Grief, Art Robinson worked with Gary North...

[elfs]

So, there was a lot of buzz about a terrible, terrible interview Rachel Maddow conducted with Art Robsinson, the candidate for the 8th district in Oregon. Maddow tried to get him to either embrace or repudiate opinions Robinson had espoused over the years, and Robinson spent the entire interview calling her questions "sarcastic lies," a tactic he seemed trained in, to the point where Maddow was banging her head on the desk.

Robinson seems to have had an interesting career. He's a PhD. chemist by profession, and had a remarkable opening act working with Linus Pauling, but over the years he's become more and more ideologically conservative, to the point where he's become a global-warming denier, and HIV-causes-AIDS denier, and "Darwin dissenter." (A classic case of crank magnetism, if ever there was one.)

But what caught my attention was that he authored a book with Gary North, the Christian Reconstructionist who believes that the day will come, "by the sword as well as the pen," when America will be a Christian nation, when non-Christian will be unable to avail themselves of the public square, and where witchcraft and homosexuality will be grounds for the death penalty.

North is really careful to never, ever say that he advocates for the overthrow of the US Government, but he's also frank that "politics involves establishing one view of the 'holy commonwealth,' and excluding all other rival views."

The right wing was all abunched last week over one imam's claim that "someday, the flag of Islam will fly over the White House." Both the left and right were inflamed by Markos Moulitsas entitling his last book American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Religious Right, in which he writes that the far right and the Taliban have many of the same aims and goals, and only the residue of the Founding Fathers' Enlightenment values prevents the religious right from really going all medieval on our asses.

But Art Robinson consorts with people who really are as close in attitude to the Taliban as one can be, and still claim to be Christian. Art Robinson wants to put a cross on the White House. Why isn't that outrageous?

[edit] Grief, Robinson's a total wackaloon. He runs a homeschooling publishing and distribution house, and has an essay on the site about how, if the evidence leads to an unbiblical conclusion, the evidence is wrong. "What are you going to believe, this many-thousands year-old book written by goatherders, or your own lying eyes?"

Comments

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

So many things that bother me these days, I receive a perverse sense of reassurance about, once I see that Rachel has experienced them, too. Art Robinson is one of those things.

[slutdiary.livejournal.com]

We watched that interview and it is the closest I've seen Rachael come to literally putting her head through the wall. He kept hammering away at his own academic credentials, as if Rachael was a junior high school drop out. [Per our friend Wikipedia: "A graduate of Castro Valley High School in Castro Valley, Maddow earned a degree in public policy from Stanford University in 1994. At graduation she was awarded the John Gardner Fellowship. She was also the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and began her postgraduate study in 1995 at Lincoln College, Oxford. In 2001, she earned a Doctorate in Philosophy (DPhil) in politics from Oxford University. Her thesis is titled HIV/AIDS and Health Care Reform in British and American Prisons. She is the first openly gay American to win a Rhodes scholarship."]

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

"The flag of Islam"?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's a quote: "We do believe as Muslims the East and the West will be governed by the Sharia. Indeed we believe that one day the flag of Islam will fly over the White House." Imam Anjem Choudary, on ABC News's Sunday talk show, This Week.

FOX News commentator Dan Gainor asked, "When Choudary said that, why did no one in the media pick it up? If a Christian televangelist said that, the mainstream media would seize it as evidence of the evils of Christianity."

Well, yeah. 88% of the country is Christian. 1.2% of the country is Muslim. If enough Christians actually formed a voting bloc, they could rescind the First Amendment. Even if every Muslim thought the exact same way, the idea of them doing anything politically interesting is laughable.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

I was wondering why he thought his religion had a flag, and what it might look like.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Ah, apparently it's a Nation of Islam thing, which makes a certain amount of sense.

http://www.fotw.net/flags/rel-noi.html

Fruitbat explanation here:
http://www.thenationofislam.org/flagofislam.html

[pieforeveryone.livejournal.com]

Apparently one of the perks of having moved to Eugene to attend college is I also get to vote against this guy. I love this town.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

"North is really careful to never, ever say that he advocates for the overthrow of the US Government"

That's because he and his ilk are certain that they'll be able to pare down the constitution to nothing, eventually.

sharia Law is being forced upon the world slowly

[(Anonymous)]

The Malik ibn Anas writer of sharia law has the belief that all muslims share in common that islamic law is the best form of law, which should be spread to all the world. The varying factions of tribal conflicts we see in iraq are those who want to implement this law. Sharia Law. Which would you prefer for our government: Women without basic representation against an abusive husband in a court case. Or a government (current one) that believes in a womens right to testify and have others testify against him?; that does'nt believe in dismemberment of body parts for stealing; in religious tolerance and tolerance towards liberal...oh I'm sorry I hurt your feelings...progressives.