Rudy blames himself for 9-11

Rudy Giuliani is now in bed with Pat Robertson, who has said that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were God's revenge on advocates of abortion rights and gay rights. Rudy, of course, is one of those advocates.

Josh Marshall has more on this matter here:

Did we deserve the attacks of 9/11?

Every time I turn around these days, I hear some moralist suggest, in effect, that perhaps America deserved to be attacked on Sept. 11 because our culture is so rotten.

They seem to be saying that we should bow to the reforms the radical Islamists prescribe for us and the rest of the world.

Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, wrote today in the Wall Street Journal: "We make it too easy for those who want to hate us to hate us. We make ourselves look bad in our media, which helps future jihadists think that they must, by hating us, be good."

The Rev. Canon Andrew White, vicar of an Anglican Church in Baghdad, was quoted recently in the Christian Post as having said that Middle Easterners are repulsed by what they perceive as tolerance of homosexuality by Americans in general, even Christian Americans.

Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report quotes Glenn Beck, a right-wing rattlepate on CNN, as recently saying:

More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals. The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We’re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts. Now I don’t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that’s the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They’re right.

Another darling of the political right, Dinesh D'Souza, wrote a whole book about how the terrorists of Sept. 11 were provoked by our libertine culture. His title summed up his sentiments quite neatly: "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11."

Of course, we all remember when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson got together on TV just two days after the attacks and blamed them on American decadence. God was angry, they said. That's what the terrorists thought, too. Jerry and Pat and the murderers were in agreement.

It wasn't so long ago that certain right-wingers were fond of saying that liberals were too quick to "blame America first." My, how times have changed.

American Hezbollah

Hezbollah is an Arabic word standing for "party of God," and it's the name of an Islamic political and paramilitary organization based in Lebanon.

Hezbollah also is the Arabic word for what Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen thinks of the Republican Party.

Van Hollen told a gathering in Lake Geneva today that the Republican Party is "a party of God, we’re a party of faith, we’re a party that will do the right thing and represent the people."

Such theocratic rhetoric brings to mind George W. Bush's messianic complex and his image among worshipful admirers as a messenger of God. It also helps explain why W's administration has hired more than 150 zealous graduates of Pat Robertson's clown college, Regent University.

Such rhetoric also comports with the opinions of Bishop Thomas Doran of the Catholic Diocese of Rockford, who sees the Democrats as the party of "abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation," as he so gently put it in a column last summer.

One wonders if America's "party of God" might eventually mimic its Islamic namesake with a Christian form of Jihadism.