gasp! horrors! Obama meets intelligent people!

[realthog]

Thanks to freethinker/revere for this, of which there's lots more:

According to some notorious hate groups, the Obama administration is meeting with hate groups:

Some conservative commentators are accusing the Obama administration of inviting "hate groups" into the White House by holding a meeting with a coalition of secularist and atheist groups. Officials from the Justice and Health and Human Services departments met Friday with representatives of the Secular Coalition for America, an umbrella group that includes American Atheists and the Council for Secular Humanism. The coalition called it "the first time in history a presidential administration has met for a policy briefing with the American nontheist community." (Daniel Tencer, Raw Story)

The complainants are the usual line-up of KKK-flavored religious fanatics like the always-off-his-meds whacko Bill Donohue of the Catholic League [. . .]

Myself, I wonder why it is that so many in the US establishment agree with me that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an extremely nasty piece of work while failing to acknowledge that the US faux-religious right is packed out with so many Mahmoud Ahmadinejads -- of whom Bill Donohue is just one. To an objective, non-partisan observer there is no difference between, say, the Ayatollah Khameini and Pat Robertson -- they're both vile psychopathic bastards who believe that the voices speaking in their heads entitle them to commit the most heinous of hate crimes. Perhaps they're one step up from mercenaries like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and Rush LimbHawHaw, who peddle hate because that's what lines their pockets, but it's a small step.

This cannot be said of the couple of people I've met who were at the White House the other day. Of one I know she's such a threat to modern society that, at an NYC meeting we both attended, she was (a) the other person busting to get to a lav afterwards, and (b) the one who in her despair scurried into the gents' by accident, leaving me hopping around in the corridor because I didn't have the guts to charge into the ladies'. Aside from that, she's a very charming and tolerant person.

There are some Third World countries in which there might expectedly be a public uproar (whether officially orchestrated or otherwise) should their heads of state convene a meeting with avowedly intelligent people: Zimbabwe, Uganda, Iran, Burma, Sudan, North Korea . . . It's to the very profound shame of the US right that the US should join such ranks.

Comments

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for this, of which I had heard nothing. This is truly disgusting. Every time I read about this sort of institutionally racist shit I remember that ghastly self parody of Bush explaining to the American people why it was that Al Quaida had attacked: nothing to do with the US foreign policy of dropping bombs on defenceless Muslims, ya know, but all to do with "They hate us for our freedoms".

No: first we turn some among our number into "they"; then we mistreat and abuse "them"; and then we wonder why "they" hate us.

Sickening. I've forwarded the article on to friends here so they can know it's not just in the US that anti-Muslim racism is becoming the new cool.