DEATH, TAXES AND PRAYER
Feb. 21st, 2010 01:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogI’m behind on my bloggery, and it’s been a fairly bloggable week. So where to start?
I guess we’d better start with A.J. Stack's final flight, for a couple of reasons:
1. This paragraph from the MSNBC story:
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said in a statement that the crash was "a cowardly act of domestic terrorism." The police chief, however, said he preferred to describe it as "a criminal act by a lone individual."
See what just happened there?
2. Before Stack flew his plane into the office building, one of the stories I had in the queue was about Pastor Wiley Drake, who I’ve blogged about before. If you’ll recall, he’s the Southern Baptist preacher who prayed for God to kill Dr George Tiller, and prays every day for God to do the same to Barack Obama.
He’s still doing that, and while God hasn’t gotten around Obama, he allegedly did take care of someone else on Drake’s list: Rep. John Murtha.
Anyway, it turns out he’s not the only pastor with a prayer and a hit list. Meet Steven L. Anderson, pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona:
Nice.
What does this have to do with A.J. Stack? Not that much – not directly. As far as we know, Stack wasn’t a fundamentalist Christian, and possibly wasn’t even all that conservative – I’ve heard plenty of left-wingers make similar complaints about both Wall Street and the IRS. Hell, even Cheap Trick wrote an anti-IRS song once (and a cracking good one at that). If Stack had any direct Tea Party links, surely he would have worked in some Obama/Kenya rhetoric or at least something about Muslims taking over the world.
However, it’s fair to say that he had at least one thing in common with the Tea Party: hysterical anti-Washington rage fueled by Big Dumb Fear. And sooner or later, that sort of thing leads to plots like this.
Not all the time, of course. And don’t get me wrong – most people who support the Tea Party would never do something this drastic, if only because most of them wouldn’t have the nerve.
All I’m saying is that when you combine fundamentalist Christian leaders preaching hate and death in the name of Jesus with far-out pundits and political hacks whipping up Populist frenzy and urging the peasants to grab their pitchforks, you can’t act surprised if someone gets their eye poked out.
Or shot in the head at point-blank range.
Put another way, I have a bad feeling we’re going to see more of this kind of thing as we get closer to the 2012 elections.
Recipe for hate,
This is dF
I guess we’d better start with A.J. Stack's final flight, for a couple of reasons:
1. This paragraph from the MSNBC story:
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said in a statement that the crash was "a cowardly act of domestic terrorism." The police chief, however, said he preferred to describe it as "a criminal act by a lone individual."
See what just happened there?
2. Before Stack flew his plane into the office building, one of the stories I had in the queue was about Pastor Wiley Drake, who I’ve blogged about before. If you’ll recall, he’s the Southern Baptist preacher who prayed for God to kill Dr George Tiller, and prays every day for God to do the same to Barack Obama.
He’s still doing that, and while God hasn’t gotten around Obama, he allegedly did take care of someone else on Drake’s list: Rep. John Murtha.
Anyway, it turns out he’s not the only pastor with a prayer and a hit list. Meet Steven L. Anderson, pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona:
“I hate Barack Obama. You say, well, you just mean you don’t like what he stands for. No, I hate the person. Oh, you mean you just don’t like his policies. No, I hate him … I am not going to pray for his good. I am going to pray that he dies and goes to Hell ... Break his teeth, oh God, in his mouth, as a snail which melteth, let him pass away, like an untimely birth of a woman—that he thinks—he calls it a woman’s right to choose, you know, he thinks it’s so wonderful, he ought to be aborted. It ought to be, ‘Abort Obama,’ that ought to be the motto.”
Nice.
What does this have to do with A.J. Stack? Not that much – not directly. As far as we know, Stack wasn’t a fundamentalist Christian, and possibly wasn’t even all that conservative – I’ve heard plenty of left-wingers make similar complaints about both Wall Street and the IRS. Hell, even Cheap Trick wrote an anti-IRS song once (and a cracking good one at that). If Stack had any direct Tea Party links, surely he would have worked in some Obama/Kenya rhetoric or at least something about Muslims taking over the world.
However, it’s fair to say that he had at least one thing in common with the Tea Party: hysterical anti-Washington rage fueled by Big Dumb Fear. And sooner or later, that sort of thing leads to plots like this.
Not all the time, of course. And don’t get me wrong – most people who support the Tea Party would never do something this drastic, if only because most of them wouldn’t have the nerve.
All I’m saying is that when you combine fundamentalist Christian leaders preaching hate and death in the name of Jesus with far-out pundits and political hacks whipping up Populist frenzy and urging the peasants to grab their pitchforks, you can’t act surprised if someone gets their eye poked out.
Or shot in the head at point-blank range.
Put another way, I have a bad feeling we’re going to see more of this kind of thing as we get closer to the 2012 elections.
Recipe for hate,
This is dF
