Jan Brewer continues the Palin legacy as the new bumbling oddity.  Just painful.  Watch it:

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Why is there fear of Sharia Law in America?

Will someone answer this question for me?  What is wrong with being a Muslim?  There are Muslim doctors, lawyers, teachers, policemen and women.  There is a Muslim congressman from the great state of Minnesota named Keith Ellison.  We encounter Muslim Americans in every facet of American life.  They are part of the American tapestry.  When did it become un-American to be a Muslim?

52% of conservative Americans believe Barack Obama wants to institute Sharia Law.  I’m sure if you also asked those polled what Sharia law is, they couldn’t tell you.  Since it’s associated with Islam and Muslims, it must be terrible– and this president must be in support of it.  Everyday more of his American identity evaporates in the eyes of these people–if it were even there at all.  Why?  Even in the face of substantial proof–evidence that is insurmountable–these people insist on painting the president as some foreign enemy of the state.

Where is the media culpability in this? Fox News pushes a bitter narrative, asking questions about Obama’s American legitimacy and his faith.  They allow this meme to be explored on a routine basis.  They harbor vicious anti-Muslim views, and foster an unseemly climate of Islamophobia.   Yet one of their major shareholders is a Saudi Prince named Al-Waleed bin Talal– a man who owns a 7 percent share of NewsCorp, parent company of Fox News.  A man who contributes heavily to Islamic groups Fox conservatives believe are terrorist organizations.  A man who in his homeland of Saudi Arabia, rules UNDER Sharia Law.  Where is their outrage?

Shouldn’t Sean Hannity be condemning this bold expansion of the Sharia law in American media?  If right-wingers fear Sharia tentacles tethering themselves to American institutions, why not start with rebelling against the power structure at Fox News?

These people are not defenders of American justice.  They hide behind euphemistic attacks–which are not only cowardly– they’re craven and treasonous.  They are dishonoring their patriotism, perverting it in order to gain political advantage.

When Byron York, staunch blue-blood right-wing pundit indulges in fantastically simplistic reporting, by placing blame directly on the president–he noted that Obama has brought much of this on himself by choosing to play golf or basketball Sunday mornings, rather than attend church–you realize just how cynical and foolish the tone of this debate is.   I did not realize that is what made one a Christian. You must attend church on Sundays. If Americans need this type of affirmation– seeing video clips of the president attending church to answer questions– perhaps they have the wrong questions.    Amazing.  Some of us are choosing to embrace religious radicalism to support our notions of nationalism.  That’s not the America I know.

These people are cowering in fear.  They are racing to a corner of self-doubt and pity, trying to resist change.  There they are, waving flags of self- pity and anger because of their reticence to accept the wave of change on the precipice.

This isn’t what this country is about.  It’s not how we were founded.  If Islamist fundamentalists choose to burn bibles and American flags, should we met their wretchedness and hatred with our own?  No, and that is what makes us better than the enemy.

This is where we find ourselves.  Struggling to discern who we are as a people and a nation.  We used to have an identity.  We used to stand for something righteous, mighty, and right.  We used to stand proudly for tolerance–at least most forward thinking Americans did.  We used to debate fairly, cogently, and intelligently.  Now we’ve become an empty husk, filling with anger, mistrust, hatred and fear.  Now we disavow our own laws callously in order to marginalize some of our citizens.  We should be better than this.

America stands for something more because we don’t devalue our idealistic principles, and we don’t deviate from our values.  We set the pace for virtuous action, and let others follow our example.  Our discourse has been hijacked by pretend patriots, who’ve warped constitutional moralities into fluid, politically expedient landmines.  America is better than this.

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Think Progress makes the case in the affirmative:

Newsweek reveals the most concrete evidence yet that this campaign is serving to bolster support for Islamic radicalism abroad. In an interview with the magazine, a Taliban operative going by the name Zabihullah said that, by “preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor.” He goes on to explain that the anti-mosque campaign is providing the Taliban with “with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” Another Taliban official expects that the anti-mosque campaign will provoke a “new wave of terrorist trainees from the West,” similar to suspected Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad. Zabihullah concludes, the “more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get”:

Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,” Taliban operative Zabihullah tells NEWSWEEK. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) “It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” [...]

Taliban officials say they’re looking forward to a new wave of terrorist trainees from the West like this year’s Times Square car bomber. “I expect we will soon be receiving more American Muslims like Faisal Shahzad who are looking for help in how to express their rage,” says a Taliban official who was a senior minister when the group ruled Afghanistan and who remains active in the insurgency. As an indication of the anger that is growing among some Muslims in the West, this official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, mentions the arrest of three Canadian Muslims in Ontario last week on charges of plotting to build and detonate improvised explosive devices. (A fourth individual was arrested in Ottawa last Friday in connection with the case.) The Ground Zero furor will likely add to that anger. “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get,” Zabihullah predicts.

