Franklin Graham's wet dream

Franklin Graham hosts birther-party for father’s birthday

The Reverend Billy Graham’s 95th birthday fête, organized by his son Franklin, was all that anyone who knows Graham père and Graham fils could have expected. The adoring guests who came to honor the frail evangelist were all, it seemed, rich, successful, famous, and self-important “Christians”—with nary a representative of the poor, the meek, the humble, and the downtrodden, whom Jesus called to follow him, in sight. Each of the media celebrities present clearly believed they were more important than the guest of honor, crowding the cameras for interviews and statements and extra seconds in the limelight. And, irony of ironies, the party that these holy, spiritual folks dropped in on was held in Asheville, NC—the “Cesspool of Sin,” as it was dubbed by a late NC House member who, as far as anyone could tell, had never set foot in the city.

The local Gannett paper titled its coverage “A-listers salute Graham,” but as the guest list made clear, the headline writer misunderstood what an A-list is. The big names in attendance were Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Glenn Beck, Rupert Murdoch, Greta Van Susteren, Ricky Skaggs, and Governor Pat McCrory. It was an A-list of, at best, Republican B-listers: Palin, a failed vice-presidential nominee (accompanied by her secessionist husband Todd) who turned losing into a $12-million-per-year gig; Trump, a failed presidential candidate, Obama birther, and self-appointed king of bombast; Beck, television’s wacko-bird college dropout who was too crazy even for Fox; Murdoch, the almost-but-not-quite-indicted gazillionaire media mogul who kicked Beck off his airways; Van Susteren, the Aussie mogul’s current blonde media favorite; Skaggs, a once-popular country music star who looks like Barbara Bush with longer, whiter hair; and McCrory, the failing, flailing governor of NC, basking in an approval rating of 37% after an exciting 10 months in office.

At least one Democrat, Asheville City Council member Jan Davis, attended, along with numerous other Republican officials: Representative Mark “Shut down the government!” Meadows, NC House Speaker and Senate candidate Thom Tillis, and Buncombe County Commissioner Joe Belcher. They were joined by hotel billionaire Bill Marriott, “Mitford” series writer Jan Karon, perky TV hostess Kathie Lee Gifford, right-wing megachurch pastor and anti-everything evangelist Rick Warren, and almost-unknown Christian rap artist Lecrae Moore—who, from photos of the event, was the only person there from what Cornel West calls “the chocolate side of town.” (Dr. West was in town the night before, speaking at UNC Asheville to the city’s intellectual, and mostly Democratic, A-list, and helping inoculate them from Thursday’s hype).

Oddly enough, for the man known as the “pastor to presidents” from Truman to George W. Bush, not a single living president showed up for Graham’s party: not Bush I, nor Bush II, nor Clinton or Obama, all of whom met with the senior Graham before, during, or after their time in the Oval Office. Their absence might have been because the birthday bash was less a celebration of Billy Graham’s life and ministry than it was Franklin’s wet dream of self-importance, his paean to the right-wing God-and-country crowd that he is desperate to turn into his own power base. Trading on his father’s charisma, fame, and success, Franklin, like Saruman, hopes to become a Power of his own; but, like the dark wizard trapped in Isengard, he is forever dwarfed by the real thing.

Not that Rev. Billy Graham is, or ever was, Sauron; rather, he’s someone who made a brilliant, or lucky, career choice as a young man and whose ego, arrogance, and lack of judgment grew in tandem with his fame and success. His poor judgment reached its apex during the presidency of Richard Nixon, when Graham “loved and prayed with” some of the most evil American political figures of the 20th century, especially Nixon himself and his sidekick, counselor, and amanuensis Henry Kissinger. It took twenty years or more for Graham to find the humility to admit that he had overstepped the bounds of minister and pastor to become a political tool and counselor to these men—to admit that he might have been wrong about their character as well as their actions—yet even after that experience of being used he went on to offer “spiritual counsel and advice” to the next six presidents.

