Virginia

Virginia Republican Lt. Governor nominee E.W. Jackson has consistently implied that President Obama is a secret Muslim, and in a 2010 American Thinker column went even further by arguing that President Obama condones anti-Semitism and terrorist attacks against Israel by Hamas.

After accusing Obama of remaining “silent” over Hamas rocket attacks against Israel in addition to Helen Thomas’ statement that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine,” Jackson writes that “given his close association with Islam and with one of Louis Farrakhan's best friends, his silence must be interpreted as consent.”

When people say "I hate to say I told you so," they rarely mean it. What they really mean is, "I was right, and I am glad to tell you so." A year ago, I wrote,

Obama apparently sees the world and Israel from a Muslim perspective. Those who think clearly about these issues must conclude that President Obama is influenced by a quiet strain of anti-Semitism picked up from elements of the black community, leftist colleagues, Muslim associations and Jeremiah Wright. For the first time in her history, Israel may find the President of the United States openly siding with her enemies. Those who believe that Israel must be protected had better be ready for the fight.

I really do hate to say "I told you so." I did not vote for Barack Obama, but I hoped he would surprise me and not be the kind of president that his background portended. Most Americans, even those who didn't vote for him, wanted to believe that he would transcend the negative forces which might have influenced his thinking. Perhaps the anti-Semitism to which he had been exposed had not gotten into his intellectual DNA. He attempted to reassure us.

…

In his much-hyped speech in Cairo, reaching out to the "Muslim World," Obama drew a moral equivalence between the "suffering" of the Palestinians and the Holocaust against the Jewish people. He said, "Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust." But he went on to say, "On the other hand, it is also undeniable that Palestinians ... have suffered in pursuit of a homeland."

To equate these two vastly different historical realities borders on the delusional. There is no equivalence between a systematic effort to annihilate the entire Jewish people and the problem of "dislocation" -- as Obama refers to it -- of the Palestinians. If there is any similarity at all, it is that many Palestinians, like the Nazis, want to kill all Jews.

…

Helen Thomas, an Obama devotee, recently said the Jews need to "get the hell out of Palestine." Obama is silent. For years, Jews in Israel could hardly sleep for fear that Hamas rockets would land in their homes. Yet when Israel takes reasonable action to search ships to prevent weapons from entering Gaza, she is condemned. Obama is silent. Reuters doctored the pictures of the recent blockade confrontation -- editing out weapons in the hands of the ship's crew -- so as to perpetuate the narrative of Israeli aggression. Obama is silent. Perhaps if he had not spent twenty years in the church of a rabid anti-Semite, President Obama's muteness would not speak so loudly. However, given his close association with Islam and with one of Louis Farrakhan's best friends, his silence must be interpreted as consent. I wish I were wrong about this president, but facts are stubborn things.

E.W. Jackson argued at a Tea Party rally last year that President Obama is trying to become a “dictator” and intent on leading “the most lawless administration that this nation has ever seen.” The Republican nominee for Lt. Governor of Virginia, who has suggested that Obama is an atheist Muslim Communist, told the Tea Party audience that unlike the founding fathers Obama “doesn’t believe” in the Constitution, freedom or America, maintaining that “for the first time” in US history a president “sets himself up as some sort of king or dictator.”

Watch:

E. W. Jackson, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia, said he opposes emergency federal aid in the case of natural disasters during his unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate last year.

In response to a question regarding the role of government “in helping folks following predictable natural disasters,” Jackson replied: “I don’t think that the federal government has much of a role at all constitutionally, at all.”

“I think as a constitutional matter the federal government doesn’t have a whole lot to do with that,” he continued, lamenting that “we’ve turned the federal government into a kind of God and you turn to the federal government for everything.”

“We don’t need the heavy hand of federal government stepping in every time something goes wrong,” Jackson said. “I don’t think there is any constitutional authority to do it.”

Watch:

Virginia’s new Republican Lt. Gov nominee E.W. Jackson made an unsuccessful run last year for the GOP nomination to the U.S. Senate. In this “message to the church” from that campaign, Jackson said there was a “calling on his life” to run for the Senate seat. He warned that “our culture is becoming increasingly hostile to Christianity” and he criticized Rep. Bobby Scott, a strong advocate of church-state separation. Jackson urged Christians to “rise up,” go to the polls, and “cast a vote for the glory of God,” i.e., for his Senate candidacy. The section quoted below begins at 2:35.

“This is an emergency, a critical point in American history. Continuing down the path we are on will result in escalating persecution of Christianity, but even worse, risk losing the favor of God on our country, which would be an unimaginable horror. I am asking Christians to unite on the biblical principles which founded our country and help me take those principles to the United States Senate. Those who understand the history of our country know the vital role the church played not only in the establishment of hospitals, colleges, and a host of other charitable organizations, but in the revolution which established this great nation. If Christians do not rise up, the future of our country is bleak. I ask you to go to the polls on June 12 and cast a vote for the glory of God. I’m not a perfect man, but I love the Lord, and I love this country, and I will always be grateful that He has saved me and gave me citizenship to the most free and prosperous nation in history. I will fight to see to it that it stays that way. As a brother in Christ, I ask for your prayers, your support, and for your vote on June 12 in the Republican primary.…"

The anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List made headlines in Virginia last week when it released the first paid advertisement in the gubernatorial battle between Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. The problem is that the centerpiece of the ad, the first in what SBA List promises will be a $1.5 million campaign to support Cuccinelli, is a blatant lie.

