Bannon and the Fine Mercer Hand.

The substantive impact of Steve Bannon’s exit from the NSC on foreign policy remains to be seen. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

The substantive impact of Steve Bannon’s exit from the NSC on foreign policy remains to be seen. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

Rumours and leaks have been swirling about in the chaos which marks the Regime. The official line is that Bannon had nary a thought about resigning in a huff, however, sources inside the chaotic mess say Bannon was prepared to walk, but held back due to Rebekah Mercer’s counsel, which sounds quite ominous, telling Bannon that this is a long-term play. Going by what we know of Bannon’s playbook, I imagine we’d all be relieved if Bannon had walked.

The man credited with honing Donald Trump’s populist message and guiding him into the White House has grown frustrated amid continued infighting in the West Wing, so much so that in recent weeks a top donor had to convince him to stay in his position.

Five people, including a senior administration official and several sources close to the president, tell POLITICO that Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has clashed with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who’s taken on an increasingly prominent portfolio in the West Wing. Bannon has complained that Kushner and his allies are trying to undermine his populist approach, the sources said.

Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, a longtime Bannon confidante who became a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign, urged Bannon not to resign. “Rebekah Mercer prevailed upon him to stay,” said one person familiar with the situation.

Another person familiar with the situation, a GOP operative who talks to Mercer, said: “Bekah tried to convince him that this is a long-term play.”

[…]

The White House said that Bannon had not taken any steps to leave, and Bannon told POLITICO that any suggestion he threatened to resign was “total nonsense.”

[…]

The “big fight is between nationalists and the West Wing Democrats,” said a person familiar with Bannon’s thinking.

“You have these New York interlocutors who are just not political and who want to think that they’re above the way Washington thinks, but if anybody is allied on delivering on things that Trump ran on, it’s Bannon and Reince and the vice president,” said the Republican who has spoken to Bannon recently.

So, we have President Bannon, who is busy having a hissy fit, and President Kushner, who is responsible for all the shit, and Daughter First Lady, who is doing who knows what the fuck, and I imagine Unpresident Trump is busy abusing taxpayer money and golfing again. What a fucking joke.

Politico has the full story.

Breaking: Bannon Stripped of NSC Role.

The substantive impact of Steve Bannon’s exit from the NSC on foreign policy remains to be seen. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

The substantive impact of Steve Bannon’s exit from the NSC on foreign policy remains to be seen. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

Seems there’s been a bit of a shake-up. Not much news at the moment, I’m sure this story will develop.

Donald Trump’s political strategist Steve Bannon has lost his place on the national security council in a staff shakeup, documents show.

An 4 April presidential memorandum took Bannon, the former Breitbart News executive and chief White House link to the nationalist rightwing, off the US’s main body for foreign policy and national security decision-making. It also restores the traditional roles of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the director of national intelligence onto the NSC.

While the revamp is likely to be seen as a victory for Trump’s second national security adviser, army lieutenant general HR McMaster, the substantive impact of the shakeup remains to be seen. A parallel security structure in the Eisenhower executive office building, known as the Strategic Initiatives Group, reports to Bannon, whose closeness to Trump is a signal-marker of influence in this administration.

As noted by The Guardian, this will not remove Bannon’s influence on Trump and the regime. It is good news as far as the NSC is concerned. Via The Guardian.

The Problem With Trump: Part IV.

Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles Times.

Part IV of the LA Times’ The Problem With Trump is up: Trump’s War on Journalism.

…This may seem like bizarre behavior from a man who consumes the news in print and on television so voraciously and who is in many ways a product of the media. He comes from reality TV, from talk radio with Howard Stern, from the gossip pages of the New York City tabloids, for whose columnists he was both a regular subject and a regular source.

But Trump’s strategy is pretty clear: By branding reporters as liars, he apparently hopes to discredit, disrupt or bully into silence anyone who challenges his version of reality. By undermining trust in news organizations and delegitimizing journalism and muddling the facts so that Americans no longer know who to believe, he can deny and distract and help push his administration’s far-fetched storyline.