Franklin, however, has deliberately and strongly aligned himself with the anti-Obama “birther wing” of the Republican party, questioning the president’s patriotism and national origins as well as his personal faith as a Christian. He has drawn attention to himself for calling Islam “evil and wicked,” and he surrounds himself with the far-rightest and most self-righteous of the right-wing nuts—those who call President Obama a Kenyan socialist-Marxist-communist-Nazi anti-American Muslim. Hence the invitations to birther-in-chief Trump, the teary-eyed Beck, crying for his country, and half-term Governor Palin.

Franklin Graham lives in, and wants to lead, a world where business, culture, and religion become one: where politics is a for-profit enterprise, and profit is a religion unto itself. It is a world where anti-democracy activists wrap themselves in the flag, and where every star on that flag is to be replaced with a cross, where a uniquely American fascism comes “wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” That world, that day, has replaced the Second Coming for this crowd, and it is for that day that Franklin Graham, for his own self-aggrandizement, has hijacked his father’s name and reputation over the past 20 years. It should be sad to see Billy Graham’s legacy stolen and destroyed this way, and it would be sad … if it weren’t so frightening.

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Finally, a tax cut Republicans hate

Finally, a tax cut Republicans hate
By Moe White

Nobody has accused the Republican Party of being the “tax-and-spend” party, at least since Saint Ronald of Reaganworld rode off into the sunset. The GOP mantra for at least the past 25 years has been “Hear no taxes, See no taxes, Raise no taxes,” and the vaguely ideological underpinning for the party’s objection has been codified into law—political canon law.
The eleventh commandment for the party of self-aggrandizement used to be, “Thou shalt speak no ill of another Republican”; but since Grover Norquist came on the scene, it has been, “Thou shalt not raise taxes…ever…on anyone…for any reason.”
Grover Norquist is the chief executive officer of Americans for Tax Reform, an outfit funded by some of the richest men and corporations in America for the sole purpose of keeping their taxes as low as possible. At their behest, Grover has turned the anti-tax mantra into a literal pledge that must be signed by every Republican candidate for any office anywhere if he or she hopes to have the support of the party’s bigwigs and moneybags. The threat is so restrictive, and so real, that even formerly moderate Republicans have signed it for fear of being “primaried”—opposed in a primary election by a candidate more right-wing than they are.
Few knew about this pledge and Norquist’s role in it until the past few years, for he is a behind-the-scenes player who managed to elude the limelight for twenty years as he developed his unchecked power; now that he has come out of his closet, he has emerged as the quiet counterpart to Rush Limbaugh, who enforces the rest of the right’s big-money, corporatocratic agenda.
That agenda has fluctuated as “family values,” “guns, gays, and God,” right-to-life,” “intelligent design,” and “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” have moved and motivated the party over the past decades. But no matter what social or cultural issues have risen to the surface, anti-taxism hs always been the driving force of the modern Republican party. That’s why it’s such a shock that this December, for the first time in a generation—or at least since George H. W. (George the Hapless) Bush broke his own “Read my lips: No New Taxes” pledge—the Republican party has decided to oppose a tax reduction. They actually have voted numerous times in the past few weeks to raise taxes!
This should, of course, be a remarkable turn of events in American political history. But alas, it’s only the long-delayed exposure of the underbelly of the party’s Tea-Party identity: the Republican party will oppose any tax increase, ever, of any sort, for any reason, on rich people; but they are willing and even eager to raise taxes on 150,000,000—that’s right, one hundred fifty million—working Americans in order to protect their wealthy masters from any tax increase, despite the fact that those masters are already enjoying the lowest tax rates since World War II.
The Social Security tax of 6.2 percent on employee wages and employer payrolls guarantees that both workers and their bosses pay into the nation’s retirement system. A year ago President Obama convinced the lame-duck Congress to lower the employee portion by two percent, putting approximately $1,000 in the hands of middle class Americans earning $50,000 a year.
In exchange, he agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans for TWO years. Those tax cuts, passed by George W. Bush and a Republican Congress in 2001 and 2003, were designed to expire in 2010, but that year Republicans declared that allowing them to do so would be “a tax increase,” and therefore anathema, treason, a grave and serious sin, a crime against nature, and an eternal curse upon Reagan’s shining city on the hill. Never mind that St. Ronald signed off on dozens of tax increases during his term; who cares about facts when you’re dealing with God’s younger brother!
That $1,000-per family tax break is set to expire December 31, and President Obama wants to extend it, even increase it by another $500, while also giving small businesses a break by offering them a reduction in what they are required to pay into the system. Just think: one hundred-fifty million Americans having an extra $1,500 each to spend would pour more than two hundred BILLION dollars into the economy next year—because the vast majority of working people have to spend everything they earn just to get by.
Obama would pay for the lost revenue by requiring the few thousand families at the very top of the income pyramid to pay an extra 3.6 percent on the top of their incomes: nothing extra on the first million dollars, mind you, just on the amount they earn above that.
In response, the Republicans have done a 180-degree about-face and declared that the nation can’t afford to give working people a continued tax break. After all, if Obama is right, those shiftless, useless employees might spend it; and that would lead to an improved economy; and that would improve President Obama’s chances of being reelected in 2012; and that would go against Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s avowed “number one priority”: to make sure that Obama is a one-term president. So they have voted, in lockstep as always, to let the economy collapse rather than help it grow, solely in order to be able to blame President Obama next November.
Finally, a tax cut the Republicans don’t like? Of course—if the money goes to you and me!

