Month: January 2013

Dishonestly and ignorantly switching the culprit from guns to games

by David Atkins

The dishonest stupidity. It burns.

The $60 billion industry is facing intense political pressure from an unlikely alliance of critics who say that violent imagery in video games has contributed to a culture of violence. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with industry executives on Friday to discuss the concerns, highlighting the issue’s prominence.

No clear link has emerged between the Connecticut rampage and the gunman Adam Lanza’s interest in video games. Even so, the industry’s detractors want to see a federal study on the impact of violent gaming, as well as cigarette-style warning labels and other measures to curb the games’ graphic imagery.

“Connecticut has changed things,” Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican and a frequent critic of what he terms the shocking violence of games, said in an interview. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’re going to do something.”

Gun laws have been the Obama administration’s central focus in considering responses to the shootings. But a violent media culture is being scrutinized, too, alongside mental health laws and policies.

“The stool has three legs, and this is one of them,” Mr. Wolf said of violent video games.

Mr. Wolf seems quite confident in this assessment, displaying all the usual brash arrogance of the science-denying Republican Party, together with a healthy dose of get-off-my-lawn ignorance to boot. The science, of course, is pretty clear that video games don’t cause violence:

But it turns out that the data just doesn’t support this connection. Looking at the world’s 10 largest video game markets yields no evident, statistical correlation between video game consumption and gun-related killings.

It’s true that Americans spend billions of dollars on video games every year and that the United States has the highest firearm murder rate in the developed world. But other countries where video games are popular have much lower firearm-related murder rates. In fact, countries where video game consumption is highest tend to be some of the safest countries in the world, likely a product of the fact that developed or rich countries, where consumers can afford expensive games, have on average much less violent crime…

Again, with only 10 datapoints, it’s not a perfect comparison. But it’s hard to ignore that this data actually suggests a slight downward shift in violence as video game consumption increases…

So, what have we learned? That video game consumption, based on international data, does not seem to correlate at all with an increase in gun violence. That countries where video games are popular also tend to be some of the world’s safest (probably because these countries are stable and developed, not because they have video games). And we also have learned, once again, that America’s rate of firearm-related homicides is extremely high for the developed world.

Science and statistics. Imagine that. But Chris Christie amps up the silliness:

“I don’t let games like Call of Duty in my house,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said this week on MSNBC. “You cannot tell me that a kid sitting in a basement for hours playing Call of Duty and killing people over and over and over again does not desensitize that child to the real-life effects of violence.”

Says a blustering ignoramus who has probably never played a first-person shooter in his life. His gut says so, so it must be true.

People who don’t play video games usually do not understand them. They’re today’s billiards in River City, a newfangled thing that a bunch of mostly younger people do that many older people fear and do not understand, and thus becomes the easy target of fear-peddling Harold Hill con artists.

So allow me to explain: video games are a tension release, often played by people who take pleasure in meting out justice in a virtual world because the real world is severely lacking in justice. They’re cathartic and can do wonders to reduce violent tendencies in people like myself with a strong sense of moral justice. The virtual violence is usually nearly comical in its extremism, but enemies (if they’re human at all) tend to have expressly nameless and stock, often faceless characters. Too much personalization of the enemies would trigger empathy in the player, making it more difficult to enjoy the game. It’s the same reason that the Storm Troopers in Star Wars all look the same and are utterly dehumanized. It’s much easier to feel OK about the death of millions on the Death Star if we don’t think too hard about the families of the millions killed on board with a single pull of the hero’s X-Wing trigger. But that doesn’t mean that people who watch Star Wars are any likelier to commit acts of mass terrorism.

I myself am a deeply empathetic person. I once ran over a small animal in my car at night and remained upset about it for hours. The mere sight of blood makes me feel faint. The notion of ever killing or hurting a living creature, much less a human being, is horrifying to me.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t killed tens of thousands virtually since I was a child playing the original Doom–the same poorly pixelated game that caused an epidemic of ignorant freakouts from misguided parents when it was released back in 1993. I’ve virtually mowed down tens of thousands of creatures human, alien, animal, supernatural and machine using swords, spells, guns and fists in Doom, Heretic, Half Life, Unreal, Halo, Call of Duty, Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed, Painkiller, Tomb Raider, Far Cry, Planetside, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Dead Space, Star Wars, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Soulcalibur and far too many others to count. I have many friends who are also passionate gamers and wouldn’t dream of hurting a fly in the real world, horrified by killing animals for mere sport, and devastated by hurting another human being.

