America, You Can't Handle The Truth!

[napkinz]

Last edited Mon Feb 9, 2015, 07:30 PM - Edit history (2)

[guillaumeb]

1. fiction

is so much better because you can edit out the parts that make you uncomfortable. Easier to talk about the exceptionalsm of all things American.

American exceptionalism is the exceptional ability of many Americans to forget history coupled with the exceptional ability to rationalize your own behavior no matter what you do when you would not excuse similar behavior if it is done to you.

Examples abound. Slavery, genocide, endless wars (all of them defensive of course), the list goes on.

[napkinz]

4. "American exceptionalism is the exceptional ability of many Americans to forget history ..."

spot on!

[napkinz]

2. after 9/11 ...

[butterfly77]

3. Kick,kick,kicked&Recommended!

Last edited Sun Feb 8, 2015, 10:59 AM - Edit history (1)

That is why they try to shut people up and try to lead people to follow down a path of lies and distractions been doing it for decades and centuries..

[napkinz]

6. "lies & distractions" ... more apt than "fair & balanced"

[Cha]

9. Losers.. they'd Lose it no matter what the President says. mahalo napkinz

[napkinz]

11. ...

[Cha]

12. Excellent from Luckovich, napkinz.. thank you!

[napkinz]

15. too bad some just don't get it

[Cha]

16. I know I just had someone on another thread tell

me to "speak for myself" on this matter. LOL!

No, I'm speaking for me and my little dog!

[napkinz]

17. now watch, he or she will next reply, ""I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!"

Not sure if we're on DU or in Oz at the moment. (Based on some of the reaction to the president's speech, seems like a few are in need of a brain or heart.)

[Cha]

18. I've been off DU for about a week and it's was such a

Nice Break!

But, then I was finding out about Brian Williams last night for the first time and reading all these comments under the articles about him.. from the WaPO to Stars and Stripes.. and the ignorance and hate out there is full blown!

So many find ways to bring Brian Williams' lying about his helio adventures around to hatin' on Obama and Liberals.

I'd think the majority of DU would be glad he brought up atrocities by others.. not as a way to condone ISIS but as a way to condemn them like we do ISIS. It's simple... not brain surgery, damn it.

[napkinz]

20. it's one thing to hear from the far-right the utter nonsense that the president was condoning

the atrocities committed by ISIS ... but to read it here ...

well, welcome back

[Cha]

32. I think some just want any excuse to rage on the President.. regardless

of how if reflects on them. What a shame.. all we have are our reps.. whether online or off.

Thank you, napkinz

[napkinz]

35. ...

[Cha]

37. ..

What a sweet

[sheshe2]

31. Mike Luckovich nailed it here napkinz.

[napkinz]

36. and there's this one ...

[appalachiablue]

5. Thanks for this terrific post, it's a keeper.

[napkinz]

7. I think most would prefer not to acknowledge those wrongs done in the name of Christianity

Most would like to expunge from the history books the brutality and the atrocities.

There's nothing to acknowledge; nothing to apologize for; nothing to redress.

[Cha]

8. This is Important to point out. It doesn't mean anyone is not Condemning what ISIS does.. it means

we acknowledge our past and condemn it like we do ISIS.

I don't know why so many can't get that.

mahalo napkinz

[napkinz]

10. The president was not condoning what ISIS does and conservatives know that ...

this is feigned outrage by some ... just another opportunity to bash the president, stir up the base, stoke hatred, and even incite violence.

In other cases, it's simple DENIAL of the truth.

[Cha]

13. I've seen talk like that around here.. that those talking about past atrocities are

giving ISIA a pass. So not true.

[napkinz]

21. posted by whatchamacallit

Cut the crap!

see http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026193575

[malaise]

14. K & R

for truth

[napkinz]

22. if only we could get those on the far-right to acknowledge the truth ...

