What the hell is Conservapedia? I'm totally baffled by this. Is Wikipedia considered untrustworthy because... liberals are allowed to edit entries too?

But I see that the first Conservapedia Commandment is: "Everything you post must be true and verifiable." So that's good.

But Apo's right, this is a great article.

In the years 2000 through 2004, before becoming a United States Senator and being in the public spotlight, Obama gave 1% of his earnings to charity even though he made $250,000 per year. Since becoming a national figure, that amount has jumped to 6%.[59]. Obama's small donations are consistent with atheism and were perhaps influenced by his nonbelieving mother.

The outright lies are just lies, but I think this piece of truthiness may be my favorite: On the campaign trail Obama has been reading "The Post-American World" by Fareed Zakaria, which is written from a Muslim point-of-view

I can't imagine why anyone thinks the "Obama is a Muslim" people are fueled by racism.

Are these people actually dangerous to anyone other than themselves?

"Many observers have criticized Obama's campaign for its incivility. For instance, John McCain's wife Cindy noted that Obama is running 'the dirtiest campaign in American history.' [...] Another feature of the Obama campaign is the unruly audience. CNN reported in October of 2008, that people are calling John McCain a terrorist at these events."

Are these people actually dangerous to anyone other than themselves?

That's an Atrios question. Yes.

The ones on the internet probably aren't the same ones who pick up the gun, however.

"Conservapedia: because Wikipedia's not the right kind of wrong."

The ones on the internet probably aren't the same ones who pick up the gun, however.

They are, however, vital to creating the environment that nurtures the ones who will eventually pick up guns.

Goddamn it feels good to see the crazies dragged into the light.

The local weekly had a piece last week covering the Republican "victory" party in Raleigh on Tuesday night. It includes gems such as, "This is the end of democracy in America," and an attendee accosting a reporter to ask, "Who'd you vote for? Look me in the eyes, and I can tell you... You're a young person, and that scares me."

I am perfectly happy for the freakazoid Republican base to be The Story for the next eight years, as long as we don't let them influence any actual policy.

Kos: 34% of the voters think that it's bad to have both Congress and the White House in Democratic hands. That's pretty close to the crazified Republican 27%.

The media meme is completely fake. Nobody except pundits and Republicans wants divided government. That was just a goal-line stand for the Democrat-haters.

I particularly like,
He has no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained as the likely result of affirmative action.

10

The media meme is completely fake. Nobody except pundits and Republicans wants divided government. That was just a goal-line stand for the Democrat-haters.

Democrats want divided government when there is a Republican President.

I am perfectly happy for the freakazoid Republican base to be The Story for the next eight years, as long as we don't let them influence any actual policy.

The problem with this is that there's a widespread "split the difference" impulse, especially among the sort of weenie liberals that populate the Democratic party and the non-Fox mainstream media. The right knows this on some level and so they encourage the wackiest people to speak up because it drags the whole discourse their way, allowing the merely bad ideas to look quite sensible in light of the batshit crazy and outright evil ones.

There are two approaches to dealing with this: Either promote countervailing insanity or attack the split the difference impulse. I strongly prefer the latter.

13: i.e., moving the Overton window.

13: I would much rather see the "countervailing insanity" approach. If the air is full of pundits calling for $10 trillion in slavery reparations, suddenly affirmative action will be seen as the reasonable, centrist approach. If one side of the argument is "stay in Iraq forever" then let the other side be "surrender Texas to the Mexicans", and the rational centre will coalesce around "withdraw from Iraq".

13: While I think there's some truth to that, it's not the whole story. One result of the civil rights movement is that it juxtaposed polite black people with crazed white people, which had the effect of making racism less acceptable, not moreso.

From their Sarah Palin entry:

"She participated in a debate with the Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden on October 2, 2008, ending up being declared the winner by most credible news sources that are not influenced by liberal bias."

15: But we might compromise by staying in Iraq forever and surrendering Texas to the Mexicans.