Do some sociopaths also play games? Certainly. Both Breivik in Norway and the Columbine kids were players. But so are millions of children and adults around the world. That’s correlation, not causation. The Newtown and Aurora killers both were fans of World of Warcraft, a role-playing fantasy game with over 10 million players worldwide, no aiming or arcade elements, and so dissimilar from first-person shooters like Call of Duty as to be risible. It would be like blaming “violent movies” for violence because two killers liked watching Lord of the Rings, while two others liked watching Pulp Fiction. It’s the sort of embarrassing comment only someone who doesn’t watch movies would make.

Back in reality land, there are two common denominators in recent mass gun violence: 1) guns, obviously, and 2) mental illness.

On the mental illness front, we have Ronald Reagan’s cuts and the refusal to fund a real mental health program to thank for that. The lack of treatment for the mentally ill is a direct result of Republican policies.

And on the gun front, we obviously have Republican policies that continue to put tools of easy, violent death in the hands of just about anyone who wants them. But there can be little doubt that the same people who so adamantly deny the scientific reality of climate change would love to displace the blame for gun violence away from guns and toward video games, a convenient theory for which there truly is no credible evidence. It certainly feeds into social and parenting hysteria while deflecting attention from guns and cuts to mental health services.

But as with deficit hysteria, it would be nice if there weren’t so many Democrats like Hillary Clinton and remorselessly-kills-animals-with-guns-for-no-reason-but-won’t-let-his-kids-play-Halo Paul Begala to help them do their dirty work.

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DOD fools

by digby

One of the more common conversation stoppers in the gun debate is when an anti-gun control person stops you in your tracks to condescendingly explain that unless you are a firearms expert you have no standing to argue about whether or not guns should be easily available. Using the term “assault weapon” is particularly offensive and shows that you should never be listened to on this subject because you’d have to be a fool not to know that such a thing doesn’t even exist.

You know, a fool like this:

Ah, what does the military know about guns anyway?

h/t to @billmon1

Backing up the president in case he decides not to panic

by digby

Greg Sargent reports that Democrats are taking some steps to ensure that the President can take some unorthodox steps to deal with the debt ceiling if it becomes necessary:

In a move that will significantly ratchet up the brinksmanship around the debt ceiling, the four members of the Senate Democratic leadership are privately telling the White House that they will give Obama full support if he opts for a unilateral solution to the debt ceiling crisis, a senior Senate Democratic leadership aide tells me.

The four Democratic leaders — Senators Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and Patty Murray — have privately reached agreement that continued GOP intransigence on the debt ceiling means the White House needs the space to pursue options for raising it that don’t involve Congress, and that the White House needs to know that Dems will support whatever it decides to do.
[…]
The White House has said it doesn’t believe the 14th amendment option is legal, and has refused to engage on the question of whether it sees the coin as a viable option, saying only that there is “no Plan B” and that the onus is on Congress to raise the debt limit.

The aide tells me, however, that top Senate Democrats see the 14th amendment option as far preferable politically to the coin. “Of the available options, the coin, on its face, is politically much worse than the others,” he said. “Whatever the legal arguments for and against it, the imagery will be difficult to combat. What better symbol of out-of-control government spending could you have than a trillion dollar coin?”

I understand that, but instead of just accepting it they could try to educate the public about the subject instead of just throwing up their hands and saying “it looks bad.” These Democrats underestimate the ability of the public to comprehend something like this. Unfortunately, one of the problems with these seemingly never-ending “cliff” negotiations is that the Democrats seem to have decided that their best negotiating position is to repeatedly scream “the sky is falling” as loudly as loudly as possible — and that means that solutions beyond capitulation (like going over the cliff or the platinum coin) are only talked about on the fringe and the general public never gets what’s really going on.

It might very well work out fine, (after the usual dramatic kabuki pageant.) But it’s also not unlikely that the Dems will panic as they usually do and start giving away the store once we get close to the deadline. That’s been the pattern so far, even if the right wing is so idiotic that they refuse to take them up on their offer. Someday, they might just wise up.

