Sick Propoganda, Part II

Yes, yes, my sweet sexy little lamb chops, I’m back again! I’ve got more tasty tid-bits from the land of First Amendment joy and love to share with you. This first bite harkens back to a post I laid on you a few days ago called “Sick Propaganda (Sometimes I really Chain Emails)”. A dear, excellent friend of mine who we’ll just refer to as “Mrs. G.” was motivated by that bit to the point that she wrote one of her own, which deals with similar topicality. And here it is. Check it:

The other day, a confirmed Shock-Jock listener (we'll just call him "Jock") says to me, "What is your opinion on racial profiling?” My definition, later confirmed, of racial profiling is that say a member of law enforcement is harassing a particular person for no reason other than their race. This person then says that isn't right, but that it is that race is included in a description of someone that said law enforcement personnel might be looking for, for a particular crime... AND that there are a bunch of people trying to get race taken out of the list of attributes when looking for a particular criminal. I said that having race on the attributes list was constitutional, and questioning people as long as harassment was not in the picture was legal, whereas adding harassment, and just picking, say "white bald bikers" up and beating the crap out of them was not.

My issue with all of this is that I find that many people who get way too caught up in the media to the level of extremism and those who use the media to spout rantings and extremist opinions rather than considering multiple sides to a story and actually doing some reading and become a little knowledgeable of actual definitions and goings-on before announcing to the lowest common denominator of society their idiot rantings is one of the most profoundly horrific acts one can perform. This sort of garbage keeps people focused on keeping honest people from doing their job and from keeping the rest of us relatively safe in our communities. Rather than listening and actually believing this crap, I say, and rather loudly and wholeheartedly, "READ A BOOK!"

Knowledge is power. Work for peace. Who cares who is what religion and that you can't say aloud in the morning your prayers in front of a bunch of people? Practice your own religion and keep public buildings friendly for everyone. Have we become so complacent that we find this stuff more important than communicating with our spouses and spending time with our children?

And there you have it. “Read a book.” A directive of true wisdom. Oddly enough, I had another similar situation dropped in my lap this week involving the spreading of a piece of poorly contrived right-wing propaganda that definitely proves that certain individuals would most definitely benefit from the reading of at least one book rather than literally making shit up to try to besmirch certain organizations and people of certain political persuasions. This is the crap I was exposed to. Please direct your attention to the pic that’s at the top of this post and the read the following:

If you look closely at the picture above, you will note that all the Marines pictured are bowing their heads. That's because they’re praying.

This incident took place at a recent ceremony honoring the birthday of the corps, and it has the ACLU up in arms. "These are federal employees," says Lucius Traveler, a spokesman for the ACLU, "on federal property and on Federal time. For them to pray is clearly an establishment of religion, and we must nip this in the bud immediately."

When asked about the ACLU's charges, Colonel Jack Fessender, speaking for the Commandant of the Corps said (cleaned up a bit), “Screw the ACLU." GOD Bless Our Warriors, Send the ACLU to France.

Please send this to people you know so everyone will know how stupid the ACLU is Getting in trying to remove GOD from everything and every place in America. May God Bless America, One Nation Under GOD!

What's wrong with the picture? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING GOD BLESS YOU FOR PASSING IT ON!

I am sorry but I am not breaking this one.....Let us pray.

Isn’t that special. Lately I'm noticing an odd and frightening trend. Many extremist right-wing fundamentalist Christian "freedom ain't fer free" types who are more than willing to piss away our 1st Amendment rights (and other rights) for some mysterious reason, have been passing crap like this around. Some of it was downright bigoted in its slant (I just wrote an article about a similar piece of shit that someone else forwarded me). The first thing that I would recommend to anyone is this: If you receive a chain Email of any sort advocating ANYTHING, check it out first before blindly forwarding it. These individuals are not doing a public service, and in fact, may actually be contributing to a public nuisance. You see, some crazy computer guys came up with this thing called Google, for example. These cats should learn to use it. Use any search engine. Do some fucking research, for goodness sake. As “Mrs. G.” pointed out, “read a book.” Hell, read anything factual.

If you take a moment, you'll find out, as was just pointed out, that most of this putrefied propagandist bullshit is just that . . . bullshit. Check it:

http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/marinepray.html

And this:

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:iXk4L_bIwgYJ:urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_aclu_marines_praying.htm+(Military+bowing+heads+in+prayer+ACLU+urban+legend)&hl=en

And to kill two birds with one stone (hardliners like killing stuff):

http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/cemetery.asp

And of course, a half-way intelligent and responsible citizen can always check hard-copy and online news media sources like the major network affiliates (to those who may be confused by that terminology, that’s NBC, CBS, ABC and yes, FOX), any major news publication (for those on the East Coast, the New York Times, for example), and AP (Associated Press) and so on.

Pardon my stringent tone, but enough, already! Jeez, this shit used to happen in pre-WWII Germany!