Another Campaign Untruth: Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro

Ted Cruz and Rafael Cruz- two consummate liars and nutcases

It increasing seems that being a shameless liar is a prerequisite to being a Republican presidential nominee contestant.  Either the candidates themselves are telling the lies or close family members are providing the false story lines.  Candidly, as the Christofascists have risen in power within the GOP, the level of lying and demagoguery has directly increased.  Now, Ted Cruz finds himself under fire for his father's fraudulent lies that have been woven into Cruz's own fairy tale narrative.  The older Cruz - who in my opinion belongs in an insane asylum - has made claims of "fighting for freedom" in Cuba as a young man.  The trouble is that many of the details he used to embellish his story simply are not true.  The New York Times looks at the truth about the elder Cruz's made up narrative.  Here are excerpts:

Since he was a boy, Senator Ted Cruz has said, all he wanted to do was “fight for liberty” — a yearning that he says was first kindled when he heard his father’s tales of fighting as a rebel leader in Cuba in the 1950s, throwing firebombs, running guns and surviving torture.

Those stories, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his father, Rafael, have hooked Republican audiences and given emotional power to the message that the Texas senator is pushing as a contender for the party’s presidential nomination. 

But the family narrative that has provided such inspirational fire to Mr. Cruz’s speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his father’s Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.

The elder Mr. Cruz, 76, recalls a vivid moment at a watershed 1956 battle in Santiago de Cuba, when he was with a hero of the revolution, Frank País, just hours before he was killed in combat.  In fact, Mr. País was killed seven months later and in a different place and manner.

In interviews, Rafael Cruz’s former comrades and friends disputed his description of his role in the Cuban resistance. He was a teenager who wrote on walls and marched in the streets, they said — not a rebel leader running guns or blowing up buildings.

Leonor Arestuche, 79, a student leader in the ’50s whom the Castro government later hired to verify the supposed exploits of revolutionary veterans, said a term existed for people like Mr. Cruz — “ojalateros,” or wishful thinkers.   “People wishing and praying that Batista would fall,” she said, “but not doing much to act on it.”

There is no question that Rafael Cruz, who is now a pastor and his son’s most effective and popular campaign surrogate, was beaten in 1957 at the hands of agents for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator.

The reason Mr. Cruz was arrested, however, is less clear, and he has offered different explanations. In an interview alongside his son in March, Mr. Cruz said he had sought to recruit to the revolutionary cause someone who turned out to be an informant working for Batista’s regime. The 1959 account, though, did not mention any informant . . . . 

Mario Martínez, who Mr. Cruz confirmed was part of his small revolutionary cell, said he did not recall Mr. Cruz’s being apprehended for trying to recruit someone and said he believed that the cause of his old comrade’s detainment was possession of a revolver — one that Mr. Cruz had never used. 

[N]one of the Cuban historians, former comrades of Mr. Cruz in his hometown or veterans of the Santiago battle reached by The Times could corroborate his story. 

[V]eterans of the operation questioned Rafael Cruz’s account of his involvement.  Luís Clergé, who prides himself on knowing the names of the commandos he served with in the Nov. 30 operation, had no memory of Mr. Cruz.   Mr. Cruz’s name also drew blanks from Luís Solá Vila, a leader of the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, a campus-based activist group in Santiago, and Luís Gálvez Taupier, a university leader who worked closely with the movement’s youth brigades, among others.

In his book “A Time for Truth,” published in June, Ted Cruz writes that the rebels who attacked the Santiago Police Headquarters met devastating resistance, and “All of the students were killed, as was their leader, Frank País.”

But of the scores of rebels who participated in the attack, only a few were killed, according to eyewitness accounts and historical documents.

It looks like Ben Carson is not the only GOP candidate challenged by truth and veracity.  Both Carson and Cruz are pushing narratives that play well with the idiots and Christofascists of the GOP regardless of whether or not they bear any semblance to reality.  Among most normal and honest people, this amounts to lying.  Deliberately lying.