If I were a betting person, I’d bet they won’t and we’ll have yet another delaying mechanism. Until the Democrats decide to pull the plug on this nonsense with something like the coin or the 14th Amendment, I can’t see any reason why the Republicans would change. They like these showdowns. Makes ’em feel powerful.

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It’s only the biggest issue facing humanity. No worries.

by David Atkins

Dave Roberts has yet another timely reminder about just how high are the stakes of climate change:

So in the name of getting our bearings, let’s review a few things we know.

We know we’ve raised global average temperatures around 0.8 degrees C so far. We know that 2 degrees C is where most scientists predict catastrophic and irreversible impacts. And we know that we are currently on a trajectory that will push temperatures up 4 degrees or more by the end of the century.

We know we’ve raised global average temperatures around 0.8 degrees C so far. We know that 2 degrees C is where most scientists predict catastrophic and irreversible impacts. And we know that we are currently on a trajectory that will push temperatures up 4 degrees or more by the end of the century…

Warming to 4 degrees would also lead to “an increase of about 150 percent in acidity of the ocean,” leading to levels of acidity “unparalleled in Earth’s history…”

It will also “likely lead to a sea-level rise of 0.5 to 1 meter, and possibly more, by 2100, with several meters more to be realized in the coming centuries.” That rise won’t be spread evenly, even within regions and countries — regions close to the equator will see even higher seas.

There are also indications that it would “significantly exacerbate existing water scarcity in many regions, particularly northern and eastern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, while additional countries in Africa would be newly confronted with water scarcity on a national scale due to population growth.”

After mentions of increasing extreme weather events, major loss of crop yields and dramatic reduction in biodiversity (read: millions of species going extinct), he concludes:

All this will add up to “large-scale displacement of populations and have adverse consequences for human security and economic and trade systems.” Given the uncertainties and long-tail risks involved, “there is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.” There’s a small but non-trivial chance of advanced civilization breaking down entirely.

Now ponder the fact that some scenarios show us going up to 6 degrees by the end of the century, a level of devastation we have not studied and barely know how to conceive. Ponder the fact that somewhere along the line, though we don’t know exactly where, enough self-reinforcing feedback loops will be running to make climate change unstoppable and irreversible for centuries to come. That would mean handing our grandchildren and their grandchildren not only a burned, chaotic, denuded world, but a world that is inexorably more inhospitable with every passing decade.

Take all that in, sit with it for a while, and then tell me what it could mean to be an “alarmist” in this context. What level of alarm is adequate?

And yet the Very Serious People spend their days desperately worrying about whether billionaires have enough tax cuts to give a few more people minimum wage jobs, which genetic tribe of desert nomads should control some scrap of desert somewhere, and how best to overcome silly liberal resistance to burning all that glorious carbon in the Canadian tar sands so we can “add jobs” without driving up that pesky deficit.

Pitiful. As a general rule, the more seriously a pundit is taken by the traditional press in America, the more frivolous are the issues and positions they care about.

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Deja Vu all over again, California style

by digby

So, the Golden State is recovering. Huzzah:

California has been Exhibit A for the fiscal upheaval that has rocked states throughout the recession. Year after year, California officials reported bigger and bigger deficits and sought to respond with spending cuts that left the state reeling.

So it was something of a moment when a jaunty Gov. Jerry Brown strode before cameras here on Thursday to present his budget for 2013-14.

“The deficit is gone,” Mr. Brown proclaimed, standing in front of an array of that-was-then and this-is-now charts that illustrated what he said were dramatic changes in California’s fortunes.

“For the next four years we are talking about a balanced budget,” he said. “We are talking about living within our means. This is new. This is a breakthrough.”

Mr. Brown was not just talking about a balanced budget. He projected that the state would begin posting surpluses starting next year, leading to a projected surplus of $21.5 million by 2014, a dramatic turnaround from the deficit of $26 billion — billion, not million — he faced when he was elected in 2010.

The governor said California’s finances were strong enough that he wanted to put aside a $1 billion reserve fund to guard against future downturns, and included in the budget sharp increases in aid to public schools and the state university system, both targets of big spending cutbacks.

There may be some glitches, having to do with Federal cutbacks, that could set this rosy outlook back, but the assumption is that California did all the right things by heavily cutting back on desperately needed services and imposing some small tax increases and now we are on the road to recovery.

