Sarah Palin Disgraces History With Claim Adams and Jefferson Support Her War on Christmas

Sarah Palin Disgraces History With Claim Adams and Jefferson Support Her War on Christmas 

 

By:  Rmuse

Sunday, December, 8th, 2013, 6:40 pm

If there is one distinguishing feature unique to conservatives, it is their predilection for war. They will declare war on anything, seemingly for sport, but primarily to advance their sick agendas whether it is war against Muslims, women, the poor, gays, or equality; they just love war. It is interesting then, that conservatives of the Christian persuasion claim there is a war on their religious liberty when they are prohibited from forcing compliance to their religious dogmata on the entire population, and then there is their annual outrage that they are victims of the “war on Christmas.” Of course, the aggressors, according to conservative Christians, in the war on Christmas are the dreaded atheists who, interestingly, enjoy the winter “holiday” season as much as the next American, but resent the fact that any sector of government uses their tax dollars to promote the religious aspect of the uniquely commercial holiday.
America’s “resident dunce,” half-term governor, and failed vice presidential candidate has taken advantage of the  non-existent “war on Christmas” to speak to like-minded conservative Christians to sell her latest screed against President Obama and all-things secular proving once again why she has the “well-established-reputation as a world-class idiot.” One hesitates commenting on the absurdity that is Sarah Palin, but her latest contention that Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would join her in the war against the imagined war on Christmas is too much of an affront to American history, facts, and reason to bear; especially for a secular humanist.
On Thursday, Palin pimped her “war on Christmas” book at Jerry Falwell’s Christian Liberty University, a place of “higher education” that Palin likely understands teaches David Barton revisionist history of America’s founding as a Christian nation based on the Christian bible. Palin told the audience that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote the U.S. Constitution (Adams did not) for moral and religious people. She said, “If you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, there will be no reason to follow our constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand we are to be held accountable by our creator so that is what our constitution is based on. So those revisionists, those in the lamestream media who would want to ignore what our founders actually wrote about in our charters of liberty” must not comprehend the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers. Principles, by the way, that apparently include celebrating Christmas the “religious way” by honoring the virgin birth she claimed atheists were hard at work fighting in an attempt to “abort Christ from Christmas” (note the “abortion” reference).

She said, “Why is it they get to claim some offense taken when they see a plastic Jewish family on somebody’s lawn – a nativity scene, that’s basically what it is right?  Oh, they take such offense, mentally distresses them so they sue, right?” No atheist considers plastic Jewish facsimiles of “virgin birth Jesus” on someone’s lawn offensive or worth a lawsuit. They do, however, take offense when Christians erect plastic virgin-birth Jesus displays, crucifixion crosses, or resurrection representations on land paid for with their tax dollars.
She continued that “heaven forbid we claim any type of offense when we say, ‘Wait, you’re stripping Jesus from the reason, as the reason for the season,’ but heaven forbid we claim any type of offense.” Then Palin went rogue and spoke for Thomas Jefferson she claimed “would recognize those who would want to try to ignore that Jesus is the reason for the season are angry atheists armed with an attorney. They are not the majority of Americans. So I think Thomas Jefferson would certainly recognize it and stand up and he wouldn’t let anybody tell him to sit down and shut up.”
Thomas Jefferson, a deist, eschewed everything divine about biblical Jesus; particularly what he called the “contrary to the laws of nature” virgin birth and resurrection story. What Jefferson did appreciate about biblical Jesus was the humanitarian ethics of goodwill toward human beings, charity for the poor, and his inherent humanism that Jefferson himself espoused.  To make his point, Jefferson gathered 4 translations of the gospel accounts, edited out each and every “contrary to natural law” part, and compiled humanistic Jesus into his version of the gospels minus Christ’s miracles, Christ as divine, and especially the virgin birth and resurrection. In fact, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote to another Founding Father, John Adams, in 1823 that “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” So much for America’s resident dunce counting on Thomas Jefferson joining her in fighting against “atheists trying to abort Christ in Christmas” or the “reason for the season” that is as absurd as a star guiding wise men to Bethlehem around December 25.