Christian Publisher Stops Publication of David Barton's Revisionist History Book

As a history major in college and a firm believer that only by knowing true and accurate history can we avoid mistakes and horrors of the past, I have long been appalled by the work of supposed historian David Barton who would have fit right in with the Goebbels propaganda machine for the Nazi Party.  The man constantly spews deliberate lies and has been a leading advocate of the myth that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation."  It's a total lie and the real truth about the Founding Fathers reveals that they were extremely suspicious of religion and that virtually none of them were of a mindset like today's evangelical Christians who live in some kind of deranged alternate universe from objective reality.  And not surprisingly, Barton is a huge proponent of Bible based civil laws that would make homosexuality a crime worthy of severe punishment.   Barton's latest book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, sought to rewrite the history of Jefferson into some kind of fantasy that turned the truth about the man upside down.   Fortunately, the books publisher has ceased distribution of the book in the face of blistering condemnation.  Here are highlights from NPR:

Citing a loss of confidence in the book's details, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson is ending the publication and distribution of the bestseller, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. 


The controversial book was written by Texas evangelical David Barton, who NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty profiled on All Things Considered Wednesday. The publishing company says it's ceasing publication because it found that "basic truths just were not there."

Since its initial publication, historians have debunked and raised concerns about numerous claims in Barton's book. In it, Barton calls Jefferson a "conventional Christian," claims the founding father started church services at the Capitol, and even though he owned more than 200 slaves, says Jefferson was a civil rights visionary.

"Mr. Barton is presenting a Jefferson that modern-day evangelicals could love and identify with," Warren Throckmorton, a professor at the evangelical Grove City College, told Hagerty. "The problem with that is, it's not a whole Jefferson; it's not getting him right."

Warren Throckmorton and I have dueled over the years on reparative therapy - he has since changed his positions supporting the "therapy" -  but he believes in honesty.  That's something unknown to Barton.  Bob Felton has some commentary on Barton's lies about Jefferson:

In order of the provocative ‘truths’ Barton proposes to set the record straight about:

• Did Thomas Jefferson really have a child by his young slave girl, Sally Hemings? Almost certainly. DNA tests performed in the late 90s established that the descendants of Sally Hemings have DNA that matches Jefferson’s descendants. Most historians think that settles the question, but others point out that the common DNA may have entered the family line through the Randolphs, Jefferson’s wife’s family. The Randolph descendents have refused to submit to DNA testing and so, strictly, the matter is unresolved. Rumors of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings were a commonplace during his lifetime, however, and it is undisputed that there were a lot of red-headed slave children running around Monticello, and that Hemings and her children received privileged treatment in Jefferson’s will.
  
• Did he write his own Bible, excluding the parts of Christianity with which he disagreed? The truth is more complicated than the question implies. Jefferson was an admirer of Jesus, but skeptical of the magic-man persona and the miracles. Jefferson cut-and-pasted the gospel narratives into an order he thought more coherent than in the traditional Bible, and omitted the miracles. Jefferson was carefully ambiguous about his religious beliefs, which, given his Enlightenment temperament, probably signifies agnosticism or deism.
  
• Was he a racist who opposed civil rights and equality for black Americans? Jefferson wanted to send the slaves back to Africa, and intimated toward the end of his life that he thought slavery might someday lead to exactly the civil war we got. It’s not clear whether he was a racist per se, so much as that he believed the race problem was irreconcilable and dangerous to the union. He was instrumental in the colonization movement that culminated in the founding of Liberia.
  
• Did he, in his pursuit of separation of church and state, advocate the secularizing of public life? Yes, emphatically so. Though his public pronouncements on religion were few and ambiguous, his private letters speak plainly and often of his contempt for the clergy.

There is much to admire in Jefferson, and even his flaws are not so bad when we consider his time and place. To recreate him as some sort of American saint is dishonest, though, and it is gratifying that Barton’s revisionism has fallen with such a clunk.

I know I comment on this repeatedly, but no one lies as much or as often as the "godly Christian" crowd.  It's ironic that the "godless liberals" do a much better job at being honest and avoiding constant outright lies.

The GOP's Phony Worship of Ronald Reagan

It's mind numbing to hear all the references by today's Republicans who claim to give adulation to Ronald Reagan even though were he to run for office with the positions he held, Reagan would likely go down to defeat at the hands of the Christofascist/Tea Party base of today's GOP.  The hypocrisy of these pretend worshipers of Reagan is only exceed by the hypocrisy of the child rapist protecting Roman Catholic Church hierarchy.  On a host of issues, Reagan would be anathema to today's GOP base.  A somewhat tongue in check column in the Washington Post looks at how Reagan would have to be "genetically re-engineered" to conform to today's insane and  extremist Republican Party.  Here are highlights:

Party officials have been making the pilgrimage to the Reagan Library this year to express their wish to re-create the great man. “I believe boldness and clarity of the kind that Ronald Reagan displayed in 1980 offer us the greatest opportunity to create a winning coalition in 2012,” vice presidential aspirant Paul Ryan said at the library last week.

