Bill Maher is back! Last night, he delivered a New Rule blasting the Tea Party for dressing up and comparing themselves to our Founding Fathers, showing that what they believed in almost every way is in direct opposition to what the Tea Party now stands for.
Now I want you teabaggers out there to understand one thing. While you idolize the Founding Fathers and dress up like them and smell like them, I think it's pretty clear that the Founding Fathers would've hated your guts. And what's more, you would've hated them! They were everything you despise. They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris, and thought the Bible was mostly bullshit.
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They were not the common man of their day. Ben Franklin studied scientific phenomena like lightning and the aurora borealis, and were he alive today, he could probably explain to Bill O'Reilly why the tides go in and out.
Full transcript and video (h/t C&L) below the fold.
And finally, New Rule, now that they've finished reading the Constitution out loud, the teabaggers must call out that group of elitist liberals whose values are so antithetical to theirs. I'm talking, of course, about the Founding Fathers, who the teabaggers believe are just like them, but aren't. One is a group of exclusively white men who live in a bygone century, have bad teeth, and think of blacks as 3/5s of a person. And the other are the Founding Fathers!
Now I want you teabaggers out there to understand one thing. While you idolize the Founding Fathers and dress up like them and smell like them, I think it's pretty clear that the Founding Fathers would've hated your guts. And what's more, you would've hated them! They were everything you despise. They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris, and thought the Bible was mostly bullshit. And yet, here is a popular painting in wingnut America.
Yes, that's Jesus with the Founding Fathers behind him, presenting the Constitution to America. Either that, or it's a settlement offer for that boy after he sued the rectory.
Super-religious guy Glenn Beck likes to play dress-up as Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine, an atheist who said churches were "human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind". John Adams said, "this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it".* Which is not to say the Founders didn't have a moral code. Of course they did. They just didn't get it from the Bible. Well, except for the part about it's cool to own slaves. It's in there, folks, I didn't make it up.
The Founders disagreed amongst themselves about that, and most issues. But the one thing they never argued about was that political power must stay in the hands of the smartest people, and out of the hands of the dumbest loudmouths slowing down the checkout line at Home Depot.
And yet, Sarah Palin once said of Obama, "we need a Commander-in-Chief, not a professor of law standing at a lectern". How gay is that! Well, I hate to break it to you, but:
Thomas Jefferson, lawyer.
Alexander Hamilton, Constitutional lawyer.
James Madison, lawyer.
John Adams, Constitutional lawyer.
They were not the common man of their day. Ben Franklin studied scientific phenomena like lightning and the aurora borealis, and were he alive today, he could probably explain to Bill O'Reilly why the tides go in and out.
James Madison was fluent in Greek and Latin, and could translate Virgil and Cicero. John Boehner can't translate Fareed Zakaria. And Thomas Jefferson was an astronomer and a physicist who founded the University of Virginia, played the violin, and spoke six languages. Or as Palin would say, "all of them".
*OK, I need to call out Bill Maher for that John Adams quote, because he did like so many others, and took that quote out of context. Here's the full quote.
Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!" But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell.
Yeah......... the rest of that quote certainly changes the meaning of what Adams really thought, doesn't it? :-\ Adams also strongly disagreed with Thomas Paine's criticism of Chrisianity. He wrote this about Paine:
The Christian religion is, above all the Religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of Wisdom, Virtue, Equity and Humanity. Let the Blackguard Paine say what he will; it is Resignation to God, it is Goodness itself to Man.
(And please, don't use that "blasphemy" quote from Adams either. It's also fabricated from two separate letters he wrote five years apart on two different subjects.)
There are enough quotes from our Founding Fathers against organized religion that Bill could've chosen from that would've equally made his point. Sigh. But still, lest some on the right dismiss what Maher said, his other points still stand, the strongest of which is this deranged anti-science stance of the Tea Party, which stands in direct contrast in the quest for scientific knowledge from our Founding Fathers.
Oh, and about that painting? It's from right-winger Jon McNaughton, and there's a funny parody site of that painting, complete with Emperor Palpatine added in! :-) Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Wonkette, and this site had already covered the story about the painting when it came out in late 2009, if you want to read more about it.