America’s 10 worst terror attacks by Christian fundamentalists and far-right extremists

Alex Henderson
11 Jan 2015

From Fox News to the Weekly Standard, neoconservatives have tried to paint terrorism as a largely or exclusively Islamic phenomenon. Their message of Islamophobia has been repeated many times since the George W. Bush era: Islam is inherently violent, Christianity is inherently peaceful, and there is no such thing as a Christian terrorist or a white male terrorist. But the facts don’t bear that out. Far-right white male radicals and extreme Christianists are every bit as capable of acts of terrorism as radical Islamists, and to pretend that such terrorists don’t exist does the public a huge disservice. Dzhokhar Anzorovich Tsarnaev and the late Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev (the Chechen brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013) are both considered white and appear to have been motivated in part by radical Islam. And many terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who were neither Muslims nor dark-skinned.

When white males of the far right carry out violent attacks, neocons and Republicans typically describe them as lone-wolf extremists rather than people who are part of terrorist networks or well-organized terrorist movements. Yet many of the terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who had long histories of networking with other terrorists. In fact, most of the terrorist activity occurring in the United States in recent years has not come from Muslims, but from a combination of radical Christianists, white supremacists and far-right militia groups.

Below are 10 of the worst examples of non-Islamic terrorism that have occurred in the United States in the last 30 years.

read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/americas-10-worst-terror-attacks-by-christian-fundamentalist-and-far-right-extremists/

[Scuba]

19. Kick for the brutal truth.

[lpbk2713]

23. There's something about pic #2 ...

that puts "preaching to the choir" in a whole new light.

[napkinz]

24. maybe the church had a coupon club?

[CanSocDem]

25. Thanks for keeping it in perspective.(eom)

[Oilwellian]

26. Context is everything

Those who moan and groan about Obama's speech are the ones who didn't listen to it. I'm sure most know I'm a critic of many of Obama's policies, but I totally agree with what he said to the Prayer Group, and am pleasantly surprised that he was willing to say it.

[napkinz]

30. there are those who think he went too far, and then some who praise the speech but say "he didn't

go far enough":


Despite Wingnut Freakout, Obama Is Right: Christian Violence Is Just as Bad as Muslim Violence.
If anything, the president understated the case.

By Zaid Jilani / AlterNet February 6, 2015

This week, President Obama met with Muslim leaders in a private political meeting for the first time in his six-year presidency. The meeting set off predicatable angry reactions from the political right, with Fox News' Sean Hannity even saying he wished Obama had demanded that the leaders publicly denounce radical Islam. Obama further raised the hackles of the Christian right when he said at the National Prayer Breakfast that no religion has a monopoly on violence, saying, "And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. Slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

The reaction to these comments was apoplectic. Rush Limbaugh called it an “insult” to Christianity; the Tea Party News Network said Obama threw “Christians under the bus”; the Daily Caller surmised that Obama's remarks were designed to “curb” criticism of Islam.

All of these critics failed to engage with the substance of what Obama was saying. The president was not attacking Christianity, he was simply noting that just as ISIS may be using the name of Islam to rally followers to its violent agenda, extremists within the Christian faith have done the same thing historically. Violence has been in the mainstream of Christianity throughout history.

If anything, Obama didn't go far enough in his remarks. Christianist violence isn't a relic of the Crusades; it continues today, and in many of its forms is just as violent as what we are seeing from ISIS.

read more: http://www.alternet.org/belief/despite-wingnut-freakout-obama-right-christian-violence-just-bad-muslim-violence

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

27. But But But But a rightwing republican president would have said the exact same thing in this

same circumstance, right?


















I HATE having to use this emoticon

[napkinz]

33. of course President Huckabee would have!

Huckabee was governor of Arkansas 1996-2007 and a 2008 Republican Presidential candidate during the primary election. As a Fox News host, Huckabee falsely claimed that Muslims believe "Jesus Christ and all the people who follow him are a bunch of infidels who should be essentially obliterated." Huckabee also referred to Islam as the "antithesis of the gospel of Christ." He also seemed to compare Muslim prayer being allowed in a church to the showing of pornographic films.

http://www.islamophobia.org/islamophobic-individuals/mike-huckabee/126-mike-huckabee.html

[napkinz]

50. and President Robertson

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

51. Ahh c'mon, they are all the same, arent they? (sarcasm)

[LiberalElite]

28. He's absolutely right! - nt

[raccoon]

29. I don't consider Todd Kincannon's opinions worth anything. I think

he says things just to be outrageous.

