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elfsSo, 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?"
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?"