The SBA List ad discusses new “TRAP” regulations passed by the Virginia Department of Health and aggressively pushed by Cuccinelli, which burden abortion clinics with unneccessary restrictions in order to shut them down. The ad claims that McAuliffe, by opposing the new regulations, “refuses to require women’s health clinics to provide the same sanitary environment we expect of dental offices and hospitals.”

Politifact Virginia discovers that not only is this claim blatantly false, but Susan B. Anthony List doesn’t even try to back it up with evidence:

We asked Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for the PAC and the Susan B. Anthony List, for proof of the ad’s claim. She provided no facts. “We — meaning Virginia women — expect a safe, sanitary environment inside abortion clinics, places that should be regulated at least as strict as dental offices and in fact, even stricter — like hospitals — which are mentioned immediately after that,” she wrote in an email.

The ad implies that prior to the new regulations, abortion clinics were allowed to operate at lower sanitary standards than dental offices. There’s no evidence to support that. They were treated pretty much the same.

Not that this is a huge surprise coming from the Susan B. Anthony list, which has never bothered itself too much with the truth. After all, even the organization’s name is based on a gross distortion of American history.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was not officially welcomed at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, but he was invited to speak at Friday morning’s prayer breakfast hosted by Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, along with a couple Members of Congress.

Not everybody was happy that McDonnell was on the premises: activists from the National Taxpayers Union and the insanely anti-gay Public Advocate USA gave out anti-McDonnell flyers and stickers to people entering the breakfast.  McDonnell’s sin against CPAC orthodoxy was his support for a transportation plan in Virginia that activists say violates a campaign pledge against raising taxes.  Public Advocate also complained that by praising the General Assembly’s approval of a gay district court nominee, McDonnell “BROKE HIS PLEDGE TO SUPPORT TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE.”

Inside the prayer breakfast, McDonnell (like the Coalition’s Executive Director Gary Marx an alum of Pat Robertson’s Regent University) was introduced by Rep. Randy Forbes and warmly received.  McDonnell gave a talk that was light on conservative red meat and focused on themes of faith and service, urging activists to pray for humility and wisdom.  He did say it is the job of public officials to get things done according to “Judeo-Christian principles.”  And he cited George Washington saying that the nation could not expect “the smiles of heaven” if it abandoned “eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself have ordained.”

Forbes, a leader of the congressional prayer caucus, said our nation’s problem is that God belongs on the throne, we’ve taken Him off, and we need to put Him back up there.  Forbes resorted to a caricature common among Religious Right leaders, complaining about people he said were trying to change the concept of church-state separation to mean that no one in government can speak about their faith and no one in church can talk about the government.

Also speaking was Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who invoked a mural of the radical abolitionist John Brown that portrays him with a Bible in one hand, a rifle in the other, and the tornado of the civil war approaching. He called the HHS requirement for insurance coverage of contraception a “tremendous threat” and an attack of religious liberty. “What would John Brown be doing now?” he asked, suggesting that Brown would be on his knees in prayer but also on his feet demanding action from Congress.  Huelskamp complained that his colleagues in Congress are not acting to protect religious liberty, and denounced their “deafening silence” on threats to marriage. Huelskamp has previously complained to Tony Perkins about “the folks on the left that would like to delete, exclude and repeal any religious liberties or any religious values throughout our entire government and our entire society.”

Rachel Campos-Duffy, a conservative activist, author, and Real World: San Francisco alum who is married to Rep. Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, talked about the dangers of churches and families having ceded territory to “an ever-expanding and insatiable government.” For example, Campos said, school breakfast programs for poor students give parents an excuse not to make breakfast for their own kids and just push them out the door rather than talking to them.

Ralph Reed didn’t make the breakfast, but Gary Marx delivered a version of Reed’s post-2012 “it’s not my fault” analysis. Marx ran through statistics on the millions of contacts the Faith & Freedom Coalition made with the 23.3 million evangelical and Catholic voters in its proprietary database, and he said five million more evangelicals voted in 2012 than in 2008, with 78 percent of them voting for Romney. He said the group is actively engaged in this year’s Virginia elections and pledged that 2014 will see the largest mid-term conservative turnout ever.

The breakfast opened with a prayer by Father John De Celles of St. Raymond Penafort Roman Catholic Church in Springfield, Virginia, and closed with a benediction from Rabbi Aryeh Spero of the Caucus for America, who called for a reaffirmation of our “national identity” as a “Judeo-Christian nation” and denounced those who threaten the country from within by trying to "dismantle" that heritage and usurp God’s will.

Footnote: Among the VIP attendees acknowledged from the podium was conservative mega-donor Foster Friess, who backed Rick Santorum’s presidential bid but who has more recently encouraged a more moderate approach to LGBT issues, which he has said is due to his familiarity with gay people, including his brother-in-law and his partner.  There was no mention at the breakfast of news that broke last night about Republican Sen. Rob Portman’s about-face on marriage after his son came out to him. 

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