Huckabee Wants Us To Be Forced To Listen To David Barton, At Gunpoint
Huckabee Wants Us To Be Forced To
Listen To David Barton, At Gunpoint
David Barton, one of the many aberrations from the right-wing stockpile
of Batshit Crazy People, now has a USA presidential contender,
HuckaBB, ballyhooing for him, (We need to listen to Barton's concocted American history, AT GUNPOINT, so we can learn historical facts).
THE FAUX FACTS, according to the dishonest, pernicious bullies in the Republican Party.
America certainly needs a good dose of 101 in reality if they
choose to follow this band of GOP charlatans. thinkingblue
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Barton introduced Mike Huckabee at the Rediscover God In
America conference, praising him as the epitome of the "Black Robe Regiment" mentality of seeking to apply the Bible to every aspect of the culture.
Huckabee, in turn, repaid the compliments to Barton, calling him
one of the most effective communicators in America and wishing that every American would be forced, at gunpoint, to listen to every Barton broadcast:
MORE HERE
Putting words in dead people’s mouths
By Steve Rendall
Abraham Lincoln despised class warfare, Thomas Jefferson detested
bailouts and the founders of the nation were all Bible-believing
Christians. These are among the historical “facts”
you’ll learn as a regular consumer of talk radio, Fox News
and other conservative sources.
While non-conservatives have been known to misquote historical
figures to add credibility to their own views, the right seems to
have a special enthusiasm for putting words in dead people’s mouths.
Take what has become known as the “The Ten Cannots,” a
list repeatedly misattributed to Abraham Lincoln. It begins:
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You
cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot
help little men by tearing down big men. You cannot lift the wage
earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor
by destroying the rich. You cannot establish sound security on
borrowed money. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by
inciting class hatred.…
And so on. These words were actually written by William J.H.
Boetcker, a conservative minister who published them in a 1916
pamphlet along with some actual Lincoln quotes (Snopes.com,
8/19/09). Almost a century and many well-documented debunkings
later (e.g., the 1989 Oxford Press book They Never Said It), some
conservatives still insist on assigning them to Lincoln.
The canard is a staple of rabidly anti-Obama right-wing media
such as Newsmax, where it has been repeated by columnist
Geoff Metcalf (1/20/09) and radio talkshow host Al Rantel
(3/1/04). This past summer, a flurry of letters to the editor
citing Lincoln’s supposed remarks coincided with right-wing
Tea Party demonstrations across the country (e.g., Charleston,
S.C., Post and Courier, 8/8/09; South Florida Sun Sentinel,
9/18/09).
Rush Limbaugh (Rush Limbaugh TV show, 2/19/96)
acknowledged falsely assigning the remarks to Lincoln in a 1986
speech he gave honoring the 16th president’s birthday. This
admission came four years after former President Ronald Reagan
misattributed the quote in his speech at the 1992 GOP convention
and the New York Times (8/19/92), CNN (8/19/92) and NPR (8/20/92)
ran stories disproving the Lincoln connection.
Current Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele used
to include “Lincoln’s” advice in his boilerplate
speech. It was in the pre-published text of his 2004 GOP
convention speech, but not in the version Steele delivered;
perhaps someone remembered Reagan’s RNC woes 12 years
earlier (PR Newswire, 8/31/04). (Steele continues to use
the quotes from the “Ten Cannots,” now saying that he
learned them from his mother—e.g., Your World,
1/5/10.)
Putting the Founders to Work
When widely syndicated columnist Cal Thomas posted a commentary
on his website (1/15/09) opposing federal bailouts, he cited
quotes from Thomas Jefferson to bolster his argument: MORE HERE
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from
those who are willing to work and give to those who would
not”; It is incumbent on every generation to pay off its own
debts as it goes. A principle, which, if acted on would save us
one-half of the wars of the world”; “I predict future
happiness for Americans if they can prevent government from
wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking
care of them”; and, “My reading of history convinces me
that most bad government results from too much government.
Thomas described these quotes as “ancient wisdom,”
which, he said, “is almost always better than what people
come up with today. Consider that it became ancient because it
was wise.”
But consulting The Works of Thomas Jefferson available in full at
the Online Liberty Library, as well as the Library of
Congress’ online Jefferson site, Ed Darrel of Millard
Fillmore’s Bathtub (2/1/09) could find no evidence
authenticating any of the quotes. As Darrel, whose website
targets historical falsehood, observed, “Jefferson seem[ed]
oddly prescient in these quotes, and, also oddly, rather
endorsing the views of the right wing.”
None of the quotes could be authenticated on the Jefferson
Library website (www.monticello.org) either, which includes the
first and the last quotes in Thomas’ column in its list of
frequently cited “Spurious Quotations.”
In a syndicated column (Washington Times, 1/25/01), right-wing
economics professor and Limbaugh stand-in Walter Williams used
purported remarks by Jefferson and George Washington to argue
against gun control. Gun control proponents were constitutionally
ignorant, Williams wrote, because they didn’t understand the
intentions of framers like Jefferson, who Williams claimed once
wrote: “No man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The
strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and
bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against
tyranny in government.” That quote can be found in the
Spurious Quotations list on the Monticello website.