I've always felt that if Congress had countervailing craziness, we would have a Democrat representative who would routinely read into the Congressional Record lists of the first people up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Anyway, it won't be long. Everybody knows that the first item on the agenda of the Left is passage of the Countervailing Craziness Doctrine to restore fairness to radio.

Obama also revealed his deep Marxist/Leninist roots in the design of the poster for his 'visit' to Berlin in July 2008. The clear parallels between the poster design and Lenin's earlier poster was obviously a deliberate yet hidden hint to his European, socialistic audience as to his political roots and beliefs.

I'm intrigued by "'visit'". Did he in fact not really go there? Was it all on a soundstage somewhere?

18: Legalize all immigration forever, then draft the new citizens for the war with Iran!

I've never heard a Democrat, except a fake media Democrat, promote the "divided government" meme. Democrats want as many Democrats in all branches as possible. (Well, maybe some neolibs and the right wing of the DLC wanted divided government, but that's the Democrat-hating wing of the Democratic Party).

The "divided government" meme is a.) the same old stupid Broderism, b.) a last-ditch way of encouraging ticket-splitting when the Republican Presidential candidate is losing, and c.) a way of diverting attention from the fact that, given unimpeded control of the government for the greater part of six years, the Republicans fucked things up worse than anyone could ever have imagined. (See, it's an institutional problem! The Republicans are not at fault! The Democrats failed to stop them from ruining everything! Fucking Democrats! Stop me before I kill again!)

I thought that Obama was Hitler, not Lenin.

Did anyone ever see Hitler and Lenin in the same room together? Has anyone ever chacked to make sure that the Lenin mummy is really Lenin?

22: Occupy the entire Middle East, extract all their oil, and then hand it out, a barrel at a time, to poor black single mothers in American inner cities!
Appoint Bill Ayers as Imperial American Proconsul of Mesopotamia!
COMITY!

then let the other side be "surrender Texas to the Mexicans"

Hey, you were supposed to make the lefty position crazy.

26: Surrender South Dakota to Equatorial Guinea, then.

Now we're talking! We really owed them anyway.

Or you could go for the ol' "Eliminate the U.S. government, handing over all executive and legislative powers for our country to the U.N." trope that right-wing crazies seem to think we believe. Not only will it make "fewer wars" a sensible compromise, it'll also make "less federalism" a centrist policy.

27: No, North Dakota - that's the one with the Minuteman IIs.

29: But South Dakota has the Corn Palace.

Nice that they admit he was born in Honolulu.

Robust,

Goddamn it feels good to see the crazies dragged into the light.

Well, I guess, but my wife is working on a committee to gather public input and advice on how our local school system will cut $10 million.

A couple nights ago she was working a table with another women at the HS cafeteria, the same night an orchestra concert was taking place.

A guy came up and asked what they were doing. He was there to see the concert, his daughter played violin in the orchestra, but he started a rant about the need to eliminate most everything - the arts, social workers, psychiatrists, guidance counselors, and social studies. He got kinda whacko and looked at them and said "I know what you are thinking. You support those kinds of things, don't you? I know who you voted for."

He got abrasive and personal and my wife and the other women got kind of frightened. I really wish I had been there, because I would love to stand nose to nose with an idiot like that. The thing is I'm pretty sure if I was there he'd have kept his mouth shut, the effing coward. I wish they had gotten his name.

I'm a pretty big guy and I'll stand up to anyone. You better hope the first swing takes me down cause otherwise you'll be real sorry. Take one swing and you are down and the cops are called.

Appoint Bill Ayers as Imperial American Proconsul of Mesopotamia!

No, right now the Department of Education needs Comrade Ayers. How else will we raise the next generation of liberal communists if Ayers isn't writing the textbooks?

I'm a pretty big guy and I'll stand up to anyone. You better hope the first swing takes me down cause otherwise you'll be real sorry. Take one swing and you are down and the cops are called.

I hope this is a joke.

The "public opinion" that the media discusses is created entirely within media discourse, with absolutely no reference to actual public opinion (insofar as that can be reliably determined).

33: You mean the Department of Re-education, right?

31 - Conservapedia is now officially less wingnutty than Camille Paglia.

