Times’ “Ideas writer” and MSNBC contributor Touré (real name Toure Neblett) has recently written about the Republican presidential candidates. Unsurprisingly, arguments are not Touré’s weapon, race is. He also has another little secret: Touré recently wrote a piece for Time which was nothing more than an exercise in school yard name calling, including the cliché “minstrelsy” charge. He also called Herman Cain a “Clown,” the “black Sarah Palin,”  and compares Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain to Flavor-Flav.

In Toure’s latest Time piece (he only manages to mention once that he went to Columbia’s graduate school for creative writing and is an author of numerous books) he accuses Rick Perry of being a birther and a racist:

“In a country where lynchings once doubled an occasion for barbeques — the strangling and perhaps burning of a Black body as the central performance act at a pleasant Southern picnic — why shouldn’t racism be fun for white people?”

Not shy of hyperbole, this was Touré’s response to Rick Perry saying “It’s fun to poke at [Obama] a little bit and say, ‘Hey, let’s see your grades and your birth certificate’”:

“I’m sure Rick Perry senses all this [racism] on a deep, subconscious level. Maybe he couldn’t articulate it but he knows that when he asserts his white maleness on Obama he gets a warm feeling inside. I bet Rick will continue sending coded racist messages at Obama in a desperate attempt to establish himself as the true Alpha white male in the race. Watch for him to refer to Obama as boy or something. Because racism is fun. For him.”

Right. Touré accuses Perry of believing in a conspiracy theory, all the while apparently being sure of what Rick Perry feels on a deep subconscious level, along with picking up on “coded racist messages.” But the craziest thing Touré believes has to do with missiles, the pentagon, and 9/11. Yes, this intellectual and telepathic giant is your standard 9/11 truther and in September of 2009 he sent a succession of Tweets illustrating such.

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In his recent assessment of his year since he was unceremoniously — and illicitly in many folks’ estimation — fired by NPR, Juan Williams indulged one of those fallacious assumptions that just screams left-wing spin. It is the sort of straw man argument that casts aspersions on others — this time against Christians — while pretending to be the logical adult in the room, not to mention while pretending not to be casting aspersions. It is a logical sleight of hand that many liberals use.

First, let me say that I am 100% on Williams’ side in that his firing by NPR was a real breach of journalistic ethics: theirs. The comments he made a year ago that got him fired did not in any way harm his veracity as a journalist, nor were they racist or even incorrect. Heck, they weren’t even injudicious except when taking the brain dead political correctness that infests the left into consideration.

Though that was the discussion of a year ago and really is not something worth rehashing here, Williams did say something outrageous in his review of that year-old issue that deserves to be highlighted. In essence, Williams made an illogical argument about how we should think of radical Islam, and he did so by assuming that domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City Bombing could be considered as representative of Christianity as the Saudi 19 were of radical Islam.

Here is what Williams said [my bold for emphasis]:

… we have to keep in mind that America is a country founded on the ideal of religious liberty. We can’t stereotype any group on the basis of the behavior of extremists among them. We don’t indict all Christians because of Timothy McVeigh.

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As America passed with solemn tribute the murder of 3000 citizens 10 years after September 11th, 2001, social media networks, like Facebook, were filled with tributes, thanks, passages from the bible, and pleas.  Amongst those pleas, that we spend no time on 9/11 engaging in politics.  We have many days ahead to talk about our ideas, our ideals, our desires for America and the best course of action for America.  9/11 is just not the day for politics.

And, as Americans, we watched the tributes on Saturday at Shanksville, PA.  And again, the social media networks were filled with video and audio from the day.  Specifically, people marveled at the words of former Presidents Bush and Clinton.  For whatever we think of their politics, their time in office or their time out of office, they understood what we understand – now was not the time for politics or pettiness.  9/11 is something we, as a nation, survived together.  We lost, we suffered, we felt anger, we are still angry.  But we survived.  For all of our problems, the republic is still here.

Yet, there are those who don’t understand.  Who don’t have the basic humanity one assumes would exists in the hearts and souls of Americans.  Who think their lofty position has entrusted upon them a higher intelligence, when all they have is farcical audacity and, indeed, deep seeded hate.  One of those is Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning Economist who fancies himself an intellectual.  As America has learned, we need people of intellect.  Pseudo-intellectuals always lead to unmitigated disaster.

