Blarney! The Faux Outrage Over Obama’s Belfast Comments

[DonViejo]

by Michael Moynihan Jun 21, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

An expression of hope for Catholic and Protestant school communities is fodder for yet another manufactured scandal twisted into place by the president’s context-deaf opponents.

It must be exhausting to be a political-outrage hunter; rummaging through speech transcripts and scrutinizing cable-news clips, divorcing quotes from context, and inflating gaffes into threats to the republic.

Consider this latest ineffable outrage making the rounds on conservative websites. Speaking in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Monday to a mixed group of Catholic and Protestant schoolchildren, President Obama meandered through a eye-glazing history of Irish America and praised his host country, long beset by religious violence, for forging a fragile but lasting peace. It was paint-by-numbers stuff. But by Thursday, those indefatigable outrage hunters (who double as guardians of democracy and religious liberty) had extracted the following two sentences from Obama’s address:

“If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs—if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.”

One would have to be a special kind of dunce to miss the context and message here. But the Internet is, unfortunately, full of dunces. Splashed across the Drudge Report, readers were told that Obama made an “alarming call for end to Catholic education.” Over at Breitbart.com, John Nolte hyperventilated about Obama’s “chilling” attack on religious education. The speech showed that “leftists like Obama loathe parochial schools because they put children outside of the reach of government,” and drop them into “an environment void of Bibles and trans-fat but loaded with condoms and victimhood.” If you thought some of the stock conservative bugbears were missing from this list, fear not. Nolte did, thankfully, get around to the president’s soft spot for Muslims: “Obama singles out Catholic and Protestant schools, and not Islamic schools.”

full article
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/21/blarney-the-faux-outrage-over-obama-s-belfast-comments.html

[Mz Pip]

1. I already got an email trashing Obama for this

From my rw cousin. I told him that if you look at the 400 years of hostilities between the Protestants and Catholics, Obama had a point.

I'm going to send him this.

[Arkana]

2. Oh my god, what a heaping helping of Who Gives A Shit.

No one ever considered that maybe he didn't single out Muslim schools because he was in fucking IRELAND?!

[Proud Liberal Dem]

3. Yeah

lots of Muslim schools in Ireland!

[Bluenorthwest]

4. His own kids go to a private, religiously based school. How could he then be against such

schools? Insane peoples.

[treestar]

5. I've seen it

That darn Muslin! At it again!

[CBHagman]

6. I would almost believe people have had their brains surgically removed...

...except they can still register emotion, albeit manufactured emotion.

[TheJames]

7. Speaking of

living in a reality-based world-view, (or not).