What did Obama actually say in his interview on French television?
And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there's got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.It seems clear that Obama was not likely implying that the U.S. was less a Christian Nation than a Muslim Nation. He was simply playing the game that parallels that of saying if California were a nation, it would have one of the largest GDPs of countries in the world. He was simply saying that enough Americans were Muslim that their numbers are very important relative to the number of Muslims in the world. This is not as inflammatory as Sean Hannity was making it. It is wrong however.
Muslims in America like to say that they number somewhere between 3 and 8 million or between 1.0 and 2.6% of Americans. This is an exaggeration used to try to project more political influence than they really have. The Pew Research Center in 2007 says that Muslims are 0.6% of the adult American population. In comparison, 78.4% are Christian, 1.7% are Jewish, 0.7% are Buddhist, 0.4% are Hindu, and 1.2% are Other (Native American religions, Unitarians, New Age, Wiccams, etc.). In addition, 16.1% are unaffiliated. Of these, 1.6% are atheists and 2.4% are agnostics. Apparently Muslims are not a very large fraction of the American population. The present population is about 304 million people, so 0.6% is 1.8 million people. There are several tens of countries in the world with more Muslims than the U.S., including France. For this reason, Barack Hussein's statement is a gross exaggeration and therefor false.
Of course, when Barack Hussein said in Turkey that we were not a Christian Nation, he really inflamed many Christians like Sean Hannity. A country that trumpets its claim that its citizens have freedom of conscience through such explicit rights as freedom of religion (which should have been called freedom of conscience and certainly includes the freedom to any religion or to no religion), freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to petition government, is not a Christian Nation. This need not deny that most Americans are and have been Christians or that this fact has not played an important role in our history. It simply says there is no requirement that a citizen in good standing need be a Christian.
I am and will remain very critical of Barack Hussein Obama. However, I am very busy fighting his program for converting Americans into a nation of servents to socialist governments. I have no desire to manufacture issues with him. There are plenty of real issues and I could easily make it my full time profession to simply address those real issues. Furthermore, those who accuse him of errors he has not committed and faults he has not revealed, undermine their credibility, and to some degree that is taken as undermining the credibility of everyone who is critical of him. So, you Conservatives need to be a good deal more rigorous in your arguments against this despot.
Argh, it annoys me a lot when media just take something out of context and make it into a huge deal. FOX news is just a terrible terrible program to watch on TV. The world would be so much simpler and nicer without them...
ReplyDeleteTake care, Elli
There is no TV or cable news station that offers a good and intelligent analysis of the news all of the time or maybe even most of the time. Fox News does not generally have the intellectual pretenses and facades of some other news networks, which actually makes it more tolerable to me. When almost every intellectual pretense is wrongheaded, as on CNN, CSNBC, and ABC for instance, it irks me to no end. Fox is more favorable to Capitalism and more critical of socialism, which I prefer. Fox is less ready to assume that all the bullies of the world would be nice if only the evil U.S. did not provoke them, sometimes just by being capable while they are incompetent. Fox has a better understanding of military and economic issues generally than do the other news networks.
ReplyDeleteYes, Fox does spend too much time on celebrities and sensational murders or accidents. It is the network that aims most to speak to the average person and their interests. Though I am not the average person, I find no home amid the leftist wrongheadedness and the elitism of the other major news networks. I cannot stand their paternalism and their presumptions that they and their highly educated listeners know better how to run the lives of the average American than that person does. This leads them to feel comfortable in calling for program after government program to choose the values the average person will live by and force them to live by them. Fox does not do this, but for a few religious hangups such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Frankly, these problems do not affect most Americans as negatively as taxing 44% of their income does and making all of their economic activities ransom to the whims of an out-of-control government. Only Fox News understands that there are supposed to be severe limits on government power according to the Constitution. Only Fox has been as severely critical of the despot Obama as his policies require.
I really enjoy Judge Andrew Napolitano. Glen Beck is bombastic, but he is performing a great service by revealing much that is wrong with socialism and the so-called progressives as they now wish to be called. Neal
Cavuto could be a stronger defender of the capitalist system than he is, but what other network gives as much time to someone even as strong as he is?
Some other networks will give you more news about the world, so they have their uses. But, you had best be very capable of winnowing out the socialist crap their corrupt worldview brings along with it. Fox has the wisdom not to buy into world government, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, taxes designed to hurt the productive which will cause government to lose, not gain, revenues, and the idea that most people are incapable of managing their own lives. What other news network has this wisdom?
Fox News is foxy. Yes, it has the prettiest women. But, it also has a lot more wisdom wrapped up in a folksy manner. This drives the intellectual pretenders up the wall, which I have to admit I enjoy.
As I hope I have made clear, I do believe a woman has an abortion right. Government has no role in marriage, but should offer domestic or civil partnerships to any combination of adults with no more limitations than would be placed on who and the number of partners in a business partnership. I do not believe in God. There are certainly things I disagree with Fox News about, but there is a still greater disagreement with the other news networks.