[napkinz]

38. same can be said of Coulter

sadly, they have a following

[raccoon]

48. They should get married. nt

[napkinz]

49. considering how similar their comments are, in this case, I am against same-text marriage

[ileus]

34. and that's why we should support ISIS: the enemy of my enemy....

[napkinz]

40. we actually did "support" ISIS ...

[seveneyes]

39. Many crimes are committed by many bearers of many banners

The numbers are in favor of those who just want to survive as comfortably as possible.

[napkinz]

46. "the numbers" ... most on the right won't like this

Christian Violence in the Past Century

In the spring of 2013, Middle East historian Juan Cole decided to compare the body counts between violence committed by Christians and that committed by Muslims in the 20th century. He found that Muslim violence has claimed the lives of around 2 million people, mostly during the Iran-Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, while violence by Christians claimed the lives of close to 100 million people. Here's what that looks like on a pie graph:





Some of this Christian-led violence is well-known: the World Wars, the Holocaust, the colonial wars in Southeast Asia and Africa. Critics of this analysis would be quick to say that this violence may have been by Christians, but it wasn't in the name of Christianity. But in virtually every conflict Cole ticks off, the combatants were overtly religious, and often invoked their religion as part of their military campaigns, just as many of the Islamist militants today are not fighting solely due to a religious grievance, but are organized around groups that share a common religious and cultural background.

But religion has played a more explicit role in some of the 20th-century conflicts involving Christians. For example, the 1990 sectarian warfare in the Balkans culminated in an explicit genocide against Muslim Bosnians by Serbian Orthodox Christians. As Balkans researcher Keith Doubt explained in a 2007 paper, the Serbian Orthodox Church was one of the prime movers in the campaign to scapegoat Bosnian Muslims and justify the eventual ethnic cleansing and genocide that took place. He notes that the “role of the Church as protector of the Serbian nation gave the Church increasing social control, and with this power clergy fermented a xenophobic and bigoted attitude towards Muslims in former-Yugoslavia.”

read more: http://www.alternet.org/belief/despite-wingnut-freakout-obama-right-christian-violence-just-bad-muslim-violence

[Jamastiene]

41. My mother has a saying for those who say all immigrants should be deported.

She says, "Great! When are you leaving? I'll help you pack."

[napkinz]

42. yep!

[Jamastiene]

43. I love it! n/t

[napkinz]

44. thought you might like this :) ...

Native American Council Offers Amnesty to 240 Million Undocumented Whites

December 2014

The Native American National Council will offer amnesty to the estimated 240 million illegal white immigrants living in the United States.

At a meeting on Friday in Taos, New Mexico, Native American leaders weighed a handful of proposals about the future of the United State’s large, illegal European population. After a long debate, NANC decided to extend a road to citizenship for those without criminal records or contagious diseases.

“We will give Europeans the option to apply for Native Citizenship,” explained Chief Sauti of the Nez Perce tribe. “To obtain legal status, each applicant must write a heartfelt apology for their ancestors’ crimes, pay an application fee of $5,000, and, if currently on any ancestral Native land, they must relinquish that land to NANC or pay the market price, which we decide.

“Any illegal European who has a criminal record of any sort, minus traffic and parking tickets, will be deported back to their native land. Anybody with contagious diseases like HIV, smallpox, herpes, etc, will not qualify and will also be deported.”

-snip-

Despite the council’s decision, a native group called True Americans lambasted the move, claiming amnesty will only serve to reward lawbreakers.

“They all need to be deported back to Europe,” John Dakota from True Americans said. “They came here illegally and took a giant crap on our land. They brought disease and alcoholism, stole everything we have because they were too lazy to improve and develop their own countries.”

http://cityworldnews.com/native-american-amnesty

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

52. Big mistake, rewarding crime like this can only lead to more crime....

Not only deport them all but hand them a bill for approximately One Trillion dollars.

[napkinz]

54. is there a Native American "Mitt Romney"?

I hear calls for self-deportation!

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

55. Instant Karma, can you imagine what this country would look like, what the lives of

many white people would look like, if Instant Karma came right






NOW








Oh god what would I pay to see that, great idea for a movie though

[napkinz]

56. :)

[napkinz]

47. ...

[sheshe2]

53. Kick and Hell Yes Recommend.

[napkinz]

57. thanks sheshe