Gary Bauer insanely equates progressives to terrorists

Gary Bauer [source: Top of the Ticket | Los Angeles Times]

There’s a piece over at Human Events by über-wingnut Gary Bauer that may just be the single most insane screed against liberals (or, as they’re known by conservatives these days, “progressives”^[1]) I’ve ever read. Even intellectual swamps like the WorldNetDaily seem to avoid employing the sort of rhetoric and above-ridiculous comparisons present in this thing. The whole thing is about how President Obama supposedly has both a “strong affection” and “such an affinity” for Islam – because merely vying to uphold the inalienable rights and freedoms of adherents of a faith that may number anywhere from 1.3 million to 7 million Americans^[2] is akin to “Islamophilia”. (Also, it makes you a secret Muslim.)

The premise may be about Obama’s supposed connection with Islam (and I forewarn you: he fucking has none), but the rest is tellingly disjointed, jumping from Obama to random British politicians and spending much time trying to equate liberals (er, progressives) with Islamic extremists. No, seriously; he actually compares American (and generally Western) liberals with bomb-lobbing terrorists. Check out this necrotic start where he presents this incredibly absurd viewpoint:

Obama’s left-wing progressivism varies with Islamism on many issues. But their adherents find common cause in a common enemy: the Judeo-Christian worldview at the heart of Western democracy.

At first glance, it would seem an unlikely alliance. Progressives theoretically want to move us forward, while Islamists wish to take us back to 7th Century-style theocracies. Progressive politicians push for marriage for homosexuals, while the Islamists push brick walls on top of them. Cultural progressives celebrate sexual licentiousness; Islamists punish it with death.

So … you’re saying that liberals and religious extremists aren’t the same, not by a planet-sized margin?

But such differences between the left and radical Islam fade to irrelevance in the face of such common enemies as traditional Christianity, Judaism, Israel, free enterprise and the very idea of America itself.

Oh, boy. So liberals are the same as terrorists because they all hate everything that’s good and happy in the world, are they?

But it’s now that Bauer comes to trying to explain this crap that the real lunacy starts pouring in:

Progressives’ and Islamists’ litanies of grievances against America are strikingly similar. Many heads in university faculty lounges across America surely nodded when Osama bin Laden told a CNN interviewer in 1997, “We declared jihad against America because America is unjust, criminal and tyrannical.” Similarly, many college professors stood behind Professor Ward Churchill’s accusation that the victims of 9-11 were “little Eichmanns.”

Many leftists’ instinctual hatred of America explains their insistence that would-be Ground Zero mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a “moderate” Muslim. To them, his contention that the United States was “an accessory” to 9/11 seemed just the sort of remark a “moderate” imam would utter. Radicals, they argue, would claim that Israel and America were the principal belligerents.

So Bauer’s case to show how progressives are all Islamist-sympathizers and hate America is … some delusional hypotheticals he conjures up out of nowhere about how certain types of liberals “surely” reacted to bin Laden and 9/11? Sorry, Bauer, but you’re gonna have to come up with more than scenes pulled out of the movie that’s playing in your ass to make your point about how liberal professors apparently support the terrorists who blew up the Twin Towers.

Also, the fact that liberals defend Imam Rauf, a Sufi Muslim who’s done nothing but preach peace and interfaith cooperation for decades, from the litany of smears and misinformation from Bauer’s side of the political spectrum – and only some liberals at that (as disturbingly many actually do fall for the Right’s bullshit) – shows only how liberals, in general, tend to favor reason and honesty, apparently to a rather higher extent than right-wingers generally do. That’s not speculation; that’s a fact. (See Media Matters’s thorough coverage on all the attacks made towards Rauf and why they’re all bunk.)

Bauer then spends a few paragraphs talking about British politicians and their efforts to increase cooperation between England and Muslims. You may be forgiven if you wonder what any of this has to do with Obama, as I thought he was supposed to be the subject of the piece, not the tenuous relation he may share with random British legislators through a Left-leaning ideology.

But after a quote from British MP George Galloway defending the idea of reconciling Muslims and progressives, Bauer gives us what’s perhaps his most shining bit of clueless, unbridled wackjobbery yet:

Progressives and Islamists are indeed on the same side. Their common disdain for Christianity explains why left-wing judges in America find any inkling of Christianity in the public square unconstitutional, while Islamist judges in the Middle East deem it executable.

Their common view that life is expendable explains the left’s embrace abortion-on-demand and why the Islamists don’t hesitate to deploy their own children for homicide bombings.

Their common totalitarian impulse explains why each group has as its governing objective to render its subjects entirely dependent on the state for everything in their lives, from education to healthcare.

Wow. Talk about desperate. So the fact that U.S. courts rule against violations of the Establishment Clause makes them akin to Islamists who have people murdered for the crime of adhering to a different religion? And terminating problematic pregnancies is the same as having children blow themselves up to kill others?

I’d probably be offended, even outraged, at such abject and mindless insults if I weren’t remarkably desensitized by now. Thank you, Internet; you may have just saved my keyboard and/or monitor.

Not that it stops me from calling you out, Gary Bauer, you sick, insane, delusional and demented son of a fuckwitted bitch.

Skipping over some more “libruls are fascists!” buliatch:

This alliance explains why the Obama State Department is spending taxpayer money to send Rauf to the Middle East on a goodwill tour. And it is why it will spend nearly $6 million of your tax money to restore, among other things, mosques and minaret around the world.

That guff again? Also, notice how, as with the AFA, Bauer stops short from saying that “the government is spending money on mosques!” and includes that weaselly little “among other things”? It’s almost as if he actually knew that claiming that the government’s funds being sent to cultural artifacts around the world were somehow violating the separation of church and state was bullshit, but just wanted to throw that in anyway to rile the ignorami up.

And to cap it all off, why not end with some hyperbolic doom-saying:

But there will be time for that later. For now, there’s a greater goal to achieve: the annihilation of moral accountability and individual liberty and the destruction of the Judeo-Christian philosophy that is the foundation of Western civilization.

OMG!! LIBRULZ ARE OUT TO DESTROY THE WORLD!!!11!

A stereotypically fitting ending to a stereotypically brain-exploding piece. True to form, Bauer; well done.

Now excuse me, I need to bleach my eyeballs and limbic system. And Bauer, in the words of the great Jon Stewart: Go fuck yourself.

[1] Tell me, how is a label that denotes a favorable attitude towards progress a bad thing? “Neener neener, you want to change things for the better! How … wrong!”

[2] There are no accurate estimates due to legal restrictions on questions about religion in the U.S. Census; see here.

Tags: Gary Bauer • wingnuts • conservatives • liberals • progressives • Barack Obama • Islam • Muslims • Islamists • extremists • terrorists