July 25, 2019: QAnon Believer Runs for Congress, Hottest Days in Europe Ever, Monica Crowley is a Muslim-Hater

 

7/25/19: The “new normal”  (see: 7/24/19) arrives almost immediately. (We won’t know this for some weeks; but I later insert it here.) 

The day after Mueller testifies, President Trump calls up the newly-elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. 

He wants the Ukrainian leader to do him a favor. He wants him to investigate Hunter Biden and his dad.

Ms. Crowley really doesn't like Muslims.

 

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“A global cabal of elite liberal pedophiles.” 

IN OTHER NEWS, Daniella Stella, the Republican candidate chosen to run against Trump nemesis Rep. Ilhan Omar, turns out to be less than the ideal choice. First, she turns out to be an advocate of the QAnon conspiracy theory. 

QAnon believers see the president as locked in battle with “a global cabal of elite liberal pedophiles.” 

Stella is also battling demons of her own. Namely: kleptomania. The 31-year-old special education teacher (somebody check her teaching license!) has described Minneapolis as “the crime capital of our country.” She promises, if elected, to help “overworked and overburdened” police. She’s a crime wave herself, having been arrested twice this year for shoplifting, $2,300 dollars’ worth of merchandise from Target and $40 from a Cubs Food store. 

Following her arrest at Target, Stella told police she remembered “arriving at Target and then nothing else,” and blamed her sticky fingers on PTSD, related to a violent assault she says she suffered years ago.

 

Ms. Stella failed to show up for a court appearance on the first charge (more PTSD?) and a warrant was issued for her arrest. 

Then she got caught, allegedly for shoplifting, again. This time she was hiding tick spray for her cat and other cat-related merchandise under her purse when she exited the store without paying. 

(Police records also indicate that in 2009, the future candidate for Congress was arrested for driving while impaired and attempting to flee.)

 

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IN MORE IMPORTANT, but less eye-catching news, four of the world’s biggest auto makers announce plans to stick with a voluntary agreement they made with the State of California. The state is seeking to impose stricter mileage and emission standards, starting in 2020, under formulas advanced by the Obama administration. 

Naturally, the Pollution administration…er…the Trump administration…wants to eliminate those standards and see just how much smog the average American can inhale. 

Ford, Honda, VW, and BMW can see the future, and appear to realize change must come, sooner or later.

 

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DID WE SAY, sooner or later? Try sooner. Across Europe, record temperatures are recorded all week. Paris hits 108.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest day in the history of the City of Light. Thermometers in Cambridge, England touch 100.5 F, only the second time the British Isles have ever seen triple-digit temperatures. Belgium (104 F) The Netherlands (105.3 F) and Germany (106.7 F) all record the hottest temperatures ever measured in those countries. 

Scientists explain that Europe’s hottest seventeen summers in the last 500 years have all come in the last seventeen years. Once again, they issue fresh warnings, which President Trump and his fans will ignore. 

“Such intense and widespread heatwaves carry the signature of man-made climate change,” said Johannes Cullmann, director of World Meteorological Organization’s climate and water department, in a statement on Wednesday. “This is consistent with the scientific finding showing evidence of more frequent, drawn out and intense heat events as greenhouse gas concentrations lead to a rise in global temperatures.”

 

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IN OTHER NEWS, CNN reports that a check of Monica Crowley’s personal blog and her Twitter account shows that President Trump’s pick for spokesperson at the Treasury Department repeatedly smeared President Obama. According to Crowley, Obama was a secret Muslim. He wanted to impose Sharia law in this country, she said, and she seriously doubted that he was even born in this country. 

At one point, Crowley wrote: 

Obama was born to a Muslim father, which under Islam automatically made him a Muslim. He says he converted to Christianity as an adult, which under Islam makes him an apostate. He grew up in Indonesia, which is the most populous Muslim nation on earth. His stepfather was also a Muslim. He was steeped in Islam throughout his formative years, so it should come as no surprise that he has loyalties to Islam. During the 2008 campaign, he even slipped and claimed that the United States has ‘57’ states, instead of 50. The number of Muslim states in the Organization of the Islamic Conference is 57.

 

It may not come as a shock that he appears loyal to Islam. The question is: can he be both loyal to Islam and loyal to the United States?

 

Crowley, of course, wanted readers of her screed to answer that question themselves. Naw. That black fella? “He can’t.” 

If she managed to drum up a little fresh anti-Muslim feeling among her readers, she didn’t care. 

Or she did, and that was one of her goals.

 

You could pick apart her stupidity at will. You could point Crowley to the U.S. Constitution, which says no religious test shall ever be required as a prerequisite to holding public office. You could note that millions of Muslims live in this country and almost all of them are loyal. 

