Rachel Maddow, There is Much, Much More to the Story of Rick Perry's Apostles

[babsbunny]

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/16/115221/583/Front_Page/Rachel_Maddow_There_is_Much_Much_More_to_the_Story_of_Rick_Perry_s_Apostles

Rachel Tabachnick

This past week, Rachel Maddow featured a series of video clips from Right Wing Watch of the "apostles" endorsing Rick Perry's upcoming The Response prayer event. Included was a shortened version of the clip posted at Talk2action in 2009 of C. Peter Wagner claiming that Japan's economic decline was due to the emperor having sex with a sun goddess. Later in the week the Texas Observer published an excellent and insightful article on the apostles by Forrest Wilder. Below the fold is my plea, originally posted at Alternet, for journalists to resist the temptation to dismiss the apostles as fringe or crazy, and to seriously investigate the phenomenon of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) including: the NAR's impact charismatic evangelicalism across the nation; their introduction of Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare or SLSW, techniques for evangelizing that were unknown prior to this movement; and their 50-state communications network, which is mobilizing "prayer warriors" for political activism.

On Tuesday, Rachel Maddow did the world a favor by airing a series of short video clips of the endorsers of Rick Perry's upcoming prayer event. The clips were posted by Right Wing Watch, with some originating from Talk2action.org. These video clips should receive much more national exposure, but they need to be viewed in context of the movement they represent. Rachel Maddow, keep at it! Perry's endorsers are not just a random group of radical evangelists making outrageous statements.

[Skip_In_Boulder]

1. for journalists to resist the temptation to dismiss the apostles as fringe or crazy,

Which is always a mistake as it does not take into account the potentiality for how dangerous these people can become if their fears are escalated to higher levels. As we just saw in Norway this week.

[patrice]

2. And ignores the absolute fact that there are people in politics who "keep their hands clean" by let

ting the crazies run wild, just like the Tea Party.

[Skip_In_Boulder]

5. You got that right. n/t

[patrice]

6. You should see some of the grassroots OIL agitators who show up at Kevin Yoder's "townhalls".

He likes lookin' all cool and sophisticated, while his constituents get pretty anxious, so he can play the mediator.

But then, apparently his Prince W strategy is getting a little tooooo tense; yesterday, he wouldn't let a bunch of people who had not pre-registered into his meeting, including a 90 year old woman, and things ended with a cancellation of the meeting.

[annabanana]

3. k&r. . . . n/t

[patrice]

4. I'd bet there's a very rich vein of different levels of patterns in all of that . . .

for anyone looking for tax exemption violations.

It'd be fun to just start with a discourse analysis (an oversimplification = frequency distributions that identify and count the number of occurrences of certain memes and their variants) and just look at where that leads. Identification can include a number of factors.

[Sal Minella]

7. A "prayer event" -- isn't this designed to say to Gawd, "Dear Gawd,

we think you are screwing up, and lissen up here cuz we're going to tell you what to do . . . "

If I was Gawd (and I was sure I existed) I would get all ticked off and smite somebody, I think.

[jwirr]

8. IMO Rachel does us a favor every day. I hear perry is trying to back

out of too close association with this circus he is putting on but it will not work. I wonder how has agreed to come to it? Looking forward to seeing him fall on his ass on this idea.

[shanti]

9. personally....

i think that it will be perry that the repigs run in 2012. they looooove him.

[RamboLiberal]

10. I liked the one who called the Statue of Liberty

A demon idol. If Perry gets the nom bet we don't see loops of these loons 24/7 and ?'s why Perry associated with them like we did with Rev Wright & Obama.