Leftist Jihad Unleashed on Rick Santorum

Now, you need to understand first of all that Rick Santorum is just an ordinary, Church-attending Catholic. He is no different in his beliefs, speech or actions than tens of millions of other Catholics in the demographic of weekly attenders. He is no more conservative than - oh, say roughly 100 million other American Christians. He is completely mainstream. He doesn't believe in abortion because it is the taking of a human life, he rejects artificial contraception because it separates sex from family and he believes that there is actually good and evil in the world.

But, you see, he has risen in the polls and now stands a very good chance of becoming President of the United States. So, the liberal jihad must be unleashed on him. Maureen Dowd, that lapsed-Catholic turned Catholic-hating bigot from the New York Times has a headline today "Rick Santorum's Religious Fanaticism." This is an example of liberal jihad. It is intolerance and visceral hatred of the Church, of Christ and of any deviation from the liberal fascist agenda.

If you are a serious Christian in politics you are a threat to the liberal fascist order. Chris Matthews yesterday called openly for a Franklin Graham to be blacklisted as a TV guest. This is new. Usually the blacklist is not made public. So this is a new development and portends evil days ahead. The media is all in a flap because Rick Santorum referred to Satan in a speech in 2008 at a Catholic university where everybody believes in Satan. Erick Erickson thinks it was likely a Romney camp leak to the media in an attempt to damage Santorum. By the way, if it was then if Romney wins using those tactics then he deserves merciless mocking about Morman underwear and so forth for the next nine months. And, if he gets the nomination, that is what he will get from the liberal media. It will serve him right. Live by bigotry, die by bigotry.

But the real story here is how ignorant the media is about religion. Honestly, as Sarah Palin said yesterday, didn't any of them ever go to Sunday School? Well, the problem is that none of the leftist media every did get any religious training. They have been brought up in a little secular bubble and they have very little experience of the lives of the majority of their fellow-citizens, except in crude, comic-book style caricatures.

By the way, Chris Matthews tried to make himself look balanced, rather than fascist, (nice try!) by contrasting Franklin Graham (bad) with his father Billy Graham (good). The take-away is that leftists believe that the only good conservative is a dead conservative. It is safe to pretend that you respect Billy Graham because he is not around to denounce your fascism. It is the same with Barack Obama's obscene pretense of having respect for Ronald Reagan. Obama hates with a passion every single thing Reagan stood for and cared about but he tries to pretend to be a "Reaganesque" figure. Sadly, he just comes off as a phoney and a hypocrite.

Coming back to Santorum; you knew that all this was coming. It was as predictable as the sun rising. Rick Santorum is no more scary this week than he was before he won Colorado, but now he threatens the left-wing's anointed Republican candidate, Mitt Romney. Speaking of Romney, why does the left want him to be the Republican nominee so badly? There are three reasons I can think of off the top of my head. First, they know he can't attack Obama on the main issue in Obama's record: Obamacare. So that is a relief to the Obama campaign. Second, they are just salivating about the opportunity to run against a rich guy. The dogs of Occupy are straining at the leash waiting to be released on on him. Third, Romney will depress the conservative base and that is the way Obama won the first time.

Rick Santorum is a normal, decent, family man and a believing Christian. I think he will make a wonderful president. One thing you have to give him; he has all the right enemies.

Newt Exposes the Media's Anti-Catholic Bias

Give Newt Gingrich credit for exposing the anti-Christian bias of the secular media and highlighting the fact that it is the Christian Church that is facing more bias and discrimination than homosexuals are today.

Last night, in answer to a typically loaded question by the moderator, Gingrich said:

"I just want to raise -- since we spent this much time on these issues, I just want to raise the point about the news media bias. You don't hear the opposite question asked. Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won't accept gay couples which is exactly what the state has done. Should the Catholic Church be driven out of providing charitable services in the District of Columbia because it won't give in to bigotry? Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivering of service because of the bias of the administration? The bigotry question goes both ways. There's a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. None of it gets covered by the news media."

You can see the video clip of this answer here. The point is that the secular media is not interested literally in "bias" or "discrimination" or "fairness," but rather in advancing the sexual revolution agenda and undermining the foundations of our culture. That is the real problem.

By the way, Mitt Romney had a great line too. He said that when he was Governor of Massachusetts the Supreme Court found that the Constitution required the state to recognize marriage between two people of the same sex. Then he said, "John Adams, the author of the Constitution would undoubtedly be very surprised to hear that!" No doubt.

