Tracking Teh Crazie - Alan Keyes at World Net Daily

You want teh crazie?  I got teh crazie, my friends.

Crazie plus crazie wouldn't describe how crazie it is.  Nor would crazie times crazie.  No, we gotta go bigger still - a crazieplex, perhaps.

Let me back up a second to explain.  A "googol" is a very big number.  It's 10¹⁰⁰ or 10 multiplied by itself 100 times and thus a one followed by 100 zeroes. A "googolplex" is even bigger. It's 10^googol or ten multiplied by itself a googol number of times.  Don't even try to contemplate writing it out.  There isn't enough time or space in spacetime to do so.

So when I say that whenever Alan Keyes writes for World Net Daily, we got a crazieplex (teh crazie^{teh crazie}) you'll more or less know exactly what I mean.

Ambassador Keyes (did you know he was an Ambassador during the Reagan Administration?  You did? Well, then did you know he was the one who negotiated the anti-choice language of the Mexico City Policy into the final resolution at that conference?  You didn't?  Well, now you do.) is more than well known for his controversial positions on sex, gender and women's health.

Well, today I found this faith based bit of intolerance at birther central - aka World Net Daily.

Keyes begins:

“California would strip the tax-exempt status from youth organizations like the Boy Scouts if they have policies that bar gay people from participating under a bill introduced at the Capitol Tuesday.” So began the report at sfgate.com. With prominent elitist faction GOP leaders like Mitt Romney pressing the BSA to end its ban on homosexual activity, the campaign to enforce respect for so-called “homosexual rights” is quickly moving toward what I have for a long time warned would be its inevitable result. By allowing the language of fundamental right to be abused in a way that perverts its logic, we have set the stage for the systematic abuse of the coercive power of government in order to force people to abandon their conscientious disapproval of homosexual behavior. Ideas have consequences, especially bad ideas.

Some people try to maintain the position that government has no lawful authority to interfere with human freedom. But according to the premises of American self-government, their view is patently illogical. The American Declaration of Independence (part of the organic law of the United States) states that all just governments are instituted to secure unalienable rights. When wrongdoers ignore and violate those rights (by criminal acts like murder, theft, rape, etc.) government is obliged to curtail their freedom. This is why the criminal law exists.

However, any action provably consistent with God’s natural law (as it applies to human activities) is an exercise of right. That’s why otherwise innocent people who kill to defend their lives against unwarranted attack are not charged with murder (unlawful killing), since their actions accord with the first law of nature. In this respect a provable claim of unalienable right trumps any provisions of human law that contradict it. The obligation to respect God’s authority supersedes the obligation to obey human authority.

I think our good friend Justice Antonin Scalia (he of the United States Supreme Court, doncha know) would disagree with Keyes on that last sentence. We quoted Scalia back in March of 2012:

We have never held that an individual's religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate.

And:

Can a man excuse his practices to the contrary because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself."

Subsequent decisions have consistently held that the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a "valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes)."

From this logic, let's just simply state that everything that follows from Keyes's assertion that the "obligation to respect God’s authority supersedes the obligation to obey human authority" is in direct opposition to the Constitution he claims to revere.

If you look closely, Keyes wants religious belief to be the law of the land - but only the right sorts of beliefs he already recognizes:

In what we call the Bill of Rights, preventing government coercion with respect to religion is the first order of business. This reflects the fact that the very idea of unalienable right depends on acknowledging that all human beings are obliged to respect “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”; that when they act accordingly they do what is right; and that they therefore have an unalienable right (i.e., a predisposition arising from the provision of God for their existence and well-being) to act as they do. As its origins may imply (from the Latin, religare, to bind fast) the word religion has to do with the views and practices connected with the natural sense that we are beholden to God for our existence, and bound to respect the provisions of God for our good.

Does this mean that every claim of right made in the name of religion authorizes people to break the law? Of course not; such claims must be examined in light of a reasonable appraisal of our knowledge of God’s law for our nature, as it applies to all human beings. Thus government may reasonably curtail the freedom of people who believe that their god requires them to murder innocent people (as was reportedly the case with the cult of devotees of the Hindu Goddess Kali, known as Thuggee; and as is true of some Islamic jihadists today.) In general a claim of religious belief, however sincerely asserted, does not supersede the obligation to respect the God-endowed natural rights of others. [Emphasis added.]

While he says that beliefs that lead to those "inalienable" rights are only those done in accordance with "the laws of nature and of Nature's God" and that only those actions, so defined, are the ones that are right, he then says that other, opposing beliefs, however sincerely held, don't have the same authority - and therefore actions taken in accordance with those religious beliefs can be curtailed.

So who decides which sincere beliefs are the right ones?  Who decides which ones are the foundations of the "inalienable rights" he's discussing?

