The Great Gazzoo of Threat Inflation Jumps the Shark on Islamist World Domination

Michael Mukasey

Via Political Wire, I see that a former Bush Attorney General [Guess which! Hint: currently a walking ad for Breitbart's Ghost] has something to warn us about... Islamists!

“You may not be interested in Islamism, but Islamism is interested in you,” warned former Attorney General Michael Mukasey at a Saturday CPAC panel of activists so fringy that they were not technically invited to the conference.

The Great Gazoo of threat inflation is hovering over Mukasey's shoulder, proudly stating how dulce et decorum it is to get other people killed in "defense" of one's country, because: Muslim hordes want global domination!

Keeping company with the likes of Pam Geller and Robert Spencer is easy when you have the facts!

“The vast majority of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims adhere to a view of their religion that agrees on the need to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, on the world,” he said.

CPAC, which was looking for reasons why the GOP lost, wouldn't officially acknowledge this panel of "activists." If they really wanted to understand why the GOP is free-falling to rump party status, they'd look closely into the big brass bolas Mukasey's swinging around over his head and calling "facts."

I couldn't find a poll that shows that a "vast majority" of the world's Muslims want to impose Sharia Law on the whole world. I couldn't find a poll that shows a simple majority wants to. (Similarly, I couldn't find any poll that shows how many American Christian Fundamentalists want to impose their biblical law on the world, but there sure are plenty helping other countries pass anti-gay laws.) Lacking any obvious hard evidence on Mukasey's claims, I realized that he is, of course, bullshitting. But it's still fun to prove how full of shit he is!

The Religion of Piece is a website run by some of the looniest loons of them all when it comes to hating on Muslims. Everything they publish is designed to make Islam look as blood thirsty as possible (project much?). For a little background on TROP, check out this article from Loon Watch.

"...anti-Islam hate site, The Religion of Peace (TROP), associated with Islamophobe Daniel Greenfield, aka “SultanKnish,” who you will recall earns a pretty penny from the David Horowitz Freedom Center."

TROP is about as far right as you can get on this stuff. Or so you would think... Mainstream Republicans would certainly move toward the center to get away from this kind of hate speech, since even CPAC didn't want to have anything to do with them, officially. One would expect that no prominent member of an administration that told us our glorious war in Iraq was certainly not a "Crusade" would support such nonsense! No matter how Freudian Bush's dyslexicon might have gotten, the sensible people in charge truly believed what Bush said when he called Islam "a religion of peace."

Watch out for the right hook!

TROP has this little page of polls from the Muslim world. A whole section on Sharia Law links to polls that show majorities (or a plurality in the case of the Indonesia, the world's largest concentration) of Muslims want Sharia Law imposed on all Islamic countries. Not the whole world, just their corner of it. According to the site dedicated to making Islam look as bad as possible. 

TROP doesn't have one poll to back up Mukasey's claim that the "vast majority" of Muslims want to impose Sharia on the whole world. The polls they do have show that in the most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, the idea of imposing Sharia on all Muslim countries doesn't even get a majority. 

So, either Mukasey is bullshitting, or he's got some information the rest of us haven't seen yet. Maybe he'll do us the favor of sharing it with us, because, based on this and other fun things he's said ("...not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime..."), I'd really appreciate it if he'd keep talking. 

Frederick Douglass Republicans: Further Proof That Republicans Have Trouble with US History

LBJ hands MLK one of the 75 pens used to sign the Civil Rights Act

After LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he was initially ecstatic. Later that evening he was troubled, and told Bill Moyers: "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come."

Almost a half a century later, and the Republican party's Southern Strategy is still their only shot at national office. Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign for President in Philadelphia, Mississippi. If can't hear that particular dog whistle, follow the link.

Bob Herbert interviewed Lee Atwater, who sums up the southern strategy as only a master of the strategy could, in 1981, right after Reagan rode to office on the back of mythical parasitic welfare queens:

[Bob Herbert]: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps? 

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Since I understand this half-century-old political extension of the centuries long war on black people (as Ta-Nehisi Coates calls it), I don't fall pray to the easy mental traps that Republicans and Tea Partiers seem to tumble into on a regular basis. Today's example of bad lip reading history comes from a whole room full of screaming wingnuts at CPAC.

The session — titled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” — was led by K. Carl Smith, a black conservative who mostly urged attendees to deflect racism charges by calling themselves “Frederick Douglass Republicans.”

Disruptions began when he began accusing Democrats of still being the party of the Confederacy — a common talking point on the right. 

“I don’t care how much the KKK improved,” he said. “I’m not going to join the KKK. The Democratic Party founded the KKK.” 

Lines like that drew shouts of praise from some attendees and murmurs of disapproval from one non-conservative black attendee, Kim Brown, a radio host and producer with Voice of Russia, a broadcasting service of the Russian government. 

But then questions and answers began. And things went off the rails.

Go read the whole thing for the glorious cacophony of ignorant shouting and various tangents tangling at once. It's awesome. Includes slavery, pledges to "take it outside," and various other fun wingy-nuggets. TPM's reporter Benjy Sarlin even tries to pin one wingnut down on the whole GOP is racist thing, and finds that bullshitters are really tough to pin down. It's stupefyingly fun.

But it's hard to top this wingnut talking point that because the Democrats were the racists before 1964, they must still be, because, you know, they're Democrats.

Lee Atwater would be proud.