The Book of Mormon is an insane document produced by a madman who was a criminal and a rapist, Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda, and Chris Matthews has a strange fascination with Erin Burnett. If you don't watch MSNBC, you really should check it out.
Among the more intriguing questions to emerge from the media over the past year is how far off the deep end you have to wander to get reprimanded by MSNBC. On the one hand, the network’s willingness to retain the services of a steady stream of grotesques has made it infinitely more watchable — in the way those “America’s Wildest Police Chases” videos are watchable — than it was several years ago when its nightly viewership was roughly 39 human beings and maybe another hundred barnyard animals. On the other hand, the network is co-owned by General Electric, so you’d expect at least a minimum level of accountability.
No such accountability seems to exist however. How else to explain Hardball host Chris Matthews getting off (so to speak) scot-free last August after venting his crush on financial correspondent Erin Burnett? As he interviewed Burnett, located in another studio, Matthews’s hormones suddenly took over:
MATTHEWS: Could you get a little closer to the camera?
BURNETT: What is it? Is it (unintelligible) strangely?
MATTHEWS (to cameraman): Come in closer . . . no . . . come in . . . come in further . . . come in closer . . . really close.
BURNETT (nervously): What are you doing?
MATTHEWS: Henh! Henh! Just kidding! You look great! Anyway, thank . . . Erin it's great to have . . . look at that look . . . you're great . . .
BURNETT: I don't even know. I'm going to have to go look at the tape here. I'm in a strange location.
MATTHEWS (still laughing): No, you're beautiful! I'm just kidding! I'm just kidding! You're a knockout! Anyways thank you, Erin Burnett. It's all right getting bad news from you even. Okay. Thanks for coming on Hardball.
When it comes to erratic behavior, however, Matthews has nothing on MSNBC senior political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell. For veteran O’Donnell watchers, 2007 will be remembered as the year Mitt Romney supplanted Arnold Schwarzenegger as the object of O’Donnell’s trademark fixation-revulsion, that creepy shrine-on-the-bedroom-wall/post-its-on-the-dining-room-table tension characteristic of, say, a Mark David Chapman — who might have had O’Donnell’s career had he gone to the right schools. So, for example, after Romney’s December 6th speech in which he talked about the relationship between his Mormon faith and his politics — a speech even Romney’s detractors could find little fault with — O’Donnell laid into him during his semi-regular gig on the McLaughlin Group:
[Romney] dare not discuss his religion . . . This was the worst speech, the worst political speech of my lifetime, because this man stood there and said to you, this is the faith of my fathers. And you, and none of these commentators who liked this speech, realize that the faith of his father is a racist faith. As of 1978, it was an officially racist faith. And for political convenience, in 1978, it switched, and it said okay, black people can be in this Church. He believes, if he believes the faith of his fathers, that black people are black because, in Heaven, they turned away from God, in this demented, scientology-like notion of what was going on in Heaven before the Creation of the Earth.
For the record, O’Donnell is referencing the fact that, prior to 1978, blacks weren’t admitted to the Mormon priesthood; they were admitted to the Church as members since its inception. The change came not for the sake of political expedience — O’Donnell, like many on the political Left, presumes he can read the minds of whomever he dislikes — but, according to the official 1978 statement by the Church, because of divine revelation:
. . . witnessing the faithfulness of those from whom the priesthood has been withheld, we have pleaded long and earnestly in behalf of these, our faithful brethren, spending many hours in the Upper Room of the Temple supplicating the Lord for divine guidance. He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority . . . including the blessings of the temple.
To be fair, O’Donnell isn’t wrong to note that the Book of Mormon contains bigoted passages. But if we’re casting about for examples of scriptural intolerance, we’re going to have to confront both the Old and New Testaments, not to mention the Koran. Every religion, every denomination, every sect, wrestles with how to interpret their holy texts, and how to integrate scripture with the sociopolitical circumstances and fuller secular understandings of their time. Such niceties are lost on O’Donnell, however, who also insisted, “His [Romney’s] religion is based on the work of a lying, fraudulent criminal named Joseph Smith, who was a racist, who was pro-slavery. His religion was completely pro-slavery.” Actually, Smith’s views on slaveholding evolved from pragmatically pro-slavery to increasingly abolitionist over the course of his life, advocating, near the end, the purchase of slaves in order to free them; the assertion that the religion Smith founded was “completely pro-slavery” would come as a surprise to the citizens of Clay County, Missouri, where a Mormon community had taken root, who complained in 1836:
[The Mormons] were eastern men, whose manners, habits, customs, and even dialect, are essentially different from our own. They are non-slaveholders, and opposed to slavery, which in this peculiar period, when Abolitionism has reared its deformed and haggard visage in our land, is well calculated to excite deep and abiding prejudices in any community where slavery is tolerated and protected.
