Well, last week was fun, wasn’t it? Obama won a Nobel prize for no reason and conservatives went nuts. Which is entertaining and all, but then groups like the DNC and Media Matters attack them as unpatriotic and siding with terrorists. Which is absolutely vile and one of the reasons the last administration and its defenders were so odious.
By the way, what kind of joke was that? A Nobel Peace Prize? Are they high?
Then there’s this, another tactic I hated from the last administration (bear in mind that I’m not accusing Republicans of inventing it, just that I associate it with the Bush administration because that’s when I started paying attention). Picking out bits of larger legislation and accusing a person of being against something was a significant part of the anti-Kerry attacks in 2004. It wasn’t pretty then and it’s not pretty now.
Or I guess you can say that anyone who’s ever opposed an omnibus spending bill hates the military, schools, seniors, etc. How fun.
A health care bill banning rescission, disallowing coverage refusals due to pre-existing conditions, eliminating the wasteful Medicare Advantage program, and expanding coverage to 94% of the country seems like a step forward.
Then again, it’s a giveaway to teh evil corporations, so I’m clearly some sort of non-sentient shill. But the alternative is being complicit with murder, so hello persistent vegetative state.
How is this not awesome? Conservapedia has a Conservative Bible Project going. Because the people who do the NIV translation are a bunch of feminist liberals. Seriously. So they’re going to translate the KJV into more modern English.
For example, one of their suggestions from Mark is to replace Pharisees with “intellectuals” or “skeptical teachers.” One instance:
Jesus perceived immediately what the intellectual types were thinking, and he asked them, “Why are you so hostile to this?
If one of your goals is to enhance the intellectual force of the Bible, the phrase “intellectual types” isn’t helping.
(for reference, here’s what the NRSV translation is: “At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves; and he said to them, ‘Why do you raise such questions in your hearts?”)
This is also an obvious example of the flaws in what they’re doing (flaws? no way!). The fact is that Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees is a conflict with a conservative religious establishment. The Pharisees are representatives of the ruling priests (from what I’ve read, anyway). Jesus’ is rebelling against a religious establishment, which is not a particularly conservative move. Characterizing the representatives of that establishment as “intellectuals,” which undoubtedly conjures up an image of anti-capitalist radicals in academia who want to destroy the very foundation of our country in their minds, is a bit misleading. Jesus is rebelling against tradition and is trying to shake the foundations of the contemporary religious establishment. You can make a better case that he’s analogous to their view of intellectuals. It would be stupid to do so, but less so than the Conservapedia alternative.
That’s not to say that verse is inconsistent with conservatism, just that using it to score conservative points obscures what Mark is describing. The world is too complicated to impose narrow ideological categorization on every event. Conservapedians, can’t handle that.
But we really already knew that, didn’t we?