Ed Shultz Falsely Accuses Perry of Racism and Tries to Brazen It Out After Getting Caught Twisting His Words

Wow! As I noted yesterday, Ed Shultz was caught red-handed by Breitbart TV selectively editing a clip of a Rick Perry speech and then accusing him of racism on the basis of something he never even said. So, having been caught red-handed on tape with the whole world able to see what he did on the internet, what does Shultz do?

He should have been suspended from MSNBC or, more appropriately, been fired. But no, all he did was apologize for selectively editing the clip and playing the unedited clip. But he never said a single word about his unfounded, unjust, slanderous, false accusation against Perry! He never even acknowledged that he called him a racist. He just left that little detail out altogether.

All I can say is: wow! If this is a taste of what is to come, the Republicans had better buckle up their seat belts. The Obama hate machine is oiled and tested and ready to go. Civil discourse? Not from the liberal side I'm afraid. It is open season on conservatives.

Francis Schaeffer Hit Piece in the New Yorker

The liberal media elites who think they run America really seem to hate Evangelicals. But that is not surprising to me; what surprises me is that they simultaneously think that Evangelicals are the single biggest threat to their Progressive vision for America and at the same time not worth studying or even attempting to understand. More American progressives speak Arabic than Baptist. They wouldn't know the difference between a Southern Baptist and a Pentecostal or between puritanism and pietism.

Therefore, whenever they venture into the "expose" mode of breathless reporting how a secret Evangelical cabal is right on the verge - on the verge I tell you! - of turning America into a Puritan Theocracy, they come off sounding like lazy Jr. High schoolers who got some stuff off the internet the night before and threw together a history essay. They make the Czarist authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion look like master historians.

Ryan Lizza is out to get Michelle Bachmann, as any card-carrying member of the media elite (AKA the Obama communications team) would be. And he thinks he has some real down and dirty dope on her due to her connection to a shadowy, theocratic, underground figure no one has heard of but who, he Lizza, is about to reveal to the world. Not since Hilary blamed the "vast right wing conspiracy" for Bill not being able to keep his zipper up, has such shocking evidence of the anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-all that is good and sweet in the world right-wing, male, homophobic, bigots (which is, admittedly, to indulge in serial redundancies) emerged. The Dominionists are coming! And it is not an invasion of Canadians, either.

Lizza is smacked down by two excellent articles. First, Joe Carter at First Things administers a little lesson in journalism. This article is too good to summarize. Read it here.

Here is a sample of one of Carter's lesson:

If Lizza had done his homework he would have found that Diamond’s mid-1980s “scholarship” is neither timely nor credible. For example, Diamond bases her contention that Schaeffer is a “dominionist” on his book A Christian Manifesto. The problem is that rather than claiming that “Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns”—Schaeffer says exactly the opposite:

[W]e must make definite that we are in no way talking about any kind of theocracy. Let me say that with great emphasis. Witherspoon, Jefferson, the American Founders had no idea of a theocracy. That is made plain by the First Amendment, and we must continually emphasize the fact that we are not talking about some kind, or any kind, of a theocracy.

In the Old Testament there was a theocracy commanded by God. In the New Testament, with the church being made up of Jews and Gentiles, and spreading all over the known world from India to Spain in one generation, the church was its own entity. There is no New Testament basis for a linking of church and state until Christ the King returns. The whole “Constantine mentality” from the fourth century up to our own day was a mistake. . . . Making Christianity the official state religion opened the way for confusion up till our own day. But through the centuries it has caused great confusion between loyalty to the state and loyalty to Christ, between patriotism and being a Christian. We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way: “We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag.”

By the way, the first paragraph of this quote can be found on the Wikipedia page for Schaeffer. Had Lizza merely been as diligent as a college freshman plagiarizing a term paper he would have discovered his error.

Barry Hankins, who has written a good book on Schaeffer, which is critical but fair, has his own piece here. Here is my favorite quote from his article:

The truth quite different from Lizza’s macro-indictment of all things evangelical. Schaeffer had a brief flirtation with Rushdoony's thought in the Sixties, but not with the Reconstructionist/Dominionist vision of Old Testament civil law. Rather, like some other evangelical figures, Schaeffer was enamored with Rushdoony's analysis of where, when, and how western civilization allegedly abandoned the moral standards of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Shocking, isn't it? Thinking that the West has abandoned the moral standards of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Simply preposterous. So, I wonder if Ryan Lizza thinks that John Paul the Great and Alexander Solzhenitsyn are also Dominionists because they believed that Western civilization abandoned the moral standards of the Judeo-Christian tradition because, as Solzhenitsyn put it in his famous Harvard Commencement Address, A World Split Apart: "men forgot God."