That's right, Alan Keyes decides.  He decides what's right and wrong.  He decides (indeed, he's already decided) based only on his set of beliefs - a set of beliefs which he believes to coincide with God's.  Anyone else who has a different set of beliefs...well those beliefs, (again, however sincerely held) to the extent they disagree with what Keyes has already decided to be the "laws of nature and of Nature's God" can be ignored.

Alan Keyes must be a very important man - to Alan Keyes.

See? Crazieplex.

The Birthers

Kitty Pilgrim debunks the Birthers:


Crooks and Liars has a transcript.

Pilgrim lists her evidence upfront:

Now, the Annenberg political fact check, which is a nonpartisan group, went to Chicago to view the birth certificate last year and they released photos and this statement, "FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the USA, just has he has always said."

The Republican governor of Hawaii, Linda Lingle, on record, she says Obama was indeed born in her state and we should note, she did support John McCain. So, we also have a copy of the "Honolulu Advertiser" the newspaper, August 13, and the "Hawaii Star-Bulletin," August 14, 1961, both announcing Barack Obama's birth.

Also, October last year, the director of the Hawaii Department of Health wrote a letter stating, "I have personally seen and verified that the Hawaii State Department of Health has Senator Obama's original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedure."

PolitiFact.com reissued their results from the investigation they conducted in June of last year and they say, "Since we published Obama's birth certificate, questions about its authenticity have been frequent and fierce. After reviewing the evidence, we are confident of our rulings."

In fact, she missed a bit. There's this from Janice Okubo, communications director for the Hawaii Department of Health:

Okubo, who said that she gets weekly questions from Obama ‘Birthers’ that are “more like threats,” explained that the certificate of live birth reproduced by Obama’s campaign should have debunked the conspiracy theories. “If you were born in Bali, for example,” Okubo explained, “you could get a certificate from the state of Hawaii saying you were born in Bali. You could not get a certificate saying you were born in Honolulu. The state has to verify a fact like that for it to appear on the certificate."

And then there's this from the Department of Hawaiian Homelands explaining about the "Certifications of Live Birth":

The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands accepts both Certificates of Live Birth (original birth certificate) and Certifications of Live Birth because they are official government records documenting an individual’s birth. [emphasis added]

So the so-called "short form" certificate is the official position of the State of Hawaii. If it's a forgery then the whole of official Hawaii (with its Republican Governor) is in on the hoax.

The funniest part of this story happens when teh crazie Alan Keyes answers this question from Pilgrim:

Now, Alan Keyes, you've been patient letting me get through all that, but what more do you need to be convinced?

And how does teh crazie Keyes start his answer?

Two words: SOME-EVIDENCE.

Alan Keyes has teh crazie.

Mad Hatters at the Tea Party

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. `I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could.

`At any rate I'll never go there again!' said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. `It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!'

"Tea Parties" were held yesterday across the nation and Pittsburgh was no exception (despite the fact that there already was a Tea Party here just last Saturday). The Other Political Junkie has posted on this phenomenon but I thought now was a good time for a review.

The Message

Ostensibly these Tea Parties are protests against taxation and big government spending. Their basis is the Boston Tea Party of 1773 which was of course a protest against taxation without representation. The participants in these Tea Parties are protesting taxation with representation. It's just the wrong representation I guess as there were no nationwide Tea Parties while Bush squandered Clinton's $236 billion surplus in his first year in office and then managed to leave a $482 billion deficit in his wake and a broken economy.

Then there's the irony of people protesting taxes who just got a tax cut -- how many of these folks do you really think make $250,000+ a year? And, how angry do they get when faced with reality?

The Tea Parties are also being presented as bipartisan events ("was neutral in any perceived attack on a particular party or politician"). Perhaps that's why Robert Baehr (Founder/Coordinator of PennsylvaniaTeaParty.com ) felt it necessary to recently take down the Obama morphing into The Terminator graphic (complete with terminator theme music) from his web site. Fortunately, I captured a screen shot of it only two days ago:


Bipartisan, my ass!

The Players

While I'm sure there were many genuine grassroots-type anti-tax activists in attendance, there is no doubt that "the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests."

On top of that, you have FOX News which both heavily promoted the events and participated in them:





The Subtext

So no one really likes to pay taxes and most folks dislike "big" government and have some reservation about the bailouts (though the Left would define "big" with such actions as, say, spying on the citizenry and denying women autonomy over their own bodies and the Right with things like taxation and gun control) so what's the problem?

As Atrios put it today:

All fun aside, there's obviously nothing wrong with the right attempting to engage in protest politics. The problem is that it was never clear what they were protesting. So far Obama has cut taxes for most of the population and... well, that's it. The protests of "The Left" have long been mocked for lacking message discipline. That criticism has often been fair. The difference is that our side's protests generally have a single point ("don't do this stupid fucking war in Iraq") which gets hijacked by a bunch of other causes when the speakers hit the stage. But the teabaggers... honestly, I still have no idea what it was about. I mean, I know it was about tribal allegiance against Barack Mumia Saddam Obama III. But it wasn't actually about anything else.