Also making the trip were VP hopefuls Marco Rubio and Chris Christie. “Like Ronald Reagan, I believe in what this country and its citizens can accomplish,” the latter declared. “The America I speak of is the America Ronald Reagan challenged us to be.”

The man they hope to join on the ticket, Mitt Romney, once boasted that he was “not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.” Now he says the party’s standard-bearer should be in “the same mold as Ronald Reagan.”

But before they go filling that mold by mapping the Reagan genome, Republicans may wish to consider some genetic flaws that party scientists should repair in the cloning process. To make the Reagan clone more compatible with today’s Republican Party, a bit of genetic engineering may be in order:

AFL-1  Reagan’s AFL-1 gene, on the labor chromosome, has a mutation that made him susceptible to workers’ rights. He said of unions: “There are few finer examples of participatory democracy.” He said the right to join a union is “one of the most elemental human rights.” And he said collective bargaining “played a major role in America’s economic miracle.”

EPA-4  Reagan’s EPA-4 gene, on the regulatory chromosome, has a protein that can summon anti-industry sympathies. He signed a law establishing efficiency standards for electric appliances and an update to the Safe Drinking Water Act punishing states that didn’t meet clean-water standards.

SSA-2 and MDCR-1  These related genes, on the long arm of the retirement chromosome, are problematic. Reagan expanded Social Security in 1983 and imposed taxes on wealthy recipients. He also signed what was at the time the largest expansion of Medicare in its history.

DEBT-1, DEBT-2, DEBT-3  A trio of abnormalities on the fiscal chromosome caused Reagan to increase taxes several times after his initial tax cut, to embrace much higher taxes on investments than current rates and to sign 18 increases in the federal debt limit.
 
SPND-1, SPND-2, SPND-3  These Reagan mutations, in the same sector as the debt mutations, created a genetic predisposition to expand the federal government. Reagan enlarged the federal workforce and the federal budget, added the Department of Veterans Affairs (one of the largest Cabinet agencies) and pursued a military buildup that would be impossible under spending limits proposed by congressional Republicans.

EITC-1  For all his talk about welfare queens, Reagan had a gene on the compassion chromosome that led him to champion the earned-income tax credit, a program for the working poor that takes more children out of poverty than any other program. Budgets proposed by today’s Republicans would cut or eliminate the credit. A related abnormality caused Reagan to say that bus drivers should not pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than millionaires — one of President Obama’s tax proposals opposed by current Republicans.

By today's standards in the GOP, Reagan would be described as a tax and spend liberal Democrat.  My goodness, he might even be called a Communist!  Today's lunatic GOP base definitely has a very selective memory of the real facts about Reagan and his 8 years as President.

Black Pastors, Marriage Equality, and NOM’s Money

I have lamented frequently about the manner in which many black pastors are routinely co-opted to act as water carriers for white Christianist organization which, if one knows accurate history, are the successors to the same far right Christians who supported slavery in the 1850's and 1860's and who later supported the Jim Crow laws and segregation. Here in Virginia, the toxic bigots at The Family Foundation ("TFF") routinely manipulate black pastors to support TFF's anti-gay agenda as if they were trained circus dogs. It's disgusting not to mention an extreme dishonor of blacks who fought against these very same Christianist for equality under the nation's civil laws. Now, Alvin McEwen has a post at Pam's House Blend that speculates that these very same pastors such as Rev. Patrick Wooden (pictured at right) are perhaps being paid by the National Organization for Marriage ("NOM") to support NOM's anti-gay jihad. Here are highlights from Alvin's post:

A 2005 article on now disgraced Atlanta pastor Eddie Long highlights a disturbing perspective to this issue of the National Organization for Marriage utilizing the black church and leaders against marriage equality that very few people are openly talking about.

The article theorizes that there was a tie between Long’s 2005 anti-marriage equality march held in Atlanta and a $1 million grant he received from the faith-based initiatives of the Bush Administration. The article also theorizes that other black pastors were rewarded for making public positions against marriage equality.

When I read the recent disgusting comments of Pastor Patrick Wooden and several other black ministers and leaders assembled by the NOM to combat marriage equality, I can’t help wondering if we are seeing a retread of this theory.

While I’m certainly not making pointed accusations, I have been amazed at how quickly and convenient these coalitions between NOM and several black pastors and leaders have come together. I have also been alarmed by the rhetoric. There seems to be a degree of unrestrained glee and vindictive pleasure in not only attacking marriage equality, dehumanizing the gay community, but also – particularly in Wooden’s case – going on a tangent about alleged gay sex acts.