I guess it's a good thing John Paul the Great and Solzhenitsyn are dead; the republic can rest easy - except for that pesky woman from Minnesota who won't shut up, which is the only reason Lizza is ploughing through all this dumb theology in the first place.

When so-called "journalists" jump from "Michelle Bachmann likes Francis Schaeffer" to "Francis Schaeffer is a dangerous theocrat who wants to overthrow the government" to "anyone who supports Bachmann is a threat to America," - the end is nigh.

Ed Shultz Deliberately Twists Perry's Words to Make Him Appear Racist

If you want to see how dirty the upcoming US presidential election is going to be, just watch Ed Shultz brazenly edit a clip of a Rick Perry speech to make it appear that Perry said something he never said. Watch it here.

MSNBC, or as it is better known, the communications department of the perpetual Obama election campaign, is not only slanted and biased. It is downright deceptive and evil. This sort of accusation - racism - is effective because conservatives are fundamentally decent people who despise racism and take accusations of racism very seriously. This makes us susceptible to the big lie when it comes out of the Obama propaganda machine.

From now on we should assume, as our default position, that liberal attacks on conservatives as "racist" are mere projection from the other side. They actually are the ones preoccupied with racial issues. It was Biden who said that a negro who is clean and articulate is a 'dream.' It was Chris Matthews who said that when listening to Obama he forgot he was black. It is liberals who favor reverse discrimination (affirmative action) and who stand for racial quotas on everything.

No one should believe them and no one should be intimidated by their shrill, crude, amateurish attempt to push the "Big Lie."

I am disgusted by Ed Shultz. If Obama does not denounce him and disassociate himself from this kind of twisting of the truth, but simply chooses to profit from it and keep quiet, then Obama is nearly as bad as Shultz himself.

The CBC Tries to Pin the Norway Murders on "Christian Fundamentalists"

Ezra Levant has a terrific 9 minute monologue on the media coverage of the Breivik murders in Norway. He shows footage from the CBC that identifies him as a "Christian fundamentalist" and then he gives quotes from his internet manifesto that clearly show (1) that Breivik knew what a Christian fundamentalist is and (2) that Breivik was not a Christian fundamentalist. Insofar as he could be said to be anything (because his manifesto is rambling and incoherent consisting of cut and paste excerpts from everyone from Dan Brown to Charles Darwin to Ghandi to Mark Steyn) he could more plausibly be described as a liberal Protestant.



Here is also a segment of Levant's show in which he interviews Michael Coren about the story. They make it crystal clear that this tragic event has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity, fundamentalist or otherwise.



The liberal media coverage of this event has been downright creepy.

The New York Times Continues Its Relentless Assault

The orchestrated campaign of villifying and smearing Christians and Christianity continues at the New York Times. Today in an op ed column Roger Cohen becomes completely unhinged.

"Breivik has many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic. Theirs is the poison in which he refined his murderous resentment. The enablers include Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who compared the Koran to "Mein Kampf" on his way to 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 election; the surging Marine Le Pen in France, who uses Nazi analogies as she pours scorn on devout Muslims; far-rightist parties in Sweden and Denmark and Britain equating every problem with Muslim immigration; Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, who have found it politically opportune to target "creeping Shariah in the United States" at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein; U.S. church pastors using their bully pulpits week after week to say America is a Christian nation under imminent threat from Islam."

How delusional is Cohen? Consider this sentence:

European Christendom in this context is a mirror image of the idealized caliphate of Osama bin Laden.

European Christendom is the same as the idealized caliphate of bin Laden? There are only two possibilities to explain this kind of delusional statement. One is that Cohen is simply ignorant of history. The other is that Cohen is willfully distorting the facts of history in order to demonize the greatest culture in history so he can help destroy it and replace it with a Utopian dreamworld invented by some madman named Marx. If so, he wouldn't be the first.

If he really means what he says, he is an enemy of science, progress, reason, faith and all the blessings of the Western world. He and Osama bin Laden have a lot in common.

There is nothing new about these tactics. They are part of the playbook of the Left. As Timothy Birdnow notes:

So now Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Newt Gingrich, Peter King are all the equivalent of Breivik and Osama Bin Laden; monsters itching to kill! kill! kill! Subhuman brutes on the verge of genocide. And any attempt to defend ourselves is an act of aggression against a harmless people who just happen to cut off heads, blow up pizza parlors and airplanes, etc. No! The real villains are those E-VIL right wingers who say "you will not destroy us".

