Jesus Cramp

I had thought that sensible people had long ago forgotten Hal Lindsey and his apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo, but an acquaintance (a very nice guy, but he and people like him are what's wrong with the voting process -- he admits that he doesn't know much about the people or policies he's voting on, and so prays for guidance on whom to vote for) swears by Lindsey's claptrap, so I had to mosey through WorldNutDaily and see for myself. The headline, just a hair north of "Obama and Bat Boy Have Love Child in John Edwards' Basement" country, does half the work for me.

There are no surprises in Lindsey's burbling horseshit, not a one, but supposedly the guy considers himself a Christian, and in their mythology one of the primary betrayals of Jesus was not just the crucifixion itself, but the denial and calumniation of him. Lindsey counters those very teachings he proclaims to uphold.

Barack has apologized to the French and Germans for Americans who are too ignorant to learn their language before embarking on their once-in-a-lifetime two-week visit abroad.

This is a profound contortion of what Obama has said, which is essentially that learning a foreign language in school (any language, not necessarily French or German) is practically guaranteed to upgrade any American's skill set in a globalized job market. This is such an obvious point it shouldn't have even needed to be said, but Lindsey is no doubt spoon-feeding the bozos who take that apocryphal Ma Ferguson quote seriously.

And yet, not true. No American politician in their right mind would hit a high-profile gig in Europe and invoke ugly American stereotypes, and then apologize for them. And Obama certainly did not do anything of the sort. But Lindsey counts on the notoriously thin skin of his audience to be reflexively offended by something that never happened.

He's apologized for the simple Midwestern rednecks who, forced to cling to religion and guns to justify their antipathy, just can't help themselves.

Another lie. There was no "apology" involved; this was merely another attempt to figure out why large groups of people keep enthusiastically voting directly against their own self-interests. Obama's explanation is as likely as anyone else's, I suppose, but there was no apology involved, simply a somewhat ham-fisted attempt to elucidate how these goobers might be won over by common sense, in a situation that Obama had assumed was off-the-record.

The reason Lindsey goes through these logical contortions is to bolster his own point, one that reeks of defensiveness. In Lindsey's brain-scrambled dimension, any attempt to right the ship of state, and identify, correct, and undo past and current wrongs where possible is an admission of error. And since these whackjobs consider the U.S. to be God's True Promised Kingdom, they conflate the country with their sky-buddy. Criticize America, and you're telling God that His wife is fat or something. Big no-no.

And Lindsey knows that he's lying here -- he's got links to newspaper articles satirizing Obama's messianic pretensions, but nothing for his assertions about Obama apologizing to the Eurotoffs for his retard hillbilly cousin.

America has never faced so many different crises at the same time in living memory. The war with al-Qaida and Islamic terror, the Iran crisis, Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation, the rising price of oil, the falling dollar, enemy acronyms like OPEC, NAM, OIC, U.N. ...

Indeed. Many of these crises have been created or exacerbated by the current regime. The idea that not just Obama in particular, but the 90% of the planet that stands against the Cheneyites in general is that knowing something about how the world works actually has some importance, and that responsibility and accountability are critical.

Even making the caveat that, at this stage of human geopolitical development, there is going to be a hegemon, and as such, the U.S. presents the least malicious option of hegemony, the fact is that we're slipping behind ascending hegemons. Obviously, this is in no small part because people keep allowing themselves to be bamboozled by superstition and outright hucksterism, smooth-talking assholes with a rarely-thumbed Bible in one hand and a script of lies in the other.

[Update: Time inexplicably lowers the bar by chronicling the ravings of some of these Left Behind goobers.

Everything from Obama's left-handedness to his positive rhetoric to his appearance on the cover of this magazine has been cited as evidence of his true identity.

John McCain is also left-handed. So is Bill Clinton, so is Poppy Bush. So, amazingly enough, are a lot of people, possibly even some Left Behind readers. I expect sites that explicitly cater to the worst sorts of dipshit tendencies of the American electorate, such as WhirledNutDaily, to spend time chronicling the straitjacketed utterances of a horrid little sliver of weirdos. Even though I don't expect much out establishment boilerplate such as Time, I would have thought them at least smarter than to bother with the sort of people who a generation ago would have been bothering unfortunate passersby with their ridiculous babble. Then again, for an industrialized nation, this country is infatuated with superstition, awash in it on a level that would make a Borneo witch-doctor uncomfortable.]