The Pulp Fiction of Republican Arguments
Read Time:9 Minute, 38 Second
He closes in for the kill, as his victim cowers in fear.
You read the Bible, Brett?
Jules has the passage memorized. He quotes ferociously at the terrified Brett.
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.
Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.
And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers!
He draws his weapon, and shouts, for he has become the very persona of a wrathful God.
And you will know My name is the LORD
when I lay my vengeance upon thee!
He and his partner Vincent fire and continue to fire, way past the point at which Brett has become a sacrifice to the celestial Jules.
Jules had told the now departed Brett that he was quoting the 17th verse of the 25th Chapter of the Book of Ezekiel. Although he isn’t exactly accurate at the very end, sure enough, he does come pretty close to Ezekiel 25:17. Here is how the prophet is actually translated from almost 2600 years ago:
And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.
Man! Those were the days, weren’t they?
Biblical scholars who take the movie Pulp Fiction seriously might get nosebleeds over everything else Jules quotes at the petrified, soon-to-be full-of-holes, Brett. The rest of it is not to be found in any part of Ezekiel, or in the Bible at all.
In chapter 25, the prophet Ezekiel talks about how God is pretty ticked off at the Ammonites, and the Philistines, and the Cherethims. He is mad as hell at specific rulers, Moab, Seir, and Edom. God is going to do horrible things to the poor, unsuspecting subjects who inhabit the areas these fellows control.
For some reason our Lord has a special dislike for … and this is a quote … “the remnant of the sea coast.” God is going to destroy the beaches right down to the grains of sand. Actually, I made up the beaches and grains of sand part, but God is going to stomp all over those coasts.
The way Jules quotes the passage, the great vengeance and furious anger parts are pretty close. And knowing the LORD is the Lord is spot on. The rest is just something Quenton Tarrintino made up and stuck in the Bible for dramatic effect, so Jules would have something terrifying to say to poor doomed Brett before dispatching him.
No path, no righteous man in Ezekiel 25.
Not a word about the tyranny of evil men.
Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will…
Are you kidding?
It’s all made up stuff. Not there. Not even close.
I thought about Pulp Fiction and Ezekiel 25:17…
Well, there’s this passage I’ve got memorized. Sorta fits this occasion. Ezekiel 25:17
…as I listened to Jen Kerns the other day on MSNBC.
Jen has a history in Republican circles. She’s been an anti-immigrant activist. She has directed large Tea Party Groups. She directed the Republican Party in California for a while.
And she offers arguments that collapse when you scratch the surface. Sometimes, you do have to scratch the surface. At least a little. Here’s one example.
In 1979, white supremacist John Tanton formed an anti-immigrant group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. They call themselves FAIR, for short. They are opposed to illegal immigration. They are also opposed to legal immigration. They just don’t like immigrants. They don’t like foreigners.
They conducted a study on undocumented immigrants. At least they called it a study. Other studies discovered that immigrants tend to commit fewer crimes than most of us. And those who are undocumented are the most law abiding of all. This also makes intuitive sense, since anyone who wants to escape detection will be less likely to jaywalk, switch lanes without signaling, or rob banks.
There are some crimes undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit, like trying to get fake documents to stay in the country. Duh. But overall, the pattern holds. They generally do not commit crimes the rest of us might commit.
But this new study by the anti-immigrant group found that those who came into the country illegally are more likely to commit crimes. They concluded this because there is a slightly higher percentage of undocumented immigrants in custody than native-born Americans.
More serious researchers point out that, since coming into the country illegally is a crime in and of itself, and since 18,000 or so agents are committed to apprehending those who come into the country illegally, this was a little like saying that a left-handed person will tend to write using the left hand.
Still, conservative groups seized on the bogus study. Republican members of one congressional staff issued an unofficial statement back in 2006, unendorsed by the committee itself. They quoted the anti-immigrant study to suggest that immigrants will tend to commit crimes.
There is an unfortunate tendency in human nature to regard both sides of any debate to be at least partially true, and only partially true. Like any purely reflexive refusal to consider actual facts, those who consider themselves as dispassionately above the fray may cloud debate with unexamined assumptions. In this case, some took the anti-immigrant study, and the Republican staff report, as a demonstration that any given set of facts can be viewed as supporting separate, equally valid, conclusions.
Naturally, Jen Kerns, the Tea Party organizer, wrote an article citing the Republican staff, and statistics from anti-immigrant fringe groups, as official proof that immigrants are a clear and present danger.