And Democrats in the state legislature, some of whom voted for these draconian cuts on the logic that they were a necessary, temporary measure, would like to restore them now.

Well …

Democrats now control two-thirds of the Assembly and Senate, and some of them have talked about restoring at least some of the social service cuts, like dental care for the poor, that were imposed to bring the state to this point, Mr. Brown said he understood the impulse to repair broken social services, but he warned against returning to a boom-and-bust pattern of spending during the good years, only to later struggle through debt.

“We have to live within the means we have; otherwise we get to that situation where you get red ink and you go back to cuts,” he said. “I want to avoid the booms and the bust, the borrow and the spend, where we make the promise and then we take back.”

Mr. Brown, who has always presented himself as something of a moderate in his party, suggested that in the months ahead, he would be an enforcer.

“It’s very hard to say no,” Mr. Brown said. “And that basically is going to be my job.”

Ok. So, what we have is a typical Democratic chump who sees his “legacy” as being the wonderful leader who left a surplus when he left office. We’ve seen that movie before. It came out only a little over a decade ago. And what’s the plot? The Democrats preside over the creation of a recovery and surplus and burnish their “fiscally responsible” bonafides by cutting vital programs and emphasizing “saving” their surplus rather than restoring those services. The Republicans then ride into power on the promise that they would hand out hundred dollar bills like candy in the form of tax cuts. (“It’s yer Muneeeeee!) And the next thing you know we’re back in deficit and it’s time to start cutting even more. The Republicans usually let the Democrats do this dirty work because well … cuts are unpopular. Tax cuts aren’t.

It’s a scam, but one that Democrats must be in on. (There’s no other way to explain why they keep doing it.) I’m guessing they have mistakenly bought into the notion that being remembered as being “fiscally responsible” is a good thing. Unfortunately, nobody really cares about that. And even more importantly, no matter what he does, the conservatives will make sure that he’s remembered as a tax ‘n spend liberal. Democrats may not understand the power of that charge to the Republicans, but the Republicans certainly do. They are not going to sit still and allow him to take credit for something they feel entitled to take credit for even if they never actually do it.

Like I said: scam.

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Who do they really think are the tyrants?

by digby

Ed Kilgore asks an important question every “second amendment remedy” believer should have to answer: who decides?

Who gets to decide when “it’s necessary”—when the police officer patrolling one’s neighborhood or the neighbors at the local Guard armory become not objects of respect but targets? James Yeager? Kevin Williamson? Wayne LaPierre? You or me? Certainly the normal mechanisms of the legal or political systems—you know, the systems that have produced and enforced the “tyranny” of Obamacare or the “injustice” of “confiscatory” taxes cannot be trusted to protect any right of revolution, can they? So apparently it’s up to heavily armed, seething-with-rage individuals and groups to figure out when “it’s necessary” to start shooting cops and members of the armed forces, and presumably advocates or beneficiaries of “tyranny.”

This is the fundamental problem not only with Second Amendment absolutists but with the Tea Party Movement’s “constitutional conservative” stand that there is a permanent—perhaps even divinely instituted and eternal—scheme for self-government that electoral majorities and legislative deliberations and court decisions cannot be allowed to modify. When those are dismissed as “tyrannical,” who gets to decide when “it’s necessary” to take extralegal action? Add in the hard (but still respectable) Right’s taste for military and revolutionary metaphors and the tendency to treat fellow-citizens as enemies of every fundamental liberty, and you’ve got a dangerous playground for the James Yeagers of the world.

I’m going to guess here that I won’t have a vote. In fact, I’m going to guess that the majority of the country won’t have a vote. It will be decided based upon some zealot’s perception that the government has become tyrannical because it won’t do everything the zealots insist it must do. Others would be neutral or take the opposite view. Democracy is how civilized nations deal with these impasses, not insurrection.

So, let’s be clear about what these folks are really talking about. They’re not advocating insurrection. They’re advocating civil war.

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“Legitimate” nutballs

by digby

He’s a doctor?

Rep. Phil Gingrey, an ob-gyn and chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, explained to the audience at the Cobb Chamber of Commerce breakfast Thursday in Smyrna, Ga., that Akin wasn’t far off on the science when he said rape victims rarely get pregnant because their bodies have “ways of shutting that whole thing down.”