From Krugman’s blog in The New York Times:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

Krugman didn’t get the memo about how to act on 9/11. (As if a memo on how to be a human being is actually necessary!)  It’s like he’s wearing a clown costume to a funeral.  Because Krugman is a clown, and 9/11 is a funeral. To start, Krugman’s elitism makes him think that he knows what people in America are thinking.  His elitism has also immediately turned 9/11 in to a class war.  People on the “right” know that what happened after 9/11 was deeply shameful?  This isn’t true about people on the left? Actually, this isn’t true at all!  It is a simpleton’s strawman argument to force through a failed meme – the left is more compassionate than the right. (A meme that is also destroyed by posting such a hateful, thoughtless article on September 11th.)

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- Party hostess Sally Quinn:

However, I will pray this Sunday. I will pray that we as Americans, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Agnostics and others can come together to end prejudice, discrimination and hatred. Violence is not more a feature of Islam, than those qualities are features of other faiths and people of no faith.

Has she read the Koran before making such a proclamation? I have. I hope that her prayers include protecting Americans from Muslim fighters and people who would “kill the infidels where they lay.” Last I checked, no Americans have flown planes into any Arab buildings.

Kudos to these media figures and politicians who don’t let any opportunity to incite division pass by, particularly if that opportunity is a remembrance.

- Obama:

The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others.

Obama says that poverty breeds terrorists. Geraghty points out that all the terrorists were ridiculously wealthy children of privilege. Compared to us, we are more impoverished.

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Ten years ago at this exact time I was standing in my pajamas in my living room with tears streaming down my face, my hair a wreck. I was a 21-year-old newlywed and mother. My months-old infant sat in a bouncy seat, fascinated by his fists. My sobs startled him; he jolted in his seat, looked for my face, smiled and cooed, which made me cry harder.

The dichotomy of such innocence in my living room and the terror and evil unfolding on my television broke me in ways that I will never be able to explain. I wept for every single person as though they were cherished members of my own family. I wanted to reach through the television to make it stop, to catch the people jumping and falling with my hands.

As the second tower fell, the realization of what our country faced and what we would have to do as a nation hit me.

Up until this point, I had identified myself as a liberal my entire life. I had a midlife crisis when I was around 19 years-old, when I began to think that I didn’t actually believe in the principles with which I was raised. I was raised by a very big southern Democrat union family. I was indoctrinated by years of pop-culture, educational bias, and family mantra. It was the only way. I did not vote for George W. Bush. I supported Gore. Even as I began to shed the beliefs of a Democrat, one thing remained: I still felt that America had a problem with the “military complex.” The only reason people were hostile to us, I surmised, was because they were intimidated by our military. I thought Bush was representative of this and it was the reason I didn’t support him.

That belief was blown to hell on 9/11.

“Thank God George Bush is president,” I blurted out in the middle of a furious sob. My husband, who was born wearing a Reagan shirt, looked at me with wide-eyed wonderment.

How foolish I had been. How naive and hubristic I was to think that we would never have to fight on our shores. To secure peace is to prepare for war. Don’t give me any of that “neo-con” garbage. Everything I thought about the world was destroyed along with those towers.

Later that afternoon I took my infant son, numb, into the local craft store and somehow made my way to the section where they kept the Fourth of July supplies. It was a beacon of hope at the end of the aisle and there were but three left. The lines in the store wrapped around the interior perimeter of the building. Every single person had a flag. Some were like me, it was the only thing they came in to get.

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In the same way he tried to capitalize on the horrific Tucson shooting as an excuse to attack Sarah Palin and conservatives, Paul Krugman has used his New York Times blog to attack Rudy Giuliani and President George W. Bush this morning in a most disgusting way:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

There is nothing wrong with reflecting on the events of ten years ago and making social and political judgements on our leaders’ reactions over the past decade.  In fact, most of us here at “The Bigs” have done so this morning at Big Government.

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The most memorable article in the New Yorker issue devoted to 9/11, “Ten Years Later,” is Paul Goldberger’s review of the new World Trade Center.

Goldberg dislikes the new buildings going up around Ground Zero, particularly the Freedom Tower, which he calls “not much more than a big version of a typical New York developer’s skyscraper.” But he likes the 9/11 memorial itself, designed by Michael Arad where the twin towers stood. “Arad figured out how to express the idea that what were once the largest solids in Manhattan are now a void, and he made the shape of this void into something monumental,” Goldberger writes.

It’s a sincere and eloquent review. And yet the fact that Goldberger prefers the memorial to the new commercial and residential structures around it neatly summarizes the posture the New Yorker itself has adopted toward 9/11.

