South Dakota Top Blogs

News, notes, and observations from the James River Valley in northern South Dakota with special attention to reviewing the performance of the media--old and new. E-Mail to MinneKota@gmail.com

Monday, June 25, 2007

A tribute to the Taliban, and other sound and fury from you-know-where

During his last election campaign, Tim Johnson commented on some perverse politics that he attributed to the "Taliban wing of the Republican Party." Whether from its puerile intellectual insufficiency or the moral terpitude that dwells within some in the Republican Party, they immediately whined, "Mama, Timmy called us the Taliban." Amid the juvenile cacophony, the fact that the comment was an apt and timely and witful characterization of a mindset that lurks in those dark regressive precincts was missed. Sen. Johnson did not call the Republicans anything. He did compare some factions within the party to the Taliban, which is characterized by small-minded malice and the repression that it imposes on people when it gets the chance. A few of still smile at the incisive aptness of the comment.




Well, the Taliban wing of the conservative movement got more vocal this week as one of its advocates said that the war on Iraq is actually motivated by the west's destruction of the patriarchical family unit. The American left is responsible for the 9/11 attack on America.



First of all, the author of this premise writes a column for the Aberdeen American News, which automatically brings the man's powers of reasoning and his literacy into question. The American News is a loud and persistent advocate for stupidity and small-mindedness--when it can muster any tolerance for the presence of a mind at all.



I do not read this man's words. In fact, I do not subscribe to the American News or read anything in it unless it is thrust in my face by some friend with the announcement that "you aren't going to believe this!" And that is how I came to read a column by Perk Washenberger in the June 19 edition, page 4A, of the American News. Mr. Washenberger is not a man of great intellect. Neither is he a man of literary skill. His kind of thinking is found more often in the comments of blogs like South Dakota War College.



Well, last week the AAN was thrust in my face with outbursts of incredulity coming from the thruster, and I read the column. It is an experience like watching a constricting snake strangle and ingest a baby rabbit or something. It is has a kind of repulsive fascination that observations of the lower species can produce in one.

Washenberger cites as a source of his inspiration Dinesh D'Souza's book The Enemy at Home in which D'Souza makes the claim that American liberalism is responsible for the hatred and attacks on America from Islam: "...the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world."

Washenberger applies his own great intellect and powerful reasoning in amplifying and explicating D'Souza. He says, "The attempts in Europe and the U.S. to redefine what constitutes a family, all in the name of liberating women and homosexuals is unacceptable to most Muslim believers."

"The premise supporting this liberation during the 1960s," writes Washenberger in a flash of historical acumen, "was that the housewife was confined to a 'comfortable concentration camp of home' in the words of Betty Friedan, and they needed to be liberated." You are not going to get a more succinct and accurate characterization of the women's movement than what Washenberger will supply. I mean, this man has the gonadal reality well in hand.

The Muslims will point out to us, if we let them, according to Washenberger, "that in a relatively short time this movement has brought about the single mom-ism syndrome in the western world. A side effect was the necessity of government financial involvement to sustain what this liberation produced." This, according to the Washenberger mantra is totally unacceptable to Muslims.

"Unacceptable too is the very notion of a nation's sanctioning of abortion. To the patriarchical Muslim family the very thought of aborting, children---children who will sustain their parents in their old age, is stupid and detestable. The more recent thinking in the West: taking the old folks to the senior care center is not an option that is considered by most Muslim families." [By the way, the punctuation in these quotations is just like the American News edited it.]

We wonder if they take the old folks out and stone them to death along with the young women they dispatch through honor killings.

But Washenberger presses on with his command of fact and pyrotechnical reasoning: "The state and/or federal official authorization of homosexual marriage is especially revolting to most Muslims."

And then he winds up with a rhetorical flourish:

"So why do many in the Muslim faith call the U..S. and the European nations pagan atheistic nations--nations of idolators and devils? Why does Osama bin Laden call the west "regions of infidelity?"

"Could our attempts at secularism--our sidlining of any notion of God in our government affairs, the sanctioning of such things as abortion, euthanasia, homosexual marriage, stem cell research and more, be the answer?"

And Republicans whimper and whine and writhe in outrage when someone suggests that a wing of their party is like the Taliban?

When you drive through South Dakota and see piles of stones in some of the farm fields, it makes one paranoid. We know the Taliban is out there condemning the freedom, the equality, and quest for equal rights and justice that has been the American agenda. Could those piles of stones be an armory of god with which his minions are going to inflict some good, old Muslim justice on us?

D"Souza, Falwell, Robertson, and Washenberger: the Taliban has spoken.

9/11, to them, was the rapture.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You make a lot of harsh but valid points.

My inaugural address at the Great White Throne Judgment of the Dead, after I have raptured out billions! The Secret Rapture soon, by my hand!
Read My Inaugural Address
My Site=http://www.angelfire.com/crazy/spaceman

Blog Archive

About Me

My photo
Aberdeen, South Dakota, United States

NVBBETA