We have seen this in liberals at least since the assassination of John Kennedy; Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist, yet liberals have invented all manner of conspiracy theories pinning his murder on the Right. Yet when John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan it was a disturbed man to the media. We've had Timothy McVeigh pinned on Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio, yet Major Hassan's little Allah Akbar! moment was said to have nothing to do with radical Islam. (McVeigh was a Nazi, an atheist, and by his own admission a man of the Left.) Remember the leftist who flew his plane into the Texas IRS building? He was immediately linked to the Tea Parties by the left and their lapdog media. Remember the Missouri Fusion Center report? Remember the DHS report warning of "conservative terrorists", people like returning veterans, Christians, pro-lifers, etc.? There has been an ongoing effort to demonize good, normal Americans. And there has been an even longer attempt to destroy Christianity, the cornerstone of Western Civilization. Promoting the idea of a "parity of evil" between religions, the notion that Islam and Christianity are just as malignant, is a high priority for the Left, particularly the atheistic Left.

Somebody tell the Daily Worker it can stop publication; its role in American journalism has been taken over by the New York Times.

By the way, a Muslim soldier who was AWOL was arrested today near Fort Hood with bomb making materials in his motel room and a pistol and "Muslim extremist literature" in his backpack. As a Muslim he had refused to go to Afghanistan because it would mean fighting fellow-Muslims. He was also under investigation for child pornography.

The headline? "Soldier's Arrest Revives Fears at Fort Hood."

At least it wasn't: "Terrorist Belonging to a Religion Exactly Like Christianity Arrested."

More on the Mendacity of the New York Times

This time the Wall Street Journal points out the deceptive, manipulative, lies of the New York Times as it attempts to use the human tragedy of mass murder by a madman to discredit Christianity and conservative bloggers:

In an editorial today, the New York Times issues a demand to the anti-Islam bloggers whose work Norway terror defendant Anders Breivik cited in his manifesto:

Mr. Breivik appears to have been deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about Islam's supposed threat to Western civilization. Their tendency to paint law-abiding Muslims with the same brush as extremists is repugnant. They need to categorically denounce Mr. Breivik's depravity.

OK, here's Robert Spencer on Saturday: "SIOA and SIOE [Stop Islamization of America and Stop Islamization of Europe] declare our sympathy for the victims and relatives of the victims of the heinous mass murders in Norway. We denounce the attacker and reiterate our dedication to the defense of free societies and opposition to all vigilantism and violence."

And here's Pamela Geller, also on Saturday: "He is a murderer, a mass murderer. Period. He's not anything else. He is sick, sick to death and he has aided the enemy in so many ways it defies comprehension. Anyone who would kill children is insane. And if he's a right winger who hates Muslims, how does that translate into killing a bunch of political youth party Workers' Youth League? . . . I despise savagery and inhumanity in any all instances. Period. This abject loser lowered himself to sub-human status."

One need not endorse Spencer's or Geller's views to acknowledge that they have already done what the Times demanded of them three days later. The Times's failure to acknowledge that is sloppy and dishonest.

A postscript: Yesterday we wrote that we did not know Spencer's religion. A reader points out that in a lengthy bio on his website, he says he is Catholic. If we'd have guessed, we'd have gotten it wrong. Another lesson in the importance of not jumping to conclusions.

I can only add this: the liberal attempt to blame conservatives for the Norway massacre has a secondary purpose besides the attempt to make Christians and conservatives look bad. It also deflects attention away from the culpability of the Left for the attack itself.

The mad policies of the culture of death and multiculturalism, which lead to the failure of a society to reproduce itself, and the naive Utopian belief that millions of Muslim immigrants can be brought into Western countries without being assimilated to the ethos of the West with no problems have created the conditions under which social peace is strained to the breaking point,. Those who have advocated such insane ideas should now take responsibility for the breakdown in social peace and civility. This is not to justify terrorism; it is to point out that the warnings conservatives have been issuing for years have not been heeded and violence has been the result. We wish liberals were willing to rethink multiculturalism precisely so that violence could be avoided.

When you meditate on the horror of terrorism - from both European and Islamic sources - remember that this is the entirely predictable fruit of policies the Left has convinced us to implement. So when will the editors of the New York Times apologize for their errors? When will they accept responsibility for the inevitable outcome of their policies? When will they apologize for mass murder in Norway?