It’s a cynical strategy, with some creepy overtones. For instance, when he calls journalists “enemies of the people,” Trump (whether he knows it or not) echoes Josef Stalin and other despots.

Click on over for the full article. A Must Read.

Stephen King on the Tiny Tyrant.

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Stephen King has an article up at The Guardian, pondering the rise of the Tiny Tyrant, and the hows and whys of it. Entertaining reading.

I had written about such men before. In The Dead Zone, Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins. He is laughed at when he runs for the House of Representatives (part of his platform is a promise to rocket America’s trash into outer space), but he wins again. When Johnny Smith, the novel’s precognitive hero, shakes his hand, he realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.

Big Jim Rennie in Under The Dome is cut from the same cloth. He’s a car salesman (selling being a key requirement for the successful politician), who is the head selectman in the small town of Chester’s Mill, when a dome comes down and cuts the community off from the world. He’s a crook, a cozener and a sociopath, the worst possible choice in a time of crisis, but he’s got a folksy, straight-from-the-shoulder delivery that people relate to. The fact that he’s incompetent at best and downright malevolent at worst doesn’t matter.

Both these stories were written years ago, but Stillson and Rennie bear enough of a resemblance to the current resident of the White House for me to flatter myself I have a country-fair understanding of how such men rise: first as a joke, then as a viable alternative to the status quo, and finally as elected officials who are headstrong, self-centered and inexperienced. Such men do not succeed to high office often, but when they do, the times are always troubled, the candidates in question charismatic, their proposed solutions to complex problems simple, straightforward and impractical. The baggage that should weigh these hucksters down becomes magically light, lifting them over the competition like Carl Fredricksen in the Pixar film Up. Trump’s negatives didn’t drag him down; on the contrary, they helped get him elected.

I decided to convene six Trump voters to discover how and why all this happened. Because I selected them from the scores of make-believe people always bouncing around in my head (sometimes their chatter is enough to drive me bugshit), I felt perfectly OK feeding them powerful truth serum before officially convening the round table. And because they are fictional – my creatures – they all agreed to this. They gulped the serum down in Snapple iced tea, and half an hour later we began. My panelists were:

Click on over for the full story.

When “Telling It Like It Is” Is Not Acceptable.

DFL House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman (screen grab).

DFL House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman (screen grab).

When is ‘telling it like it is’ not acceptable? When the telling is done by a woman, aiming a pointed remark at white men. Uh oh.

According to The Uptake, the incident happened on Monday while the Minnesota House was debating a bill that would increase penalties for protesters who block roads, a tactic successfully used by Black Lives Matters.

DFL House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman noticed that many members had not been on the floor to hear Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (DFL) speech comparing modern day protesters to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. So Hortman used a procedure known as “call of the House” to force lawmakers to return to the chamber.

“I hate to break up the 100 percent white male card game in the retiring room, but I think this is an important debate,” she said, exposing the activity of absent lawmakers.

Republican state Rep. Bob Dettmer objected: “I’m a white male. I respect everybody. But I really believe that the comments made by the Minority Leader were really not appropriate.”

“I have no intention of apologizing,” Hortman replied, adding that she was “really tired of watching women of color in particular being ignored. So I’m not sorry.”

[…]

However, Rep. Greg Davids (R-Preston) did think the statement was racist. Heather Carlson of the Rochester Post Bulletin reports that Davids thinks Hortman should resign over the comment. “I was greatly offended by minority leader Hortman’s racist statement about white males,” said Davids according to Carlson.

Mr. Davids has now gone the mortally offended route, and thinks Ms. Hortman should resign for saying something white men don’t like. He’s also claiming it’s racist. Idiotic Privilege, thy name is Davids.

Full story here.

