Pontius Pilate was a Wingnut

I recently wrote a post about how the dopes at RedState were extremely aggravated by the "Jesus was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate was a governor" line, and here we are a week later and they're still upset about it. Last time, we had RedState Founder Erick Erickson threatening liberals with eternal damnation if they kept saying it, and now we've got Pejman Yousefzadeh still struggling to spin this against us.

His solution? Check out this doozy:

Dwight Eisenhower was a war hero.
Adlai Stevenson was a politician from the state of Illinois.

Right. So now every politician from Illinois is no better than Adlai Stevenson (which presumably would also apply to Abraham Lincoln). And even more absurd, a POW from a bad war that we lost is the same as the Supreme Commander who saved the world from fascist Nazis. And this is so good that Pejman suggests they might want to "bumper-stickerize" it. Honestly, would even 1% of the population be able to make sense out of this one? I doubt it. I suspect "Adlai who?" would probably be the standard response.

And hey, if we came back with "Dwight Eisenhower was a war hero. Abraham Lincoln was a politician from the state of Illinois," would their heads explode? I hope so. That'd be great!

Back-Asswards Again

But of course, Pejman's got all this backwards. First off, the whole thing got started when conservatives started smearing community organizers and trumpeting Palin's experience as governor. And so the purpose of the liberal slogan was to defend community organizers, while showing that governors aren't always great. And that was it. It wasn't an attempt to say that all community organizers are Jesus or that all governors are evil. It was merely a way of defending community organizers.

But naturally, conservatives didn't get that at all. Because they're small-minded people who can't make connections of that nature. That's why they attacked community organizers in the first place. I suspect that most of them didn't even know what a community organizer was until they were told Obama was one, and so they naturally assumed it must be a bad thing because Obama was one.

So when they mocked Obama for being one, they weren't trying to smear all community organizers. That was merely a by-product of their smear on Obama. But they're much too small-minded to realize how many people they were offending with those empty attacks. Had they been told that McCain was a community organizer, everything would have been different and they'd be praising organizers as being the salt of the earth.

And so basically, when you say "community organizer" to a conservative, all they mean is Barack Obama and the anti-American radicals that they associate with Obama. And that's it. The term doesn't really have any wider meaning to them. And that's why they imagine that it's somehow blasphemy to say that Jesus was a community organizer, because to them, that's the exact same as saying Jesus was Obama. Because that's all the word means to them.

Defending War Heroes

And now we see Pejman making the same small-minded mistake. Because remember, the liberal slogan was created because conservatives had been smearing Obama for being a community organizer, and liberals wanted to defend community organizers. So the conservative equivalent of this would be if liberals were attacking McCain for being a war hero and conservatives wanted to defend war heroes.

And in this case, they'd defend war heroes by pointing out that Eisenhower was also a war hero, which would mean that it's wrong to smear war heroes. But of course, nobody is smearing McCain for being a war hero. Nobody. They might argue that being a POW doesn't make McCain a hero, but they're not smearing him for being a hero. So it makes no sense to create a slogan to defend war heroes if people weren't attacking war heroes.

Similarly, if liberals were praising Obama simply because he was a politician from Illinois, in the same way that conservatives praised Palin simply for being a Governor, then it would make sense to point out that Illinois has had a bad politician come from there. But again, nobody is praising Obama simply because he is a politician from Illinois, so it makes no sense to create a slogan denouncing politicians from Illinois. That's just not how this works.

Small Minds Think Alike

So once again, we see conservatives who have totally missed the boat because they're too small-minded to even understand what a boat is. In their small world, this wasn't about community organizers or governors or war heroes or Illinois; this was only about McCain, Palin, and Obama. And even more small-minded, it was just about conservative versus liberal. And so Pejman set-off to find some sort of link-up that would defend the conservative and attack the liberal, and this was it. And suddenly, every POW that has ever existed is instantly greater than any politician from Illinois, simply because a conservative had his feelings hurt.

And while the liberal slogan needed to be about community organizers and governors, Pejman's slogan could have been anything. It could have focused on age, and pointed out that George Washington was over fifty when he became president and Charles Manson was under fifty when he killed those people. Or it could have been a height thing, focusing on good short people and bad tall people. And hey, a "Winston Churchill was white, Idi Amin was black" slogan would have been a lot of fun. But whatever it was, it had to say that McCain had the same attribute of a good person while Obama had the attribute of a bad person; and that's it. Small minded.

And funniest of all is that this toss-off bumpersticker phrase still irks conservatives so much. Not that I get some big thrill by annoying conservatives, but it's funny to see what gets them upset. A slogan. It was just a stupid slogan. Hard working Americans are losing their homes because of greedy bankers, and these jerks couldn't care less. But create a slogan that gets their goad and you'll still see them struggling to fight it a week later. It's funny. It's sad. I'm laughing, yet I'm shaking my head. It's all so confusing.

Oh, but on the good side for us: According to Pejman, our slogan is only "quasi-blasphemous," so perhaps there's some hope for our souls yet. Perhaps we only go to quasi-Hell for that one. Erick Erickson wrongly concluded that saying the slogan was a "unforgivable sin." Perhaps now it's merely quasi-unforgivable.