Liberal Media Exploit Mass Murder to Take A Cheap Shot at Christians

You knew it was coming. Yet when it happens you still shake your head at the hate-filled, extremism that seeks every possible way to attack Christianity.

The New York Times ran this headline: "As Horrors Emerge, Norway Charges Christian Extremist."

It does not matter than he does not belong to a church.
It does not matter that he is not a believer in Christian doctrine.
It does not matter that Christianity condemns murder.
It does not matter that Christians the world over condemned the actions of this likely insane megalomaniac swiftly, totally and without reservation.

No, none of that matters. If the NYT gets a chance to frame a story in such a way as to make Christianity look bad it just salivates with lust for defamation and condemnation. Its moralistic "We told you so . . . Christians are evil" tone is repulsive and should be condemned by all reasonable people whether Christian or non-Christian.

Bill O'Reilly has an eloquent and hard-hitting defense of Christianity from the attacks of those who wish the world was rid of Jesus Christ.



If the Antichrist appeared tomorrow and sat with the New York Times for an interview, he could count on their endorsement. Can there be any doubt of that?

By the way, here are three more reasons why Breivik could not possibly be a Christian.

1. If he really was a Knight Templar he would never kill innocent civilians; his job would be to protect them.

2. If he was a Christian and felt called to fight he would join the army and serve in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban and Al-Quaida, which are violent armed groups threatening world peace.

3. If he was a Christian, he would not have left the political party that opposes high levels of Islamic immigration to Norway, which is to say that he would use democratic means of persuasion to work for a cause in which he believed. By resorting to terrorism he became as bad as what he (supposedly) opposes.

Hypocrisy Alert: Obama's Call for a New Civility and Union Violence

I can't resist pointing out how hypocritical the mainstream media is on the the issue of civility in public debate. When the tragic shooting of Gabrielle Giffords took place, the mainstream media exploited the situation to blame the right for creating an atmosphere of incitement in which violent acts could occur. All we heard for about two weeks was calls for civility and restraint in public speech. Sarah Palin was practically blamed for the act of a murderer just because she dared to use routine language about "battleground states" and "targeted races."

Now that the unions are fighting for their perks in Wisconson and other states and there is a need to fire up the left-wing troops, we are seeing just exactly who in today's America is wedded to violent rhetoric. From Lori Ziganto at Red State comes:

Yesterday, Massachusetts Democrat Representative Mike Capuano encouraged union members to go out in the streets and get a little bloody, as Guy Benson at TownHall reported earlier:

A Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts is raising the stakes in the nation’s fight over the future of public employee unions, saying emails aren’t enough to show support and that it is time to “get a little bloody.”

“I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary,” Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Ma.) told a crowd in Boston on Tuesday rallying in solidarity for Wisconsin union members. …

This is not Capuano’s first brush with violent rhetoric. Last month Capuano said, “Politicians, I think are too bland today. I don’t know what they believe in. Nothing wrong with throwing a coffee cup at someone if you’re doing it for human rights.”

Firstly, oh, the irony in saying that throwing a coffee cup – at a human – is okay if it’s for human rights. Secondly, I suppose if throwing a coffee cup and “getting a little bloody” are just fine and dandy, it’s no surprise that union thugs decided that throwing phones and hitting a woman are just as proper. Oh, the new civility at work!

I guess we will have to wait a while for the Huffington Post, Sojourners, Daily Kos and Chris Matthews to get all worked up about the threat to democracy posed by union thuggery.

But isn't it interested that when the Left wants a poster child for violence, they have to find a mentally-disturbed loner who isn't even a conservative like Jared Loughner, but to find a violent left-winger, you can easily find one right in Congress? That tells you which side is really wedded to violence. The only reason the Left (and their enablers in the media) so frequently accuse the Right of violence is to deflect attention from the blood on their own hands.

I'm Pretty Sure Rachel Maddow is a Racist

Shocking news from MSNBC. In an attempt to take on Fox directly in the ratings, it appears that MSNBC is competing with Fox in President Obama-bashing. First, we have Keith Olbermann making Rush Limbaugh look like a tongue-tied freshman who just can't find the words to get his point across as he rips Obama up one side and down the other.

Then we have Rachel Maddow attacking Obama like a crazed Fox commentator at a Tea Party rally!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Based on what I've learned from the mainstream media over the past year, I have to conclude that Rachel Maddow must be a racist. She is attacking the awesome wonderfulness that is Obama and he is a "black" president, right? She is a member of the white liberal media establishment, right? And no white person could be attacking a black president for any reason other than racism, right? I mean Maddow and Olbermann and everybody in the mainstream media told us a year ago that the only reason the Tea Party could be so anti-Obama is because of lingering, perhaps unconscious, racism. It couldn't be because they disagreed with their policies.