A Few Words from Alan Cumming…

#ArtAgainstHate PLEASE SHARE by reposting, or volunteer if you would like to partake in this project. Help build a community with us by raising awareness of the bullying this administration is enabling. Find empowerment in the words they call you. In these chaotic times it’s easy to lose grasp of hope for this troubled country. Yet if we open our hearts and our minds to the lush array of souls and energy that surround us every day we can find common ground. And if we advocate others to try their best to learn just one positive thing about that person who may seem so alien on the surface, perhaps we all will discover that beneath the masks that we hide behind are actually more similarities than differences. And one by one, may we shed these words of hate that are spawned by fear of the unknown. #Model: @alancummingsnaps #Photographers: @StevenTrumon & @GINGERB3ARDMAN #MAKEUP: @makeupartbynoel #Retouch Collab: @shinehorovits #ArtistsAgainstTyranny #SpreadTheWord #LoveTrumpsHate #AmericaTheBeautiful #UnitedNotDivided

A post shared by Alan Cumming (@alancummingsnaps) on

#ArtAgainstHate PLEASE SHARE by reposting, or volunteer if you would like to partake in this project. Help build a community with us by raising awareness of the bullying this administration is enabling. Find empowerment in the words they call you. In these chaotic times it’s easy to lose grasp of hope for this troubled country. Yet if we open our hearts and our minds to the lush array of souls and energy that surround us every day we can find common ground. And if we advocate others to try their best to learn just one positive thing about that person who may seem so alien on the surface, perhaps we all will discover that beneath the mask we hide behind are actually more similarities than differences. And one by one, may we shed these words of hate that are spawned by fear of the unknown.

Source.

The National Park Stunt.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer, right, holds up a check during the daily briefing with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, left, and Harpers Ferry National Historic Park Superintendent Tyrone Brandyburg. CREDIT: AP Photo/Susan Walsh.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer, right, holds up a check during the daily briefing with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, left, and Harpers Ferry National Historic Park Superintendent Tyrone Brandyburg. CREDIT: AP Photo/Susan Walsh.

First, another photo distraction. Look at Zinke eyeballing that check – he looks like he’s about to lunge, grab it and run. The National Park stunt, it’s bullshit, so don’t swallow it. The Tiny Tyrant needed a distraction from the set of Damocle’s Swords hanging over his head, so this little stunt was staged. And it is quite little – $78,333 to the National Park Service. Given that his ideal budget strips the NPS, among many others, this is an empty gesture, and worse. Neither Trump nor Zinke give one tiny squirtle of a shit for land. They are both in favour of more pipelines, poisoned water, coal mining, strip mining, fracking, drilling for oil in protected reserves, and wholesale pollution. This tiny little check of a photo op is toxic bullshit of the highest order. While the Tiny Tyrant could not possibly care less about caring for our planet, there is one thing he sorta kinda cares about, battlefields. Yep. So incredibly important to maintain historic battlefields! What’s more important than the reminders of bloody slaughters?

…And as far as his donation, it falls well short of the cuts Trump himself would impose on the National Park Service’s supervising agency, the Interior Department.

Trump’s budget calls for a punishing 12 percent cut to the department, which manages the United States’ public lands. It would eliminate some of the department’s programs altogether, including the $13.2 million National Wildlife Refuge Fund and the $20 million funding for the nation’s 49 National Heritage Areas. It would also decrease funding for land acquisition — such as land that would be added to the nation’s national parks, and then stewarded by the NPS — by $120 million.

Zinke, in his remarks thanking the president, said he would put the money towards the department’s $229 million shortfall in maintenance of the United States’ historic battlefields. According to Spicer, Trump chose to give the money to the NPS himself, specifically because he was interested in restoring the battlegrounds.

“It’s a decision he made. Counsel presented him with several options. He believed… some great work is being done there, especially work being done to restore our great battlegrounds,” Spicer said.

Right. Fuck you, Trump. Think Progress has the full story.

The Problem With Trump.

Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles Times.

The LA Times has a searing series on all the ways the Tiny Tyrant is problematic. Part I is Our Dishonest President. * Part II is Why Trump Lies. * Part III is Trump’s Authoritarian Vision. Part IV will be published on Wednesday.

These are a must read. Clear, concise, and chilling with condemnatory truth.

In a matter of weeks, President Trump has taken dozens of real-life steps that, if they are not reversed, will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.

