Yes, Mr Thomas, the respectable Christian Conservative journalist spoke in our little town this week. I’m still frothing at the mouth.
How does this guy get away with this stuff? Why is he considered respectable, when he should be right in there with Phelps, Chick & Co?
AAAAAARRRRRGGGHH! FROTH! SPEW!
Well, fuck you with a hatrack, Mr Thomas, you self-righteous effluvium of a dung heap. Those “ignorant” Islamic kids are gonna learn to hate YOU all right. Along with some of their other fellow humans.
Gee, I wonder if astorian has seen this guy’s columns. Because, you know, fundamentalist Christians don’t have any power in this country. Like a weekly newspaper column or anything.
I remember one column in which he documented the “horror” of his grandkids having to attend a pagan evil atheist secular humanist liberal hippie PUBLIC school for a week. Amongst other accusations made by Thomas that I can rember was that schools are unresponsive to the issue of weapons being in school. I can’t think of anything more absurd.
It’s to bad the archive provided by DDG doesn’t go back far enough to reveal that one (it was about 2-3 years ago) or the one in which he said science was deceiving the public on the issue of homosexuality (his argument: it’s 100% choice, and an evil, wrong one at that). Also the one in which he said science was lying about evolution, too.
One that is in the archive I like is this one, in which his argument seems to be that kids making editorial cartoons satarizing the right-wing is proof that public schools are brainwashing kids. What paranoia!
I just read a very level-headed interview with Thomas, in which I thought he was making a point almost opposite to this. I’m very surprised.
The point was that Christians aren’t going to “win” any culture war. It’s not a matter of culture anyway, it’s belief systems. You can’t get people to live “right” unless they want to. Pushing them to do it when they don’t want to and don’t see the reasons only wastes time and makes them mad. I don’t mean not having laws, but you can’t expect people to live your way when they don’t believe the same things.
Is Thomas really of two minds? I’d like to know. If he really said that about evolution, then he’s on my hit list of Christians who violate my 11th commandment: Don’t talk about things you don’t know about.
Of course, that includes about 88% of the church in general, and certainly even a significant percentage at mine, where this kind of thing is not a rallying cry (or I’d leave).
There seem to be two Cal Thomas personae. One is the individual whose essence is captured in the above links, who I consider to be really, really, really off the wall. The other one, who seems to turn up in about 10% of his writings, is a thoughtful man who urges the christian community to stop taking on the secular world, but to just live their values quietly. I have difficulty reconciling the two views into the same person.
december, you keep losing your "some"s from your posts.
“Unfortunately, some Islamic kids ARE learning to hate us”
Otherwise, you are simply joining a long list of people who choose to demonize their opposition with overstated rhetoric rather than actually presenting supportable facts in a rational manner–kind of like a certain Osama bin Laden.
Fair point, tomndebb. I understood Friedman’s implication to be that since our good friends the Pakistanis are doing this, then many other Arab countries are also doing so.
I may have read too much into his column, because I’ve rad other sources that described anti-American propaganda in a number of Arab countries. Naturally, it exists in places like Iran and Iraq. But, it also exists in ally Saudi Arabia. The Palistinians and Egyptians, who are given large amounts of money each year by the US, nevertheless demonize the US on state-controlled media.
However, I will again concede that tomndebb is correct. My cite proved only that some Islamic kids are learning to hate us.
I have issues with a lot of what Thomas has said as well, but can’t you criticize him without putting words in his mouth? (Or quoting someone who put words in his mouth?)
Is it true you like to wear women’s undergarments?
For reason that may be pretty obvious, Friend Thomas started to appear on a regular basis in the “Newspaper that Thinks All Iowa Depends on It” just about the same time that the paper was bought out by the USA Today people. Brother Thomas’s appearance is thought by some to mark the beginning of that papers decline. With few if any exception his stuff has been borderline psychotic and premised on the idea that American Christians are an oppressed and threatened minority. In his own way Brother Thomas is as offended by a secular society as is the Taliban themselves. I find that I can get through his columns without actually setting fire to the paper if I stop every two or three lines and repeat the mantra: this man is an idiot, this man is an idiot.
Cal Thomas is a self-centered, arrogant bastard whose only goal in life is to appear on as many MSNBC news/talk shows as possible. Every once in a while he’ll write some halfway-decent sounding article about how maybe Christian Conservatives should devote every second of their waking lives to slamming political enemies. Then he’ll plunge right into his next tirade of insults without even bothering to catch his breath. He doesn’t believe any of the things that he says in the rare, “reasonable” columns. He just writes those to get attention.