So when will Olbermann, Maddow and company openly confess their racism, resign in disgrace and renounce all criticism of the first black president? They were totally sincere when they detected Tea Party racism, weren't they?

Liberal Media Bias in Full View: Have They No Shame?

James Delingpole documents the smug hypocrisy of the New York Times and its pretense to objectivity. He notes that the NYT has decided to post the Wikileaks documents on its website and compares the statement on today's website explaining why to the one posted last year explaining why it would not be "responsible" for it to post the Climategate emails.

“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.” Andrew Revkin, Environment Editor, New York Times Nov 20, 2009.

“The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. The New York Times and a number of publications in Europe were given access to the material several weeks ago and agreed to begin publication of articles based on the cables online on Sunday. The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.” New York Times editorial 29/11/2010

Can you spot the difference between these two statements of high moral principle? Scott at the Powerline blog can. (H/T Bishop Hill/WUWT)He notes:

Interested readers may want to compare and contrast Revkin’s statement of principle with the editorial note posted by the Times on the WikiLeaks documents this afternoon. Today the Times cites the availability of the documents elsewhere and the public interest in their revelations as supporting their publication by the Times. Both factors applied in roughly equal measure to the Climategate emails.

Without belaboring the point, let us note simply that the two statements are logically irreconcilable. Perhaps something other than principle and logic were at work then, or are at work now.

Ah, but perhaps something other than principle and logic were at work. Now what could that possibly be . . . you don't suppose it could be ideological bias? Surely, the New York Times wouldn't let its left wing ideology determine it method of reporting the news? Say it ain't so, Joe . . .

The Real Threat of Islamic Theocracy and the Benign Christian Call for a Return to Traditional American Beliefs

This morning I read two stories which, when juxtaposed, illustrate neatly the schizophrenic character of the contemporary liberal media. They stew, fret and hyperventilate over the non-existent threat of a potential, future, Christian "take-over" of America while calmly and meekly accepting the dictatorship of Islamofascism in the here and now.

First, from Newsreel Blog:

In July we learned of anti-Christian sentiment against Sarah Palin in the media with the Journolist scandal. Leftist fear of Sarah Palin‘s Christianity continues to be a serious problem. Sources prominently held up as credible in the “mainstream” media have a deep fear and hatred of Sarah Palin based on her Christianity alone, and NRB has the video to prove it.

GodDiscussion.com bills itself as a voice of “reason” and “moderate” religion that seeks to “slay the dragons of fear” in America. In reality, they provide a textbook example of the Left‘s propensity to accuse conservatives of exactly what they themselves are guilty of. In the video below, you will hear a portion of GodDiscussion.com‘s October 7 BlogTalkRadio program featuring Military Religious Freedom Foundation [MRFF] board member Leah Burton. Burton speaks of how fearful she is of Sarah Palin specifically because of her Christianity.

Conservatives4Palin refers to Leah Burton as a “nutcase” who engages in “vintage fruitloopery“. That seems to be an accurate characterization given Burton’s claim that conservatives who say that America is a “Christian nation” are “extremists” and have a desire to rule America as some sort of protestant Christian theocracy. Nevertheless, MRFF is frequently cited by CNN and other news outlets, including the New York Times, as if they are credible voices.

Nobody I know would want a Christian theocracy for America unless you think that 1950s America was a Taliban-style Christian theocracy. But here is a real live Islamofascist who lives in London, England asserting that the flag of Islam will one day fly over the White House.



Then we have this story about the Washington Post pulling a "Non Sequitur" cartoon that gently mocks the Muslim ban on images of Mohammad by drawing a picture like the "Where's Waldo" ones and answers the question of what is the least likely title for a picture book by suggesting that it is "Where's Mohammad?" You can see the cartoon here. There is no image of Mohammad in the cartoon. I wouldn't even call it "mocking" anybody's faith; it is more like gentle teasing. Yet, it was self-censored by the Washington Post, which is obviously living in fear of Muslim violence.

So, one the one hand we have Christians like Sarah Palin calling for a revival of the Christian beliefs and values that have animated America throughout history and, on the other hand, we have radical, political Islam calling for America to become a theocracy like Iran. And the liberal media is scared by the former and accepting of the latter? That is just plain weird.