I liked this sentence about how the state of Hawaii has declared his birth certificate to be valid: "If states are no longer regarded as a valid authority on citizenship of those born within them then no one is eligible for President because no one can prove that they are natural born citizens." Presumably this is a rare voice of reason that will soon be edited out.

I do think it's interesting that both candidates this time around were born abroad.

38: Yeah, what are the odds that two long-running programs to install a mind-controlled zombie into the White House would come to fruition the exact same year?

4:1

Make that three.

"Americans want divided government" is an old idea from the era around 1968-1992, when Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives since forever, but Republicans usually won presidential elections. The real reason for it was simple: the Democrats still had a conservative, white-supremacist southern wing on the national level, and their supporters tended to vote for Republican presidents. Now that that's essentially gone, the adage doesn't really apply. But when the Republicans won big in 1994 over continued economic discontent that had already gotten in a Democratic president, people spuriously fit it into the "divided government" frame.

Has anyone ever chacked to make sure that the Lenin mummy is really Lenin?

When I was in Moscow in late '94 and early '95, I mentioned this in passing to my host-mother. She was someone who had hated Communism, was very liberal by the standards of that time and that place, but when I mentioned that there are people who think that Lenin's corpse, which I'd gone to see that morning, might not be real, she got very stony and very sober and said, quietly, "That is him. It is not fake." I was scared to ask anything about politics for the rest of the trip.

All this is to say that Obama is clearly neither Hitler nor Lenin, he's post-cosmetic-surgery Castro. He faked illness and rumors of his own death so that he could take us over from within.

The conservapedia entry on same-sex marriage is a real hoot.

So what happens when Obama is not sworn in on a Koran? Do they just deny it and insist it was secretly a Koran? At what point are they accountable when what they say doesn't match reality?

Why does Dick Morris still get on TV.

Wingnut: There are VERY REAL CONCERNS that it was a Koran bound in a Bible cover!

Putz: Interesting link.

At what point are they accountable when what they say doesn't match reality?

Pretty much never, if by "they" you mean "the internet nutbars who write political fan-fic and call it truth"; only very rarely if "they" are people with some degree of genuine political influence. At this point a significant fraction of the "conservative" electorate is practically indistinguishable from LaRouchites, Truthers, or hardcore UFOers.

45
At what point are they accountable when what they say doesn't match reality?

I imagine it would vary from state to state. In Indiana, for example, the answer is probably "never." Rep. Dan Burton has pushed for the death penalty for drug dealers even though his son was arrested while allegedly in possession of eight pounds of marijuana (never spent any time in jail, though), and he shot a pumpkin trying to prove that Clinton murdered Vince Foster. Last week he was elected to his sixth or seventh term with 68 percent of the vote.

I think Conservapedia is an accurate representation of how the average Republican thinks these days. I know there are some sane people who still identify with the Republican Party and don't appreciate being lumped in with the nuts and I feel a little sorry for them, but it's not like anyone's forcing them to stay in the party.

FWIW I'm trying to settle things down a bit over at Apo's Obama the Anti-Christ thread, although it would be cool to get to 3000 comments. There is one nutcase who I doubt will ever run out of steam, but I think most people are seeing him for what he is.

I hope this is a joke.

Why is that?

49: Isn't that thread more than three years old now? I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it came back to life yet again, but still.

Just so you know, you can relax. I wouldn't worry about anyone mistakenly getting the idea that someone commenting in that thread is sane.

Cyrus,

I comment in that thread . . . and I haven't been accused of being crazed in, I dunno, six months or so.

52: Don't worry, I said "mistakenly getting the idea." Since you brought it up, though, six months? Try three hours. That's the impression I got, at least; ajay can correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah, I'm waiting for clarification from ajay too. I think there is a misunderstanding at work here.

46: Obama does not need a Qur'an. It's obvious that during his indoctrination at a madrassa he memorized it (that is what they do there), and he will be reciting it in his head during the ceremony.

Isn't that thread more than three years old now?

Posted August 2004.

55: Obama can transform a normal Bible into a Koran with a touch. (Only the King James Version, being God's Own Words, is immune.)

