Truth (plus lies) » right-wing

Cordoba’s logo has the peace sign in it…. for what it’s worth

Jefff — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:07:08 +0000

The designer who made the Cordoba Initiative’s logo by arranging western peace signs in a Muslim-ish flower pattern sighs over the insignificance of his design in the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. For him, the Initiative’s embrace of this western symbol is evidence of their good intentions.

Oh but this is the culture war, and nothing is uncontroversial in the culture war. Back when the Peace symbol was becoming ubiquitous, conservative and Christian groups warned about the nefarious meanings encoded in it. From Time Magazine, 1970:

American Opinion magazine, published by John Birch Society Founder Robert Welch, compared the familiar peace symbol to an anti-Christian “broken cross” carried by the Moors when they invaded Spain in the 8th century. A recent national Republican newsletter noted an ominous similarity to a symbol used by the Nazis in World War II; some experts say it was a letter in an ancient Nordic alphabet. Any resemblance, however, is probably coincidental. The peace design was devised in Britain for the first Ban-the-Bomb Aldermaston march in 1958. The lines inside the circle stand for “nuclear disarmament.” They are a stylized combination of the semaphore signal for N (flags in an upsidedown V) and D (flags held vertically, one above the signaler’s head and the other at his feet).

Which sounds an awful like the present-day right wing’s conspiracy theories about Obama’s nuclear summit logo and this missile defense logo:

Says Big Government’s Frank Gaffney:

Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.

What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.

The evidence is conclusive.

PS I think the lesson for designers in this is that people will receive the message they’re looking for in your design long before they receive the message you actually put there.
Via The Morning News, Wikipedia.

Bad optics

Jefff — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:53:36 +0000

My experience with Confederate Yankee (who deletes dissenting comments but only when the commenter has a point) has prompted me to read more conservative blogs in an effort to avoid my own epistemic closure.

As a result, I’ve read an eyeful about the Tea Party’s tax day demonstrations, which by all accounts (even those outside the conservative media) went pretty well. The movement has become a little more mainstream, and the crazies have been reined in. Which has led conservatives to blog feverishly about how the mainstream media is still trying to push the story that Tea Party members are racist nuts. I’m not sure that charge is true, but it’s at least arguably true. The point remains: the Tea Party wants to be judged fairly, as a whole, and not by their worst elements. I can get behind that.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore reports like this one, wherein Colorado embarrassment and former congressman Tom Tancredo wants to send Obama back to Kenya among other madness. Ok, yes — most tea partiers are not hateful lunatics. But isn’t this kind of embarrassment the price you pay for billing yourselves as a grassroots, populist movement? If you don’t want to take the rap for craziness, then you have to marginalize the crazies in your movement, yes?

Because at the very least, including unrepentant xenophobes and homophobes and many other types of phobes is “bad optics”. This is a concept that conservative bloggers like Instapundit and Confederate Yankee understand at least as far as it concerns Obama.

Obama Will Ban Fishing after He Kills Your Baby

Jefff — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:42:57 +0000

Throw another one on the pile of absurd lies that Real Americans are willing to believe without a second thought as long as they will get another reason to hate Obama.

Apparently now, the President wants to ban fishing. What? Yes, he has set up a task force that is looking to make some recommendations about managing our waterways. It is therefore not a stretch (read: completely untrue) that the task force will ban recreational fishing.

Here’s some research from Media Matters.

Via Wonkette

The “Comprehensive Argument” Against Barack Obama

Jefff — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:09:55 +0000

As the election comes to a close, I find myself more easily able to investigate right-wing arguments. Most of the time, when I try to entertain opposing points of view, my guard goes up and the less sense an argument makes (they rarely make much sense) the bigger a headache I get from trying to take it seriously. But with the election looking a lot like it’s over, I don’t have to feel threatened by broken logic, and I’m able to let ignorance wash over me — rather than constantly try to come up with the counter-point to every point.

I’m optimistic that this will continue after the election. Hopefully, I’ll be able to bask in the post-partisan glow and stomach enough of the crazy BS to find some of conservatism’s considered principles. Broaden my horizons a bit.

In the meantime, enjoy the schadenfreude of Michael Medved’s “For Conservatives, Obama’s Changes Would Be Permanent and Devastating” and “The comprehensive argument against Barack Obama”, which contains this line in the second paragraph:

What follows is by no means comprehensive