You could even note that Heinz used to advertise “57 varieties,” a reference to the company’s wide array of pickle and condiment products. You could, I imagine, suggest that Obama had a secret plan to poison all our ketchup. People who listen to Crowley would believe it, for sure. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: In December 2016, the newly-elected Mr. Trump had announced that Crowley would be joining his National Security Council. 

That appointment fell through when it was learned that Crowley had plagiarized her PhD. dissertation in 2000 and then done some plagiarizing again in 2012 when she wrote a book.

BLOGGER’S NOTE (9/18/21): It has always been interesting to me, because I am not suffering from brain fog, to recall how right-wing types, including Crowley, pilloried President Obama for what she herself once called “the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal.” In 2007, when Obama first announced he was a candidate for president, you could find dozens of stories about Rev. Wright and what Crowley herself later labeled his “vicious anti-American rhetoric.” Crowley referred to Wright once as “Obama’s longtime pastor.” 

So, the argument was, Obama couldn’t go to a Christian Church – and still love America – if the minister was sometimes a jerk. It was indubitably true, however, that Pastor Wright was the head of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and that his flock of 8,000 were in fact Christian worshippers.

 

The problem the right-wingers had was that Rev. Wright wasn’t scary enough for most Americans to rule Obama out as a person they could vote for. So, people like Crowley had to try to turn him into a Muslim. Sometimes, the bait-and-switch tactics were subtle. Sean Hannity, for instance, loved to accentuate the candidate’s (and later the president’s) middle name: “Barrack Hussein Obama.” What, he sometimes pretended – I can’t accentuate a man’s middle name? – acting all innocent and smug, enjoying his clever tricks. 

Other times, subtlety was cast to the winds and full-blown anti-Islamic rhetoric was spewed. Jerome Corsi started showing up as a guest on Hannity’s show, always pushing the narrative that Obama might keep a copy of the Koran on his nightstand to pick up before bed. Corsi liked to make outrageous claims, to help sell his books. A few examples for fun, since I just looked Corsi’s history up: He claimed Hillary Clinton was really a lesbian. He insisted John Kerry was really a communist. He stirred up a good dose of religious hate, insisting that Muslims really worshipped Satan, not Allah, tagging all Muslim men as “RAGHEADS,” “Boy-Bumpers” and “Women-Haters.” For added bigoted fun, he noted that “the Pope is okay with pedophilia as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press,” and hinted darkly that Obama might still be using drugs as an adult, because he once admitted that he tried drugs when he was young.

 

Painting Obama as a closeted Muslim became a new kind of clever, right-wing fun. Steve Doocy, on Fox News, could claim that Obama was “raised as a Muslim” because he was raised, from age six to age ten, in a Muslim country. Laura Ingraham could build a case out of colored blocks, arguing that “if your mother is Jewish, you’re considered Jewish, right?” So. Muslim father for Obama. Must be a Muslim, himself – even though he never saw his father again, after his parents divorced in 1971. Which interested me. My wife’s father was a Mormon when he was young. But he wasn’t a Mormon when he was older and she’s not a Mormon at all. My father was a Presbyterian. I think. Since he never went to church, I’m not sure what he believed – save only that he was an upright and supremely honest man. Whatever he was, I was raised Catholic, because of my mom. I’m not a Catholic anymore. As for Obama, he was honest about his upbringing. His parents and grandparents were non-believers, he once said. 

“I was not raised in a religious household,” he explained.

 

That statement, alone, would be enough to freak out some devout Christians; but here, I feel compelled to mention that Monica Crowley was once named Washington Times online opinion editor, which might also freak some Christians out. That paper was founded in 1982 by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and is still owned by his Unification Church. 

Moon, if you’ve never heard of him, was big on college campuses in the early 70s, when this blogger was young, and back in school after a stint in the United States Marines. Among other claims his followers liked to make: Moon had been chosen by Jesus, when he was sixteen, to be the new messiah. The “Moonies,” as we often referred to his acolytes, pedaled Moon’s ideas assiduously, from a regular post near the main campus gate, and if you cared to stop and listen, always seemed to be cadging for funds. 

Later, Rev. Moon made headlines by holding mass weddings, where, in one case, 4,000 members of his church were paired off and married to one another, in one giant ceremony, sight-unseen. In 1984, he went to prison for tax evasion. Which must have sucked for a messiah.

 

When Moon died in 2012, a Unification Church spokeswoman explained, that his followers believed Jesus served as the messiah until Moon took up the role as the second coming in his youth. “The second coming of the lord is not the physical return of Jesus Christ,” she explained, “but the anointing of a person who inherits the mission of the messiah.” 

So, in terms of religion, I would argue, for Crowley, or Corsi, or Hannity, or Obama, or you, or me, to each his or her own.