(God help me—Photo of an actual botched Wal-Mart Cake)
Or 24-Percenter Tales To Astonish!—Issue #41:
“Jesus and The Amazing Time Travel Machine”
Many readers and commenters here have rightfully cited a simple point in fact—a point in fact that is troublesome to have to deal with, but is undeniably so—that there is a hard-core 20%-to-30% of the American people who will unflinchingly believe as the one, true Gospel anything their lunatic, dim-bulb masters tell them.
I'll tell you why that's distressing. It's the uncomfortable feeling that these wind-up bots of muddle-headed group-thought will say and do just about anything to defend their positions—wrong as they may be, and are just as liable to lash out irrationally when their side loses enough clout to where they can be more easily ignored.
Let's focus on the slightly better prospect of the two—the “say and do just about anything to defend their positions” path. We are talking about people who have had it imbedded deep in their primary operating systems—like Robocop's “Prime Directive” list—the guiding mantra that THEY MUST NEVER ADMIT TO BEING WRONG...EVER!
They can answer 2+2 =5 as a “Final Jeopardy” question before a live audience of hundreds and millions of TV viewers, or run down from the stands and drop kick a just-grabbed-from-the-stands newborn 70 yards through the goalposts on ‘Monday Night Football”, and as sure as Djimon Hounsou ain't Edgar Winter's brother, they will find a way to deny, straight lie and justify their goof-up as somehow not being a goof-up at all.
The case in point today?
The broken-hammer dumb Bill O'Reilly while playing his role of skeevy Father O'Falafel on the radio for his 38 listeners, got all authoritative with a caller about how the Middle East's current clashes were all pre-ordained, stating:
(November 13th O'Reilly Factor: RADIO via Media Matters)
...“Go to Revelations in the Bible and look at the prediction for the end of the world. It's fascinating, because it does involve the Middle East, and it does involve the clash of cultures, as Jim pointed out.”
“Now, a lot of people think that's superstition, nonsense, all of that. The secularists reject it out of hand. And I'm not trying to convert you to be a Bible-thumper. I'm just saying it's an interesting read. This was written -- what? Five thousand years ago?”
Um...I have found that even a great many non-Christians know the simple and oft-repeated time-frame of the Bible's time of creation—Jesus died 2000 years ago, and the Bible was written shortly thereafter. 2000 years ago! I know it, You know it. Even the most lapsed CEOs (“Christmas and Easter Onlys”) know that hammered-in little factoid.
But Bill O'Reilly somehow didn't, and in fact pulled an extra 3,000 years out of his onanistically-diddled ass and plain-old fudged (Good God! Did I just use the verb “fudged” in that sentence too?) the date.
Keith Olbermann didn't miss O'Reilly's half-assed Bible schooling either, and here's where it gets hilarious:
(O'Reilly) who blasts secular progressives and makes fun of people who slip up on their biblical knowledge; he made a bible reference himself; “go to revelations in the Bible and look at the prediction for the end of the world. This was written, what, 5,000 years ago?”
Five thousand years ago? All right, let me go through this slowly for you. The Revelations in the Book of Revelations are said to have been written by John after an Angel came to see him with these revelations from Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, Bill. Now, he was supposed to have died roughly 2007 years ago, which is where we get the number on the calendar, the calendar things with the years on it. It‘s a.d., ano domini (ph), year of our lord. It is sort of dated back to the death—
The rusted, cinderblock-propped clown car that is Newsmax.com—the “Dick and Jane” primer for the freepazoid set then decided to come back on Olbermann, chiding him for dating A.D. as “roughly 2007 years ago” as opposed to subtracting the assumed 33 years of Christ's life to get the “proper” 1,974 years.
O'Reilly missed by thirty centuries and they look the other way, Olbermann says “roughly 2007 years”—missing by about thirty, and he's the fuck-up? Well, to complete the “no limit to their ass-covering” circle, Newsmax went here—without so much as a fare back:
But were you right in suggesting that Bill O’Reilly was wrong? In a word, no.
Bill O’Reilly, as you reenacted him, tossed off questions asking whether the Book of Revelation was written 5,000 years ago. But odd and off-base as this number is, we technically cannot call O’Reilly wrong.
Why? As its resident star-scientist Carl Sagan could have explained to you when you attended Cornell, lowest vine of the Ivy League (which, as a privileged loony-left kid from Westchester, you probably chose because it is known as “Big Red”), simple questions may imply but rarely assert factuality. Therefore simple statements in the interrogative mode — questions — are almost never “wrong.” E.g., “Could it be that this footprint is evidence that Bigfoot exists?”
It’s like Sen. Hillary Clinton avoiding direct answers in debates.
But, Keith, Bill O’Reilly’s inflection made clear that he himself was asking questions about whether the Book of Revelation “was written, what? 5,000 years ago?”
Yes...that's how far they will go. Fuck the “Chewbacca” defense—these sillingtons have brought it millions of light years home with the good, old American “Bigfoot” defense.
For them, O'Reilly was right because in the middle of his religious bloviating, where he authoritatively speaks of how “interesting a read” Revelations is (See, he's read it and whatnot.) and cites passages predicting this and that, he states in “Who doesn't know this?” question form when the book may have been written, thus making it okay to muff the date by thirty fucking centuries!!! Brilliant!!!
That kind of neener-neener cognitive dissonance is the sort that leads fools the way to dusty, head-bagged, and freshly-Nike-ed death.
You kind of know the rest of it...
“Out! Out, brief truth!
Thou art a walking annoyance,
A poor substitute,
Who struts and frets his hour 'pon the stage
And is paid attention to no more.
T'is a tale, told by a reality-spouter,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying uh...nothing they want to hear.
And with that, I reluctantly await Sean Hannity's splitting the uprights later this season at a Jets game and having it all explained away as an unfortunate “metatarsal-to-infant malfunction.”
I can only hope that the netting behind those ever-moving goalposts breaks the tot's fall somewhat.
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