Stalin, the NY Times and Walter Duranty

The following post, "Crimes of the NY Times" by Vladimir Steblina, is from American Thinker. When you read about the NY Times slamming Pope Benedict XVI or Sarah Palin or whoever, just think of this story and think of how much credibility that paper actually has. The information in this post is completely true. If you want to read more about Stalin's manufactured famine in the Ukraine, try The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by distinguished historian, Robert Conquest.

The reference librarian's answer was brief and to the point "There is no record of it. It never happened. Your father lied."

My father had the misfortune to be born in June 1917 in the southern Ukraine. He spent the first thirty years of his life under Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler and survived them all. He never lived in a free country until we immigrated to America is 1956.

As I was growing up, my father told me stories of his life. They were not pleasant. Stories of the Red Army sweeping across the farm in 1926 and taking all the horses. The Communists returning a year later and confiscating the farm, shooting my grandmother, and making my father an orphan at the age of 10.

He told stories of surviving in the Black Sea marshes by fishing for pike and trapping ducks and other wildlife. The German army marched into the Ukraine in 1941. Here the stories included surviving summary execution by the Germans not once, but twice.

He went to Germany as a forced laborer and spent the war years there. The only funny story I can remember him telling is when the United States Air Force bombed the local brewery in Austria and the streets ran with beer for the drinking. Even that story had the backdrop of war.

But the story he always kept coming back to was the famine in the early 1930s. He had already been an orphan for five years when the Soviet government removed all food and seed stocks from the Ukrainian people, sealed their borders, and waited for them to die. And die they did, by the millions.

It was this story that prompted my visit to the library. I looked in the subject card catalog and could not find any books under the Ukrainian famine. So I went to ask the reference librarian and there got her "definitive" answer.

Like any son, I had issues with my father. But I never knew him to lie or overstate facts. At that time, I was the same age he was when the famine started. So I just chalked it up to a local famine that somehow got blown out of proportion in the telling.

Then, in the late 1980s, I received a phone call from my father. In an excited voice, he said "The truth is finally out. The world now knows the truth." I immediately knew what he was talking about. He was tired of people doubting his story, same as the rest of the Ukrainians who survived the famine only to have their stories denied. The Harvest of Despair documentary was shown on the local PBS station.

Further investigation brought to light the fact that New York Times reporter Walter Duranty knew of Stalin's murder of ten million people and refused to report it. To add insult to injury, Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize in the early 1930s for his reporting from the Soviet Union.

But it gets worse. A British reporter, Gareth Jones, discovered the truth and started writing stories about the famine. The New York Times published Walter Duranty's rebuttals, admitting that times were tough in the Soviet Union, but there was no Holodomor, or "murder by famine" killing millions of Ukrainians, even though the Ukrainians themselves knew the truth. America's "newspaper of record" with its worldwide reputation convinced the world that they, not Gareth Jones, had the story correct. And so people continued to die.

Nearly eighty years later, the New York Times has still refused to apologize to the Ukrainian people for its complicity in the murder of ten million people. They still hang Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize in their building.

The reference librarian was wrong. There is a record of it. It did happen. The New York Times lied, and ten million people died. My father told the truth.

For that I will never forgive the New York Times.

Nor should anyone.

The Leftist Media and the Times Square Bomber

Andrew Thomas at the American Thinker blog asks a legitimate question: "Did "left-wing media" trigger the Times Square Bomber?" He writes:

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say. If it is legitimate for the MSM to speculate on whether conservative talk radio and Fox News could inflame an unstable right-wing "nut case" into a violent act, then the opposite question can be posed as well. Was would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad "radicalized" by the incessant drumbeat of hatred toward George W. Bush by CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and left-wing talk radio for the years during which Shahzad was a US resident?

In 2004, Shahzad bought a house through real estate agent Igor Djuric. Asked about Shahzad, Djuric recently told a New York CBS affiliate, "He didn't like the war and he didn't like the president (Bush)." Djuric went on to say, "I'm a stranger and just met him and he mentioned that. Normally we don't go like that and tell strangers our feelings like that." Apparently, Shahzad had developed some strong emotional opinions, hateful enough to attempt the slaughter of hundreds of innocent Americans. Did the virulent hatred spewed by leftist MSM commentators push him into becoming a radical Islamic terrorist?