The magazine is not only mournful about the past, but morose about the present and gloomy about the future. The dark cover is more optimistic than the appropriately stark “black on black” cover after 9/11–but only just, depicting the Twin Towers descending into the waters around Manhattan. The featured articles by Adam Gopnik (“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat: Is America Going Down?”) and George Packer (“Coming Apart: After 9/11 transfixed America, the country’s problems were left to rot”) leave little room for new hope.

The “Talk of the Town” section is extended to make room for the reflections of a dozen authors–many of whom are still hung up on “Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, bin Laden” (Colum McCann), or blame America for the attacks. Author Lorrie Moore even attacks J.K. Rowling for creating a “gruesomely cheering” generation of “‘Harry Potter’ readers” that celebrated the killing of Osama bin Laden this past May.

The fear and loathing that drip from the pages of the New Yorker are a striking reversal of the “hope and change” with which the New York literary elite greeted the election of President Barack Obama. They are also a dramatic contrast to the reality of life in New York today, which seems almost as lively today as it did before 9/11–perhaps not quite as self-confident, but every bit as spontaneous, bizarre, steamy, stinky, and beautiful.

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Many of you sent me a video of Herman Cain’s 9/11 tribute. Many individuals have made such tributes; they’re all over Youtube and making the rounds via email. There is no shame in honoring what we lost as a country on 9/11: lives and innocence. A decade is little salve to the wound inflicted on our spirits and psyches. Tributes are cathartic; memories of the worst attack on our nation’s soil are still fresh in the minds of Americans.

Salon, however, has a problem with tributes, especially Herman Cain’s. Republicans just can’t do anything right according to Salon. In a recent piece trashing Cain’s tribute, Salon attempts to position themselves the policemen of 9/11 memorials and taste, protecting progressives’ patent on tragploitation.

So, Joe Scarborough only produced the second-grossest 9/11 “tribute” video I’ve seen this week. Herman Cain’s presidential campaign produced this monstrosity, in which Cain croons “God Bless America” over footage of the 2001 attacks and their aftermath.

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George Soros has spent an inordinate amount of his life trying to change the landscape of economics to his benefit. Now he’s attempting to manipulate the sentiments surrounding the 9/11 anniversary.

As the U.S prepares to acknowledge the 9-11 10th Anniversary,  multi-billionaire financier George Soros released a report that claims a conservative cabal of groups and individuals are Islamophobic and the 9-11 memorials are more about hatred for Muslims than commemorating the killing of close to 3,000 Americans by radical Islamists.

Soros calls these Americans, most of whom are conservatives, Fear Incorporated.

The Soros group known as the Center for American Progress (CAP) is deliberately attempting to take attention away from events in the U.S. that are in progress to commemorate the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, and focus that attention on claims of Muslim-bashing by members of counterterrorism think-tanks, terrorism analysts and some members of the news media such as Fox News Channel.

That one of the report’s authors is in custody due to a suspected relationship with Hamas says it all.

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The media should be destroying Joe Biden right now. There should be a countdown clock on his resignation.

The Vice-President of the United States of America said that tea party Republicans “acted like terrorists” during the recent budget and debt ceiling discussions.

Where’s the “wall to wall” stories, live shots, commentary and demand of accountability here?

Terrorists.

This administration doesn’t call terrorists, terrorists.

Biden has denied making the comments, but Politico is sticking by its story, they also say Pennsylvania Democrat Mike Doyle used the same phrase.

In this post 9/11 world it’s unthinkable that the White House would so blatantly attack its own citizens by using that phrase. Terrorists killed my son’s high school language teacher on the Flight 77 that was forced in to the Pentagon. I drive by the memorial for Barbara Edwards at least 2 or 3 times a day and there is not a time that I go by that I do not recall those horrific attacks of that day.

Personal note here to Biden: I can get creative with words, Joe, but unlike you, I am not a plagiarist. I can think of a lot of things to call you right now, and if you ever have the pleasure of meeting me, I will use them. For now, you can use your imagination. You are not worth getting into a pissing match with.

These are fellow American that Joe Biden is calling terrorists. You and me. In using that phrase towards Republicans in Congress, Biden uses it against each of us who called for Representatives who would vote for fiscal responsibility in Washington DC and not blow our money and lead to Homeland Insecurity.

Personal note to the media: Where the hell are you on this?  You patronize by your silence. I’m waiting for one of you to refer to this a just another Biden “gaffe.” Enablers. You have made careers out of trying to destroy Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin, but you will find no story here. Speak truth to power. You don’t get much more powerful than the White House. Bob Woodward, where are you?

