Author Archive

Pamela Troy

“Read the latest on McCarthy — He was basically vindicated.”
Don McLeroy, Member of the Texas State School Board of Education, on Senator Joseph McCarthy

So McCarthy apologists have at last managed to worm their way into some semblance of respectability.

Git yer history, right here!

The Texas State School Board of Education recently rammed through some changes to the state history standards that, along with the omission of Thomas Jefferson in discussions about the impact of enlightenment ideas, include the strong implication that Joseph McCarthy was “vindicated.”

This “vindication” story is a lie. There is nothing revealed in the decades since his death that vindicates either McCarthy or McCarthyism.

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Pamela Troy

“The common assumption is that the Nazis were a right wing phenomenon, a right wing party, that Hitler was a man of the right, and there are a lot of problems with this. His social agenda for expanding universal access to health care, for expanding access to education. It was for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. It was for attacking big business and high finance. People say, ‘Well, Hitler abolished labor unions. He was right wing then.’ Well, how did labor unions do under Stalin? How are labor unions doing under Fidel Castro?”

Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Beck special, January 22, 2010

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less."

Here is where the insularity so carefully fostered within the right wing over the past two decades begins to pay off. It is obviously news to a good many of Beck’s viewers that the full name of Hitler’s party included the word “socialist.” Rather than blame the fact that they dozed off in their 20th century world history class, many of these folks are eager to blame this ignorance on a liberal “cover-up.”

The sheer amount of misinformation packed into Goldberg’s relatively terse statement quoted above is impressive, but I’ll break it down:

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Pamela Troy

“In a pretrial hearing Friday, Kansas Judge Warren Wilbert said he might allow the defense to present evidence that Mr. Roeder acted in defense of others — in this case, fetuses — whom he believed to be under imminent threat. The judge said he would make that call as the trial proceeded, on a witness-by-witness basis…

Judge Wilbert also said he was open to the defense presenting evidence that Mr. Roeder might be guilty not of first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison, but of the far lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, which carries a sentence of about five years.” The Wall Street Journal 1/9/10

You can find it online, conveniently typed-up.

In an effort to terrorize into compliance those who disagree with them, anti-abortion activists have vandalized and firebombed clinics. They have threatened, assaulted, maimed, and murdered clinic workers and physicians. The dead so far:

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Pamela Troy

The Mohler case grinds on in Missouri. For those unfamiliar with it, six men in the Mohler family, Burrell Mohler Senior, and his five sons, have been accused of ritually abusing Burrell’s grandchildren back in the ‘80s.

You can find it online, conveniently typed-up.

The memories, we’ve been told, were initially “suppressed” by the 26-year-old woman who came forward with them. She claims that from the age of five to eleven, she was regularly and ritually molested by these men. She claims she was impregnated and forced to have an abortion at the age of eleven, and that the abuse stopped after this.

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Pamela Troy

Remember the heroic souls, who, almost a hundred years ago, helped us win World War I?

They did it by bravely referring to sauerkraut as “Liberty Cabbage”, and German measles as “Liberty Measles” and by occasionally kicking a Dachshund (but rarely German Shepherds, for some reason).

Lights out.

Oh, surely you’ve heard of them, those courageous Americans who harassed and frequently threatened their neighbors and co-workers who were of German descent? Some of them even went that extra mile. German born Robert Prager, a naturalized American, aged 30, was executed by a doughty band of about 300 patriots for making alleged disloyal utterances at a Socialist meeting. They generously allowed him to pray and write a brief farewell letter to his mother before tightening the noose around his neck. A local paper, doing its bit for the war effort, headlined the story with: “German Enemy of U.S. Hanged by Mob.” Read the rest of this entry »

Pamela Troy

“It is interesting, that termites don’t build things, and the great builders of our nation almost to a man have been Christians, because Christians have the desire to build something. He is motivated by love of man and God, so he builds. The people who have come into [our] institutions are primarily termites. They are into destroying institutions that have been built by Christians, whether it is universities, governments, our own traditions, that we have…. The termites are in charge now, and that is not the way it ought to be, and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation.”
– Pat Robertson New York Magazine, August 18, 1986

Histrionics.

“Experts come in, actually envelope the whole dwelling in a giant tent – and send a very powerful fumigant, lethal to the varmints and unwelcome creatures, into every nook and cranny of the house. Done thoroughly, every last destructive insect or rodent is sent to varmint hell – and in a day or two, the grand house is habitable again.

I believe – figuratively, but in a very real way – we need to tent the White House!” Pat Boone, World Net Daily

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Pamela Troy

“He doesn’t like the Constitution. I’ve said it over and over again and now here are his own words, ‘The constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is most revealing. The so-called founders…’ This is his thesis, his college thesis at Columbia… The constitution is the most liberty promoting and freedom acknowledging document in the history of the world!

Fake but accurate.

“And this little boy, in college, writing about it with utter disdain and he still shares those same feelings!

” . . . I’ve had quotes attributed to me that were made up. And when it was pointed out to the media that the quotes were made up, they said, “It doesn’t matter. We know Limbaugh thinks it anyway.”… so I shout from the mountaintops, it was satire. But we know he thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth; he’s mad at the courts for not going far enough on it.” Rush Limbaugh, on a recent Michael Ledeen article that used quotes President Obama never uttered from an undergraduate thesis he never wrote.  October 23, 2009

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Pamela Troy

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way.  I have piles and piles of black friends…” Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell of Hammond, Louisiana, on his recent refusal, as justice of the peace, to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple.

Stop! For the children!

While the shock and anger this case has evoked is gratifying, I’m not sure why everyone is so surprised by it. There’s nothing especially freakish or even unusual about Bardwell’s attitude, especially in the deep south.

There seems to be a widespread notion that racist beliefs ingrained for over a century just – “Poof!” – disappeared in the wake of the civil rights movement.

Every particle of racism was magically expunged from the hearts of those same people who responded to integration by screaming epithets at schoolchildren and/or snatching their kids out of the public school system and placing them in hastily thrown together white flight academies.

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