Picture a saner world. In that saner world, we'd have polite disagreements about tax cuts or funding a study about the mating habits of Alaskan crab (or Palins?). But after that House vote, we'd still manage to come together for a shot of whiskey (or a bottle, if you're Speaker Boehner) and agree that Ronald Reagan was a really, really lousy actor.
Except we don't live in that fantasy world. We live in a world where GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann is on the House Intelligence Committee and accuses American citizen and long-time Sec. of State Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin of being secretly tied to a radical Muslim group. But she doesn't stop there. She also accuses her House colleague - Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim-American elected to Congress - of the same.
Bachmann's disgusting Islamophobia is the red-meat-and-Cheetos of the post-2008 United States, representing an extreme faction of Republicans so outraged at the election of a non-white president, that any and all different becomes foreign. And to Bachmann, that foreign includes the treasonous Abedin, who has apparently averted government attention by working as Clinton's aide for 16 years and being married to the former seven-term congressman from New York's Ninth District, Anthony Weiner.
The facts don't matter to Bachmann, including the fact that one of Abedin's alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood - her dad - has been dead for almost 20 years. Bachmann is on the hunt for secret infiltrators. While some Republicans may point to President Obama as the secret infiltrator (even though he keeps killing Muslim bad guys and was incessantly tied to a Christian preacher during the 2008 election), Bachmann need look no further that the last Republican president for the culprit.
GOP President George W. Bush, a man who has the stain of the worst terrorist attack on US soil in history on his watch, made deliberate efforts to differentiate Muslim Americans from the terror-loving terrorists we set our eyes on throughout his two unpaid for wars. "Some of the comments that have been uttered about Islam do not reflect the sentiments of my government or the sentiments of most Americans," Bush said in 2002. "Islam, as practiced by the vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion, a religion that respects others. Ours is a country based upon tolerance and we welcome people of all faiths in America."
How things have changed politically when the last Republican president sounds as liberal as margaritas with Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the Badlands in the Castro.
It doesn't stop there. Bush made the Muslim celebration of Ramadan a yearly event at the White House, hosting eight dinners in honor of the holiday. "Each year, the end of Ramadan means celebration and thanksgiving for millions of Americans," he said at one such dinner. "And your joy during this season enriches the life of our great country."
And let's not forget 2005, when Bush became the first US president to place a Holy Quran in the White House library. "I have asked young Americans to study the language and customs of the broader Middle East," he added. Only a few years earlier he had noted that "the Islam that we know is a faith devoted to the worship of one God, as revealed through The Holy Quran. It teaches the value and the importance of charity, mercy, and peace."
Indoctrination, clearly.
Perhaps Bush's most obvious "secret Muslim" moment was when he apologized for the 2008 desecration of the Quran by American military. This was, of course, ignored by most of the GOP and right-wing media, who then attacked Barack Obama for doing the same a few years later.
The question is, what does Bachmann do now? If her goal is to locate secret Muslim agents in the United States government, she should skip the lowly aide and instead focus on Republican, Quran-loving, Quran-apologist Bush, the former head of state and government. Who knows how many infiltrators have seeped through the party, invading state GOP groups and Rascal-Scooter-abundant Tea Party gatherings. But with so much evidence pointing to the Texas-brush-clearing mole, Bachmann is guaranteed victory.
Oh, there's also this.
No comments:
Post a Comment