The fact that O’Donnell is an ignorant bully, of course, doesn’t necessitate a rebuke from MSNBC. More damning, however, are remarks he made in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt in which he attempted to clarify his earlier attack on Mormonism. He only dug himself a deeper hole, asserting that the Book of Mormon is “an insane document produced by a madman who was a criminal and a rapist.” Then, when Hewitt asked him whether he’d dare talk about Mohammed the way he was talking about Joseph Smith, O’Donnell replied:
Oh, well, I’m afraid of what the . . . that’s where I’m really afraid. I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do. . . . Mormons are the nicest people in the world. They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.
In other words, Lawrence O’Donnell is both an ignorant bully and self-confessed coward. Oblivious to evidence and scared to speak out. Just the kind of guy, I guess, MSNBC wants doing political analysis.
Which brings us to the current star in the network’s stable of hosts and pundits, Keith Olbermann of Countdown. The crucial thing to remember about Olbermann is that he got his big media break as a baseball card maven, and he remains, even today, a jock sniffer at heart, a refugee from ESPN’s SportsCenter who waded into the deep end of the cable news pool buoyed by the conviction that you can use exclamation points to tighten a syllogism. He has, in effect, brought to nightly news commentary the rhetorical methodology of the average sports debate: You-can-tell-I’m-right-because-I’m-more-worked-up-than-you-are. But the very fact that he reasons in the imperative mood — Impeach Bush! Indict Rove! — puts him on the same wavelength as much of the hardcore Left. Indeed, Olbermann looms at the epicenter of a genuine political zeitgeist, hero to thousands of ill-informed, irrational, relentlessly self-righteous moonbats. Thus, for example, to mark July 4th, Olbermann attempted to take on President Bush with the kind of baritone gravitas that Edward R. Murrow once took on Joe McCarthy:
I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people, a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient. I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors. I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely-motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience, and letting him run roughshod over it.
You’d need a tic sheet to track the begged questions, hyperbolic claims and outright non-sequiturs in such a passage. Except Olbermann’s not really arguing; he’s accusing. So logic be damned.
Again, there’s a segment of the political Left that eats up this slop. Why corporations like GE would choose to serve it on a nightly basis is a mystery. But setting aside Olbermann’s manifest intellectual shortcomings, setting aside his nasty, neurotic, O’Donnell-esque obsession with his 8:00 pm rival Bill O’Reilly, there remains the question of how even the limp suits at MSNBC could let pass Olbermann’s interview in the October issue of Playboy:
Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda — worse for our society. It's as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.
If such a comment escapes even a wrist slap at MSNBC, we’re left to wonder whether the network has any sense of shame whatsoever.
[...] When Enough Rope Isn't [...]
[...] Remember Lawrence O'Donnell's anti-Mormon ranting? Mark Goldblatt, belatedly, fisks it very well. [...]
O'Donnell's assertion that Mormons are "racist" is patently false and absurd. Mormons are more diverse than America. Half of Mormons live outside the US in one of 175 nations. About a quarter million Mormons are in African nations like Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique, etc. Several million Mormons are in Latin America, incluidjing a million in Mexico, and nearly that many in Brazil (many of whom are black). Many of these are Native Americans. There are a million Mormons in Asia and Polynesia, including 33% of Tonga and 25% of Samoa, 100,000 in Japan (about 10% of all Christians in that nation), plus 600,000 in the Philippines, and others in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Mongolia, and India. The BYU-Hawaii Campus is predominantly non-caucasian. And the "white" Mormons in the US serve missions in all those other nations, living with the people and learning their languages. For example, Zack Wilson, one of the lead dancers in Fox TV's new dance reality competition, served a mission in Ghana.
Mormons have never had racially segregated congregations. Blacks joined the church even before 1978. My congregation in Salt Lake in the 1950s, where I grew up, had black families. I baptized a black sergeant in Colorado Springs in 1974. As you noted, the black Mormons already IN the church (such as the thousands in Brazil) were the major reason the Church leadership asked God to approve a change in the long standing policy. There were also thousands in Africa who had been pleading for missionaries to come baptize them, who had been converted just by reading the Book of Mormon and sharing it with friends and family.