These folks come across like well-paid hired guns. . . . . And in this case, we may be talking about NOM’s mysterious funds. Remember, the organization has fought tooth and nail to conceal not only how much it has, but also just who is footing the bill. Yet NOM spends that money like water, brazenly committing large sums of money to stop marriage equality in states like New Hampshire and Washington.

I am not the only lgbtq of color to have voiced this opinion. In the lgbtq of color community, there has been much talk and opinion-forming that these ministers and leaders who step out publicly to not only vilify marriage equality but verbally crucify the gay community in general aren’t exactly doing it solely on spiritual terms.

Again, I am merely speculating. However, if, when it’s all said and done, we find out that money has in fact been greasing some brown, very well manicured palms, lgbtqs of color won’t be surprised and we won’t be shocked. But we will say “we told you so.”

Candidly, in my personal opinion, there are few organizations more morally bankrupt and willing to engage in underhanded and dishonest behavior than the "godly Christian" set. It seems, in their minds, the means justify the end - i.e., the persecution and denigration of LGBT individuals - and no lie and no bribe is too big or distasteful for the Christianists. Indeed, they are the most immoral people one is likely to ever meet.

The Continued Myth of American Exceptionalism

Having traveled in Europe last month and visited cities and nations ten fold older than the United States, I was reminded of the tunnel vision that too many Americans have when it comes to seeing the USA in the larger world context. Are individuals who are not well traveled, wouldn't know the Arts if it hit them in the head and who rely on Fox News for their world view really morally superior to citizens of foreign nations? Or more frighteningly, do they possess the answers to everything as they like to believe? I think not. But that will not stop politicians - especially those in the GOP - from seeking to get mileage out of the myth of American exceptionalism. In my view, this myth is a mechanism for ignoring all of the nation's many failings be it the obscene lack of health care for millions of Americans, declining social mobility and/or a wealth disparity gap that would have embarrassed a banana republic of old. The myth continues to be an excuse for Americans to not take a good look in the mirror and face the fact that despite the good things America has done, it has much to be ashamed about. A piece in Time looks at this myth of exceptionalism as we move closer to the 2012 campaign season. Here are highlights:

In the beginning — before the beginning, really — Americans have thought of themselves as exceptional, as the new chosen people of God.

The “city upon a hill” phrase — [John] Winthrop borrowed it from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount — echoes still. . . . . In a recent Pew poll, when asked if they agreed with the statement “Our people are not perfect but our culture is superior others,” 49% of Americans said yes, compared to 32% of Britons and 27% of French.

In rough political terms, the Republican presidential field argues that America is a place set apart, a nation with a divinely ordained mission to lead the world. A corollary to the case as it is being put in the 2012 cycle is that President Obama does not believe this.

The argument is well-suited to reassure voters who are pessimistic about the life of the nation and about the place of America in the world.

We are going to be hearing more about this notion of exceptionalism, possibly far beyond Iowa and New Hampshire and into the general election. So let’s be clear about the history — and the uses and abuses — of the vision of America as an instrument of God’s will on earth.

This sense that we are the new Israel, a chosen people, is among the most ancient and most potent of American ideas. It has informed our finest hours and some of our worst. It has given us the confidence to project our power in defense of the weak and of the innocent and the persecuted. It has sometimes fed a sense of hubris and moral self-certainty.

Lincoln had it right. During the Civil War a Northern minister once came to the White House and said how glad he was that God was on the Union’s side. No, no, Lincoln replied: we had to hope that the Union was on God’s side.

America is a great country, and we have done great things. We can again. And one key to national restoration lies in another, less-quoted part of John Winthrop’s sermon. “We must delight in each other, make others’ condition our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together.” To be exceptional we have to do the exceptional thing and unite in purpose.

Sadly, those who boast of American exceptionalism the most are the same politicians who most seek to divide Americans based on race, national origin, faith, and, of course, sexual orientation. It is far past time that America take a good look in the mirror and realize that hubris and an often unjustified inflated ego are obstacles to exceptionalism.

