Going Full Retard

Kirk's advice for the Simple Jack sequel, Simple Jack Goes Teabaggin'.

There are a lot of practical reasons I don't post much these days -- work, school, and family leave very little leisure time, and what time is left is ill-spent in a medium best perhaps best characterized by its response time to hot-button issues. There's not much percentage in jumping in on a story after ten thousand other mooks have already wrapped their dick-skinners around it, especially when most "stories" and "issues" really have about a 36-hour shelf life -- or none at all, for those of us with functioning basal ganglia. That's the easy answer.

The harder answer is that it's more difficult to keep up with the accelerating pace of American stupidity. This refers to both the corporate media and its -- I don't want to bother with the usual trope and say "sheep-like", because it seems an insult to friendly, harmless ungulates -- aggressively retarded audience. Everything is a cause for which the barricades must be immediately and resolutely manned. You'd think all the exercise they get from mindless raging, seizing moral high-ground, and rabid ankle-biting would work off their sloshing beer-bellies, but no such luck.

So. Fat, stupid fucks looking for shit to get weird about. Really, who can keep up with it? And yet, I suppose in the end my ass-spelunking into the ridiculous activities of my fella 'merkins qualifies as some sort of amateur anthropology. Eventually their chimp-like antics get the best of my studied indifference, and I have to WTF the situation. So like us, but with some increasingly important distinctions, such as the ability to read and comprehend fairly simple points of fact, as opposed to constantly acting like someone deliberately ran over their dog.

So it is with the ongoing, endless hoo-ha over the "Ground Zero Mosque", an ongoing narrative into the continuing dumbassificationof this doomed land of ours. (Not that America isn't a great idea, but great ideas cannot continue when they're weighed down by an overabundance of morons.)

Two protests on Sunday morning, in the normally quiet blocks north of Ground Zero, claimed to be on the side of tolerance. One camp stood in favor of the mosque and Islamic center that has been proposed for the area; the other argued against.

Around 500 of those opposed gathered in a cordoned-off area, heavily monitored by police. They sang patriotic songs and spoke of a hijacked Constitution, a renegade presidency and tolerance toward the sensitivities of New Yorkers whose relatives died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks

....

Opponents of the mosque insisted they fully supported religious freedoms, but that the location of the planned Islamic center represented an incursion on the rights of Americans who deemed Ground Zero a hallowed space. “It’s a disgrace to have a mosque at this sacred site; it’s a smack in the face,” said Kali Costas, a Long Island education worker who said she was a member of the Tea Party.

"[H]ijacked Constitution", "renegade presidency". Hanh? Ex-squeeze me? Look, faced with someone whose family died in the WTC, I would at least grant them the benefit of the doubt on the "sensitivity" thing, inapropos as it is. But I literally have zero clue as to what this manufactured issue has to do with the Constitution, which has a curious lack of mention as to people's fucking feewings, or Obama, who has sidestepped taking a stand on this issue with the Astaire-like deftness with which he approaches every issue of contention, real or imagined.

But 500 people in New York City, the city so nice they named it twice, decided that the best use of a glorious summer morning was to be corralled in a free-speech zone and lob their tired-ass Mad Lib epithets at a building which, as it stands, does not even have sufficient funding to pay for the lot, much less the building. Where's a suicide bomber when you could really use one? Seriously, the collective effect on the IQ of an area infested by these gaggles of idiots must be like a sudden pressure drop, a tropical storm of stupid gathering to assault the beaches of sanity.

As one would expect, Faux News has done its part to fan the flames of stupidity, as it jibes with their teabagger promotional campaign, and their million-dollar donation to the husk of the Republican party. And yet, how many of these jabbering dipshits know about this?

Amid the howls of outrage over the proposed Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero, some political pundits on Fox News, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate News Corp. (NWS), have been particularly vocal in their opposition to the project.

Last Thursday, popular Fox News host Sean Hannity said the proposed center's leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a U.S. citizen who has spent 25 years working to improve relations between the Muslim world and the U.S., wants to "shred our Constitution" and install "Sharia law as the law of the land in America." Sharia is a body of law derived from the Koran and Islamic teachings.

