The Barbarism and Obscenity of Sarah Palin and Her Supporters

No matter what else he does during the balance of his remaining political career, John McCain will forever be remembered as having unleashed on America one of the most obscene, barbaric and false Christians to have ever carried the GOP standard: Sarah Palin.  Not only is the woman a mental midget in may ways, but she has pulled many in the GOP base down into a fetid swamp of hate, prejudice and advocacy for torture and war crimes.  Perhaps the only individual as bad or worse than Palin is the monstrous Dick Cheney, a/k/a Emperor Palpatine Cheney on this blog.  What's perhaps more frighten than Palin herself, however, is the fact that (i) her support of torture and war crimes is now mainstream among white evangelicals and (ii) few in the Republican Party have dared condemn her and/or argue  that decent Republicans need to shun her.  Palin - and her Christofascist supporters - has reached a new low in her recent support of torture and equating water boarding to "baptism for terrorists."  Andrew Sullivan takes Palin to task in a post.  Here are highlights:

If you want a classic example of political Christianism – and its active hostility to spiritual Christianity – it’s hard to beat Sarah Palin’s remarks yesterday. I offered a brief response last night, but this obscenity needs to be unpacked some more. And the first thing to say is that a former US vice-presidential candidate did not just endorse a war crime; she endorsed it as routine for every human being suspected of terrorism. And she seems to endorse it as an introduction to captivity. “Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists” is a glib statement but a revealing one. 

She believes that torture should be the first resort – a sign of how America treats its foes, a badge of honor. What can one say but that this is a bona fide fascistic sentiment. It revels in violence against individuals tied down by their hands and feet and strapped to a terrifying board in order to be suffocated hundreds of times to near-death. It is the kind of statement you might expect from the Khmer Rouge, or from the Chinese Communists who perfected “stress positions”, or from the Nazis, whose Gestapo pioneered “enhanced interrogation”, i.e. brutal torture that would leave no physical traces. Except it’s worse than that. Even totalitarian regimes have publicly denied their torture. Their reticence and lies are some small concession of vice to the appearance of virtue. Not Palin – who wants to celebrate brutal torture as the American way.

And then she manages to go one step further. She invokes torture in the context of a Christian sacrament. Not since the Nazis’ Deutsche Christen have we seen something so disgusting and blasphemous in the morphing of Christianity into its polar opposite. 

It reveals that vast swathes of American Christianity are objectively anti-Christian, even pagan, in their support for this barbarism. Rod should know this by now. In the best recent polling on the question, 62 percent of white evangelical “Christians” back torture as often or sometimes justified, with only 16 percent holding the orthodox position that it is never justified. Now compare those numbers with Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion: the number in that demographic is 40 percent in favor in some or many cases, and 26 percent against it in all circumstances. Is this a function of wayward and uncommitted Christians? Nope. Support for torture is highest among those who attend church at least weekly and lowest for those who rarely or never go to church. In America, torture is a Christian value. And some people wonder why I prefer to term “Christianist” to describe these people.

[T]orture is a far graver evil, even for orthodox theologians, than non-procreative or non-marital sex. And yet today’s Christianists are obsessed about the latter and not just indifferent to the former, but actually in favor of it. It’s this twisted set of priorities, this exquisitely misplaced set of fears, and this utter ignorance of even basic Christian teaching that reveals all that’s so terribly wrong with American Christianity. It has become its own nemesis.

As I have said before, conservative Christianity has become an abject evil.   Despite their posturing and self-congratulation, conservative Christians are, in my view, among the most immoral members of the population.  Decent people - and decent politicians - need to shun these Christofascists the way lepers were shunned in the Bible.  They are a menace and will be the cause of Christianity's death.

McCain/Palin Lying About Crowd Size??

Obviously jealous of Barack Obama's ability to turn out unprecedented crowds, since announce wingnut fruitcake Sarah Palin as his running mate, the McShame campaign has been trying to create spin that suddenly McCain/Palin are drawing large crowds. It turns out that such is perhaps not the case after all and instead is just more of the non-stop lying coming out of the GOP. Increasingly, the McCain/Palin campaign are displaying nothing less than an utter contempt for voters and apparently seem to believe that the larger American public is as simple minded as the Christianist base of the GOP. If truth is such a scarce commodity now, one can only wonder what would McCain/Palin do if elected to office? It appears so far that they'd make the Chimperator look down right honest - a fact that speaks volumes as to why the nation cannot afford a McCain/Palin regime. Here are some highlights from Bloomberg.com:
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Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Senator John McCain has drawn some of the biggest crowds of his presidential campaign since adding Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to his ticket on Aug. 29. Now officials say they can't substantiate the figures McCain's aides are claiming. McCain aide Kimmie Lipscomb told reporters on Sept. 10 that an outdoor rally in Fairfax City, Virginia, drew 23,000 people, attributing the crowd estimate to a fire marshal. Fairfax City Fire Marshal Andrew Wilson said his office did not supply that number to the campaign and could not confirm it.

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In recent days, journalists attending the rallies have been raising questions about the crowd estimates with the campaign. In a story on Sept. 11 about Palin's attraction for some Virginia women voters, Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher estimated the crowd to be 8,000, not the 23,000 cited by the campaign.

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The McCain campaign said 10,000 people showed up at the Consol Energy Arena in Washington, Pennsylvania, home of the Washington Wild Things baseball team. The campaign attributed that estimate, and several that followed, to U.S. Secret Service figures, based on the number of people who passed through magnetometers. ``We didn't provide any numbers to the campaign,'' said Malcolm Wiley, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service.