Marco Rubio's Fictional Family History

It seems the typical GOP politician is either a closeted gay, a religious fanatic or someone who invents a more dazzling self-history to dupe the gullible. A case in point for the latter phenomenon is Florida Senator Marco Rubio who fabricated a compelling family story to promote his political future. The only problem is that now the story has been shown to be totally false. It's one thing to modestly enhance one's biography. It's something far different to totally make it up. Yet that's what Rubio apparently did in part to cater to Cuban-American voters in Florida. The question obviously arises as to what elese Rubio has lied about in the course of his self-promotion. The Washington Post has details - here are some highlights.

During his rise to political prominence, Sen. Marco Rubio frequently repeated a compelling version of his family’s history that had special resonance in South Florida. He was the “son of exiles,” he told audiences, Cuban Americans forced off their beloved island after “a thug,” Fidel Castro, took power.

But a review of documents — including naturalization papers and other official records — reveals that the Florida Republican’s account embellishes the facts. The documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than two-and-a-halfyears before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power on New Year’s Day 1959.

The supposed flight of Rubio’s parents has been at the core of the young senator’s political identity, both before and after his stunning tea-party-propelled victory in last year’s Senate election.

And the 40-year-old senator with the boyish smile and prom-king good looks has drawn on the power of that claim to entrance audiences captivated by the rhetorical skills of one of the more dynamic stump speakers in modern American politics.

The real story of his parents’ migration appears to be a more conventional immigrant narrative, a couple who came to the United States seeking a better life. In the year they arrived in Florida, the future Marxist dictator was in Mexico plotting a quixotic return to Cuba.

The senator’s office tried to clarify the facts in its statement Thursday. . . . legal scholars on both sides of the McCain debate told The Post that Rubio’s citizenship does not appear to be an issue.

Vatican Crony Blames Homosexuality for the Fall of Roman Empire

Apparently, if one wants to be awarded the Order of Knighthood of St. Gregory the Great by the Vatican, one way to enhance your chances is to make outrageous and unfounded statements against homosexuality. Roberto De Mattei - described as a "devout Roman Catholic" and who has already demonstrated that he'd fit right in with some the USA leading Christofascists by saying the Japanese tsunami was ‘divine punishment’ - has now said homosexuality was the cause of the Roman Empire. Never mind the real causes of Rome's collapse, just blame it on the gays - one of Pope Palpatine's favorites past times. There seems to be no end to the lengths the Vatican will go to denigrate LGBT individuals. The Daily Mail has a sampling of the batshitery issuing from the Vatican's favorite historian. Here are highlights:
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Roberto De Mattei . . . said: ‘The collapse of the Roman Empire and the arrival of the Barbarians was due to the spread of homosexuality. ‘The Roman colony of Carthage was a paradise for homosexuals and they infected many others.’ The 63-year-old added: ‘The invasion of the Barbarians was seen as punishment for this moral transgression. ‘It is well known effeminate men and homosexuals have no place in the kingdom of God. 'Homosexuality was not rife among the Barbarians and this shows God’s justice comes throughout history.’
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Last night fellow historians, gay rights groups and politicians expressed outrage. Paola Concia, an MP with the Democratic Left, said: ‘I have tabled an urgent call for the education minister to intervene.’
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Italian homosexual groups said the professor’s comments were ‘based on superstition, ridiculous and outrageous’ and called on him to resign from his Rome-based post. Historian Emilio Gabba, a leading light in Roman history, said: ‘It is highly improbable homosexuality led to the fall of the Roman Empire.’
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Professor Lellia Cracco Ruggini, an expert on Roman history from Turin University, said: ‘There is no proof Rome had a high number of homosexuals. I can safely say Rome did not fall because it was gay.’
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Professor De Mattei co-operates with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Historical Sciences and has been awarded the Order of Knighthood of St. Gregory the Great in acknowledgement of his services to the Roman Catholic Church.

Wingnut B&B Owners Tell Gay Couple they Are "Wrong and Unnatural"

