Christian Congressman Has "Nagasaki and Hiroshima" Plan for Gaza
April 1: “Hiroshima” fix for Gaza … Kidney punch … Transgender Easter … NJ Dems vs. democracy …
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) was revealed on Friday to have said at a public forum last week that Israel should eliminate Hamas “like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”
Walberg is a former pastor, the 2023 co-chair with Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA) of the National Prayer Breakfast, and the guy who in October told Uganda to “stand firm” against international pressure to drop its anti-LGBTQ+ death penalty.
Naturally, just as Walberg tried to deny that he said what he said in Uganda, over the weekend his office suggested that he invoked the only wartime use of atomic bombs, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, as a metaphor for quickness.
Y’know, like when your parents would say, “Turn off the TV and clean up your room right now. Like Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”
But Walberg also endorsed the other kind of killing people: Slow and torturous. Health officials say malnutrition and dehydration are already killing people in Gaza. But Walberg argued that, “We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid," using a common metaphor for starving people to death.
Condemnation of Walberg’s remarks came swiftly, like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And not just from Democrats. Republican Senate candidate former Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) also weighed in on Walberg’s “utter indifference to human suffering.”
Of course, Amash’s umbrage arose from knowing actual people affected, because compassion for abstract people is hard, while proximity empathy is easy. Amash is Palestinian American and has relatives in Gaza.
But even some Democrats screwed up their response. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) took a shot at Walberg’s remarks, but caused some collateral damage among nonbelievers. “This is a reprehensible thing for anyone to suggest, especially an elected official and someone who considers himself a man of faith,” she said.
The implication, of course, is that we expect to reprehend the shit that atheists say. As I’ve written before and will again, “Christian” ≠ “good,” let alone “morally superior.” (In real-life land, secular countries have lower rates of violence than countries run by men of faith.)
If someone really wants to stir some shit, they could condemn Walberg’s remarks by saying, “This is a reprehensible thing for anyone to suggest, even though we expect this kind of moral failing from a man of faith.”
Walberg’s a real, dyed-and-rose-again-in-the-wool Christian. And Democrats need to acknowledge that reality before we can have a real conversation about why some (most? all?) religions are susceptible or even prone to yield people like Walberg who make statements like Walberg does. And we need to have that conversation soon, like Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
FLASHBACK As your humble Fucking News previously reported, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), chair of the Equality Caucus, asked The Family — the secretive group behind the National Prayer Breakfast, with ties to Uganda’s death-penalty legislators — where they stand on Uganda’s law. And The Family wouldn’t say.
Racism So Systemic It’s Found in Circulatory, Urinary Systems
It turns out it’s not just Black lives that matter. Black kidneys matter, too. (Do not tell me all kidneys matter.)
Until just a few years ago, Black people who needed a new kidney were being discriminated against. That’s because labs were using a formula to analyze kidney test results that overestimated kidney health in Black people.
Y’know, like when a witness tells police a 12-year-old Black kid was a grown man with the strength of ten.
As a result of these super-kidneys, Black people were getting discriminated against in organ-transplant lists. They had to wait years longer than if they and their super-kidneys were white. (And, yes, this isn’t the first or last case of systemic medical racism, which can arise out of unconscious bias but rectified by people who are conscious of it. Or “woke,” if you will.)
The good news is that the super-woke National Kidney Foundation and American Society of Nephrology a few years ago pushed labs to stop using that racist formula to crunch patients’ kidney numbers. And then something else good happened.
Staffers at woke transplant centers started racing — working weekends and overtime — to identify people currently on the transplant lists who would’ve qualified earlier if they weren’t Black. There are almost 90,000 people waiting for new kidneys and about 30% are Black (Black people actually suffer kidney failure at rates three times higher than white people do).
Since January 2023, transplant-network staffers have found 14,300 Black people who have now been moved up the list for transplants. (Which, of course, will be outlawed by the right-wing Supreme Court as racism against white kidney patients and/or kidney beans.)
Already, as a result of being moved up the list, more than 2,800 of those people have now received new kidneys. Which, of course, the right-wing Supreme Court will order them to return. But it’s a victory for now!
Israelis Stage Largest Anti-Israel Rally Since Oct. 7 Attack
Tens of thousands of antisemitic Jewish Israelis filled the streets around the Knesset yesterday. As American politicians have explained, calling for a cease-fire or criticizing Israel is not only anti-Zionist, it’s antisemitic.
It’s not clear why so many Jewish Israelis turned out to express their hatred of Jews and Israel. But for the first time since the Oct. 7 massacre, family members of hostages are now taking the lead in protests, which are obviously led by Hamas sympathizers.