Williams also quoted Washington: “Firearms stand next in
importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American
people’s liberty teeth and keystone under
independence.” Five years earlier, after Playboy
magazine (12/95) ran a longer version of that same quote, the
magazine had to run a lengthy retraction (3/96) that cited George
Warren, editor of the Papers of George Washington project at the
University of Virginia, who called it “either a complete
fabrication or a case of misattribution.” Williams and the
Washington Times apparently found the quote too useful to fact
check—or to retract.
Founders as ‘Bible-Believing Christians’
Over the last two decades conservatives have waged a war on the
“wall of separation between church and state,” arguing
that the United States was founded on Christian principles by
deeply religious men who intended to enshrine their beliefs in
its founding documents. As Rush Limbaugh (or ghostwriter Joseph
Farah) wrote of the founders in his 1994 book See, I Told You So,
“Don’t believe the conventional wisdom of our day that
says these men were anything but orthodox, Bible-believing
Christians.” The book cited constitutional architect James
Madison as saying: “We have staked the future upon our
capacity to sustain ourselves according the Ten Commandments of God.”
In reality, several founders (including Madison) were not
Christians, and Limbaugh’s Madison quote is a fraud, as
revealed in FAIR’s 1995 book, The Way Things Aren’t:
Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error. Furthermore, independent of
his religious views, Madison was a staunch proponent of
separation, arguing in his 1785 essay “A Memorial and
Remonstrance”: “During almost 15 centuries has the
legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been
its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in
the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both,
superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
But despite conclusive debunkings, the bogus Madison passage
lives on, cited alongside other fraudulent founders’ quotes
by conservatives who care less about history than ideological
expediency. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has cited a
version of the bogus Madison quote on several occasions,
including a column (6/5/00) chiding the ACLU for constitutional
ignorance. A version of the “Madison” quote also
appeared recently in an op-ed (Tulsa World, 6/30/09) written by
U.S. Rep. Sally Kern (R-Okla.).
One of the most prolific purveyors of bogus founder quotes is
Christian theocrat David Barton. Though not a household name,
Barton’s tireless efforts to construct a Christian origin
story for the United States have been praised by the likes of Pat
Robertson and Newt Gingrich (Church & State,
7–8/96). His 1989 book The Myth of Separation attributed
bogus quotes to Washington (“It is impossible to rightly
govern the world without God and the Bible’’),
Jefferson (“I have always said and always will say that the
studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make us better
citizens”) and Patrick Henry (“It cannot be emphasized
too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not
by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the
gospel of Jesus Christ”). Barton has also misattributed the
“Ten Command-ments” quote to Madison.
In 1996 Barton admitted that these and nine other quotes
he’d been circulating in his writings, videotapes and live
appearances were either false or unverifiable (Church &
State, 7–8/96). But Barton’s reputation suffered
little from the fraud, according to Rob Boston of Americans
United for Separation of Church & State. “He’s
doing better than ever,” Boston told Extra!, noting that
since 1996 Barton has served as vice-chair of the Texas GOP, and
now sits on the Texas state committee advising the state’s
board of education on history and social studies curiculum,
“despite no history credentials.”
Meanwhile, the bogus quotes Barton helped to popularize continue
to make the rounds. In a 2007 column in the far-right World
Net Daily (1/29/07), conservative activist and actor Chuck
Norris used “Washington’s” passage about the
impossibility of governing without “God and the Bible”
to argue for teaching the Bible in schools. A Human Events
profile (7/1/02) singing the praises of president of the Council
on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools used the
“Jefferson” quote about the need to study the sacred
volume. The “Patrick Henry” quote on the U.S. being
founded “on the gospel of Jesus Christ” has been
repeated in numerous newspaper op-eds (e.g., Fond du Lac, Wisc., Reporter,
5/1/09; Wichita Eagle, 5/27/06; Columbia, S.C., State, 9/21/04).
Making fake history every day
You can’t expect a culture that conveniently fabricates
history to restrict that practice to the distant past. So
it’s not surprising to see conservative opinion leaders
arguing, contra history, that Nazism is a liberal ideology
(Extra!, 3/10) or that government spending made the Great
Depression worse.
Nor is it surprising to see such commentators ignoring facts to
distort current events. Witness the trend among conservatives who
dismiss global warming science, fantasize imaginary “death
panels” in healthcare legislation, or declare Barack Obama
to be a Kenyan, a Muslim or maybe even the Antichrist (CNN,
8/15/08).
Indeed, the ascendance of a black, Democratic president seems to
have sent irrational conservative tendencies into overdrive.
Commentators Rush Limbaugh (10/23/09) and Michael Ledeen (Pajamas
Media, 10/21/09) heatedly pointed to a socialist thesis they said
was written by Barack Obama while a student at Columbia
University. Like one of the the fake Lincoln or Jefferson quotes,
the thesis was a hoax (St. Petersburg Times, 10/26/09), but it
met the contemporary conservative standard: If it makes your
point, run with it.
Appropriately, upon learning later in the show that the thesis
might be a hoax, Limbaugh responded, “I don’t care if
these quotes are made up. I know Obama thinks it.”
See FAIR's Archives for more on: Religion
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We really need more dialog from those at the top... The
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posted by thinkingblue at 4:31 PM
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