Based on their treatment of a gay couple seeking a venue for their civil union ceremony, the owners of TimberCreek B&B (pictured at left) demonstrate the mindless idiocy - and bigotry - of self-congratulatory Christianists who feel they can flout the civil laws and discriminate against anyone who does not live their life in accordance with fear based and intolerant based Christianist religious beliefs. One can only hope that the State of Illinois will prosecute these jerks for violating the Illinois Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation by businesses open to the public. Not only did the B&B owners refuse to accommodate the civil unions ceremony but they also chastised the couple and called on them to repent. With too many individuals like these B&B owners, it is no wonder that the USA is sliding towards second tier nation status. Here are some highlights from the Advocate:
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Todd Wathen of downstate Illinois sent out inquiries to Beall Mansion and the TimberCreek B&B regarding his upcoming civil union reception. While Beall Mansion's managers told Wathen they allow only traditional weddings at their property, the TimberCreek B&B went much further.
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"We will never host same-sex civil unions. We will never host same-sex weddings even if they become legal in Illinois," TimberCreek operators told Wathen in an e-mail. “We believe homosexuality is wrong and unnatural based on what the Bible says about it. If that is discrimination, I guess we unfortunately discriminate."
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When informed of Illinois's new civil unions law, Jim Walder of TimberCreek replied, “The Bible does not state opinions, but facts. It contains the highest laws pertinent to man. It trumps Illinois law, United States law, and global law should there ever be any.”
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Walder later sent an unsolicited e-mail of Bible passages to Wathen. He wrote, “Hi Todd, I know you may not want to hear this, but I thought I would send along a couple of verses in Romans 1 detailing how the Creator of the Universe looks at the gay lifestyle. It’s not to late to change your behavior.”
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Walder obviously knows very little accurate history and has done no serious study of the Bible and its many rewritings and the political compromises made in dogma all the way back to the time of Constantine the Great. Oh, and did I mention that some of the "facts" recounted in the Bible are off by centuries in terms of true time line chronology? Perhaps Walden needs to be shipped to Iran where the current leadership welcomes such ignorance in the populace.

"Conservatives" Continue to Try to Rewite/Dumb Down History

The loons of the far right offer many things that are upsetting, from their embrace of ignorance and out right lies to seemingly living in some warp alternate universe. I truly cannot understand the bizarre mindset where objective facts and data are viewed as meaningless. This insanity extends to trying to rewrite history to make it match their current insanity on various issues. Their approach? If history doesn't support your lies and theocratic agenda, just change it. This has occurred notably in Texas in the distortion of text book revisions, but the problem is much more pervasive. As the Soviets did for decades, the far right and extremist Christianist want to flat out say that historical facts are not true since they undermine their fantasy world view. McClatchy gives some examples of their dangerous efforts that seek to dumb down all to the far right's lobotomized view. The goal? To make the public more likely to fall for far right demagoguery. Here are some highlights (it's a bit long, but important to understand):