Even when blacks were not ordained, the church ordained Native Americans, Polynesians, Latinos, and Asiansand had been sending missionaries to them for over a century before 1978.
If O'Donnell had bothered reading the Washington Post the week before his tirade, he would have seen an article about black Mormons in Nigeria!
O'Donnell's remarks are deeply offensive to Mormons generally, and doubly so to racial minority members like me (I am a Japanese American, born in Japan). It is even more ironic that Lou Dobbs hates the Mormon Church because it EMBRACES immigrants from Mexico and Latin America! He thinks we are contributing thto the illegal immigrant problem by being nice to people.
With respect to Joseph Smith's character generally: No trial ever found him guilty of any felony. He was often arrested (under the vague standards of the time) for "disorderly conduct" because other people got disorderly when he preached to them. The most significant legal actions against him were plainly illegal, like the trial of Jesus: He was arrested in Missouri bi the militia and initially ordered to be summarily executed without trial. The subordinate officer refused the order. He and other leaders were then held without bail for months, without being indicted or tried. By Spring 1839, the state of Missouri was so embarrassed that they lethe prisoners "escape" during transport to a new venue, without a shot fired by the guards, who lent them horses. In Illinois, Smith peacefully surrendered to arrest, was taken to the county seat (away from the protection of other Mormons), released on bail but then rearrested after the circuit judge left town, so he would be held in the jail for a day. Before he could have a bail hearing, a unit of Illinois militia stormed the jail and shot him, his brother Hyrum, and his unindicted friend John Taylor. The resemblance to the execution of Christ was not lost on Governor Thomas Ford, who acknowledged feeling like Pilate in promising Smith safety.
So many preachers and political demagogues of Smith's day became rich and powerful without challenging the established religions of the day, that if Smith's goal had been riches and power, he could have gotten them with the approval of millions. HIs journals and letters, and those of hundreds of contemporaries who lived and worked with him every day, are now available for scrutiny. The picture they paint of him is of a man who was guided by principle, who put others before himself, who put telling what he believed to be true before the expediency of telling people what they wanted to hear. There is no evidence that Smith was in any way insincere in his professed beliefs. His sermons express love for God and his fellow man. He does not meet the criteria for a con man, who takes from his followers. Smith suffered as much or more than his followers. He had no home of his own until the last years of his life. He and his wife suffered several times the agony of losing children in infancy. He worked hard at physical labor his entire life.
Slandering Smith's chartacter is like the tales that Jesus somehow faked his death and resurrection, without any explanation for how a person of so much corruption could attract and establish an institution that engenders so much virtue among its members.
As for Smith's religious production, it is something that has withstood almost two hundred years of calumny and scrutiny. While the primary allegiance of Mormons to the truth of the Book of Mormon, as a companion witness of Christ's reality, is based on reading, pondering and prayer, there has been growing realization in the last 50 years that applying the standard tools of scholarship to the book demonstrates again and again that it has the marks of an authentic text with origins in 600 BC Jerusalem. It makes casual references to facts about the Arabian Peninsula that were unknown to any American in 1830, including the name of a particular location in Arabia, and the fact that, contrary to the beliefs of geographers, there was a small area in the Oman coast that was (and still is) lush with vegetation, including trees that could be used for ship timbers, as well as the only known depostis fo iron ore in Arabia, the latter only discovered 5 years ago.
The fact that Smith asserted the original record was written on gold-like metal was only a point for ridicule in 1830. Yet since then, hundreds of metal records from the millenium before Christ have been unearthed in the Middle East, such as the Copper Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which, like the Book of Mormon, was hidden up in a container and placed under the ground (in a cave) for later recovery.
The book uses proper names that have since been identified as non-Biblical but authentic Hebrew and even Egyptian names of 600 BC. Since the Rosetta Stone had not been translated yet, how could Smith have guessed at those names, and ones that were well known at that period? Two of the leading men in the book are named Alma, yet the fact that this was a male name was not known until 50 years ago, when Yigael Yadin found and inscription attesting to it.
