Once Again with Tony Perkins

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 5 Comments

"Not even a little bit. Never. Not once. Why do you guys keep asking me this? Is it my lips? I know I have expressive lips."

Perhaps you’ve heard, but yesterday a district court judge issued an injunction that stops the enforcement of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, thus A) ending decades of homophobic discrimination in the US military and B) reminding everyone that Congress isn’t the only damn branch of government. Tony Perkins is pissed. The Family Research Council President and lifelong crusader against gay rights, who is definitely not a homosexual, said in a public statement that “once again, an activist federal judge is using the military to advance a liberal social agenda.” First of all, I hope this doesn’t interfere with Mr. Perkins’s research. Second—”once again,” Tony? Let’s look at previous instances of judges using the military to advance a social agenda.

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Obama’s Islam, polls and belief as personal expression

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 3 Comments

A Tea Party demonstrator embraces Sarah Palin's made-up Twitter word, for reasons that are probably semiotically complex.

Smick sent me an interesting email yesterday about anonymous polls—particularly this one, which holds that 46% of Republicans believe that President Obama is a Muslim. When you think about it, that number is absurdly high. The notion that almost half of the Republican Party genuinely believes that the President of the United States secretly practices a religion—different from the one practiced at the church he attended in Chicago for years, which posed his most serious PR problem during the 2008 campaign—and that he has successfully hidden his practice from the most aggressive media in history, despite having two young children who will say anything once you get a couple juice boxes in them, is perhaps too fantastic to accept. Certainly, there are wingnuts. But half the party? That’s more agreement than could initially be mustered on the issue of Mitt Romney versus Mike Huckabee.

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Ground Zero Mosque dominates last week’s media coverage

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 2 Comments

You might be in the Tea Party if: you regard the entirety of lower Manhattan as a war memorial.

In a move of such metacritical complexity that it may threaten the space-time continuum, the New York Times reports that a Pew Research Center survey found that stories about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque constituted 45% of straight news on cable and radio. I personally look forward to the day when the Times is composed entirely of news reports on statistical surveys of the contents of the news, and Combat! blog can comment on them. Overall, the GZM story accounted for 15% of total newspaper, television and radio coverage, an entity that Pew amusingly refers to as the “newshole.”

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Tennessee Lt. Gov. suggests Islam is not really a religion

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 1 Comment

Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey of Tennessee, explaining to children "the other kind of book."

Republican senatorial candidate and Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee Ron Ramsey told a constituent in Chattanooga this month that it was arguable “whether being a Muslim is actually a religion or is it a nationality, way of life or cult, whatever you want to call it.” Hint: it’s not a nationality.* Ramsey, who is currently running third in his primary as the favored Tea Party candidate, made the statement in response to a question about “the threat that’s invading our country from the Muslims.” This atmosphere of sense and syntax seems to have coalesced around plans to build an Islamic center in nearby Murfreesboro—something you may have heard about on ABC. You know the country is upholding its stated ideal of religious tolerance when a plan to build  new mosque is national news.

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Something d-o-o economics. Voo-doo economics

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 7 Comments

How young you were, Ben Stein. Also how ironically cast.

John Smick sent me this excellent column by Martin Wolf on the political genius of supply-side economics. For those of you who did not hire me to help you prepare for the US History SAT II, supply-side economics is the theory that the best way to foster economic growth is by making it easier for people to produce (supply, natch) goods and services—primarily through reducing taxes on the rich and deregulating industry. Ostensibly, the increased economic activity generated by these policies offsets the decrease in revenue caused by the tax cuts; one gets 17% of $8 trillion rather than 34% of $4 trillion, and everybody wins. In practice, that’s never happened. Proponents will tell you that’s because supply-side economic policies have never been consistently implemented for a long period of time, but it might also be that the whole thing is hooey. Still, while the economic value of supply-side economics has yet to be demonstrated, its political value to the Republican Party is so significant as to have made it an article of faith.

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