Pundit Country

Right idea, wrong President.

What we are witnessing right now is an anti-Christian programmatic pogrom. What is a ‘pogrom’ it’s the word that describes anti-Jewish raids by Cossacks and others in czarist Russia, but a programmatic pogrom best describes what is happening right now. These are not isolated attacks. And while we no longer have Cossacks to threaten, we now have left-wing bloggers who actually call themselves Kossacks.

-Ken Blackwell, former Republican Secretary of State for Ohio in an opinion piece for FOX News.

Sir, I realize FOX distorts the news but I don’t think even they can manufacture a mass murder in America’s streets and they be the only ones who notice. I would suggest locating a dictionary ASAP. That word (pogrom) doesn’t mean what you think it means. Also, Christians are not an ethnic group.

According to most sites that measure web traffic, Facebook is the second most-populated site on the Internet. Only Google ranks higher. While it’s original intent was to serve as a social site for the traditional college-aged crowd, it now appeals to all ages and industries. However, with growth has come some measure of controversy and dissatisfaction with the manner in which the company’s founders address the needs of the rapidly growing site.

Some are critical of the constant UI and functionality changes, others have expressed frustration with the way in which their data is organized, while still others have raised concerns about the company’s stance on privacy protection. But it’s the company’s stance on content control that has generated the most outcry. While pages focusing on adult content (read: nudes or semi-nudes) are regularly taken down citing a violation of the ToS which protects harmful content from being accessible of minors, other pages, groups and individual accounts which spew hatred for peoples of color, race or gender are allowed to remain. Facebook has been reluctant to remove such content believing there is a First Amendment protection even to offensive content.

Now I’m all in favor of social networks being as hands-off as possible in regard to content. It’s not their job to censor, but merely play referee when things get out of hand, violate their Terms of Service policy, or the law. An excellent example would be earlier today when the sites owners removed fan pages that were established to honor Joseph Andrew Stack, who crashed his plane into a building in Austin, TX which housed a local branch of the IRS. It was the right thing to do (although at the time of this writing I’m not sure if it was at the request of many users or the FBI; the reports on this point seem to contradict each other). However, there are other groups that spout the same kind of hate that should also be removed from the social networking site.

Take, for example, something called O.B.A.M.A. (One Big Ass Mistake, America). Now I understand that the President isn’t the most popular person in some conservative circles. Their guy lost and some are some are genuinely concerned about the direction of the country. Others though, have issues with a black man in the highest office, or Democrats and liberal-progressives in general. This borderline hate group seems to cater to all of the above, but a majority of the commenters are of the teabagging, uber-paranoid variety who seem to be attracted to lurking online and spewing whatever bile lurks in their head, confident in the fact that there are people online who are just like them and support their viewpoints.

Once you log onto the front page, it all seems pretty standard grassroots group who aren’t a big fan of the sitting President. It’s when you get to the pictures section that the rage gets turned up to 10. Below are some examples of what they are displaying.

This isn’t some fringe group, either. As of this writing they have a membership of over 566,000.

While it should be noted that some in the group expressed disgust or disapproval over these images, they were in the minority. A clear majority of the users who commented applauded the images and wanted more.

Facebook’s administrators have yet to take the fan page down. Do you think it should come down?

*semi-weekly to be defined as “whenever the hell I get around to it” (links courtesy of Right Wing Watch and Hatewatch).

For the period ending October 4, 2009:

• Truth Wins Out: Focus on the Family Seeks to Exempt Alabama Gays from Antibullying Protection.
• Amanda Hess: Ex-Gay Group Calls Hate Crime Laws “Anti-Ex-Gay.”
• Family Research Council released its anti-ENDA testimony, in which it claims that “homosexuality is [not] biologically determined” and “‘transgender’ people have a mental illness.”
• Group marches for ‘white civil rights’ after Limbaugh hyped bus beating as a hate crime against whites.
• The LA Times takes a look at the “personhood” efforts, which is now coming to Missouri as well.
• The Pacific Justice Institute has filed suit against a California school district over it’s LGBT anti-bullying efforts, claiming it is really a effort to indoctrinate school children into the gay lifestyle.
• David Hart reports that the anti-LGBT group National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is desperately trying to connect the fight over marriage equality to ACORN.
• Media Matters chronicles the on-going right-wing crusade against Kevin Jennings.
• Think Progress: Rep. Steve King Says Same-Sex Marriage Is “A Purely Socialist Concept.”
• The Alliance Defense Fund has announced its second Pulpit Freedom Sunday, to be held on September 27 in order to challenge IRS restrictions on what pastors and priests can say.
• Randall Terry and company are now targeting the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
• Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute warns that bullying and harassment prevention programs are “one of the central ways to get pro-homosexual information and resources into public schools.”
• You really should read the excerpt from the forthcoming book by former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer published in GQ.
• Everything you need to know about the Tea Party movement can be learned for Mark Williams’ pathetic appearance on AC360.
• FAIR (not the media watchdog group) Embraces Racist Founder.
• Rick Santorum: running for president?
• Think Progress: Neal Boortz compares President Obama to a child molester.
• Adele M. Stan: “Make no mistake; the Tea Party movement is the new religious right. The megaphone of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family media empire has been replaced by FOX News Channel and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.”
• Alan Turing gets a long overdue apology from the British government … the sort of which, had it happened here, the Religious Right would have vehemently opposed.
• Joseph Farah says that President Obama should be impeached for the “audacious plot of the White House to harvest personal e-mail addresses from Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites for political purposes.” Of course, none of that is true.
• The effort to place a “Personhood Amendment” on the Florida ballot would likely end up outlawing birth control.
• Dave Weigel recently wrote a great piece on the rising influence of WorldNetDaily.
• Student Hate Group in Michigan gets new faculty advisor.

I find myself rarely in agreement with Tom Friedman. While I don’t consider myself an expert by any measure in foreign policy matters (the field a majority of his commentary is focused), I am almost in disagreement with him in relation to domestic issues. I’ve always felt his conclusions to be more of the same D.C. insider bunk that pervades most opinion journalism; too focused on the needs of the moneyed interests and less on the Main Street interests.

However, I am rather awed at his comparison between the public tension in the U.S. compared to the tension in Israel prior to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995. He makes a salient point when he notes:

Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.

However, what bothers me more lately is what appears to be the administration’s lack of attention to this matter or their inability to take it seriously. If the vitrol is this bad just a few months after the election, imagine how much worse it will get in the next three years.

You can read Friedman’s entire piece here.