His attempt to de-insure millions of people who had finally received healthcare coverage and, along the way, enact a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been put on hold for the moment. But he is proceeding with his efforts to defang the government’s regulatory agencies and bloat the Pentagon’s budget even as he supposedly retreats from the global stage.

These are immensely dangerous developments which threaten to weaken this country’s moral standing in the world, imperil the planet and reverse years of slow but steady gains by marginalized or impoverished Americans. But, chilling as they are, these radically wrongheaded policy choices are not, in fact, the most frightening aspect of the Trump presidency.

What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.

Highly Recommended, go read!

Susan Rice: No Bombshell At All.

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National Security Advisor Susan Rice follows President Barack Obama across the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, to board Marine One, Thursday, July 7, 2016. CREDIT: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster.

Conservatives and Nazis are jumping all over a non-existent bombshell, which has to do with former National Security Advisor Susan Rice. If you’re interested in the truth of the matter, go on over to Think Progress to get the facts. All that really needs to be noted about this compleat lack of a story is that it was spread all over the place by Nazi Mike “Pizzagate!” Cernovich.

It’s yet another case of bullshit. Don’t swallow it. The totally phony Susan Rice story, explained.

Also see: Trump Junior Is A Fucking Idiot.

Painfully Obvious Ethical Carnage.

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Some people have had enough, and just can’t take it anymore. The Wallace Global Fund can’t take it anymore, and have fired their lawyers, Morgan Lewis, for their role in allowing Trump to continue in his constant corruption and fraud.

The Wallace Global Fund is sick of pretending.

In a scathing letter, the investment fund fired its elite law firm, Morgan Lewis, for its role in enabling Donald Trump to use the presidency to line his pockets.

In January, Morgan Lewis partner Sheri Dillon publicly signed off on Trump’s plan to maintain ownership of his business empire while president. Instead, Dillon established a variety of measures that fell “well short of the steps recommended by the Office of Government Ethics.”

[…]

The Wallace Fund also blasts Morgan Lewis for largely ignoring the Constitutional prohibition on presidents receiving payments from foreign governments. Trump will purportedly donate the “profits” from foreign governments spending money at his hotels, a step that has been widely dismissed as insufficient and unenforceable.

A business partner of Trump’s in Las Vegas recently revealed that Trump is not taking steps to segregate profits from foreign governments.

The letter ticks through the “ethical carnage” that has piled up since Morgan Lewis blessed Trump’s plan: the doubling of initiation fees at Mar-a-lago, Trump’s private club; the courting of foreign governments at Trump’s D.C. hotel; and his numerous financial entanglements with the Chinese government.

“America deserves a President of undivided loyalty. Your firm has denied them that. We cannot be complicit in that,” the letter concludes.

Full Letter from Wallace Global Fund. Full Story at Think Progress.

The Best Baseball Player! The Best!

MSNBC host Joy Reid, Donald Trump -- (MSNBC screenshots).

MSNBC host Joy Reid, Donald Trump — (MSNBC screenshots).

Oh, that photo! I’m by no means a sportsball person, but that doesn’t look like a pitch, more like a convulsion. Joy Reid had a fun time reporting on the “best baseball player in New York State when I was young”, and his avoidance of tossing out the first pitch of the season. I expect any “scheduling conflict” has to do with the Tiny Tyrant spending yet another weekend golfing or off to Florida or whatever, at taxpayer expense.

The AM Joy host explained that there is a long tradition of presidents tossing out the first pitch while making the point that Trump had previously said at one time he was the best baseball player in the state of New York.

“Baseball season officially kicks off today, followed by a dozen match-ups on Monday. including the home opener for the Washington Nationals, the team that asked Donald Trump to throw out the ceremonial first pitch,” Reid began. “It’s tradition, after all. Every sitting president has thrown a first pitch at least one major league baseball game since President William Howard Taft threw out the first ball for the Washington Senators in 1910.”

