Brayton’s Bag of Links and Snark: Bush, Bigamy and B.S.

Obama meets with Muslim leader

I forgot to mention last week that during his trip to Michigan, Barack Obama had a meeting with prominent Shiite Imam Hassan Qazwini of Dearborn. The right wing press had a field day with that, with the Worldnutdaily declaring it “breaking news” that “Shiite leader met privately with Obama.” Michigan’s favorite Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel, who thinks every Muslim in the universe is an agent for Bin Laden, declared that the visit “says a lot about the company Obama keeps…and why he shouldn’t be President.”

There’s just one tiny little thing they left out: George W. Bush met with Qazwini at least 4 times during the 2000 presidential election and numerous times over the last 7 years. The picture to the left is Bush kissing Qazwini during a visit to Detroit in 2003. Qazwini has been a frequent guest at the White House. And while the Imam didn’t officially endorse Bush in 2000, he urged his followers to vote for Bush after the candidate issued a statement at Qazwini’s request rejecting the use of secret evidence and racial profiling in terrorism cases. Irony, thou are a fickle muse.

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O’Reilly’s hateful followers

Bill O’Reilly continued both his campaign to villify Markos Moulitsas and his longstanding tradition of making himself look like a buffoon this week. For more than a year O’Reilly has been calling DailyKos, one of the largest liberal political blogs on the net, a “hate site.” After Newsweek hired Moulitsas, the blog’s founder, as a columnist O’Reilly declared that this was like hiring David Duke. A gaggle of O’Reilly followers promptly fired off a bushel full of emails to Moulitsas calling him all sorts of charming names and threatening his life. My favorite:

Stay gay you c*ck sucker!!

I wish these bigots would make up their mind. Are gay people supposed to pray away the gay and become straight or are they supposed to stay gay? Speaking of which, now that Ted Haggard is out of the pulpit and desperate for money, I keep waiting to see him on late night TV selling Gay-B-Gone (“apply directly to the foreskin”).

Megachurch minister, underage girl….must be Thursday

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A minister at one of Texas’ largest megachurches was arrested this week after driving his wife’s car 200 miles for a planned liaison with a 13-year-old girl he met on the Internet.

Greeting Rev. Joe Barron, minister to married adults at the 26,000-member Prestonwood Baptist Church, near Dallas, when he arrived Thursday, with a package of condoms on the car seat, were members of the Bryan, Texas, police force.

And the members of Ted Haggard’s church in Colorado reply: “Hey, at least it was a girl.”

More of those “family values” we always hear about

I’m sure you’ve all heard by now about Rep. Vito Fossella, the New York Republican congressman who was so steeped in family values that he had two families, one in New York and one in Washington DC. Now it comes out that this holier-than-noone hypocrite has disowned his gay sister, just to make the hypocrisy even more rank. Because those lesbians are immoral people, you know. Not like fine upstanding men like Fossella.

It’s the end of the world as we know it

The religious right is in the midst of a full-scale freakout over the ruling by the California Supreme Court that the state must call gay domestic partnerships “marriages.” Janet Folger, one of the wingiest of the wingnuts, actually wrote a column for the Worldnutdaily with this headline:

How same-sex marriage points to end of the world

Short, concise, to the point. I like it. Her evidence for this is some Rabbi who says that the final straw that made God destroy the world with a global flood in Noah’s day was that they were allowing same-sex marriage. Uh, Janet…there was no global flood. That’s a myth, flatly contradicted by all the geological evidence. Thank you for playing and we have some lovely parting gifts for you. Like 500 mg of thorazine a day.

Not to be outdone, Dennis Prager opines that the problem with same-sex marriage is that it will cause “sexual confusion” and that “young girls will be discouraged from imagining one day marrying their prince charming.” Right. Because I’m sure in Massachusetts right now there isn’t a single young girl dreaming of their wedding day. There’s a direct causal relationship between person A being allowed to marry someone of the same sex and every other person no longer being able to daydream about their wedding. At least, I’m sure that’s true in some bizarro universe where up is down and black is white. Unfortunately, that bizarro universe seems only to be inhabited by anti-gay bigots.