December 2009

Yesterday I noted the blatant lies of a Twittering wingnut who calls himself Steven F. N. Jones. Jones has posted an outright admission that he is, in fact, a liar:

Earlier today, I made the statement on Twitter that 100% of terrorist attacks since 1995 were carried out by followers of Islam. Unfortunately, I did not make it clear on what I consider to be a terror attack.

What Jones “consider[s] to be a terror attack” is irrelevant. He is in no position to define the term. The fact is that he claimed that “100% of terrorist attacks since 1995 were carried out by followers of Islam”. Period. No qualifications.

Abortion clinic bombings are not terrorist attacks. They are criminal acts.

Why? No reason given. Like most authoritarian wingnuts, the sole justification for this assertion seems to be BECAUSE! JONES! SAYS! SO!

Now, I admit that the 100% claim was an exaggeration.

Jones is lying again. The claim was a flat out lie. Jones’ attempt to whitewash the claim as a mere “exaggeration” simply highlights his fundamental dishonesty.

Also, Meat mention on his blog a post that I have about Robin Williams being a conservative. I know Mr. Williams is not a conservative. I posted that knowing that it was not true.

Ah, here we come to it at last. “I posted that knowing that it was not true.” Steven F. N. Jones now publicly admits that he is a liar. Why, then, should we accept any claim he makes as true without supporting evidence?

One thing is certain: Steven F. N. Jones will continue to lie. Like almost all wingnuts, he knows no other way of expressing himself.

Twitter is a wonderful service. It’s basically a microblogging service, where millions of users post their thoughts daily. Of course, some of those users will be wingnuts, and many (perhaps most) of those will be prolific liars. And thus we come to Steven F. N. Jones.

In the course of a spirited discussion about the futility of ethnic profiling as an anti-terrorism tool, Jones made the following claim:

Wow, 100% of terrorist attacks since 1995 have been committed by followers of Islam. Hmmm, let’s profile Anglos. Makes sense.

Here’s a screen shot:

This claim is a favorite of the wingnut terror monkeys. It is, of course, a baldfaced lie:

BarbinMD at Daily Kos:

[W]e have Republicans refusing to fund anti-terrorism efforts, Republicans who made poor decisions on releasing terrorists, and a Republican who is playing politics with the TSA because he doesn’t like unions.

All which can mean only one thing. The attempted terrorist attack that occurred last week is all President Obama’s fault.

This is brilliant, even if it is a “rerun”:

Maybe it’s just, I cast my eyes back on the last century …

FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike … NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

… and I’m just a little tired of being on the wrong side of that historical arc.

More: RERUNS: “Wait, Arent You Scared?”

My blogbrother Green Eagle highlights an article on the legislative history of the minimum wage, and notes that reading it will put the current struggle over health insurance reform in perspective.

So, go read it. Nice catch, GE.

Glenn Greenwald explains why the current terrorist-fighting paradigm so beloved of the wingnut right (and, strangely, embraced by the Obama administration) simply cannot succeed:

So with this missile strike [in Yemen last week], we find yet again the most pervasive and destructive myth of American “counter-terrorism” efforts:  that there’s this finite worldwide club called “The Terrorists” (also known as “al Qaeda”), and our solemn mission is to hunt down its members and kill them all, and once we do, there will be no more “Terrorists” and we will have won.  Even at the peak of America’s warmongering hysteria in mid-2003, even Donald Rumsfeld knew enough to worry that more terrorists were being recruited and created than we were killing.  The Pentagon’s 2004 independent Task Force emphatically concluded that our acts of violence in the Muslim world were fueling—not undermining—Islamic radicalism.  Mountains of other evidence demonstrate the same conclusion.