DAVID BARTON, ANTI-HISTORIAN & SEPT QUOTES

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/09/1237633/-Conservative-non-historian-David-Barton-keeps-on-keeping-on

It's only history if it makes them feel good

If you are still by some chance unfamiliar with the conservative anti-historian known as David Barton, this is a good primer...he engages in various not-quite-true versions of history that regularly send evangelical conservatives, elected conservatives and professional conspiracy peddlers like Glenn Beck into shivers of feel-goodism about themselves. 

All this came to a head about a year ago with a David Barton book on Thomas Jefferson that was so riddled with errors and half-truths that, after a humiliating lambasting by dozen of actual historians—prominently including Christian scholars—it was pulled from publication. It was that bad.

...if you still supposed that anyone involved actually gave a damn about the difference between truth and fraud, but the key to Barton's success is that he tells the crowd what they want to hear. 

Barton appeals to a very specific portion of evangelicalism that treats history and science as interchangeable with religion—a movement that does not, and cannot, distinguish between the two. If belief dictates that the founding fathers were theocrats, then they were.

This is why the conservative evangelical movement will always be taken in by hacks and snake oil salesmen and the various pronouncements of the Glenn Beck; they want to be. In this movement of the compulsively self-centered, a movement that prides itself on cherishing beliefs over evidence not merely in religious matters but in science, in history, in sociology, and in politics, Barton plays the role of the priest, the oil company executive, or the tobacco company lawyer. Whether or not the facts of the case say one thing or another is utterly irrelevant; the demanded assertion is Such-And-Such, and the assertion of Such-And-Such is the beginning and end of the argument. 

BOOMAN - T-PARTY DELUSIONS, OBAMA AIDING AL QAEDA? MUST BE MUSLIM.
SAYS HE'S A CHRISTIAN...WE'LL HAVE TO TAKE HIS WORD FOR IT:

If you've been reading my recent pieces on Syria, you know that the Bush administration made a decision in late 2006 and early 2007 that they had miscalculated in invading Iraq. They had 

inadvertently empowered Iran and their Shiite brethren in the Arab world, much to the consternation of our Sunni allies in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the gulf emirates. Israel was none-too-pleased about the development, either, especially after their difficult confrontation with Hizbollah in 2006. As a result, the neo-cons devised a plan to combat and contain Iran which involved raising holy hell about Iran's nuclear program, as well as efforts to destabilize Bashir al-Assad's regime in Syria. Over time, this meant that al-Qaeda types and other radical jihadists with Sunni sympathies got into the fight to topple Assad's regime. Admittedly, this really got rolling after the 2011 Arab Spring began, which was on Obama's watch, but Obama had tried to reverse this policy and engage Syria and Iran diplomatically. He did not buy into the idea that the way to rectify the mistake of invading Iraq was to fuel a region-wide sectarian war on the side of the Sunnis. That makes it all the more ironic that the Benghazi conspiracy theorists are makingallegations like the following:

The lunacy began when Cliff Kincaid, a leader of Accuracy in Media, the group holding the gathering, suggested that the Obama administration is covering up events regarding Benghazi because the CIA operation there was secretly arming the enemy. “This administration has a policy of supporting al-Qaeda, the same people behind the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11,” he declared.

One of the panelists, former CIA officer Clare Lopez, picked up the theme. “Have we flipped our policy,” she asked, “to where we are placing the power, the influence, the might, diplomatic assets, military assets, intelligence assets, financial assets, at the service of al-Qaeda in the Middle East to bring to power forces of Islamic jihad? . . . Are we involved in the Middle East to help the forces of Islam, of al-Qaeda, of the Muslim Brotherhood, of jihad and sharia?”

[Rep. Frank] Wolf’s [R-VA] reply: “I think Clare makes a very good point.” And this is the man leading the effort to create a “select committee” to investigate Benghazi.

It's ironic because it was the Bush administration that decided, in the midst of a violent insurgency led by al-Qaeda in Iraq, that it was actually the Shiites who were the greater threat to our interests. They made that conclusion because our Sunni allies were so angry with us that we needed to respond to their concerns or our relationships with them would have been damaged. So, they set out to fight the Shiites and Shiite-influence in the region, which is the policy they handed to Obama.