Talks to free the hostages resumed yesterday, but there’s little reason to think this time will be any different. The only time Hamas has freed significant numbers of hostages is during the previous cease fire, which both Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have failed to agree on repeating.
“We believe that no hostages will come back with this government because they’re busy putting sticks in the wheels of negotiations for the hostages,” Boaz Atzili told the AP. Atzili’s cousin was taken hostage and killed, while his cousin’s wife was released. “Netanyahu is only working in his private interests,” Atzili said.
Protesters called for a new cease-fire to effect more hostage releases. They also blamed Netanyahu for security failures that enabled the attack. Failures like, I dunno, fostering Hamas’s growth to counter the Palestinian Authority.
And they blame Netanyahu for toxifying Israel’s relations with the United States. Then there’s Netanyahu’s whole corruption-trials thing.
American politicians who have called U.S. cease-fire protests antisemitic were not immediately available for hypocritical comment about the Jewish Israeli antisemitic protests.
More Good News About Jesus’s Love
Yesterday was Easter Sunday. For some Christians, anyway.
And this year, Easter happened to fall on March 31, which is also the Transgender Day of Visibility. For some Christians, anyway.
But as I wrote on Twitter, some Christians were horrified to find transgender people instead of chocolate and Peeps™ during their Easter egg hunts. Because Pres. Joe Biden issued a proclamation recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Biden had “betrayed the central tenet of Easter,” which is apparently that transgender people should be invisible.
So I did a little digging and it turns out The Bible doesn’t tell us what the central tenet of Easter is, because The Bible doesn’t even mention Easter. (Don’t look for Christmas, either. In fact the only modern Christian holiday explicitly celebrated in The Bible is the Fourth of July, which marks the day that Jesus signed the Declaration of Independence, giving oil companies dominion over the Earth.)
So where did we get this whole “Easter” thing? Syncretism1! It turns out, Easter appears to be named after Oester, the Germanic goddess of spring or fertility or something similar that involves rabbits and chickens and other animals that fuck a lot. Then I dug even more and found that there’s a connection to a male spirit of light named Austri.
Which means Easter may have changed sexes along the way. And if that’s true, then maybe Johnson and his fellow Christians have been celebrating transgender visibility all along.
Also I asked AI what Oester and Austri might look like today…
Criminal Successfully Barred from Office
A former president was not only convicted of a crime but has now successfully been barred from office in a country — not ours, obvi — where former presidents must obey the law.
Former South African President Jacob Zuma, who resigned in 2018 amid corruption allegations, was actually convicted of a crime and in 2021 was sentenced to 15 months in prison for failing to appear before the commission investigating him.
Zuma got medical leave to serve just two months, but the sentence itself stood — and South African law bars anyone sentenced to more than a year from holding public office.
So, last week, the Independent Electoral Commission ruled that Zuma is ineligible to run for the National Assembly, which if he won could then elect him president. Zuma has only until tomorrow to appeal, because obviously you wouldn’t wanna let a former president drag out important legal disputes for months or even years.
Campaign Watch
DEM JERSEY DEMS New Jersey is famous for Democratic corruption, legal or otherwise. And, no, I’m not even talking about Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). I’m talking about elections.
The New Jersey ballot famously gives preferential treatment to Democratic Party endorsees, putting them on what’s called “The Line,” the most prominent ballot position. Well, Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) is running to replace Menendez and he and other Democratic candidates in other races filed a lawsuit challenging “The Line.”
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi flatlined “The Line,” ordering a ballot redesign. The Democratic machine can now appeal Quraishi’s ruling, while also pursuing a ballot redesign that will still undemocratically aid their friends but in a new way.
It’s not just the Democratic Senate primary — in which Kim is now the clear front-runner — at stake. Menendez’s son, Rep. Rob Menendez (D-NJ) — aka Rob “No Relation” Menendez — is being primaried for the House seat that he mysteriously somehow won in 2022.
Quraishi’s ruling just gave a leg up to Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla, the other contender in that primary.
TCB
ME AND MY TALKING Don’t forget to catch me tonight around 5:30pm eastern time for my weekly “The Fucking News” segment on The Nicole Sandler Show. You can watch or listen here.
In the meantime, come say hi on Twitter or Facebook or Bluesky or Mastodon. I’ve been a little remiss in my social-media stuff lately as I’m racing the clock to finish my next story. I even worked on it over the Easter weekend, betraying the central tenet of Austri.
Go get ‘em, kids…!
When a new made-up religion replaces a previous made-up religion by making some of its made-up shit look a helluva lot like the made-up shit it’s replacing.
Pure gold--"the only modern Christian holiday explicitly celebrated in The Bible is the Fourth of July, which marks the day that Jesus signed the Declaration of Independence, giving oil companies dominion over the Earth."