Focus on the Family likens Obama and Democrats to Nazis

This evening James Dobson's Focus on the Family Action sent out a fundraising email to members that likened the victories of Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in Tuesday's election to the Nazi bombing of England during World War II. The author of this vile letter is Tom Minnery, Senior Vice President of Focus on the Family Action. It was nearly inevitable that anger over losing the 2008 election would soon provoke right-wing extremists to violate Godwin's Law. Obama's victory in Colorado may have been particularly galling for the Colorado Springs based Focus on the Family, which has been heavily involved in the political campaign this year advocating for conservative issues. James Dobson personally endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket this fall.

Focus on the Family has not so far posted this hateful fundraising letter on the web. Here is the opening section of the letter:

Dear Friend,

The spirit of Winston Churchill was alive and well on Tuesday night at Focus on the Family Action headquarters.

You may recall that in the most desperate days of World War II – when Great Britain was being pounded daily by Hitler’s Luftwaffe – that Winston Churchill called on his countrymen not to despair from danger but to rise to the challenge.

“Do not speak of darker days,” he said. “Let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days — the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we shall all thank God that we have been allowed, each one of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable. ...”

As our incredible team of staff members watched the election results pour in on Election Night, an amazing thing happened that Churchill might have recognized. Despite some sobering disappointments, there was no mood of despair and no “bunker mentality.” Instead, a firm sense of resolve began to permeate our team — a spirited and determined recognition that now, more than ever, we must prayerfully and boldly shine the light of truth in the public arena and defend what is right.

Let me speak plainly. Our nation has never faced the kind of anti-family, pro-abortion assault that we’re likely to see in the coming weeks and months. We don’t have to guess what the Left will do now that they control Congress and the White House; they’ve told us:

• President-elect Obama has promised, “The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” That bill could wipe out every abortion restriction in state and federal law and result in an increase in abortions each year in America.


• He has also pledged to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act — signed by President Clinton in 1996 — and force every state without a constitutional amendment or specific state law protecting traditional marriage to recognize same-sex marriages.


• And religious freedom will be badly damaged if and when the gay lobby’s two top bills — hate crimes and Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA) — become law. A veto threat is all that has stopped them before, and Obama has vowed to sign them.

To stop these tragic outcomes — and much more that I won’t take time to list right now — we must mobilize extraordinary numbers of citizens who care about upholding virtue, defending life and safeguarding religious liberty.

The letter carries on then with a typical appeal for money to stem the tide of liberalism, and concludes:

Together and with God’s help, we can turn these “sterner days” into great days in the history of America!

crossposted at unbossed.com

The company presidential candidates keep

Perhaps, like me, you're less than convinced that any of the leading presidential candidates can be trusted entirely to adopt mature policies, however essential. Perhaps you're wondering whether they will definitively and forever sweep into the landfill of history all the many outrages against decency that President Bush has mounded up around the White House, like a fortress of so much manure.

Perhaps you're concerned that once again so-called liberals will try to compete with so-called conservatives in bellicosity, chest-thumping, strong-on-defensism, mine-shaft-gapism, and so forth—thus insuring some kind of continuity in the insane policies of the Bush administration. Perhaps, for example, you fear that each and every one of them would ultimately refuse to withdraw from Iraq (notwithstanding everything), out of an excess of caution regarding what the "serious people" in Washington might think of their hawkish credentials.

You should be worried, because by now virtually every one of them has publicly taken an obstreperous or incautious stance on some foreign policy issue...threatening Iran, for example. It already looks like a race to the bottom, and I fear that there'll be a lot of table-pounding before the primaries are over. This list of hawkish foreign policy advisors assembled by the main presidential candidates may give you even more grounds for concern.

In particular, I'm astounded (though not in the least surprised) to learn that Hillary Clinton relies upon the advice of that notorious Brookings-Institution fool, Michael O'Hanlon.

This is the person who recently returned from a hurried visit to Iraq, hosted by the US military, and declared in an op-ed that (a) he was a longtime critic of the Iraq War, and (b) "we are finally getting somewhere" in Iraq. Neither was true, as many people pointed out.

Last year, sensing that O'Hanlon was going to be promoted hard by the administration's apologists as a 'sensible' (i.e. hawkish) "liberal", I wrote a profile of O'Hanlon's recent career as a self-promoting goofball. His war-mongering has since become legendary, but it's worth emphasizing that O'Hanlon is a laughingstock for a whole range of reasons.

Here I'll quote part of that profile, where I talk about the desperation of think-tank "experts" to retain their seats in front of the microphones:

You can see that that is exactly what O'Hanlon prizes from the boast in his Brookings bio:

O’Hanlon has appeared on the major television networks more than 150 times since September 11, 2001 and has contributed to CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and FOX some 300 times over that same period.

Who in the hell counts up their television appearances? And who subdivides the tally between major and minor networks? It's pathetic, but all too characteristic. These people are desperate self-promoters living in fear that their pretensions to omniscience will be exploded and the microphones snatched away. O'Hanlon, for example, claims to be an expert in eleven areas of national and international policy (including expertise in several Asian countries). Yet he speaks only a single foreign language (French) and his undergraduate degree was in physics.

This know-it-all has been wrong about virtually everything important in Iraq (one of his proclaimed areas of expertise), such as when he congratulated Bush for denying that a civil war had broken out this spring [of 2006]. That was, by his own admission, the day after 30 headless bodies were discovered en masse in Iraq. And a full year after we began seeing headlines regarding the systematic kidnapping and torture committed by Iraqi Interior Ministry forces, he writes drivel like this:

If the country begins to descend toward civil war, the temptation of many [Iraqi security forces] will be to take sides in the sectarian strife rather than stop it.

Puffed up experts such as this are frauds who can only retain their grip upon respectability by avoiding scrutiny of their record.

That's sufficient to demonstrate, I believe, that O'Hanlon's advice even in his areas of "expertise" is about as worthless as any advice could possibly be. Even more troubling, he's a confirmed and unrepentant hawk on Iraq. In other words, he believes in principle in a policy of bashing certain countries, at least certain Middle Eastern countries, as long as the bashing is done efficiently and with some tidiness.

And this is the clown whom Hillary Clinton counts as a trusted advisor? To my mind, that says a great deal about her sense...not just about her preferred foreign policies, but also about her basic sensibilities.

All of the lists of advisors for Democratic candidates are troubling—for whom the lists include and whom they don't include—even if none of the others have stooped as low as to turn to Michael O'Hanlon. And the Republican candidates' advisors are even more extreme (Norman Podhoretz, for heaven's sake).

So it looks like our choices next year may boil down to (a) 8 more years of hell, or (b) 8 more years of heck.

crossposted from unbossed.com