Astronomers, real “wise men,” who use science, mathematics, and empirical data of the observable Universe have concluded that according to the Christian bible account of Christ’s birth, Christmas should be June 17 and not, as Christians contend, December 25. That particular date coincides with a pagan holiday celebrated around December 25th as a time for feasting, goodwill, generosity to the poor, the exchange of gifts, and the decoration of trees sometime after Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity that began imperial patronage of the Christian church. The festival of Saturnalia was a popular Pagan Roman holiday around the winter solstice, and if there really is a war on the Christ in Christmas, it is Christians celebrating a pagan holiday (Saturnalia) that, according to the god of the bible, is a major sin punishable by death; but that is another story.
The real story is that Palin is a charlatan, an imbecile, and an opportunist with no more knowledge of the “Christ” in Christmas than the Founding Fathers she attempted to channel to sell her pathetic book. Her assault and false account of the Founding Fathers’ intent in writing the Constitution is as offensive as her assault on atheists’ desire to abort Christ from Christmas or wage a war on Christmas. Sarah Palin is a parasite on America and this secular humanist has had just about as much of her bloodsucking pandering to pad her bank account as one person can take. Obviously, the Liberty University audience has not had enough of Palin because there were no reports of even one “higher education” student standing up and telling Palin that her lack of knowledge of the Christ in Christmas, or the Founding Fathers, informed that the only war this holiday season is her assault on intelligence of which she has none.

Sarah Palin Disgraces History With Claim Adams and Jefferson Support Her War on Christmas was written by Rmuse for PoliticusUSA.

© PoliticusUSA, Sun, Dec 8th, 2013 — All Rights Reserved

4 Republican Favorites Who Would Despise Republicans

Author: Juniper Russo September 29, 2013

Conservatives have a thing for historical celebrity-worship. They tend to pick out a few figures from history—usually, but not always, heterosexual white males—and establish them as their own cultural superheroes. There’s nothing wrong with having historical figures you look up to, but you know there’s a problem when the greatest heroes a movement are people who wouldn’t have approved of the movement at all. Here are some of the historical figures that today’s right-wingers tend to idolize… without knowing much about what these people really believed.

Ayn Rand was atheist, pro-choice, and hated libertarians.

Certifiable sociopath Ayn Rand has been one of the gods of conservativism ever since the New York Times dubbed her the “novelist laureate of the Reagan administration” in 1987. After this point, conservative douchebags, including Alan Greenspan, Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and Paul Ryan, all unanimously decided that Ayn Rand was just awesome. Just to demonstrate that they’re independent thinkers, masses of high-school and college-age libertarians decided that they’d sound really smart if they called themselves objectivists and said that they adhered to Ayn Rand’s philosophy and formed a Cliff’s Notes-based cargo cult on her ideas.
The funny thing is that, until at least the 1980s, Rand was pretty largely despised by the right because more people bothered to find out what she actually believed… Like that she idolized a serial killer, that she was pro-choice, and that she was staunchly opposed to religion.
Objectivism was all about cold, hard reasoning with no room for anything remotely spiritual or emotional. So Rand was not only openly atheist, but she considered religion to be an instrument for brainwashing people into obedience. In Philosophy: Who Needs It?, she wrote:

Faith and force… are corollaries: every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.

In other words, ladies and gents, Ayn Rand’s world has no room for your religion. Or anyone else’s.
So what about the Unborn, those precious little souls terminated before birth, that conservatives use as poster children for the evils of liberalism? Ayn Rand didn’t care much for them, either, as she stated in The Voice of Reason:

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn). Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?

Wait a sec,that sounds… That sounds a lot like what you hear from feminists, doesn’t it?
Conservatives who are willing to concede that Ayn Rand wouldn’t be a fan of the modern-day Republican party usually jump to the next conclusion. She would totally be on board with libertarians, right? Well, unlike many historical figures, Ayn Rand was actually alive along enough to see her beliefs being misappropriated and was quick to shoot that down. In 1971, she wrote in The Objectivist:

For the record, I shall repeat what I have said many times before: I do not join or endorse any political group or movement. More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with, and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called “hippies of the right,” who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either.

Burned.

Thomas Paine was a socialist and loathed organized religion.

How does a socialist become a teabagger? There’s not a punch line. It’s a serious question. Thomas Paine was a hardcore socialist who somehow became, in the minds of his oblivious “followers,” a gun-toting, God-fearing, tax-cutting, immigrant-hating conservative—to the point that right-wing lunatic Glenn Beck went so far as to rewrite Paine’s Revolutionary War pamphlet Common Sense for today’s audience, ad Paine is considered one of the most influential historical figureheads to conservatives.
We already know that Glenn Beck is off his rocker, but for the record, Paine was everything that the Tea Party is not. For one thing, he wasn’t a fan of church involvement in religion—or even church involvement in church. In his magnum opus, The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine wrote:

My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

Whoa, that sounds almost like something a radical liberal would say! But it doesn’t stop there. His pamphlet Agrarian Justice is essentially a socialist manifesto and full of the things that inhabit the nightmares of conservatives. Calling uncultivated land “the common property of the human race,” Paine stated that property is necessary in a society with buildings and agriculture, but that since all “improvements” take place on land that naturally belongs collectively to mankind, property-owners naturally have a debt to those who do not own property.
He outlines a system in which the wealthy pay taxes for all their income, and that those taxes are used to provide for the needy. Remarking that financial support for the elderly is “not the nature of a charity but of a right,” Paine suggested setting up a national fund that would pay the living expenses for everyone over age 50, as well as the “lame and the blind.” Adjusted for inflation and our pesky increasing life expectancy, that’s Social Security– invented by liberals and loathed by conservatives.
There’s more. Thomas Paine also suggested that poor families receive a credit every year to help support the cost of feeding and housing every child under they age of 14. This has existed since the Clinton era in the form of the Child Tax Credit, which Republicans staunchly opposed—because, hey, if you can’t feed ‘em, don’t breed ‘em, right?
Once those kids came of age, Paine stated that they were owed a one-time payment of 15 pounds to help them get a start in life, ensuring that even poor young adults would be given some opportunity at success. Instead, a couple-hundred years later, our young adults are saddled with five-digit student loan debt—if they’re privileged enough to go to college to begin with– by the time they reach their 21^st birthdays.
Want to pick a different idol to worship, Glenn Beck?

Thomas Jefferson was the guy who established separation of church and state

Thomas Jefferson is one of those rare presidents who most people agree was pretty cool. Liberals and conservatives alike tend to like him — 89% of people say they view him “favorably” — despite the fact that he was totally okay with slavery and repeatedly raped his slave Sally Hemings, who mothered six of his children.
But in case that is not enough evidence that Jefferson wasn’t the guy we want to remember him as, there are his many letters and statements regarding religion—and they’re not what conservatives would want. As many an angry Republican has pointed out, the constitution itself does not actually contain the phrase “separation of church and state.”
Somebody else said that — Thomas Jefferson. The entirety of his >statement was:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

Yes, conservatives: Jefferson was the one who first and most openly suggested that you don’t get to use your religion to infringe on other people’s freedoms. Sorry, guys.

Jesus of Nazareth was a political activist and a socialist.

If there’s one historical figure who is deeply adored, and profoundly misunderstood, by conservatives, it’s Jesus of Nazareth. Now, we’re not going to argue with anyone over whether Jesus performed miracles or whether or not he was God, because these things are ultimately pretty irrelevant to what his political beliefs were. And whether you think Jesus of Nazareth was God, a prophet, a teacher, or just some Jew who lived 2000ish years ago, there are some things about the guy that are pretty clear.
For example, we know that Jesus was a political activist. You remember Reza Aslan, the Iranian-American who was the subject of the most humiliating interview Fox News has ever done? In his book Zealot, he—speaking as an educated historian, not the Big Bad Muslim out to get you—points out that, in Jesus’s time and place, crucifixion was a punishment reserved for political revolutionaries. Jesus was crucified for the crimes of sedition and treason. He was into the idea of overthrowing an unfair government way before it was cool.
Now, let’s take a look at what Biblical accounts of Jesus had to say about him. At one point, 5,000 people followed Jesus out into the desert wanting food. His disciples were worried because they had only five loaves of bread and two fish—not enough for 5,000 people—but he told them to distribute the food freely within the crowd, and somehow, everyone was fed.
Maybe the “miracle” here wasn’t that Jesus did a trick that made massive amounts of food from very little. Maybe the miracle was that he gave what he had even when it looked like wasn’t enough, and, seeing the example, those in the crowd who did have food began to share. The fish and loaves miracle wasn’t a magic trick: it was a way of showing that when people choose to share, they will be happy and well-fed.
The Bible gives plenty of other accounts of what most people would call “socialism” on Jesus’s behalf. In Matthew 25:31-46, he said that God will judge people by how they treated the “least” among themselves. He commanded that people serve him by caring for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the ill, and the imprisoned—yes, even those dirty, rotten criminals. There is no “unless they’re gay,” or “unless they really deserve to be in prison,” or “unless they’re just lazy and won’t get a job,” here. It’s unconditional. Those who don’t do as he says? It’s Hell for them, and Heaven for those who helped the needy.
He also said that the wealthy sell what they have and give it to the poor, and when some of them refused—screaming for a tax cut, we suppose– Jesus made it pretty clear that they’d just sold their tickets to Heaven. It is easier,” he said, “for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Well, since the chances of a camel walking through the eye of a needle are exactly zero, we’re going to assume that, if there’s a Heaven, there aren’t many one-percenters there.
We’re not sure why it is that Conservatives seem so Hell-bent on misinterpreting the political beliefs of their favorite icons, but it seems to be the norm, not the exception. Note to Conservatives: idolize whoever you want. Just make sure you do your research to find out what they actually believe before claiming to share their opinions.