“Trump declined on Tuesday to step up to the mound because of, quote, ‘scheduling issues,’ ” she continued. “But we can’t help to wonder if that’s the real reason why, especially because Trump actually played baseball.”

Noting a 2014 interview in which Trump boasted, “I was the best baseball player in New York when I was young,” Reid an eyebrow before comparing him to youthful contemporaries Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees.

Full story here.

Republican Love, Orwell Style.

nothing-to-hide-cut

Mr. Tweet has made another appearance, this time touting the “love and strength” in the republican party. All I can think about are the Ministries.

Anybody (especially Fake News media) who thinks that Repeal & Replace of ObamaCare is dead does not know the love and strength in R party!

Talks on Repealing and Replacing ObamaCare are, and have been, going on, and will continue until such time as a deal is hopefully struck.

Sweet Zombie Jesus, it’s painful to type those out. Once again, note that Donnie uses his personal account, not the POTUS account. Anyroad, upon seeing the latest from Mr. Tweet, all I could think about, again, was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, specifically, some of the ministries:

The Ministry of Love (or Miniluv in Newspeak) serves as Oceania’s interior ministry. It enforces loyalty to Big Brother through fear, buttressed through a massive apparatus of security and repression, as well as systematic brainwashing. The Ministry of Love building has no windows and is surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, steel doors, hidden machine-gun nests, and guards armed with “jointed truncheons”. Referred to as “the place where there is no darkness”, its interior lights are never turned off. It is arguably the most powerful ministry, controlling the will of the population. The Thought Police are a part of Miniluv.

The Ministry of Love, like the other ministries, is misnamed, since it is largely responsible for the practice and infliction of misery, fear, suffering and torture. In a sense, however, the name is apt, since its ultimate purpose is to instill love of Big Brother—the only form of love permitted in Oceania—in the minds of thoughtcriminals as part of the process of reverting them to orthodox thought. This is typical of the language of Newspeak, in which words and names frequently contain both an idea and its opposite; the orthodox party member is nonetheless able to resolve these contradictions through the disciplined use of doublethink.

The Ministry of Truth is the propaganda ministry. As with the other ministries in the novel, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer because in reality it serves the opposite: it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events.

As well as administering truth, the ministry spreads a new language amongst the populace called Newspeak, in which, for example, “truth” is understood to mean statements like 2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants. In keeping with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is thus aptly named in that it creates/manufactures “truth” in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes the doctoring of historical records to show a government-approved version of events.

In Newspeak, the ministry is known as Minitrue.

The Ministry of Plenty (in Newspeak, Miniplenty) is in control of Oceania’s planned economy. It oversees rationing of food, supplies, and goods. As told in Goldstein’s book, the economy of Oceania is very important, and it’s necessary to have the public continually create useless and synthetic supplies or weapons for use in the war, while they have no access to the means of production. This is the central theme of Oceania’s idea that a poor, ignorant populace is easier to rule over than a wealthy, well-informed one. Telescreens often make reports on how Big Brother has been able to increase economic production, even when production has actually gone down (see § Ministry of Truth).

The Ministry hands out statistics which are “nonsense”. When Winston is adjusting some Ministry of Plenty’s figures, he explains this:

But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of time you were expected to make them up out of your head.

I’m also reminded of this particular quote, from chapter 3:

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything.

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

Via Raw Story.

Christians Hating Christians, Progressive Equals Monstrous.

Janet Mefferd.

Janet Mefferd.

A story from Reuters has fired up the Religious Reich. The story has to do with the increasing political activism on the part of progressive Christians, who lean left rather than reich. They are all false prophets, false teachers, and generally horrible people all around. They twist the bible to pieces, oh my! That latter accusation based on taking the very few decent bits of the New Testament seriously, like be kind to the poor and so on. Turns out it’s quite monstrous to interpret “feed the poor” as “feed the poor”. Oh, and of course, blame is placed squarely on women. Seems that horrible progressive type Christianity has been infested with women, oh my!

On Thursday, the American Pastors Network’s Sam Rohrer, along with his guests Gary Dull and Dave Kistler, devoted their entire “Stand in the Gap” show to trashing the religious progressives highlighted in the Reuters story.

