Communists in the State Department, Arabs on the Donor List
Right up front, I'd like to apologize to those who come here looking for funny physics stuff. The following will be a bit of a rant, so if you're put off by bile, well, go hang out in MC Hawking's Crib, and give the rest of this a miss.
Yesterday, I stumbled across what may well be the most disgusting thing I've read since September 11th last year. In a world containing both Ted Rall and Ann Coulter, that's really saying something. Just linking to this filth makes me want to take a shower.
It seems that Scott Koenig over at "The Indepundit" decided to look into the fund-raising records of Rep. Cynthia McKinney, the outspoken Democrat from Georgia who has drawn the ire of the warblogosphere, basically for failing to get behind the current program of raining fiery death upon Middle Easterners who have displeased us. (To be fair, she's said some astoundingly stupid things in the process, and I am no huge McKinney fan). Mr. Koenig's big finding? She reported $13,850 in campaign contributions on 9/11/01, from people with Arab-sounding names. He ends his post with a smug "Probably a coincidence," but the implication is clear: McKinney's taking money from Arabs, and therefore must be entirely in Al Qaeda's pocket, paid to spout anti-American gibberish. The people in his comments thread certainly jumped all over it.
Let's leave aside for the moment the mind-boggling idiocy involved in thinking that Al Qaeda might judge it a good investment to buy the allegiance of a single member of the House of Representatives, let alone a member of the minority party, let alone a member of the minority party who was already know as a bit of a wing nut. Their $14,000 would've been better spent buying the allegiance of a Yemeni busboy at the Hawk and Dove, in hopes that he might be able to slip Tom DeLay a mickey, but let's leave that aside.
Let's also leave aside the fact that the donations listed on OpenSecrets' web site tend to be reported on only one or two days a month, almost certainly recorded by either the date on the paperwork filed with the FEC (or whoever it is that gets that stuff), or the postmark on the envelope it was mailed in. That incriminating "9/11/01" was almost certainly the work of either a congressional staffer filling out forms late on 9/10/01, or a postmark stamp from the USPS (and even on that darkest of days, the mail still came). But let's forget about that--let's assume for the sake of argument that all of those checks really were donated exactly on September 11th.
Let's leave aside all of the justifying arguments, and elided details, and rational explanations, because, at the core of it, none of that matters. Stripped down to its thoroughly vile essence, what do we have here? A list of Arab-sounding names on a fundraising report.
Well, thank God for you, Tail-gunner Joe! We'll string her right up from the nearest tree. I mean, everybody knows those filthy camel-jockeys are all terrorists, and anybody who took money from them must be tainted.
And hey, while you're at it, you better ship me off to Guantanamo Bay, too-- a close colleague of mine is of Iranian descent, and we all know they're Evil (the President said so!), and I have lunch from time to time with another Iranian, who's a devout Muslim. Yep, slap on the cuffs, and strip me of my civil rights, I'm consorting with terrorists.
I am thoroughly sickened by this. This argument is so utterly revolting, I have trouble keeping my hands steady enough to type. McKinney's said some idiotic things, but nothing she's said or done can possibly justify this McCarthyite horseshit. The people crowing about this on the Indepundit site and elsewhere are lower than the slime that pond scum scrapes off its shoes, and I would've expected better of Jim Henley.
Several people, myself among them, have raised the dark spectre of the Japanese-American internment camps, and McCarthy-style blacklists, when discussing the civil rights concerns raised by recent government actions. Until this weekend, I've always thought that was little more than a rhetorical scare tactic, that the memory of those dark chapters in American history would be enough to restrain the worst excesses of the War on Terrorism. With this poisonous idiocy entering the major media, I'm no longer so sure.
If we're going to go down this road, and I fervently hope we're not, I hope we can at least get a Joseph Welch to stand up and ask "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" before irreparable damage is done.
Posted at 2:10 PM | link | follow-ups |