Close Readings: Gingrich on Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading, Uncategorized 6 Comments

Reason #378 why we do not miss 1994

I don’t know about you, but I like my Republicans shrill, vaguely racist and relentlessly accusatory. I was thus terribly disappointed when Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich left the House of Representatives in 1998, leaving that body unable to pursue its constitutionally-mandated function of investigating the President’s real estate deals, campaign financing and extramarital affairs in an endless attempt to remove him from office. Fortunately, President Bush assumed office shortly thereafter, and the Republican Party coincidentally decided that executive privilege was extremely important. Now, though, we have Barack Obama, a man “who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.” That was Gingrich’s assessment of the President in a recent edition of the National Review, and it’s one of the least crazy things he says in the interview. The real money shot is after the jump, and it’s the subject of today’s Close Reading.

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Religious politics and the President’s secret agnosticism

By Dan Brooks in Christianism 3 Comments

In all the speculation about whether the President of the United States is a secret Muslim—a concern matched only be the pre-election fear that his Chicago pastor made him a secret black nationalist—we sometimes forget another possibility: that he secretly subscribes to no religion at all. Obviously, when you’re publicly speculating on a man’s deeply-held beliefs, you can’t just accept what he says. Until we devise some sort of test for determining whether someone is actually a Christian, possibly involving a very large wheel, we’ll have to content ourselves with two things: wild speculation by crazy white bitches and textual analysis.

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Can we please trade Kim Lehmans?

By Dan Brooks in lying 4 Comments

Which of these ladies is more likely to tell you a made-up story?

I’m not saying that the Kim Lehman we’ve got—Republican National Committee member Kim Lehman, who recently tweeted “@politico you’re funny. They must pay you a lot to protect Obama. BTW he personally told the muslims that he IS a muslim. Read his lips”—is bad. We diaspora Iowans love to hear any mention of our mythical homeland not in the context of a 30 Rock punchline, as evidenced by our continued enjoyment of Steve King. It’s just that, in the course of trying to figure out who our Kim Lehman is, we found out about this other Kim Lehman—Kim Lehman the Beelady—who seems much nicer.

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