commercial break. Trump asked the crowd four times where Clinton had gone.

Then the drooling dimwits cheered!

"I know where she went -- it's disgusting, I don't want to talk about it," Trump said, screwing up his face, as the crowd laughed and cheered. "No, it's too disgusting. Don't say it, it's disgusting."

Rump would certainly know disgusting when he sees it, every morning in the mirror and looking out at his crowds.

No doubt after a few "Sieg heils!", the slack- jawed crowd goose-stepped home.

In the meantime, let's see what the very slimy number 2 (yes) Sen. "Tailgunner Ted" Cruz has been up to:

Conservative Christian activists whose support has been hotly pursued by Republican presidential candidates have begun to quietly coalesce around Sen. Ted Cruz — a major boost for his efforts to present himself as the leading challenger to front-runner Donald Trump.

Members of this core GOP constituency have long been torn between several favorites in the party’s crowded field. But many organization leaders have decided in recent days to line up behind Cruz (Tex.) because they consider him the best-funded and most electable social conservative in the race, according to several participants in the discussions.  [snip]

Since the Dec. 7 meeting, endorsements have been announced by influential figures such as James Dobson, a radio host who founded Focus on the Family; Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage; and Bob Vander Plaats, head of the Iowa Family Leader organization.

The next gathering will take place a few days after Christmas at a remote ranch in central Texas, where Cruz, his wife and several key financial backers will visit with some of the country’s most prominent evangelical leaders for private conversations and a public rally.  [snip]

Participants said the effort was organized in part by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who has long urged Christian conservatives to pick a consensus presidential candidate early in the nomination process.  (our emphasis)

Well, he certainly is working to corner the market on the Southern Poverty Law Center's designated hate groups.  It was a ("traditional") marriage made in heaven: the evangelical "Christian" snake oil salesmen and Cruz, the political snake oil salesman.

So, to summarize:  the front- runner is a neo- fascist, nitwit, misogynist demagogue, and the number 2 (yes again) is a theocratic, hate- group pursuing, smarmy demagogue.  What a choice, Republicans!

BONUS:  No surprise to anyone with a pulse and a brain, Rump's the most disgusting Liar of the Year, or of any other year.

Starbucks' "War On Christmas"? - A Latte Nonsense

The ever- aggrieved dimbulbs are at it again.  This time, it's Starbucks' choice of a plain red Christmas holiday season coffee cup, rather than one adorned by snowflakes, reindeer and other relevant symbols of... Jesus? Here's Petula Dvorak:

The devout went wild. One after another, folks declared on Facebook and other social media that they’ve had their last nonfat vanilla latte.

One pastor urged caffeinators who didn’t want to boycott Starbucks to tell baristas that their names are “Merry Christmas” when they order their drinks, forcing them to write it (probably “Mary Krysmus”) on their cups.  [snip]

This? This is what Christmas is all about?

I’m willing to concede that there is a war on Christmas. The real Christmas.

If Christmas is about honoring the birth of an impoverished child to a homeless couple who must eventually flee a tyrant to keep their baby safe, then, yes, there is a war on Christmas.

If Christmas is about peace, joy, generosity, thankfulness and goodwill among people, then yes, there is a war on Christmas.

But this Starbucks frenzy is a faux war on a faux Christmas.

In a country where 15 million children sometimes don’t have enough to eat, how could any real Christian conclude that the color of coffee cups deserves their outrage? Only in honor of the faux Christmas.

In a nation where 22 percent of our children live in poverty, why would any churchgoer care about a local shopping mall’s decision to go with “glacier” themed decorations this winter instead of red/green/Santa/trees? Only in honor of the faux Christmas.

Across the globe, children are walking hundreds of miles to escape unspeakable violence, and red cups are supposed to command our attention and advocacy? Only in honor of the faux Christmas.

Mocha ado over nothing?  A latte nonsense?  Sure, but to the "God and guns" culture warriors on the right, everything that can be perceived as an insult to their cherished beliefs will be (Starbucks also earned the wrath of gun fondlers when they asked patrons to not come strapped when they come in to order -  the horror!).

These are the same people who call themselves pro-life, as long as we're talking about prenatal life;  once you're out of the womb, you're on your own, Jack!

These are the same people who don't believe affordable health care is everyone's right.

These are the same people who want to deport 11 million men, women and children in this country because of the language they speak and the shade of their skin.

But, take the reindeer and snowflakes off the Starbucks cups?  It's war!

Jesus would weep.

UPDATE:  Given the faux nature of this "war," who better to volunteer for action than the faux candidate, the very devout Donald "Rump" Trump.

Scary Gay People! Run For Your Lives!

Lights!  Camera!  Bigots!

Courtesy of Right Wing Watch, here's a trailer for a movie called "Light Wins," shedding light (complete with lantern -- get it?) on the "gay agenda" conspiracy to "criminalize Christianity." Did you know Christianity was going to be criminalized?  Neither did we.  But we're not on medication, either.

The filmmakers propagandists have gathered an assortment of small-bore, Bible-banging drama queens talibangelist bigots purporting to be "Christians" fulminating in garish terms about the hellfire about to be visited on 'murrica because of... Teh Gheys.  Not to mention the faux sense of victimization. Hmmm.... we smell another right-wing grift coming to a theater near you -- another fleecing of the sheep.  So, come for potential Republican presidential candidate and fully-realized asswhistle Mike "Hucksterbee" Huckabee at approximately 1:21, but stay for the "dividing of sheep and goats" at approximately 3:04.  Ladies and gentlemen, behold the grifting of the fearful hive mind of the "Christian" Republican right (Warning:  scary-scary sound effects):

Teabagger Values Cartoon of the Day

(click to enlarge)

We've seen the images of angry, vengeful teabaggers from California to Texas who have tried to block buses carrying unaccompanied children from Central America, with some inevitable cases of mistaken identity (see post below).  We'd bet that these teabaggers would be the first to proclaim, loudly and insistently, that they are devoted, Bible-as-literal-truth Christians.  They're just hypocrites, of course, who cherry pick their "principles" when it suits their political/social prejudices.

BONUS:  Here's just one example of how wingnut prejudices and stupidity have sabotaged a humane effort to help some of these children, with special kudos to jackass extraordinaire and Stupidest Man on the Internet Jim Hoft and "guest blogger" Kristinn "But Definitely Not Christian" Taylor.

(cartoon: Jeff Danziger, via Gocomics.com)

Ralph Reed, Humping for "Value Voters'" Bucks Again

On the heels of the Sanford Saga, former Christian Coalition choirboy and huckster Ralph Reed is talking about a comeback, presumably to vacuum out the pockets of Rethug base holy rollers, according to Washington Monthly. (Check out the cred Ralphie brings to the table in the form of his conversations with Jack Abramoff about cleaning up in the corporate world since the bucks from the Christian right were drying up.)

(Photo: Ralph Reed, laughing all the way to the bank?)

Praise Th' Lord, And Pass Th' Waterboard

One of the more interesting phenomena of American life is the fact that people who identify as fundamentalist, conservative Christians are the most likely to support military adventures abroad and, it now appears, torture. In a survey conducted by the Pew organization, 54 percent of the Bible-thumpers said that torture was "often" or "sometimes" justified in the interrogation of suspected terrorists. Ah yes, such good Christians.

Actually, listening to the sermons of Southern evangelical or pentecostal "ministers" would break any terrorist quicker than waterboarding.