“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”

“But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak,” Gingrey continued. “And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”

Gingrey also defended Akin’s theory that women who claim to be rape victims are often lying about it.

“‘Look, in a legitimate rape situation’ — and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape,” Gingrey said. “I don’t find anything so horrible about that.”

Gingrey also addressed the campaign season comments by GOP senate nominee Richard Mourdock in Indiana, who said that pregancy from rape “is something that God intended.”

“Mourdock basically said ‘Look, if there is conception in the aftermath of a rape, that’s still a child, and it’s a child of God, essentially,” Gingrey is quoted as saying Thursday.

I’m at the point where I’m going to need to know my doctor’s political beliefs before I hire him. There are just too many wingnut doctors in Congress spouting ridiculous views for me to take for granted that the medical profession isn’t filled with them.

Aside from the absurd “shutting the whole thing down” premise, (in which he shows a frightening ignorance for a medical doctor)he reveals the underlying assumption: women are lying when they say they’ve been raped. And they lie not just when they “get themselves” pregnant, they lie about rape all the time. In fact, people like Gingrey tend not to believe rape even possible (except, of course, when it’s a racial affair.)

This is one of those rare misogynist intersections where you can see quite clearly that the issue is female sexuality and (the rare and unique) power it has over men. The stupid birth control “slut” argument of the last campaign did the same thing.

Gingrey is a misogynist, patriarchal OB-GYN. Yikes ….

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Yet another city seeks to allow police to use torture devices

by digby

San Francisco:

No-taser advocates’ struggle to defeat SFPD’s push for tasers was audible throughout 14 2012 Police Commission meetings, a Nov. 14 Mental Health Board hearing, and the Dec. 6 Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee hearing, where ACLU attorney Micaela Davis presented the letter to Supervisors Eric Mar, Christina Olague, David Campos and John Avalos.

Unanimous citizen comment at the Dec. 6 Public Safety Committee hearing aligned perfectly with ACLU’s stance.

“San Francisco doesn’t want tasers! San Francisco doesn’t need tasers!” said first presenter, Lisa Marie Alatorre. Instead of setting “a national precedent,” Suhr promotes “a new, shiny, lethal weapon to use on people in mental health crisis.”

Alatorre introduced well-coordinated public commenters highlighting national and state “lawsuits and respected studies” exposing the “harms of trigger-happy police officers who rely on excessive force instead of decent, culturally-competent de-escalation tactics that could have saved lives.”

Public commenters proceeded one by one to address the five central issues raised in the letter: costs, injury and death risks, disproportionate impacts on mentally ill people and people of color, and police misuse and abuse.

There is good evidence on all those issues that tasers are counterproductive.

Nobody ever makes the argument that shooting citizens full of electricity is a form of torture. The fact that it doesn’t usually take more than a few seconds of its extreme pain to get compliance doesn’t alter the fact that it is torture. It proves it.

h/t to GP

The wages of austerity

by David Atkins

The social chaos and extremist rightwing backlash in Greece is getting worse:

Greek police have stepped up efforts to catch illegal immigrants in recent months, launching a new operation to check the papers of people who look foreign. But tourists have also been picked up in the sweeps – and at least two have been badly beaten.

When Korean backpacker Hyun Young Jung was stopped by a tall scruffy looking man speaking Greek on the street in central Athens he thought it might be some kind of scam, so he dismissed the man politely and continued on his way.

A few moments later he was stopped again, this time by a man in uniform who asked for his documents. But as a hardened traveller he was cautious.

Greece was the 16th stop in his two-year-long round-the-world trip and he’d often been warned about people dressing in fake uniforms to extract money from backpackers, so while he handed over his passport he also asked the man to show him his police ID.

Instead, Jung says, he received a punch in the face…

Jung says that outside the station the uniformed officer, without any kind of warning, turned on him again, hitting him in the face.

“There were members of the public who saw what happened, like the man who works in the shop opposite the police station, but they were too afraid to help me,” he says.

Inside the police station, Jung says he was attacked a third time in the stairwell where there were no people or cameras.

“I can understand them asking me for ID and I even understand that there may have been a case to justify them hitting me in the first instance. But why did they continue beating me after I was handcuffed?” he asks…

And some visitors to Greece have been detained despite having shown police their passports.