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Here are five recent examples of new conservative versions of history:
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JAMESTOWN
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Reaching for an example of how bad socialism can be, former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said recently that the people who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them.
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"Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow," he said in a speech March 15 at the National Press Club. *
It was a good, strong story, helping Armey, a former economics professor, illustrate the dangers of socialism, the same ideology that he and other conservatives say is at the core of Obama's agenda. It was not, however, true.
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The Jamestown settlement was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit. The colony nearly foundered owing to a harsh winter, brackish water and lack of food, but reinforcements enabled it to survive. It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States.
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ALEXANDER HAMILTON
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At the same event, Armey urged people to read the Federalist Papers as a guide to the sentiments of the tea party movement. "The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers," Armey said.
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Others such as Democrats and the news media, "people here who do not cherish America the way we do," don't understand because "they did not read the Federalist Papers," he said. A member of the audience asked Armey how the Federalist Papers could be such a tea party manifesto when they were written largely by Alexander Hamilton, who the questioner said "was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government."
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Armey ridiculed the very suggestion. "Widely regarded by whom?" he asked. "Today's modern, ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case, in fact, about Hamilton."
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Hamilton, however, was an unapologetic advocate of a strong central government, one that plays an active role in the economy and is led by a president named for life and thus beyond the emotions of the people. Hamilton also pushed for excise taxes and customs duties to pay down federal debt. In fact, Ian Finseth said in a history written for the University of Virginia, others at the constitutional convention "thought his proposals went too far in strengthening the central government."
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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
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Theodore Roosevelt was long an icon of the Republican Party, a dynamic leader who ushered in the Progressive era, busting trusts, regulating robber barons, building the Panama Canal and sending the U.S. fleet around the world announcing ascendant American power.
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Fox TV commentator Glenn Beck, however, says that Roosevelt was a socialist whose legacy is destroying America. It started, Beck said, with Roosevelt's admonition to the wealthy of his day to spend their riches for the good of society. "We judge no man a fortune in civil life if it's honorably obtained and well spent," Roosevelt said, according to Beck. "It's not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it only to be gained so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community."
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Actually, Roosevelt said, "We GRUDGE no man a fortune ... if it's honorably obtained and well USED." But either way, Beck saw the threat. "Oh? Well, thank you," Beck said with scorn during his keynote speech to the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. The presidential suggestion that the wealthy of the Gilded Age should contribute to the good of society was a clear danger that must be condemned, Beck said.
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"Is this what the Republican Party stands for? Well, you should ask members of the Republican Party, because this is not our founders' idea of America. And this is the cancer that's eating at America. It is big government; it's a socialist utopia," Beck said. "And we need to address it as if it is a cancer. It must be cut out of the system because they cannot coexist. ... You must eradicate it. It cannot coexist."
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There's no doubt that Roosevelt was a domestic policy liberal by today's standards. In a 1910 speech in Kansas, he acknowledged that his "New Nationalism" meant "far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had." The 26th president insisted, however, that he wanted the government to guarantee opportunity, not a handout. "The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare," he said. "Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. ... Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him."
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In his autobiography three years later, Roosevelt went on to dismiss the tenets of socialism as taught by Karl Marx as "an exploded theory." "Too many thoroughly well-meaning men and women in the America of today glibly repeat and accept," he wrote, "various assumptions and speculations by Marx and others which by the lapse of time and by actual experiment have been shown to possess not one shred of value." In addition, Roosevelt didn't advocate government ownership of the means of production, the definition of socialism.
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FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
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It's long been debated how well Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal government programs countered the Great Depression, but now a prominent conservative has introduced the idea that Roosevelt CAUSED the Depression. "FDR took office in the midst of a recession," Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., told the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. "He decided to choose massive government spending and the creation of monstrous bureaucracies. Do we detect a Democrat pattern here in all of this? He took what was a manageable recession and turned it into a 10-year depression."
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A year before, Bachmann went to the House floor to blame FDR and what she called the "Hoot-Smalley" tariffs for creating the Depression. "The recession that FDR had to deal with wasn't as bad as the recession (President Calvin) Coolidge had to deal with in the early '20s," she said.
Coolidge cut taxes and created the roaring '20s, Bachmann said. "FDR applied just the opposite formula: the Hoot-Smalley act, which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions. And of course trade barriers and the regulatory burden and of course tax barriers.
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"That's what we saw happen under FDR. That took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression. The American people suffered for almost 10 years under that kind of thinking."
The truth? Historians agree that tariffs hurt trade and worsened the depression.
However, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act — not Hoot-Smalley — was proposed by two Republicans, Sen. Reed Smoot of Utah and Rep. Willis Hawley of Oregon. A Republican House and a Republican Senate approved it. President Herbert Hoover, a Republican, signed it into law.
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The facts also show that the country was in something far worse than a "manageable recession" in March 1933 when Roosevelt took office. Stocks had lost 90 percent of their value since the crash of 1929. Thousands of banks had failed. Unemployment reached an all-time high of 24.9 percent just before Roosevelt was inaugurated.
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JOE MCCARTHY
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Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., burst onto the national stage in the early 1950s with accusations that he had a list of names of known Communists in the federal government. He didn't name them, was censured by the Senate eventually and his name became synonymous with witch hunts — McCarthyism.
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Now, the end of the Cold War has opened up spy files and identified many Communist spies who operated inside the government during the era. Some conservatives argue that this proves not only that McCarthy was right, but also that he was a hero and that he was smeared by liberals, the news media and historians. "Almost everything about McCarthy in current history books is a lie and will have to be revised," conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly said.
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"Liberals had to destroy McCarthy because he exposed the entire liberal establishment as having sheltered Soviet spies," conservative commentator Ann Coulter said in one interview.
"The myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times," she said in another. "Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. ... If the Internet, talk radio and Fox News had been around in McCarthy's day, my book wouldn't be the first time most people would be hearing the truth about 'McCarthyism.' "

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Yet even some prominent conservatives say that McCarthy's defenders go too far, and that even from a conservative perspective, McCarthy was no hero and damaged the country. "A dangerous movement has been growing among conservative writers to vindicate the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and his campaign to expose Soviet spies in the U.S. government," Ronald Kessler wrote for the conservative Web site Newsmax.com. "The FBI agents who were actually chasing those spies have told me that McCarthy hurt their efforts because he trumped up charges, unfairly besmirched honorable Americans and gave hunting spies a bad name."
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Kessler said the release of secret Cold War files under the Venona Project confirmed that there were Soviet spies in the U.S. government. "The problem was that the people McCarthy tarnished as Communists or Communist sympathizers were not the real spies," Kessler wrote. "The cause of anti-communism, which united millions of Americans and which gained the support of Democrats, Republicans and independents, was undermined by Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin," wrote William Bennett, who was the conservative secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan.
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"McCarthy addressed a real problem: disloyal elements within the U.S. government. But his approach to this real problem was to cause untold grief to the country he claimed to love," Bennett wrote in his book "America: The Last Best Hope." "Worst of all, McCarthy besmirched the honorable cause of anti-communism. He discredited legitimate efforts to counter Soviet subversion of American institutions."

