The King's Speech

Horrible, shocking and disgusting news out of Staten Island: 

NEW YORK - A 13-year-old girl has been arrested on hate crime charges and is accused of helping bully and attack a Muslim girl at their New York City school.

The girl is being charged as a juvenile, along with a 12-year-old boy who was arrested last week. She is charged with third-degree assault as a hate crime and attempted robbery. She is due in Family Court Tuesday.

Authorities say the two bullied and tormented a 13-year-old Muslim girl at the Staten Island school, calling her a "terrorist" and trying to steal from her.

(full story) 

You can call it coincidence if you so chose, but this comes less than a month after NY Congressman Peter King held his McCarthyesque hearings on "Islam and Terrorism" on Capitol Hill. And maybe it is a coincidence. Just like Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford's attempted assassination was in no way, shape, or form linked to the "Lock 'N Load" language and imagery of the Tea Party.

The Dixie Chicks speak for tens of millions of Americans and say they're embarrassed by George Bush, and what ensues is a big old fashioned German-style CD burning party. Because you know, saying that some bumbling idiot who's broken the world is an "embrassment" is somehow dangerous rhetoric. 

But when the extreme right pops off about Muslims or throws a marksman's target over a Congresswoman's home district on a map, and then violence ensues, we need to watch what we say about where we point our fingers. Don't blame a collective of nutjobs for the action of one lone nutjob. 

I'm not saying speech should be curtailed. I was appalled when that little ass-tick Ari Fleischer said some Americans need to watch what they say during wartime. Free speech knows no few boundaries as far as I'm concerned.

What I am saying though, is educate your friends, relatives and neighbors on who these people are. They ARE hateful. They ARE spiteful. They ARE batshit crazy. They ARE dangerous. Not in speech, but in practice.

Riddle Me This: Barack and Christlam

On the way to work this morning, for no reason whatsoever, I started to think about the countless questions that I have - many for some time now - that remain completely unanswered. At least in a satisfactory way. I remember as a youngling, when I found myself puzzled, I could do one of two things: ask somebody, or go to the library. 

Being raised in a Catholic home and having attended a Catholic grammar school, ask someone inevitably meant bracing for the response "Because that's the way God wants it". Looking it up usually meant referring to either my father's Encyclopedia collection (that, no lie, when listing the Presidents, had "John Fitzgerald Kennedy: 1961 -" and well, didn't refer to African-Americans in a way I'm comfortable repeating on the internet) or going to a slightly (not by much) more updated library. 

But the internet changed all that. Or, at least it was supposed to. Still, things remain that not even Google will answer. I'm not talking about the philosophical ("Why are we here?") or the conspiratorial ("Who killed Kennedy?"). Simple questions that nobody has taken the time to answer for me, despite my ranting, and what I believe to be sensible queries into the times we live in. 

So, in borrowing a phrase from my favorite villain on my favorite horrible TV show as a kid,  I ask you, The Internet.... 

Riddle Me This: How can the same people who decried Barack Obama's Christian Pastor Jeremiah Wright now say with a straight face that they believe Obama is a Mulsim? 

I'm serious. For years my wife's favorite gripe about BushCheneyCo was "their inability to hold an opposing thoughts". Well my dear, the right wing has finally taken "holding opposing thoughts" to the extreme.

They spent the better part of 2008 screaming about "Black Liberation Theology" that allegedly took place at these Christian churches in the inner city. Now, 33% of Republicans think that the President is a Muslim. 

I'm not stupid. I know these people treat Muslim as a derogatory slur that they're somehow - in ways that they're too feeble-minded to understand - allowed to say in public (as opposed to what you and I absolutely know they call him behind closed doors). It's part of the klan-sans-sheets nature of the Tea Party. But I would think that even these simpletons could think back to their outrage at Reverend Wright and realize "Hey? Didn't I kill this guy for baptizing his children in the fucking name of Christ Jesus in this man's church?" 

Obviously we're dealing with some low-dangling fruit here. The same folks don't believe he was born in the United States. And I get that there's some backlash because they may feel we disrespected their President who broke the whole world and all. But I don't ever recall anybody on the left ever saying "George Bush is a Genius" after years of saying the complete opposite. 

So "cowboy up" teabaggers. How can one man be simultaneously be a Muslim and a White-Hatin' Christian? 

At least one inquiring mind wants to know.