Obviously, there is no proof of this. On the other hand, has the lack of proof prevented President Obama and former President Clinton from decrying the potential for conservative commentators to incite violence? If, as Clinton recently stated, he believes the "right-wing media" and blogosphere could be culpable for any future politically-fueled extremism, then he must now admit that the "left-wing media" and blogosphere could be culpable for Faisal Shahzad.

It seems pretty obvious that the left-wing media hates Western ideals, Western history and Western religion. So it has that in common with Islamofascist terrorists. But the question of cause and effect is tricky. What may be said with little doubt, however, is that there is a moral complicity of the media insofar as it hates exactly that which most ordinary Western people love: freedom, personal moral responsibility, limited government, free enterprise and democracy.

So even if the leftist media did not actually "cause" this act of terrorism, it certainly bears some responsibility for creating an atmosphere in which more radical individuals would act as Shahzad did in this case. The atmosphere of hatred toward George Bush, Republicans, conservatives and all those who fail to endorse the leftist narrative of the West is palpable and irresponsible. It is as if the 1960s hippies took over major cultural institutions and imposed their drug-induced, logic-deprived, naive, utopian Marxism on those institutions. Come to think of it; that actually is what happened.

Mark Shea is Mad and He Isn't Going to Take it Anymore

Mark Shea is mad about the liberal media's shameless inquisitorial tactics, misleading half-truths, irresponsible journalism against Pope Benedict XVI and he isn't going to take it anymore. Good for him.

Reason doesn't seem to work with these people. Facts are brushed aside like annoying insects. Maybe they can be shamed. Probably not, but Mark gives it a good try in this article:

As the Mysterious Get Benedict Society campaign to destroy Pope Benedict XVI continues shooting itself in the foot with various false starts, half-baked stories, and tales told by mainstream media idiots, the thing that continues to impress me is the sheer self-contradictory irony of the thing. It's really quite crushing.

We are instructed (just as a pedophile priest might have told one of his victims) that our proper response to the media as Catholics ought to be gratitude for the massive eruption of unapologetic lies that have been told about Benedict over the past month because, you know, we depend on them as the mediators of truth and light, and we would live in darkness but for their ministrations. So yeah, even though they may have committed a few peccadilloes in the performance of their sacred duty, still it would be foul ingratitude for any Catholic to offer them anything but abject thanks for the debt we owe them in saving us. Indeed, we are to take it for granted that, with the sole exception of the fact that the MSM has pretty much gotten everything dead wrong in the whole "Benedict, the Nazi pope, protected perverts and endangered The Children" narrative it has ginned up for the past month, it mostly got everything right. On the other hand, those who question that narrative are "deflecting blame" and not taking that "searching and fearless inventory" of Benedict's wretched moral failings that the MSM are just about to discover after several false starts, lying headlines, and craptastic pieces of lousy reportage.

That much we talked about previously in this space.

But, nothing daunted by their ignorance and transparent malice, the MSM marches on in its war on Benedict, determined to get the Nazi pope, even if they have to completely throw aside all their journalistic ethics to do it.

Much of this is due to pride and vanity as much as to malice against Benedict and the Catholic Faith. When a journalista has documentably screwed up not just once but multiple times in his hysterical vendetta, he presses on, hoping that he can find some sort of dirt to prove that he is the brave crusading journalist and not a hack with a grudge who is afraid of looking stupid. So we keep getting a succession of dramatic "Ah-HA!" flourishes from the press, with the assurance that this time, for sure, they've nabbed the Nazi with the goods.

Read it all here. In all the anti-Catholic hysteria so far, I have not heard one word of apology from a media outlet for the outright lies and distortions they have printed in the cause of character assassination against Pope Benedict XVI. They won't acknowledge even a tiny bit or bias or even admit it when caught out in factual errors: they just move on to another 23 year old fabrication or whatever.

Do they realize that even atheists are beginning to find it all offensive and a bit ridiculous? Brendon O'Niell has an article in Spiked entitled "The Secular Inquisition" in which he says:

The New Atheist campaign to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested when he visits Britain later this year exposes the deeply disturbing, authoritarian and even Inquisitorial side to today’s campaigning secularism. There is nothing remotely positive in the demand that British cops lock up the pope and then drag him to some international court on charges of ‘crimes against humanity’. Instead it springs from an increasingly desperate and discombobulated secularism, one which, unable to assert itself positively through Enlightening society and celebrating the achievements of mankind, asserts itself negatively, even repressively, through ridiculing the religious.

Read it all here. Even from an atheist perspective, there is something pathological and pathetic about the current anti-Christian campaigning going on in the Western, liberal media. From a Christian perspective it is downright sinister.