I have to say that I agree with him on the Obama Derangement Syndrome part. Here are some signs from yesterday's protests:


Here's a video of delusional wingnuts from a Cleveland Tea Party a couple of months ago:



And, then there's this bit from the Saturday Pittsburgh Tea Party where Alan Keyes compared the Obama team to Al-Qaeda:

We have had foreign enemies who have sought to terrorize us with attacks, and we have domestic enemies who seek to terrorize us with economic collapse.

And works its way to a vision in which we are being led

happily into the slaughter pens where we shall go from being proud citiziens of the United States, fearing no one but our God, to being the subjects of a government where we must fear its every shadow.

But maybe Philly being far from Pittsburgh, Atrios is too far from seeing the broader picture: the Tea Parties aren't just about hatred and fear of Obama, they are about that deep, dark, ugly strain of America who hates government itself, fears anyone who is not like them, find conspiracies around every corner and see themselves as victims (but who only play at being martyers with their little tea bags vs. colonists who actually put their lives and liberty on the line).

As Chris Potter put it at his Slag Heap blog:

Let's recall that one week to the day before Keyes gave his little pep-talk, three Pittsburgh police officers were gunned down -- apparently by a guy who thought the government was going to take away his guns. It is in this context, in this city, that Keyes chose to praise his audience as a group in which "every individual is an army empowered by their faith in God."

I'm willing to bet that's how many lone gunmen see themselves. Especially the ones who would admire this line from Keyes' speech:

[N]ever as long as we have breath [will we] surrender the instruments with which we can defend [our] liberty against the depradations of a government no longer committed to it.

Make no mistake: I'm not suggesting that Keyes is encouraging people to go shoot cops. (His political program, such as it is, seems to involve "throwing the bums out" -- voting against every incumbent in 2010.) Nor would he be responsible if one of his audience later goes out and does just that. But Keyes talked quite a bit about how "liberty" wasn't all about doing whatever you wanted -- at least not when it applied to things like gay marriage. Maybe a word about the moral obligations of gun ownership would have been in order?

If you're in a city still grieving from a terrible shooting, you might want to think the se things through. If only to show you actually give a damn about the city you happened to parachute into that morning with your rantings. This is almost like Charlton Heston showing up in Littleton, Colorado to do the NRA "not from my cold, dead hands" shtick after the Columbine shootings.

What does it say when you don't have to go to skinhead web sites to hear these rants, when you can hear them at rallies across the country or pimped on FOX News or just listen to the batshit crazy rants of an elected official like Rep. Michele Bachmann who wants people to be "armed and dangerous," who rants about Obama's reducation camps for kids, calls for the major newspapers of the country to investigate other members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America" and feels like she's a "foreign correspondent on enemy lines" when in the nation's Capitol or Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican, told a Birmingham paper that there were 17 socialists in Congress?

Undoubtedly, someone can easily Google up a picture of Bush portrayed as Hitler from some Left rally, but there is a difference between the Left and the Right. For one, when the Left claimed that Bush cherry-picked intelligence or spied on citizens or tortured prisoners, they were proven right. More importantly, when they asked for redress, they called for impeachment or war crime trials -- legal remedies. The right is throwing red meat with talk of revolution and some coming storm and the need to keep their AK's.

If there's any doubt just how far they've gone, one only needs to see their mouthpieces willingly self-identify with extremists and terrorists all the way down to local radio personality Fred Honsberger who according to his Facebook message claims that our government thinks that you might be a home grown terrorist if: "you're a returning war vet, you ascribe to "radical" Christian views, you're against abortion, you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car."

The Joke

But before we settle into a deep depression over the ugliness and lies of the Tea Parties, let's remember that wingnuts seem to have never heard of teh google and did not know that teabagging refers to a specific sexual act. So when you see things like this:






Remember that it means this:


And, laugh your ass off at them (but remember to breath through your nose):


.

I WAS Gonna Write About Alan Keyes

Glad I didn't.

Potter did. And his was much better. Potter does our homework for us and watches the WHOLE SPEECH by Ambassador Keyes.

Some highlights:

It starts with Keyes comparing the Obama team to Al-Qaeda:

We have had foreign enemies who have sought to terrorize us with attacks, and we have domestic enemies who seek to terrorize us with economic collapse.

And works its way to a vision in which we are being led

happily into the slaughter pens where we shall go from being proud citiziens of the United States, fearing no one but our God, to being the subjects of a government where we must fear its every shadow.

He calls Keyes "batshit nuts" and waxes sociological on this followers:

The temptation is to say there's something "chilling" about all this, but actually it's sort of sad. The folks at Media Matters have posted footage from other recent "Tea Parties," which pretty clearly shows what's going on here. Despite the rhetoric, the real grievance these folks have isn't that America has "lost its democracy." It's that these folks lost the last election. And they just can't imagine how the hell that happened.

Alan Keyes: Batshit nuts.

Teh Crazie

Keyes is right about one thing: This is insanity.