It’s not difficult to see the how terror organizations would used our own fear and ignorance against us.  It just seems too easy of an assumption to make–after all, radical Islamists need no additional motivation to strike Americans.  What the Mosque fiasco is however, is the latest example of manufactured fear-mongering on the part of some in this country.  It is an overreach, most certain to sully our reputation even further in the Muslim world.  But I’m quite certain that’s exactly the way conservative war hawks want it.  It makes it easier to load rocket launchers.

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Chris Wallace: “Do you regret having called [Obama] a racist and saying he had a deep seated hatred for white people?”

“Of course I do. I don’t want to retract the, um … I want to amend that I think it is much more of a theological question, that he is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim. ‘Racist,’ first of all, it shouldn’t have been said. It was poorly said. I have a big fat mouth sometimes and I say things. That’s just not the way people should behave. And it was not accurate. It is liberation theology that has shaped his world view.”  Glenn Beck

Oh boy.  Why is Glenn Beck considered the arbiter of faith in America?  Glenn Beck is not a prophet.  He was not delivered from on high, offering a message of restoration and sacrifice.  Beck is no inheritor of America’s religious promise as he claims to be.

Beck is a fraud.  In fact, his deliverance did not come from wanting to save America from wandering in darkness.  It could not have, because Beck is culpable of driving us there.   He is partly responsible for the divisive nature of our politics.

Listening to Beck wax incoherently with Chris Wallace yesterday, I felt an immediate urge to wretch.  Beck wants “people of faith to reclaim the movement (civil rights) from politics.”  He says “People of faith believe you should have equal rights to justice.”  That sounds grand in theory.  If only Mr. Beck practiced this, maybe he would be taken more seriously.  For a guy who’s appointed himself a civil rights paragon, he sure has a colorful history of racially charged, uncivil rhetoric.   He is too duplicitous on the issue to know what he is talking about.

Here’s another problem.  Beck wants people to reclaim civil rights.  The Civil Rights Movement was about equality in the face of oppression and degradation.  Of course in Beck’s usual hallucinatory rants on his radio and television shows, he equates the 1960′s civil rights movement with some form of treasonous paganism–an un-American fiat led by socialists and communists.  It’s Becks lack of authenticity that casts doubt on all of his actions–and degrades any nobility that may be hidden in his motives.  It was Glenn Beck who called Martin Luther King a communist.  It is Glenn Beck who’s misguided understanding of what civil rights mean lead him to  confuse freedom and economic oppression with manufactured partisan anger.  He’s no fan of liberation theology.  Well, that’s what the movement was.

You cannot simply co-opt the a movement without embracing its core ideology.  To do so is asinine, and emphatically arrogant.  Then again, I would expect nothing less from Beck–A man short on real solutions, yet full of anecdotal barbs laced with retrograde intolerance and derision.

Real struggle– amidst intolerance and death– is what the movement was based upon.  Beck is a clown prince, perverting the very idea of real equality and liberation–and championing the perceived sleights tea partiers feel from their government. There is no honor or civility in that.  Just arrogance and ignorance.

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“I can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead,”

Indeed.  Thank you Mr. President.

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In honor of what true American spirit looks like– and what real struggle and sacrifice embody– here is the “I Have a Dream Speech,” by Martin Luther King Jr. in it’s entirety.

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The sheer number of manufactured controversies by the media this year has been nothing short of astonishing.  Rachel Maddow manages to shed light on them as part of a bigger narrative–  The white fear meme:

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As Glenn Beck claims the mantle of 21st century shaman of black America, I must pause to give a little background on this farcical new display.  The majority of Beck’s audience probably has no clue whatsoever about the black American struggle inherent in the fabric of American history.  It is nice to know that Mr. Beck can fill them in on the minute details.

Beck’s performance here can be summed up best as specious, arrogant, factual inaccurate, and borne of a propagandist bent.  He doesn’t seek to enlighten anyone.  Instead, he chooses to encourage the wrong type of debate.  For reasons I cannot explain (probably ratings), Beck has become proficient at painting himself as the clown prince of historical moralizing.  I weep for his audience.  Then again, those people get what they deserve.  Watch the inanity below:

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The past two years have resulted in the most bizarre incongruities and hypocritical stances by leading conservatives (deficit reduction, stimulus spending, preserving the constitution, religious tolerance), and their media mouth piece Fox News.  This, in a nutshell, sums all of them up.  John Stewart:

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Video footage from the anti-Mosque rally at Ground Zero.  This rally is also anti-Muslim, anti-tolerance, and anti-American.  Watch the sheeple turn rabidly on a black man who has the unfortunate distinction of “looking Muslim.” Sad.

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