GOP: Founding Fathers created defect-free Constitution, ended slavery

GOP: Founding Fathers created defect-free Constitution, ended slavery

by Jon Perr

 

The Republican National Committee's proclamation honoring Rosa Park's "role in ending racism" is continuing to receive the scorn and derision it richly deserves. As it turns out, the GOP's attempt to literally whitewash American history is hardly its first.
Consider, for example, the RNC's response to President Obama's 2010 nomination of now Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. Unable to prevent three-fifths of the Senate from voting on Kagan's nomination, the RNC instead suggested the Founders' three-fifths of a person standard for counting slaves was no defect. As The Hill reported, the RNC, including Michael Steele, objects to Kagan's citation of a 1987 Marshall speech in a 1993 tribute to her late mentor. Among the offending if self-evident passages from the 1987 address by Marshall:

[T]he government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite "The Constitution," they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.

Even more alarming to the Republican mind than Marshall's spotlight on the early Constitution ("We the People" included, in the words of the Framers, "the whole Number of free Persons.") was Kagan's approving citation of his belief that the mission of the Supreme Court was to "was to "show a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged." Inquiring conservative minds, the Hill reported, now want to know:

"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?" the RNC asked in its research document. "And Does Kagan Still Believe That The Supreme Court's Primary Mission Is To 'Show A Special Solicitude For The Despised And Disadvantaged'?"

For her part, Minnesota Congresswoman and one-time Republican presidential front-runner Michele Bachmann has acknowledged the Constitution's original sin of slavery. In January 2011, the Bachmann told Iowans for Tax Relief that America was founded on diversity and the Founding Fathers eliminated the "scourge" of slavery in their lifetimes:

"How unique in all of the world, that one nation that was the resting point from people groups all across the world. It didn't matter whether they descended from known royalty or whether they were of a higher class or a lower class, it made no difference. Once you got here [to the United States] you were all the same. Isn't that remarkable?... We know we were not perfect. We know there was slavery that was still tolerated when the nation began. We know that was an evil and it was scourge and a blot and a stain upon our history. But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. And I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forebears, who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country."

Alas, math and history are hard.

John Quincy Adams was extinguished in 1848. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until 1863 and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which ended slavery was not ratified until 1865.
Of course, in the telling of Republicans like Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Trent Franks and legions of others, there are many things at least as bad as slavery. That list includes the U.S. national debt, Obamacare, gun control, abortion and just about everything else conservatives oppose. As Franks put it in 2010:

"In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say 'How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible.' And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery."

No doubt, that news would have come as a surprise to Rosa Parks.

Originally posted to Jon Perr on Mon Dec 02, 2013 at 10:13 AM PST.

Also republished by Daily Kos.

The End of Democracy

The end of democracy...(Quotation)

Quotation: "The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations."
Variations: "The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and moneyed incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling...I hope we shall...crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country.  I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies."[1]
Sources consulted:

1. Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Digital Edition
2. Thomas Jefferson: Papers collection in Hathi Trust Digital Library
3. Retirement Papers

Earliest known appearance in print: 1994[2]
Earliest known appearance in print, attributed to Thomas Jefferson: see above
Status:  This exact quotation has not been found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson.  It may be a mistaken amalgamation of the author's comments in the above 1994 reference with a real Jefferson quotation.  Jefferson wrote in 1825 to William Branch Giles of "a vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who, having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of '76, now look to a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions, and monied incorporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures, commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry."[3]  Chomsky's 1994 book quotes Jefferson's 1825 letter to Giles and then comments that "[Jefferson] warned that that would be the end of democracy and the defeat of the American revolution."

Footnotes

• 1. Shelley A. Stark, Hidden Treuhand: How Corporations and Individuals Hide Assets and Money (Boca Raton, Fla.: Universal-Publishers, 2009.), 226.  This version includes a spurious first sentence combined with two genuine Jefferson quotes, from two different letters ("crush in it's birth the aristocracy..." from Jefferson to George Logan, Nov. 12, 1816 and "I sincerely believe that banking establishments..." from Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816).
• 2. Noam Chomsky, Keeping the Rabble in Line: Interviews with David Barsamian (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1994), 245.
• 3. Jefferson to William Branch Giles, December 26, 1825, in Ford, 10:356. Polygraph copy available online from the Library of Congress.