Rohrer was quite fond of his formulation that, unlike the Religious Right, the “religious left” is in fact “irreligiously wrong.”  Rohrer and his co-hosts were not shy about judging the progressive religious activists as “false prophets” and “false teachers” that the Bible warns against.

Dull said that progressives deny the “authority of scripture” and a “biblical worldview” and he offered one possible explanation:

I have found that a lot of the leaders and pastors, a lot of the pastors in this particular movement are ladies, and we believe as we look at the word of God in its true sense, that the word of God teaches us that ladies do not, well, they should not be in the pastorate.

Rohrer has previously said that having women in political leadership is a mark of God’s judgment upon a nation.

Oh that pesky “true sense”. It’s a pity there’s no such fucking thing when it comes to the Christian Book of Myths. It can be interpreted any way a person wants, which would be why there are so damn many types of Christianity. Most of them, however, do agree on the women leaders icky stance.

Kistler ticked off a list of issues motivating progressive activists—providing sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, protecting LGBTQ people, defending Obamacare, denouncing Trump’s proposed cuts in foreign aid—and decreed them “all leftist causes…that are very, very unbiblical in nature.” Kistler said flatly that it is not possible for a “Bible-believing Christian” or “genuine, true believer in Jesus Christ” to be part of the “religious left.”

Time to play No True Christian! They are right about all those things being unbiblical in nature, given that the bible is basically a long treatise on how to be a psychopath. There are decent bits sprinkled here and there in the New Testament, such as found in the slim Jefferson Bible. It should not be forgotten though, that the NT also has Jesus saying he is there to uphold every jot and tittle of the old laws. Of course, there follows a number of passages which refute Jesus’s statement, so we’re back to where we started, and the bible can mean anything you like, making it quite meaningless.

There’s more about Sam and his companions here. Moving on to the ferocious Janet Mefferd…

On her Tuesday “Janet Mefferd Live” show, Mefferd was quick to challenge the faith of progressive Christians included in the article. “These people are progressives,” she said. “They’re progressives! And for many of them progressivism is their religion. It’s not Christianity.”

No, it’s not filled with hate, so it can’t be Christianity! I didn’t listen to the soundcloud, but I’d bet there’s a serious amount of poison in her spitting out of “progressives!” Everyone should know that true Christianity is all about being a regressive, hateful asshole!

“The problem is when they start quoting scripture, it turns into something monstrous, and really, really, out-of-control not biblical,” Mefferd said, warning that progressive politics are “popping up” even in evangelical circles and among millennial evangelical Christians.

Oh no, someone leaked compassion into Christians, the horror of it all! Better get that nasty stuff out of there right now, it’s infectious.

Mefferd read from Jeff Jacoby’s March 23 guest column in the Boston Globe, entitled, “Deliver us from Scripture-citers,” in which Jacoby says biblical exhortations to feed the hungry and clothe the naked are “personal, not political.” Mefferd said of a recent letter from religious progressives that cited those verses, “They’re constantly taking the Bible and twisting it.  They twist it. They take it out of context.”

Whereas the Religious Reich, always looking for confirmation of their hatred and biases, would never ever twist scripture or take it out of context, no.

Mefferd also cited Kelly Monroe Kullberg, who has a record of rallying conservative Christians in opposition to progressive religious voices; a few years ago she organized Evangelicals for Biblical Immigration, which was meant to counter the Evangelical Immigration Table, and Christians for a Sustainable Economy, which criticized progressive Christians who argued against cuts to federal programs that serve the poor. Kullberg spearheaded  a group of more than 600 conservative Christians who last year called on progressive Christians to “repent” for “work that often advanced a destructive liberal political agenda.”

Well, here’s hoping Christians with a conscience and glimmerings of empathy win the day. I would ask Ms. Mefferd how she squares the regressive attitude towards women preachers/teachers with her mouthing off, but I’m sure I’d get sprayed by a mouthful of shit, so I’ll refrain.

Via RWW.