The Book has many iknstances of Hebraic text forms, such as the inverted parallelism Chiasmus (ABC, CBA), sith some examples of 10 and 15 levels. This form was not known in America in 1830, and only a few scholars in Europe had studied it. There is no evidence that Smith ever tried to use this form to authenticate the book, which he surely would have done if he had known what it was, and had gone to the trouble of purposely introiducing it into the text. No one noticed it was there until 1967. Repeatedly, application of various scholarly methods to the book have borne fruit in demonstrating it is full of authentic Hebrew language, grammar, and pre-exilic religious beliefs (as attested by Methodist British scholar Margaret Barker). Proefssor John Sorenson has proposed a strong correlation between the text and the geography of southern Meexico and Guatemala, for which he gives detailed support.
Mormons do not expect enyone will accept the Book of Mormon on those gorunds alone. But they do maintain that what they have discovered shows that it is intellectually possible to be an educated person and a Mormon. The book just keeps getting more and more to look like an ancient document.
On the dismissal of the idea of a pre-Columbian voyage to the Americas: Archeology now supports an understanding that the earliest Americans arrived as much as 20,000 years ago, before the "land bridge" through the ice cap opened up 13,000 years ago. The only rational way for them to do that was by boats, probably small coastal vessels or rafts. Thus, travel by ocean appears to have been the PRIMARY method that mankind colonized the Americas. The fact that humans were found all over the Pacific Ocean by the Eruopeans means that they had the means to travel those distances before European technology arrived. The refusal to accept the cultural cross-connection betwen the pyramids of Egypt and Mesopotamia and oiAmerica is more the proprietary attitude of American archeologists than any actual evidence of separate origin or lklogic.
The Book of Mormon itself is full of teachings concerning the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and attest to the centrality of salvation through Him. Critics complain it is etiehr too much like the bible, or too different from it., They cannot make up their minds. It is clearly supportive of the Bible narrative, and does not contradict it in any way. Its main message is that God is the God of the whole earth, not just one small region in the Middle East. The alleged "racism" of its text is a modern superposition on some of its phrasing. Remember that its references to another "race" is really only about two branches of the same original colonizing family. All through 1,000 years they communicate and intermarry. There are mass movements where one faction dissents from one group and joins the other. And at the two most important junctures of the history, it is the "whiter" group that is the most wicked and suffers the greater destruction! The message is clearly NOT that "whiter" people are approved by God, but rather that those who obey God are approved by God. Some of the greatest heroes of the Book of Mormon are the "Lamanites", such as Samuel the prophet who foiretells the birth of Christ, and the 2060 young men who fight to defend the "white" Nephite nation against their unbelieving cousins. These "stripling warriors" are icons of fortitude and faithfulness to Mormon children. While some Mormons absorbed typical American attitudes toward Indians, in general the Mormons had better relations with the Indians than other settlers, and treated them better, teaching each other that they were children of Isrtael to whom God had made promises of special blessings. Spencer W. Kimball, who received the 1978 revelation, was especially concerned with advancing the education of American Indian youth. for decades, "white" Mormon families would take in Indian children as foster children to live with and go to school with their own childrten. Integration could not be more advanced than that. Almost every Mormon in the West attended church and school with Indian children and youth during the 1950s and 1960s. One of my circle of friend s in high school included Bill, a Navajo who had been abandoned by his family because he was a para[plegic, and confined most of the time to a wheelchair. We had several classes together, and he drew posters when I ran for a student body office.
EVen out in the periphery of Mormondom, we have Mormon missionaries from Kenya and Mongolia who come to help convert the people of eastern Idaho. One of Japanese misisonary companions had three daughters, one of whom was a missionary in Florida and on Temple Square in Salt Lake. A second daughter attends BYU Idaho and married an Idahoan. HIs third daughter attended BYU-Hawaii and married another Japanese student, and they are employed in Chicago!
O'Donnell, if he simply visited Mormon wards in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC, would be confronted with Mormons of all races, often married to each other, and speaking each other's languages.
He needs to be told to go out and meet some real Mormons before he passes judgment on people who have been persecuted for so many years for such little reason. O'Donnell has born false witness against his neighbors, 13 million fold. The fact that he has a role in the production of the TV series "Big Love" just compounds the culpability of the media for engendering hatred. After playing the role of a sincere liberal Democrat on The West Wing, he has demonstrated the hypocrisy of the Left, which lauds itself for its support for diversity, but demonstrates through tirades like his that whenever it gets power, it wil be totalitarian in its intolerance of real diversity and its obstinate ignorance.
[...] You'll find over at the Intellectual Conservative's site a pretty big mix in this article. In the article is a blurb about Chris Matthews of "HardBall" and his interview with Erin Burnett. It was a really odd commentary between the two – and the Intellectual Conservative has it written down. [...]