nutroots

I was just reading a report on today’s Netroots gathering and I’m now wiping coffee spray from my monitor. Seriously, it was that funny.

The panel for one of today’s discussions featured – ready for this? – three ‘Nutroots’: Dan Choi, John Aravosis and Jane Hamsher. The ‘Look At Me’ brigade!

So much hate, fakery and narcissism at one table!

Choi, bless him, is still recovering from the crushing disappointment of President Obama fulfilling his promise to end DADT, a development that robbed him of his media star status – no one really wants to hear his rants any more, his 15 minutes of fame are up.

When an Organizing for America volunteer stood up and asked him to support the President in 2012, Choi ripped up an OFA flyer he had been given and threw it in the man’s face.

Classy!

It renewed his hero status with the Nutroots people who pollute Netroots, though, so that was nice.

America Blog’s Aravosis? You know, the guy who’s equally devastated by the President’s record of achievement on gay rights – because his ‘Obama is a Homophobe!’ rants have just become embarrassing.

Firebaggerlake’s Hamsher? What can you say about this creature? It’s five years since she let her mask slip when she posted that photoshopped picture of Joe Lieberman as a ‘black’ man on Huffington Post, in a sneering attempt to describe his efforts to “woo African American voters”. The photo was promptly removed, and she offered a ‘sorry if you were offended’ apology. And still the professional left regard her as a progressive!

Also on the panel was immigration reform supporter Felipe Matos who attacked the President for not passing the DREAM Act. Err? Could someone let this guy know how American democracy works? Hint: the President wants the DREAM Act passed, the Senate rejected it.

“One way to ensure Democrats do not take progressive votes for granted is to stop voting for Democrats,” said Choi.

How about President Bachmann, Dan? (“We need to have profound compassion for people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life and sexual identity disorders.”) Or any of the Republican candidates?

Good luck with that.

Hey, thanks for the laughs, Nutroots!

The headline on Arianna Huffy’s site tonight …. no wonder she admires Dan so much, they’re both self-promoting right-wing fakes, posing as ‘progressives’. See you in 2012 😉

peculiar pals…

Alex Pareene (Salon): Mother Jones writes about Rep. Michele Bachmann’s connections to Olive Tree Ministries, an evangelical Christian operation founded by a former Jew for Jesus and longtime friend of Bachmann’s named Jan Markell. Olive Tree Ministries … is obsessed with Israel because it believes we are living in the end times. Bachmann’s been on Markell’s radio show multiple times, attended an Olive Tree Ministries conference, and left a testimonial on its website. As MoJo says:

“…in 2005, the then-state senator denied any knowledge of Olive Tree Ministries. However, Markell tells Mother Jones that she’s known Bachmann off and on for 35 years, and says she spoke about Israel at Bachmann’s church in the late 1970s. “My hunch is that they misquoted her,” Markell says. “She’s been at my conference. Why she would have said otherwise, I don’t know.”

….So Bachmann stands with Israel because she needs the Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so that Christ can return, rapture the Christians up to Heaven, convince the Jews to worship him during the Tribulations, and then rule over the Earth from Israel for 1,000 years. (This is what these people believe, very, very literally.)

….in 2006 she was a member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church of Stillwater, which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. WELS is one of the very conservative “confessional” Lutheran denominations that maintains that the “antichrist” is the pope. You know, the leader of the Catholic Church? That pope….

…In 2008, as I’m sure you remember, Michele Bachmann repeatedly called Barack Obama “anti-American” because of his “mentor”, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And here is Bachmann’s good friend and minister Bradlee Dean calling the pope “that devil disguised as a minister of righteousness.”

It seems more than fair to ask whether Michele Bachmann is anti-Catholic, and whether, should she be elected president, she’d purposefully sabotage a Middle East peace deal in order to bring about the Second Coming. Or whether she’d launch some sort of tactical strike against Vatican City. I think she would. Look who she pals around with!

Full post and videos here

‘birtherism is dead. long live otherism’

David Corn (Mother Jones): …..Mitt Romney … is still playing footsie with a popular conservative meme: Obama’s not really one of us …. (he) made a fierce pronouncement: The Obama Administration fundamentally does not believe in the American Experiment.…here was Romney saying that the president doesn’t understand the country he governs.

…Romney was engaging in what can be called otherism, a big cousin to birtherism. Otherism can be more virulent than birtherism (Obama is a secret Muslim socialist!) or more subtle (Hey, this Obama guy just doesn’t get America), but the main contention is that somehow he’s not a true American. It’s not a matter of his birth records, but of his attitude.

Newt Gingrich has helped set a benchmark for otherism …  Mike Huckabee said Obama’s “worldview is dramatically different than any president, Republican or Democrat, we’ve had… He grew up more as a globalist than an American.”

…Romney slammed Obama for apologizing for “American misdeeds, both real and imagined.” (Romney didn’t explain what was wrong with apologizing for real misdeeds.) His bottom-line message: Real Americans don’t apologize. And the obvious conclusion is that if Obama does apologize, he’s not a you-know-what.

…Birtherism is (was?) fundamentally about delegitimizing Barack Obama – proving him a complete fraud … Yet the birthers, dependent on conspiracy theories, were easily done in by basic facts…..

Yet otherism continues and thrives … The strategy is to fuel suspicion, not prove a conspiracy. But the goal is the same: to encourage voters to believe Obama is not a real American …Unlike birtherism, otherism remains quite useful to the Republicans. Not even the adults of the party can resist its ugly temptations.

Full article here – really worth reading

‘trump’s lunacy reveals core truth about the republicans’

Johann Hari (The UK Independent): Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” – but that wasn’t enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an “interesting coincidence” that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is “I’m better at what I do because I’m gay”, and argues “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”

That wasn’t enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn’t anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN’s polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It’s not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality…..

…So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.

Read the full article here

This is brilliant Edwina, thank you so much for the link