'Gays' in the Military: A Revival of The Pink Swastika?

The Christian News Wire generally isn't too worried about legitimate credentials when posting the work of authors and self-proclaimed authorities - especially when the author is obsessively anti-gay. However, this alleged 'new site" has out done itself in scraping the bottom of the barrel for material by featuring a column by Scott Lively which claims that the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell would result in a "mass exodus of normal men from a homosexualized military" and "severe morale problems for normal men forced to live as the objects of sexual interest of other men with whom they share close quarters." Worse yet, Lively, author of the thoroughly discredited book "The Pink Swastika" goes on to allege the much bigger, longer-term problem is the threat of a homosexual takeover of the military branches. Here are highlights from Lively's delusional piece:

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"Certainly there would be a mass exodus of normal men from a homosexualized military," said Lively, "probably leading to the reinstatement of compulsory service. . . . And yes there would be severe morale problems for normal men forced to live as the objects of sexual interest of other men with whom they share close quarters. However, the much bigger, longer-term problem is the threat of a homosexual takeover of the military branches.

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Hitler's initial power base when he launched the Nazi Party was a private homosexual military force organized and trained by a notorious pederast named Gerhard Rossbach. Rossbach's homosexual partner Ernst Roehm, who was also Hitler's partner in forming and building the Nazi Party, converted the "gay" Rossbachbund into the dreaded SA Brownshirts."

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Brownshirt leaders in Germany recruited boys from the local high schools for sex. Roehm himself once briefly fled Germany for South America over a scandal involving a young male prostitute. This bodes ill for the young men who will be our future draftees."Every effort should be taken to prevent this policy change," he said.
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Sadly, Lively makes Elaine Donnelly look almost half rational. Of the various Christianist nutcases with whom I have had debates and/or e-mail exchanges, Scott Lively, at one time head of the American Family Association of California and also director of the Abiding Truth Ministries and the Pro-Family Law Center, has to rate as one of the most unhinged in my opinion. Here's some more information on Lively, which shows that Christian News Wire is beyond pathetic itself for featuring him in the first place:

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Mr. Lively, who seems to deem himself an expert on everything, received his Juris Doctor degree from Trinity Law School in Santa Ana, California, a non-ABA accredited law school with less than 100 full time students and a total of 6 full time faculty, affiliated with Trinity International University, a small fundamentalist educational institution that requires its students to concur in a fundamentalist Statement of Faith. On the Abiding Truth Ministries web site, Mr. Lively has previously admitted that he is a former an alcoholic and drug addict from the age of 12 until his “miraculous deliverance during prayer” at age 28.

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In addition to holding a degree from a non-accredited law school (most states will not allow one to sit for the state bar exam unless one has graduated from an ABA accredited law school), Mr. Lively has authored two publications that suggest he has an irrational obsession with certain social issues, particularly homosexuality. In The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, Mr. Lively maintains that homosexuals were responsible for the rise of Nazism and the guiding force behind Nazi atrocities, including the Holocaust. In The Poisoned Stream: "Gay" Influence in Human History, Volume One, Germany 1890 - 1945, Mr. Lively purports to delve into the history of homosexuality in Germany and claims to reveal its “poisonous influence” not just in Second World War, but also World War I as well through the “intrigues of the Homosexual International.”

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Serious, legitimate historians have dismissed Mr. Lively’s theories in these books: Erik N. Jensen of the University of Wisconsin regards the authors' linkage of homosexuality and Nazism as the recurrence of a "pernicious myth", originating in 1930s attacks on Nazism by Socialists and Communists and "long since dispelled" by "serious scholarship. Jensen sees the book as coming about in "the aftermath of an Oregon measure to repeal gay rights". Dorthe Seifert of Humboldt Universitat Berlin cites it as a response to increasing awareness of Nazi persecution of homosexuals. Christine L. Mueller, Professor of History and Humanities, and a specialist in German history, at Reed College in Portland Oregon, argues that the historical record does not support Abrams' assertions. A rebuttal by Christine L. Mueller to the Pink Swastika can be found here.