The Chickens Come Home to Roost

On January 8 it happened at last: the chickens of Sarah Palin’s narrow-minded, anti-American hatred came home to roost. One of the democratic congresswomen she had targeted for “removal” – literally putting her district in the crosshairs of a rifle sight – was shot in her Tuscon, Arizona district by a “deranged gunman.” Congresswoman Gabby Giffords is on life support; one of her staffers, a nine-year-old girl, a Federal judge, and three others who were in the crowd are dead.

This political assassination is not collateral damage or an unintended consequence of the rabble-rousing Palin and her Tea Party supporters. This is the expected outcome of a long, well-funded, highly organized campaign designed to terrorize candidates, elected officials, and voters who disagree with the Tea Party’s goals.

In the summer of 2009 numerous sitting congressman were assaulted, accosted, shouted down, threatened with guns, and otherwise intimidated at town hall meetings with their own constituents. In January 2010 the number of threats against elected officials – almost exclusively against Democrats who had supported health insurance reform – reached an all-time high of 42. Later that year a congressman and long-time civil rights leader was spat upon as he walked to the capitol while his Republican “colleagues” stood on the balcony of America’s very seat of government and urged the rabble on.

It was only a matter of time before someone with a gun, a loose cog, and anger stoked and fed and encouraged by the right wing, took to heart Palin’s suggestion of putting real people in real crosshairs, and pulled the trigger.

Of course those who are behind this new level of violence disclaim all responsibility. According to the AP, Palin “issued a statement in which she expressed her ‘sincere condolences’ to the family of Giffords and the other victims.” But as Giffords herself had pointed out in an MSNBC interview after her office was vandalized following her health reform vote, “We’re on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action.”

Palin is as blandly dismissive of the real consequences of her hate as was Giffords’ Republican challenger last fall, Jesse Kelly. Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on his website in military gear holding his automatic weapon to promote his fundraisers, at which, the AP reports, he “urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle.”

But Kelly’s spokesman John Ellinwood says, “"I don't see the connection” between the fundraisers featuring weapons and Saturday's shooting. He doesn’t know the shooter, so he’s not responsible.

Of course not! How could there possibly be any connection between a harridan travelling the country screeching at rallies that her angry audience must get rid of those people – those democratically elected representatives – identified on her website as specific targets in the crosshairs of a rifle; and a candidate taking on one of those targeted representatives by inviting supporters to “remove Giffords from office” by joining him for target practice; and someone else, two months later, doing exactly what they urged him to do.

Do I blame Sarah Palin and Arizona governor Jan Brewer and Dick Armey and their ilk for this heinous crime against America? I do. Because when you point at the target, tell the public to “get rid of” someone, urge them to engage in target practice, and all but hand them a gun, you can hardly disclaim responsibility.

These are people who prefer loud noise and violent action to reasoned discussion and the compromise necessary to a democratic society. They disdain the ballot box, asserting that if they don’t win there they’ll win with a box of bullets. And now they’re doing exactly that.