I do enjoy how every last Republican seems to think that now is the perfect time to pipe up with their own batshit insane theories about why Barack Obama iz not gud American. You may have thought we had dispensed with most of these theories years ago, but no. House Republicans have them squirreled away in their hearts, ready to bring out again whenever one of America's most batshit insane radio hosts needs a little
self-validation.
Republican Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp said comments from President Obama on Christian history and modern Islamic extremism reflect his education overseas as a child.
“Well as you said he believes this and uh, don’t forget this was not a man educated in our American system,” Huelsklamp told Laura Ingraham last week. “He learned all kinds of things wherever he was educated. He spent time in Indonesia and their schools there and this is exactly what they taught there. It’s probably close to what he believes.”
We're talking about time spent abroad when Obama was roughly kindergarten age, as I recall? I'm fairly certain that any attempts by my teachers to indoctrinate me on nuances of religious extremism and non-extremism at that age would have gone considerably worse than their already-doomed attempts to teach me how to draw landscape scenes featuring happy suns and dubiously structured single family homes, but it is a staple of the
Obama as foreigner crowd to suspect that his brief time there so overwhelmed all other life experiences that it basically turned him into a ticking time bomb of anti-Americanism that would stew and stew and stew and finally go off one day in a violent explosion of maybe helping to convince Congress to give people marginally better health care.
Again, though, all of this is (still) in service to explaining why Barack Obama bringing up the Crusades that one time is just the worst, and explaining why Christian religious extremists from a thousand years ago were good and pure and how dare you insult them and so on and so forth.
["P]eople are dying out there because of Muslim terrorists, and unless we recognize that fact we are never going to defeat them. But after a 1000 years of history Laura, there is no question that the unpinning of Islam is radical and it is violent. Which is completely different than our Christian history, and we have to understand that. [...]”
Huelskamp added that Islam was spread by “fire and sword and terror,” while Christianity was spread by “saints and martyrs,” a history that he said Obama wants to rewrite.
If you had asked me just a year ago whether we would be having prominent Republicans absolutely seething for weeks over a political opponent criticizing
The Freaking Crusades, I would have thought you were joking. Lesson learned. As for the supposition that Christianity was spread by peace-loving Crusaders, Inquisitors and Conquistadors who farted rainbows and unicorns over the land while Islam was spread only by Bad People, yeah, I would have believed that one. Tim Huelskamp probably learned that from his radical American kindergarten teacher and he'll go to his grave believing it.