David Barton and the US Religious Dimwits

David Barton is a Republican Party activist and a fast-talking, self-promoting, self-taught, self-proclaimed historian who is miseducating millions of Americans about U.S. history.
April 20, 2011 |

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Newt Gingrich promises to seek his advice and counsel for the 2012 presidential campaign. Mike Huckabee calls him America’s greatest historian, says he should be writing the curriculum for American students, and in fact suggested that all Americans should be “forced at gunpoint” to listen to his broadcasts. Michelle Bachmann calls him “a treasure for our nation” and invited him to teach one of her Tea Party Caucus classes on the Constitution for members of Congress. State legislators from around the country invite him to share his “wisdom” with them. Glenn Beck calls him “the most important man in America.” Who is this guy?

This guy is David Barton, a Republican Party activist and a fast-talking, self-promoting, self-taught, self-proclaimed historian who is miseducating millions of Americans about U.S. history and the Constitution.

Barton has been profitably peddling a distorted “Christian nation” version of American history to conservative religious audiences for the past two decades. His books and videos denouncing church-state separation have been repeatedly debunked by respected historians, but that hasn’t kept Barton from becoming a folk hero for many in the Religious Right. His eagerness to help elect Republicans has won him gratitude and support from national as well as state and local GOP leaders. Former senator Sam Brownback, now the governor of Kansas, has said that Barton’s research “provides the philosophical underpinning for a lot of the Republican effort in the country today -- bringing God back into the public square.” Indeed, Time Magazine named him one of the nation’s 25 most influential evangelical Christians in 2005.

Barton broadened his audience when Fox News’ Glenn Beck became a fan. Last year, Beck invited Barton to appear regularly on his “Founders’ Fridays” broadcasts, sending Barton’s books up the bestseller lists. And when Beck brought his messianic road show to Washington, D.C. in August 2010, Barton shared the stage with him. At America’s Divine Destiny, the kick-off event on the eve of Beck’s Lincoln Memorial rally, Barton waved copies of old books and sermons and argued that the nation’s founding documents were essentially cribbed from colonial-era sermons.

While Barton is best known for his claims about the religious intentions of the nation’s founders, he has become a full-service pundit for the far-right in Tea Party America. He pushes predictable positions on abortion, gay rights, and the judiciary. But he is also attacking environmentalists working to combat climate change. And he is a key figure for conservative strategists who would love to forge an even stronger political merger between the Tea Party and Religious Right movements between now and the 2012 elections. Barton’s contribution: claiming that a radically limited role for the federal government was God’s idea, and that Jesus and the Bible are opposed to progressive taxation, minimum wage laws, collective bargaining, and “socialist union kind of stuff.”

Why Barton Matters

Barton’s growing visibility and influence with members of Congress and other Republican Party officials is troubling for many reasons: he distorts history and the Constitution for political purposes; he encourages religious divisiveness and unequal treatment for religious minorities; and he feeds a toxic political climate in which one’s political opponents are not just wrong, but evil and anti-God.

Scholars have criticized Barton for presenting facts out of context or in misleading ways, but that hasn’t stopped him from promoting his theories through books, television, and, yes, the textbooks that will teach the next generation of Americans. He promotes conspiracy theories about elites hiding the truth from average Americans in order to undermine the nation from within. Last summer, he declared that liberal and media attacks on the Tea Party were just like attacks on Jesus. In February, Barton spoke at the Connect 2011 Pastors Conference, where he said that Christians needed to control the culture and media so that “guys that have a secular viewpoint cannot survive.” Said Barton, “If the press lacks moral discrimination, it’s because we haven’t been pushing our people to chop that kind of news off.”

Race and the Tea Party's Ire

By Eugene Robinson, Truthdig

The first African-American president takes office, and almost immediately we see the birth of a big, passionate national movement—overwhelmingly white and lavishly funded—that tries its best to delegitimize that president, seeks to thwart his every initiative, and manages to bring the discredited and moribund opposition party roaring back to life. Coincidence?

Not a chance. But also not that simple.