Last summer, a Nigerian-born American, Christian Ukwuorji, visited Greece on a family holiday with his wife and three children.

When police stopped him in central Athens he showed them his US passport, but they handcuffed him anyway and took him to the central police station.

They gave no reason for holding him, but after a few hours in custody Ukwuorji says he was so badly beaten that he passed out. He woke up in hospital…

In May last year a visiting academic from India, Dr Shailendra Kumar Rai was arrested outside the Athens University of Economics and Business, where he was working as a visiting lecturer.

He had popped out for lunch, and forgotten to take his passport with him.

“The police thought I was Pakistani and since they didn’t speak English they couldn’t understand me when I tried to explain that I am from India,” he says.

When passing students saw their lecturer being held by police and lined up against a wall with a group of immigrants they were horrified and rushed inside to tell his colleagues.

Despite protests from university staff who insisted they could vouch for him, the police handcuffed him and marched him down to the police station.

The police are now mostly in league with the fascist Golden Dawn party, and conspire to terrorize and intimidate anyone who doesn’t look “Greek.”

While we can tut tut and shake our heads, it’s crucial to note that this isn’t happening in a vacuum. These are the wages of austerity little different from the fate of immiserated Germany after World War I. When a proud and previously prosperous people are suddenly thrown into extreme poverty and their safety net destroyed, nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-“other” sentiment is the inevitable result. One would think the Germans of all people would recognize this pattern.

The austerity crowd isn’t just temporarily destroying economies. They’re toying with entire cultures, failing to learn lessons that should have been permanently etched into the world’s memory over 70 years ago.

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Feeling persecuted even before it happens

by digby

Fergawdsakes. Think Progress reported yesterday that one of the pastors slated to speak at the inaugural had made some homophobic comments back in the 90s. There was a little chatter, but there was not even a real kerfuffle, much less a major scandal. But a mere 24 hours after the little piece a Think Progress went up, the past pre-emptively withdrew saying:

I am honored to be invited by the President to give the benediction at the upcoming inaugural on January 21. Though the President and I do not agree on every issue, we have fashioned a friendship around common goals and ideals, most notably, ending slavery in all its forms.

Due to a message of mine that has surfaced from 15-20 years ago, it is likely that my participation, and the prayer I would offer, will be dwarfed by those seeking to make their agenda the focal point of the inauguration. Clearly, speaking on this issue has not been in the range of my priorities in the past fifteen years. Instead, my aim has been to call people to ultimate significance as we make much of Jesus Christ.

Neither I, nor our team, feel it best serves the core message and goals we are seeking to accomplish to be in a fight on an issue not of our choosing, thus I respectfully withdraw my acceptance of the President’s invitation. I will continue to pray regularly for the President, and urge the nation to do so. I will most certainly pray for him on Inauguration Day.

So, he withdrew voluntarily once the information about his older comments came to light. He crawls up on his cross and whines a little bit but as far as I know there were no petitions, no protests, no nothing. He assumed there would be and decided he didn’t want to deal with it so he took his ball and went home.

So far, it all makes sense. He’s probably not the right guy to be speaking at a big Democratic event and he knows it. So what in the hell is this all about?

A chorus of right-wing leaders Thursday decried the withdrawal of Pastor Louie Giglio from President Obama’s second inauguration ceremony, suggesting a left-wing conspiracy to force him off of the program.

There are a bunch of idiotic quotes,including some from such luminaries as Eric Erickson and Kristen Powers, all of whom apparently believe this poor man was forced out of the celebration despite the fact that he clearly says he quit in order to avoid a fight.

But this one takes the cake:

“The bully bigots at Big Gay win huge victory for fascistic intolerance.” [Bryan Fischer, American Family Association radio host]

That’s this Bryan Fischer:

American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer yesterday on Focal Point defended his close ally Scott Lively, downplaying his work shaping Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill and advocating for the imprisonment of gay people as simply giving “talks supporting natural marriage.” But Fischer, who shares Lively’s views on criminalizing LGBT status and blaming gays for the Holocaust, asserted that Lively “did the same kind of stuff over there that we do every day on Focal Point.” Fischer said the left seeks to “exterminate pro-family voices” and “want us to be destroyed,” which is interesting because the bill in Uganda makes the “promotion homosexuality” a crime.

No hobgoblins in that little mind.

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