There are no two ways about it: Many illegal immigrants are coming here to commit crimes.
As a result, illegal immigrant criminals are also clogging up our correctional facilities and costing taxpayers big time.
Okay, so lots of folks get misled by bogus statistics. They are not really lying if they believe the lies they tell. Right?
Free debate is supposed to resolve that sort of conflict of fact. All that it requires is a basic mutual respect for truth. If people argue in good faith, the debate tends to clarify.
And there’s the trouble.
Martin Longman, writing for Washington Monthly magazine, describes the long fall he has seen since his time in academia. Although he never embraced the naive idea that all, or even most, serious advocates for opposing views argued in good faith, he did expect that there existed islands of intellectually honest debate. But, over the years, he became disillusioned. The change in the very nature of conservatism carried with it an unwelcome challenge to his lifetime assumption of good faith:
It suggested a lack of respect for the rules of debate and a willingness to offer any argument, however disingenuous, to gain some kind of emotional advantage.
As host David Gura closed a segment on MSNBC, one guest offered a quick couple of points. It was Jen Kerns:
Article I of the Constitution clearly states the federal government has complete authority to enact immigration laws over any state.
The Tenth Amendment also says that the federal government can revoke funding of those cities.
Article I says something about immigration? That sounded odd.
It seems evident that any national government would have the legal right to regulate its own borders. We can’t have Missouri start setting state quotas on how many folks from Kansas are allowed to enter. Right?
But at the beginning, immigration was considered only as something the new nation desperately needed for essential growth. Why invest a section of an Article in regulating it?
So I looked it up. There is no mention of immigration in Article I. Or in the six articles that follow. There is a section that says Congress can set rules for who can become a citizen. But nothing on immigration. Nothing at all.
I didn’t even have to look up the Tenth Amendment. I was sure about it. It has been thrown at pretty much anything conservatives find seasonally fashionable to oppose. This is what it says word for word:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
That’s it. They ain’t no more. No subsections. No clauses. Nothing that you can look sideways at and think might be mistaken for … how did that go again?
The Tenth Amendment also says that the federal government can revoke funding of those cities.
And there you have it. The perfect illustration of the Martin Long theorum. Today’s example of the current state of the contemporary conservative debate.
Voter suppression activist Hans von Spakovsky deliberately distorts statistics to show the opposite of the studies he quotes.
Conservative Christian activist David Barton quotes the founding fathers with bits and pieces of sentences to prove they said the opposite of what they really said.
Both are dishonest. But at least there are studies and statistics to quote, there are original documents to distort.
Why even go that far, when today’s new conservatives can simply pull a Constitutional article or amendment out of the air and substitute whatever fertile right-wing imaginations might wish was there?
There are only baby steps from the anti-intellectual to the anti-fact. There is only a brief stumble from anti-fact to anti-honesty.
Well, there’s this passage I’ve got memorized; sorta fits this occasion. Ezekiel 25:17
Yeah, right.
Joy Reid teaches us how to fight this sort of thing. Jen was on her show last October, trying out the Crooked Hillary scandal concerning Uranium. It’s edited for length to preserve our space/time continuum.
How many people sit on the committee?
Nine members.
How many have to approve a deal like this?
All nine of them.
How many approved this deal?
Nine of them.
Did he own any assets in Uranium One at the time that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State?
You know, I don’t know that, but here’s what I would…
He sold them years before.
So what you’re talking about is a deal that nine members of CFIUS approved unanimously. None of whom was Hillary Clinton.
You have a donor who separately gave Hillary Clinton donations at a time when she was not Secretary of State.
The members of CFIUS have been very clear that Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with approving that deal. She would have had to strong-arm eight other people in order to get them to unanimously approve the deal and ultimately the President of the United States would intervene if they saw any problem.
There’s actually nothing about the deal that’s controversial.
When confronted with dishonesty, stop pretending we are dealing with good faith debate. It becomes time for research, preparation. Then rhetorical search and destroy.
And you will know My name is the LORD when I lay my vengeance upon thee!
Many thanks to our friends at FairandUnbalanced.
Happy
0 %
Sad
0 %
Excited
0 %
Sleepy
0 %
Angry
0 %
Surprise
0 %
0
0
Lies, exaggerations, threats, make up this White House, and our government. Unlike Pulp Fiction, with the last word being the operative one, this movie is real and taking place as we live and breathe.
If I read through such a long article, you know it was a damned good one. In fact rampant disregard for truth is the argument of the day.