In fact, in his book What's Right With Islam, Rauf writes that "many Muslims regard the form of government that the American founders established a little over two centuries ago as the form of governance that best expresses Islam's original values and principles." (Page 81.) He has never publicly advocated "shredding" the U.S. Constitution or replacing it with Sharia law.

A Major Backer From the Muslim World

The stridency with which Fox News personalities attack the downtown Islamic center -- red meat for the millions who tune in each night -- is an example of the often uneasy relationship and occasionally diverging interests between many of News Corp.'s properties, in this case Fox News and its parent corporation.

For example, News Corp.'s second-largest shareholder, after the Murdoch family, is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (pictured at left, and above right), the nephew of Saudi Arabian King Abdullah, and one of the world's richest men.

Through his Kingdom Holding Co., Alwaleed owns about 7% of News Corp., or about $3 billion of the media giant. He also owns 6% of Citigroup -- to which he was introduced by the Carlyle Group -- or about $10 billion of the giant bank. He's a part-owner of the famed Plaza Hotel in New York and has invested in many other prominent companies. (At one point he invested in AOL (AOL), the parent company of DailyFinance.)

Earlier this year, News Corp. invested $70 million for a 9% stake in Alwaleed's Middle Eastern media and entertainment company, Rotana, which "owns the Arab world's largest record label and about 40% of the region's movies -- most of which are Egyptian -- and operates 11 free-to-air television channels, two of which are through a partnership with News Corp.," according to Reuters. (Rotana broadcasts Fox movies and TV shows throughout the Middle East.) News Corp. has an option to double its stake in Rotana for another $70 million within 18 months.

....

Saudi Arabia, which is ruled by Alwaleed's uncle King Abdullah, is, of course, an authoritarian petro-monarchy that actually is governed by Sharia law and is known as one of the top global sponsors of terrorism. A spokesperson for the Saudi embassy in Washington says that while Alwaleed is part of the royal family, he isn't a member of the government, but rather a private citizen.

Alwaleed, like Iman Rauf (pictured at right), professes a desire to build bridges of peace and understanding between the Islamic world and the West. One man is a multibillionaire, with far-flung investments around the world, and the other is a religious cleric, whose congregation happens to be in downtown Manhattan.

Now, this is not exactly a "gotcha", afaic. I happen to be a capitalist and a (cautious) globalist at heart, and I see at least the potential in engaging with assbackward buttholes like Saudi Arabia, in the hopes of bringing them along into the 21st century -- or hell, even the 10th century. This is how progress happens, when it does, slowly, incrementally. As long as positive direction can be tracked -- an important distinction for putatively idealistic Democrats -- incrementalism can be acceptable, even desirable.

(Not to mention that there is a very real distinction between the peaceful, introspective Sufism of Rauf and the aggressive, regressive, extremist Wahhabism/Deobandism cynically endorsed as a control mechanism by the Sauds. I get that the average knucklehead at these ricockulous protests just sees towelheads regardless, but that's supposed to be the function of a free press -- to point out the crucial differences.)

But by the avowed goals of the teabaggers and the assorted morons rolled up in this particular episode of bullshit, they should be refusing to even consider watching Faux News, seeing as it is in significant part -- and yes 7% is significant -- bankrolled by someone who, however much of a businessman/philanthropist he aspires to be, still works ably and willingly within the constraints of a profoundly regressive system, one which raises every red flag these weepy, posturing fake patriots have stashed up their collective arsenal.

Put more simply for the window-lickers in the teabag crowd: if you watch Faux News, if you swallow the lies Hannity and Beck are feeding you, you are, in some small but aggregately important part, supporting the sharia system you profess to detest.

That exploding sound you just heard may be their heads exploding from the cognitive dissonance, or maybe one of these impressionable goobers finally decided to strap himself with semtex and rebar chunks and become McVeigh 2.0.