Tripp has a stamp on his hand that says "SANE". That's good enough for me.

The book will have the accidents of a Bible but the substance of a Koran.

56: Honest to the gods, I have got $1 that says that (barring disk failure, archive explosion, the cessation of blogging in the People's Republic of Mohammedstan, etc.) in February of 2017 there will be people in that thread arguing about whether the thousand year reign of the Anti-Christ is eight years old, hasn't started or is make-believe. I love that thread so much.

Tripp's "SANE" stamp is on his forehead, and it's nested in a mandal of his own design.

Another Norm Coleman allegation turns out to be completely baseless.

But the American wingnutosphere completely believes the story, and a year from now they'll still believe it.

The first Coleman allegation was so unjustifiable that even Powerline didn't buy it. Powerline!

Thanks Walt, but actually they are tattoos. Since I am left-handed it starts with my left pinky and says S A N E and the thumb has a question mark '?'.

So I think the question is still open at this time.

Tripp, I can help you remove that ambiguity and be sane forever, with one quick stroke of a knife.

Fido,

Thanks, but how much fun would that be, being completely sane?

54: in retrospect I shouldn't have posted that - it's perfectly obvious that Tripp wasn't being serious. ("You better hope the first swing takes me down cause otherwise you'll be real sorry" - heh. Is the passage original or is it a quote? It's very good either way.)

I have obviously been pwned by whatever Internet law it is that says that any parody, however broad, will still be taken as serious by at least one person. Boy, do I feel stupid.

32 wasn't serious? It doesn't seem to be a quote from anything.

I think the last paragraph wasn't serious. The "You see this fist? They used to call this fist THE HAMMER" paragraph. The rest seems OK, and I'm sure is true, but on rereading it there is a real shift in style and tone into the last paragraph which should have tipped me off.

I use the "You see this fist? They call this fist apo's cock" line all the time. Scares the bejesus out of them.

"You see this fist? They used to call this fist THE HAMMER"

"Now they call it THE PAPERWEIGHT."

Arresting reminder on the front page of Conservapedia.

Remember, it's more dangerous to have a Bible in a public school these days than it is to have a student get her throat cut in front of her classmates.

48: I think Conservapedia is an accurate representation of how the average Republican thinks these days.

Surely, sir, you go too far.

Only the intellectuals among them, I'd guess.

The "debate" pages are, um, informative. Currently active "scientific" debates include:

Does Darwinian natural selection suggest that bigotry is a necessary self-defense mechanism?
Does Darwinian natural selection suggest that homosexuality is bad for the survival of a species?
Is Darwinian natural selection compatible with Marxism?
Is the theory of macroevolution true?
Is Giving Birth the Bible Way Better?
Should Creationism/Intelligent design be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution in public schools?
God, Earth and Global Warming
Is the evidence in favor of evolution convincing?
Is Relativity in direct conflict with the Genesis account?
Why are God's works always questioned?
Is homosexuality a mental illness?

Is Giving Birth the Bible Way Better?

Giving birth to the Bible is way better than giving birth to the Koran.

Is Giving Birth the Bible Way Better?

Do they mean, like, in a manger?

Here's a great debate topic: How can we protect Conservapedia by distinguishing real conservative encyclopedia articles from satires written by liberals?

I know I sure as fuck can't tell the difference between conservative positions and liberal satire. Interesting to see that conservatives have a hard time with this as well.

76: Closely related to: "How can we protect Salon by distinguishing real Camille Paglia articles from satires written by liberals?"

Is Darwinian natural selection compatible with Marxism?

Are cats compatible with quantum electrodynamics?

Holf the time yes, half the time no.

Strictly speaking that's only true until you open the box.

Giving birth to the Bible is way better than giving birth to the Koran.

I'd dispute that. The Koran is a lot smaller.

We will have a leader who sees the value of thinking things through instead of scaring up a MOB of cowards and psychos....AKA: Tripp, Jimmy Neutron, Capsaicin, Viva La Canadian Bacon, and of course the ever famous APOSTROPHER.

How's that for censorship asshole!