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Thank you, Mr. President. Osama bin Laden is finally gone. Dead. With a bullet in his head. A fitting end to the evil mastermind behind 9/11 – the worst terrorist attack on our own soil in our country’s history.

Last week, after experiencing your lowest approval ratings ever, you finally received a big bump in the polls and praise from all corners – among them your fellow Democrats and even conservative Republicans on FOX. That is not hard to understand. They want to be on the opposite side of anything starting with ‘Osama’ and ends with ‘Bin Laden.’ In this case, that would be you, Mr. President. And, of course, there are your friends in the biased mainstream media.

Apparently, the media believe that you did more than telling your military advisers, “OK, yeah, just go ahead.” Much more.

They way the media portrays it – it was your overarching philosophy in the War on Terror, your courage since 9/11, and your experience in military tactical strategy that saved the day. After all, former President George Bush and the post 9/11 intelligence infrastructure he created were so yesterday. And, really, who cares that the waterboarding stuff you have been condemning as torture actually worked?

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Try to remember how you felt on the days after the horrible events of September 11, 2001. I remember our country experiencing something close to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous stages of grief. Except instead of “acceptance” being the final stage,  our nation swelled with an enormous sense of patriotism and resolve best represented by the bi-partisan members of Congress singing “God Bless America” on the steps of the Capitol, President George W. Bush’s rallying rescue workers on a pile of rubble, and flags being flown on almost every porch in America. Do you remember those days and those feelings? Now, ask yourself:  What kind of person would instead take the occasion of the day after the attack to lead a rally condemning America and holding the terrorist murderers up as martyred heroes?

Van Jones is that kind of person.

In a recently discovered video, the former White House appointee and current hero of the liberal elite and de-facto Huffington Post/AOL editorial director is seen telling the adoring crowd,  “It’s the bombs that the government has been dropping around the world that are now blowing up inside the U.S. borders.”  He said this after a whole host of speakers from the radical fringe fringe denounced our country and her policies and hijacked the tragedy to justify unloading a laundry list of cliched, left-wing reasons to blame America for the acts perpetrated by radical Islamist totalitarian terrorists.

Remember, this rally was taking place while the bodies of 3,000 Americans were still smoldering in the rubble of the World Trade Center and American heroes were putting their lives at risk at ground zero in a massive humanitarian effort.  What kind of monsters would use this occasion to turn Americans against one another?

It’s no wonder that this man is embraced and honored by groups like the once-relevant, now-radical NAACP and was given the high honor of holding a Presidential appointment in the first year of the Obama Presidency.  He speaks the revolutionary “blame America first” rhetoric of Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Malik Zulu Shabazz. (more…)

Democrats and their media lapdogs and busy exploiting first responders in the Zadroga bill in whatever way possible to gain political advantage. Despite President Obama telling the NY delegation that he opposed funding the legislation earlier this year and waffling back and forth, Democrats and their state media have inundated America with headlines accusing the GOP of refusing to pass the Zadroga bill due to coldheartedness.

Backbone

In reality, the problem lies with Democrats refusal to cut any of their entitlement spending in order to pay for it. See, while our first responders are important to them when it’s time to issue a sound bite, they cease to occupy the same space on Dems list of priorities – which included a pork-laden omnibus bill with enough earmarks to fund the Zadroga bill many times over.

Republicans have applied the brakes due to their desire to discover and eliminate earmarks and to make sure that the heros who risked their lives for us on 9/11 actually get their money and that it’s not a repeat of Pigford.

In the Pigford fraud, as evidenced by many attorneys and original victims in the case, people who had never farmed (but expressed a desire to do so) were given the same $50,000 as someone like Jimmy Dismuke, who’d spent his entire life farming. The discrepancy is one that the GOP wishes to avoid, and surely Democrats do as well. Because “anywhere from 10-50%” of the claims are fraudulent in this just-signed settlement, says Huffington Post reporter Lee Stranahan, you can imagine the caution felt by some on the right in entering this legislation. Yes, those who risked their lives for America may be eligible for care but you have to wonder: if it’s as important as Democrats say it is, then why would they oppose safeguards to make sure that those who need help aren’t looted out of it by shysters?