First, I’ll state the obvious: It’s not racist to criticize President Obama, it’s not racist to have conservative views, and it’s not racist to join the tea party. But there’s something about the nature and tone of the most vitriolic attacks on the president that I believe is distinctive—and difficult to explain without asking whether race is playing a role.

One thing that struck me from the beginning about the tea party rhetoric was the idea of reclaiming something that has been taken away.

At a recent campaign rally in Paducah, Ky., Senate candidate Rand Paul, a darling of the tea party movement, drew thunderous applause when he said that if Republicans win, “we get to go to Washington and take back our government.”

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Take it back from whom? Maybe he thinks it goes without saying, because he didn’t say.

On Sunday, in a last-minute fundraising appeal, Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee implored his supporters to help “return American government to the American people.”

Again, who’s in possession of the government right now, if not the American people? The non-American people? The un-American people?

There’s an obvious answer, but it’s one that generally comes from the progressive end of the political spectrum: Americans must fight to take back their government from the lobbyists and big-money special interests that shape our laws to suit their own interests, not for the good of the nation.

That may be what some tea partyers have in mind, but the movement hasn’t seen fit to make campaign finance reform one of its major issues. And the Establishment Republicans who are surfing the tea party wave—while at the same time scheming to co-opt the movement—would view the idea of taking money out of politics with horror, if they thought it might actually happen.

So who stole the government? What makes some people feel more disenfranchised now than they were, say, during the presidency of George W. Bush?

After all, it was Bush who inherited a budget surplus and left behind a suffocating deficit—I’m not being tendentious, just stating the facts. It was Bush who launched two wars without making any provision in the budget to pay for them, who proposed and won an expensive new prescription-drug entitlement without paying for it, who bailed out irresponsible Wall Street firms with the $700 billion TARP program.

Bush was vilified by critics while he was in office, but not with the suggestion that somehow the government had been seized or usurped—that it had fallen into hands that were not those of “the American people.” Yet this is the tea party suggestion about Obama.

Underlying all the tea party’s issues and complaints, it appears to me, is the entirely legitimate issue of the relationship between the individual and the federal government. But why would this concern about oppressive, intrusive government become so acute now? Why didn’t, say, government surveillance of domestic phone calls and e-mails get the constitutional fundamentalists all worked up?

I have to wonder what it is about Obama that provokes and sustains all this tea party ire. I wonder how he can be seen as “elitist,” when he grew up in modest circumstances—his mother was on food stamps for a time—and paid for his fancy-pants education with student loans. I wonder how people who genuinely cherish the American dream can look at a man who lived that dream and feel no connection, no empathy.

I ask myself what’s so different about Obama, and the answer is pretty obvious: He’s black. For whatever reason, I think this makes some people unsettled, anxious, even suspicious—witness the willingness of so many to believe absurd conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, his religion, and even his absent father’s supposed Svengali-like influence from the grave.

Obama has made mistakes that rightly cost him political support. But I can’t help believing that the tea party’s rise was partly due to circumstances beyond his control—that he’s different from other presidents, and that the difference is his race.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

msnbc tv: Head stomp heard round the world

msnbc tv: Head stomp heard round the world
Rand Paul supporter stomps moveon.org woman who opposes big banks.

Can Teaparty Get US to Fascism?

Robert Paxton defined fascism as:

...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Paxton laid out the five basic lifecycle stages of successful fascist movements. In the first stage, a mature industrial state facing some kind of crisis breeds a new, rural movement that's based on nationalist renewal. This movement invariably rejects reason and glorifies raw emotion, promises to restore lost national pride, co-opts the nation's traditional myths for its own purposes, and insists that the country must be purged of the toxic influence of outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.
cited by Sara Robinson

Alamo Rising

The City of San Antonio and its permits department has been giving us the run around on confirming the event location for months now. With initial quotes of $300 for the permit and being ensured that all was well, San Antonio then decided to up the costs and then demand mandatory purchases that they approved of for us to hold our rally on October 10. These mandatory costs for our right to free speech on a public location have increased to nearly $10,000. Included in this was costs to pay law enforcement and use of their designated barricade company.

The city did not give the option to use other companies that could be cheaper or more cost effective. Therefore the sanctuary city of San Antonio has done its best to make sure that this rally did not occur. Included in their stonewalling was setting up meetings for a walk-through of the location - which our representative drove 4 hours one way to meet with them only to have them not show up.

This is not the first time that San Antonio has done this to a group. In cases of issues that the city agrees with, such as diversity type rallies, they have waived all such fees. With this as a fact Voice of the People USA is pursuing a lawsuit against the City of San Antonio for violations of first amendment rights under the Constitution of the United States.

With the government in San Antonio obstructing rather than simply doing their job, we have decided to cancel this event for now rather than allow them to push us to the last day and not allow the rally to occur as intended.

We will have more information in the future explaining how this all occurred so that everyone will know the truth.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may have caused you and it has been hard, but logical, to have come to this decision.

NAACP Blisters Racists in Teaparty

The NAACP has passed a resolution condemning racism in the Tea Party movement.

The resolution was approved in a vote by more than 2,000 delegates at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Kansas City.

Versions of the resolution condemned "explicitly racist behavior" in the Tea Party movement and called on people to "repudiate" what it described as racist elements of the Tea Party. The final text of the resolution has not yet been made available, however, and that language may have changed.

As the Associated Press notes, NAACP President Ben Jealous has said the Tea Party movement needs to "be responsible members of this democracy and make sure they don't tolerate bigots or bigotry among their members."

Members of the Tea Party movement vehemently deny that their movement is racist.

A CBS News poll in April found 52 percent of Tea Party members believe too much has been made of the problems facing black people. Far fewer Americans overall -- 28 percent -- believe as much. Among non-Tea Party whites, the percentage who say too much attention has been paid to the problems of black people is 23 percent.

The original NAACP resolution, submitted by the group's Kansas City branch, said the Tea Party movement has "displayed signs and posters intended to degrade people of color generally and President Barack Obama specifically."

It condemned "racist elements" of the movement as "a threat to progress" and referenced instances in which black congressmen said they were verbally and physically abused by Tea Party activists.

Willo Governor Brewer be able to Bring Down POTUS?

Dear Editor: The following email was sent to psenseman@az.gov, Governor Brewer’s press secretary.

(PARTIAL)


The Boston Tea Party was a protest against taxation without representation. But is our representation today by the U.S. Congress any better than the colonists' representation by the British Parliament in 1773?
Dear Mr. Senseman,

As you know, there are many unanswered questions about Barack Hussein Obama’s constitutional qualifications to act as President of the United States. Governor Brewer, or any sitting governor, for that matter, has unique standing to challenge Obama on this issue and resolve the constitutional crisis he has perpetrated on the nation by his refusal to prove that he is a “natural born Citizen” by filing a Writ of Quo Warranto.

The American people are looking to Governor Brewer to defend her state as she is doing, but also to challenge a man who has most likely assumed the office of President through dissembling and deceit, wire fraud, election fraud, and document fraud.

There is a tremendous amount of circumstantial and other evidence which points to a foreign birth for Obama, and by his own admission, he was born a dual citizen. He has also carefully described himself as “a native citizen of the United States of America” but not a “natural born Citizen.”

Article II, Section 1, paragraph 5 of the U.S. Constitution states:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

It is impossible for Obama to be a “natural born Citizen” if he was born with dual citizenship, and “native born” is not the same as “natural born.” Since he has never shown his original birth certificate, we also do not know his actual age.

Congress refused to check on Obama’s qualifications for office, despite thousands of requests to do so by concerned constituents before the certification of electoral votes in January 2009.


It makes no sense to mount an expensive legal defense when Governor Brewer could simply ask Obama “By what authority” his Department of Justice is suing her state and naming her as a defendant. In fact, if Obama is a usurper to the presidency, he has no authority to do anything nor to direct anyone else to act. If that is the case, Obama and his entire government must be removed from office and a new presidential election held.

You may have read that Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely (Ret.) has called for Obama and his regime to do just that, and he believes that Obama is hiding something very significant about his background from the American people. For someone to spend almost $2,000,000 to hide his birth certificate and other records, he certainly must be.

http://www.thepostemail.com/2010/07/11/arizona-governor-can-force-obama-to-prove-hes-eligible-or-not/

Louisiana Teaparty Celebrates Lifting of Moratorium

A Teaparty Officer [ret] Speaks Out

But why is it that the tea party has drawn so much attention, negative mostly, from media sources and political operatives? One word, it is fear.

Today is the 15th anniversary of a tragic and terrible day in America, the Oklahoma City bombing. What should be a day of remembrance and mourning was used by another Democrat President, Bill Clinton, to launch a despicable attack against the tea party movement. Clinton made the comparison of what resulted in the deaths of 168 Americans to Americans seeking to “redress their grievances to government”, highly disgusting and dishonorable. In accordance with such we have Time magazine writer Joe Klein accusing Sarah Palin and others of sedition, a felony crime.

What we are witnessing is the imagined fear of the liberal progressives in America. They are attempting to create a sense of intimidation and violence where no such thing exists. The constant stoking and probing for the smoking gun that will solidify their claim comes up empty time and time again.

The real fear of the liberal progressives is that the silent majority is no longer silent and is rejecting their collectivist, big government agenda centered on nationalizing production and expansion of the entitlement class. Americans are rejecting the notion of the nanny-state where we find 47% of Americans are not paying taxes. We are rejecting the liberal progressive objective of having a majority of Americans wedded to government either by subsistence checks or by employment.

The real fear is that since 2006 the Democrat party has laid ruin to our fundamental principles upon which America was built, namely our Constitution. They realize that there is a true danger for them in the mid-term elections of 2010, that means you too Ron Klein! And that is not intimidation, just means we will defeat you in the Congressional race for Florida district 22./

If one really wants a lesson in political intimidation you need only look to the history of the Democrat party. It is the party which created the Ku Klux Klan as its terrorist arm. It is the party of segregation, Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and lynching, among other forms of violence. It is the party that reversed much of the Reconstruction era civil rights legislation and would have blocked the Civil Rights Act of the early 1960’s, save not for Republican Senator Everett Dirksen.

Today the Democrat party maintains its intimidation mantra through the thugs of ACORN, SEIU, New Black Panther Party, Code Pink, and anarchist groups. See if any political party recognizes violence and intimidation in America, it is the Democrat party. Now with the media in tow, they have expanded their means by which to attack simple Americans yearning for their freedom and liberty. Let us never forget the heinous treatment of former President George W Bush and the last American President to be shot……a Republican, Ronald Reagan.

It is beyond contempt and belief that the party who promoted slavery and segregation is now attempting to call anyone racist. I find it absolutely humorous when the left attacks me as a; radical, racist, uncle tom, oreo, sellout, and token. The actions of the left media who interviewed a black Gentleman at a tea party trying to coach him into condemning the tea party as racist is reprehensible, but indicative of the MSM. The real racists in America are liberal progressives. Their dishonest tyranny which promotes failing social welfare policies centers on enslavement, not empowerment. They have created a new 21st century plantation and utilize such people as Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the Congressional black caucus as their plantation overseer’s.

The duplicitous hypocrisy of a Senator Harry Reid making statements about “light-skinned” and “non-negro dialect” as being acceptable to him is the essence of racism. How funny, that the mindless lemming lap dogs who refer to themselves as black leaders gave him a pass. Therefore, I am proud to stand with my American Brothers and Sisters, and their children, at TEA Party events and rallies. I would rather stand with them than live in shame and submission to the party of slavery, secession, segregation, and now socialism.

It is amazing to me that President Obama and his cronies find it hard to address our real enemies; Islamic terrorists, muslim extremists, and jihadists. Instead he seeks to ridicule and demonize Americans exercising their Constitutional rights, truly Alinsky style. The TEA Party movement is about the rejection of his policies, not his skin color. The TEA Party movement is about rejecting ruling class elitism and career politicians that feel Americans should say thank you and in submission, “Kiss the Ring”. Americans have no issue with being justly governed, but we will reject being ruled, ask the last fella who tried, King George III.

We are having a TEA Party across the land, time for true Americans to make a stand. Steadfast and Loyal!

LTC A B West (USA, Ret), Atlas Shrugged