This bill has languished in congress for awhile now. Democrats passed a $26 billion-dollar EduJobs teachers’ union bailout before this. They passed a failed stimulus before this. They passed DADT before this. They debated the Omnibus with billions of dollars of earmarks before this. All of these things apparently infinitely more pressing than helping first responders, which, now that the cameras are on, is suddenly important to the left. When Democrats had the chance to turn it into action they compromised themselves by choosing a procedure that impeded their ability to shove it through.

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Over the last few days, on the news channels and the net, it has been wall-to-wall coverage of the Juan Williams firing by the tools over at National Public Radio. NPR was serving the hydra-headed, Hamas-supporting Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which called on them to take action against Williams.

I am grateful for this high-profile incident. Much like with the Ground Zero mosque affair, Americans have suddenly become aware of something quite terrible — a sea change, a profound transformation of a basic assumption, and a stunning reversal of their very basic unalienable rights. Their sensibilities are shaken. How could such a major seismic shift be kept hidden, kept so secret, until suddenly Juan Williams, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, gets fired for telling the truth? Is it any wonder that recent polls show that the majority of Americans no longer trust the media? That is a good thing.

To Williams’ point, we have an entire government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), dedicated to protecting us from terrorists who are largely Muslim. We have torturous security procedures at every stage of air travel. We bear unfathomable costs in taxpayer dollars, but worse, in the surrender of privacy and individual rights because of Islamic jihad: because of the 9/11 Muslim terrorists; and the British Muslims who planned to blow up seven planes and kill 4,000 Americans and/or British people in the name of Islam in 2006; and because of Richard Reid, the Muslim with the exploding shoes; and the Christmas day bomber, the Muslim with the exploding crotch.

And yet in watching the mainstream media coverage of Juan Williams affair, we witness the fact that the media still cannot face up to its own capitulation. It’s all over the airwaves, but no one will discuss what is actually happening — the loss of the freedom of speech to Islamic supremacism and domination. This is a deadly fight — Islam in the West and its suppression of free speech. (more…)

From Juan Williams, posted at FoxNews.com:

Yesterday NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.

This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims. In a debate with Bill O’Reilly I revealed my fears to set up the case for not making rash judgments about people of any faith. I pointed out that the Atlanta Olympic bomber —  as well as Timothy McVeigh and the people who protest against gay rights at military funerals — are Christians but we journalists don’t identify them by their religion.

And I made it clear that all Americans have to be careful not to let fears lead to violation of anyone’s constitutional rights, be it to build a mosque, carry the Koran or drive a New York cab without fear having your throat slashed. Bill and I argued after I said he has to take care in the way he talks about the 9/11 attacks so as not to provoke bigotry. (more…)

WATCH VIDEO HERE.

They were outraged over Mr. O’Reilly’s suggestion that the 9/11 attacks were executed by Muslims. Barbara Walters immediately chastised her colleagues for their behavior.

The editors of Big Hollywood add, “Funny how no one bothered to storm off the set while Whoopi defended fugitive child ‘not-rape-rape’ rapist Roman Polanski.” As uncomfortable as it may be for people on the multiculturalist left, O’Reilly was speaking the truth, unlike Behar when she said mother-of-28 Michele Bachmann is “against children.” Remarkably, conservative pundit S.E. Cupp managed to keep her composure and stay on stage in that instance

Over the past couple of months, a lot of readers of my website, AtlasShrugs, have been asking me why I go on these consistently belligerent TV shows to discuss Islam, knowing that:

• It is going to be a hostile environment;
• I will be debating liars, deceivers and Islamic supremacists;
• I will be defamed, smeared and slandered;
• The playing field will be grossly unfair;
• I will be interrupted, cut off, and rebuked;
• I will be given much less time than my opponent.

I will tell you why. It is an opportunity, however compromised. Voices like mine, Robert Spencer’s, Wafa Sultan’s and Ibn Warraq’s are never heard in the mainstream media. The truth is hidden from the masses, and the media’s criminal negligence is cloaked in good intentions. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This is guerrilla warfare in the information battlespace, in the war of ideas. These media opportunities were hardly perfect, but they were something. Why make perfect the enemy of the good? They were better than the traditional blackout on our freedom- defense initiatives. It was a shot, and I was taking it and running with it, no matter how disgusting it all was.

From the media’s perspective, the Ground Zero mosque was an historical phenomenon. For the first time, a major news story became the most important national and international news story without the media. Think about that. Unlike the fringe pastor in Florida, who tweeted a Qur’an threat and the media descended like locusts to a Florida backwater to create a news story, a narrative, the Ground Zero mosque was not shaped by the media, not covered by the media — not at first anyway. (more…)

Over to you: