Chuckie (Charlie Daniels) vs. Taco Bell and ... the Illuminati?!?

Back in the Aughts, I used to do a regular "Chuckie Watch" on the "Soapbox" posts from country musician Charlie Daniels, who appointed himself an avatar of Patriotic Correctness for the country music scene after the 9/11 attack.

At 81, ole Chuckie is still posting Soapbox rants at his website and on his Facebook page. They haven't changed much or improved in quality over the last 15 years or so. And because the rants are so monotonous, dull, and unimaginative, I've wondered sometimes if they are ghostwritten. But I'm willing to give Chuckie credit for being monotonous, dull, and unimaginative all by his own self.

These days, Chuckie has made a bit of news because he thinks that Taco Bell is being dangerously soft on the Illuminati conspiracy: Charlie Daniels wants Taco Bell to take Illuminati seriously USA Today 01/10/2018.

The Norway terrorist attacks, political violence and the politics of fear

By titling this post as being about political violence, I don't minimize the role religion may have played in the killings to which Christian extremist Anders Behring Breivik has confessed. Extremist Christian and Jewish hatred of Muslims clearly played a role in his ideology. But his act was very much a political act, aimed at the ruling social-democratic party of Norway.

What we need in response to terrorist acts like Breivik's is realism more than fear. Juan Cole, in an otherwise thoughtful column on Breivik and far-right terrorism (When Extremism Learns to Blow things Up Informed Comment 07/24/2011) writes:

But when you hear people talking about lumping all these issues together; when you hear them obliterating distinctions and using black-and-white rhetoric; when you hear them talk of existential threats, and above all when you see that they are convinced that small movements that they hate are likely to have an immediate and revolutionary impact, then you should be afraid, be very afraid. That is when extremism learns to hate, and turns to violence. [my emphasis]

That's not good advice: it's one thing to understand the real danger of far-right violence; but the reaction shouldn't be based on "be afraid, be very afraid." Cole himself even make that point in a following paragraph:

Unfortunately, some unscrupulous billionaires, Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers prominent among them, have honed their propaganda skills in the media and public life. The promotion of hate, panic, and fear, especially if it is tied to specific political, ethnic and religious groups, always risks violence. [my emphasis]

But he goes for the lets-all-look-at-ourselves approach in his concluding sentence, "The real message of Breivik is that we should all take a deep breath and step back from the precipice."

If this were the late Weimar Republic and the political parties had to have effective combat wings to survive, then advice like that might be appropriate. But at least in the US, there is currently no significant political violence coming from "the left." But, as Dave Neiwert and others have documented, during the last three years we have had repeated instances of overtly political violence coming from people acting on radical-right notions. Fortunately, we've had nothing on the Breivik scale since the Oklahoma City attack of April 19, 1995.

In this case, it's important to remember that far-right groups operate within in a particular context. I've seen a bit of hair-splitting by writers trying to say that of course those who only advocate hate should not be equated with those who commit murder.

But what's good about Cole's column is that he focuses on the particular combination of qualities of political demagoguery that lead to violence. This silly compulsion to equate "both sides" is just that, silly. It comes from a particular social and political milieu. The milieu of far-right political violence (with which the US has a serious problem) and that of leftwing political violence (which currently is effectively non-existent in the US) are very different. A thug like Scott Roeder, the antiabortion zealot who murdered Dr. George Tiller in his church in 2009, is not going to listen to what a liberal might have to say. Only if other antiabortion activists made it clear to him that they thought that murdering health providers was wrong, a sin, and a thoroughly un-Christian way to oppose abortion would be likely to have some effect on him.

Yousef Munayyer, executive director of Executive Director of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development, writes in Lessons drawn from the blonde bomber Ajazeera English 07/26/2011 has some good advice, and it's not "be afraid, be very afraid":

The only thing worse than failing to anticipate right-wing terrorists like Breivik because of short-sighted assumptions is failing to do so again, now that we've witnessed what they are capable of. Western nations must take this opportunity to reflect on the attacks in Norway and ask what is being done to prevent this from happening again.

First, there needs to be a serious rethinking about the Islamist boogeyman and a reevaluation of the share of security and intelligence resources dedicated exclusively to it.

Second, Breivik's attacks should put to rest the idea that complex networks or cells are necessary to pull off massive and devastating attacks. [This comment was probably premature; we don't know what kind of network he may have had. - Bruce]

Third, Breivik's ethnic background and the fact that he knew it would help him "escape the scrutiny often reserved for young men of Arab descent" should put to rest any discussion about racial profiling as an effective or efficient security measure.

Fourth, serious attention must be paid to the radicalisers on the right and the Islamophobes who preach a dichotomous worldview. Explicit calls to violence are clearly not necessary to inspire violence against civilians, and thus right-wing chat forums should receive every bit as much scrutiny from terror analysts as so-called jihadi web sites.

The lives of the victims of the tragedy in Norway are lost forever, but we mustn't let their blood be spilt in vain. Instead, we must adjust our assumptions and policies about terrorism and Islamophobia at this critical moment.

Breivik wanted to send a "wake-up" call. Let's make sure we're never asleep when Islamophobia or right-wing terrorism tries to shake our societies again.

I'll add one reservation that I suppose seems "quaint" in these days of massive NSA data sweeps. But there should be some legitimate law-enforcement reason to monitor websites. There are privacy concerns. Yes, I'm old-fashioned that way. And wading through mountains of cyberjunk rantings from grumpy rightwingers could waste an enormous amount of time that law-enforcement could be devoting to something more useful.

Having anti-terrorism personnel spending their time reading some old fool like Chuckie fantasizing online about various forms of violence and children being dismembered is unlikely to tell them more than that Chuckie is a weird old has-been country singer still trying to market records to elderly Tea Party types. But it's unlikely that either he or his small handful of fans have either the brains, guts or energy to do anything more dangerous that give themselves strokes ranting about whatever their momentary obsessions are.

Tags: chuckie, charlie daniels, charlie daniels soapbox, norway attacks 2011, radical right, terrorism

Chuckie Watch 121: Revisiting Chuckie

Well, y'all, it's been quite a while since we stopped in to visit ole Chuckie. Eight whole dang months, as a matter of fact!

But being one of the country's leading experts on ChuckieThought and all, I don't see how I can turn down the call of duty.

This week, Chuckie's writin' about Confrontation 04/09/07.

Chuckie's heard about that there Nancy Pelosi woman goin' over to Syria when Bush done told her not to. And Chuckie don't like it:

As far as I'm concerned Nancy Pelosi's name can be put alongside Jane Fonda as someone who has no trouble delivering a slap to the face of every man and woman serving in the military.

To think that the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States would go to a terrorist state, play patty cake with a dictator who is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of scores of service men and women serving in Iraq is past disgusting, it's downright sickening.

And all this in defiance of the Commander and Chief.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, Chuckie. But let's start from the bottom and work back up.

First of all, I'm guessing by "Commander and Chief" you mean your Chief and Commander, Dear Leader Bush, Liberator of Peoples and Scourge of the Heathen. And we all understand how you fell about Dear Leader, Chuckie, we really do. We git it.

But, you know, there's this paper called the Constitution. And it's, well, the legal basis that defines our government. I know this seems real abstract and all, but it really works that way!

Now, this Constitution thang defines the President as the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces when their on active service. Armed forces, that's soldiers and sailors and people like that, Chuckie. Not members of Congress, unless they also happen to be on active duty military service. Pelosi's not. That means Dear Leader ain't her Commander-in-Chief. Or mine, or anybody else's except the active duty armed forces. I mean, unless you just want to adopt him as your own Commander-in-Chief, or Commander and Chief, or Chief Commander, or whatever.
Now about this playing patty cake with dictators and all, I have a request for everybody. Please, don't nobody show Chuckie that photo of Don Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand. Pore ole Chuckie might have a stroke or something.

And, Chuckie, I know you have special contacts in the foreign policy field. But you
must be gittin' behind on your FOX News watching. It's Iran that the Party says is "indirectly responsible for the deaths of scores of service men and women serving in Iraq" and is, you know, all "past disgusting" and "sickening" and stuff. That's IraN, Chuckie, it's on the other side of IraQ. You can call IraN "Persia" if it helps you keep it straight.

But Chuckie, Chuckie, Nancy Pelosi is like "Jane Fonda as someone who has no trouble delivering a slap to the face of every man and woman serving in the military"? Oh, it hurts to have to do this. But we have it on good authority that Chuckie has praised Jane Fonda his own self! Back when Jane announced that she had had a born-again Christian religious experience, ole Chuckie wrote:

And there will be those in the Christian community who will question your commitment. Yes Jane, you’re probably going to catch it from all sides, from people who are supposed to be your friends. And those, who a few short years ago were lauding you with honors and Academy Awards may very well turn their backs on you. So be it. That’s just the way of the world. What you have received is the most precious thing in existence. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul. So hold on, Jane. Through criticism, ridicule and doubt. You just keep holding on to Jesus because he is the way the truth and the life. I will bepraying for you Jane. Welcome to the family my sister.

Yes, it's true. Chuckie himself has praised the woman "who has no trouble delivering a slap to the face of every man and woman serving in the military". Yep, back then, Chuckie said, "So hold on, Jane. Through criticism, ridicule and doubt." Even called her "my sister"! Why, Chuckie, why? What will we tell the children?

Chuckie also writes in his current sharing of wisdom:

Some in Congress and the Senate actually want to set a date for withdrawing the troops from Iraq. That's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It's like telling a burglar what time you¹ll be leaving your house so he can come in and take every thing you own.

Now, Chuckie, I just ain't that good at analogies. But wouldn't it be a better comparison to say it would be like leaving somebody else's house and leaving the owners of the house there to deal with their home security issues? I'm just sayin'.

Chuckie also says:

The only kind of diplomacy people like Assad and the mullahs in Iraq understand is strength and Pelosi has taken a giant step in demonstrating that there is a breach in the American armor, There are people who had rather placate and run instead of standing and fighting.

Chuckie, I know that Syrians and Iraqis are both Arabs. Well, except for the ones who are Kurdish and stuff. But just because we're fighting Arabs in Iraq doesn't mean that the Syrians are preparing to land commandoes on the East Coast of the US.

Iraq, Syria, Iran, I know they're all Arabs and foreigners and Muslims and so on. You know, except for the Kurds. Well, and the Iranians are mostly Persians. And, they're foreigners to us but they're natives in their own country. The point is, you gotta try to keep up which countries it is we're at war with.

And when I read this:

I guess she has grandiose imaginings of being some great statesman but all she has done is pour gasoline on the burning determination of the radical maniacs
who have no problem with slaughtering women and children or hacking an infidel's
head off.

Chuckie, you might want to scratch the itch for these kinds of fantasies by going to a horror movie or something instead of stewing it around all which-a-ways in your head. Check out that new double-movie Grindhouse. It has exploding pus-zombies getting gunned down all over the place. It even has a woman with a machine-gun leg! Try it, Chuckie. I bet you'll think it's almost as much fun as listening to 10 hours of Rush Limbaugh at a stretch.

See also my Chuckie Watch index.

Tags: charlie daniels, charlie daniels soapbox, chuckie

Chuckie Watch 4: Chuckie wins the war

CHARLIE DANIELS, would-be arbiter of Patriotic Correctness for country performers and fans, has a book out called Ain't No Rag, published by the rightwing Regnery Press. One of the essays is called "Veterans," which recycles a blowhard "lesson" of the Vietnam War, one that anyone who grew up in America has heard a few dozen times. And to let us know where this fits in the culture wars, he writes:

When I think about brave men and women being spit on by dirty, stoned-out, jobless, pseudo-intellectual hippies whose only contribution to this nation had been to burn their draft cards, it makes my collar get about two sizes too small.
Now, Chuckie's not too big on citing sources. But presumably he knows about some incident in which a couple of intoxicated unemployed guys with poor personal hygiene who read Hermann Hesse novels and had burned their draft cards spit on some veterans. Or maybe they were just drunk and threw up on them.

However that may be, Chuckie knows about fightin' wars:

We could have won that war [Vietnam], if it would have been fought on the battlefield instead of the halls of Congress and the Oval Office.

Now, I'm not quite sure how it is that the US could fight a war without the President and Congress being involved. But anyway, Chuckie says:

In my book, when you go to war you shoot at the enemy every time you see him and you keep on shooting until he either surrenders or doesn't exist any more. You throw everything you've got at him every hour of every day until you grind him into the dust. Bomb him; shoot him; overrun his positions; cut his supply lines, and do it consistently until you pound him into submission.

Now, this sounds to me more like a description of an antebellum Southern slave patrol going after some planter's human property who had absconded from the plantation than like guerrilla warfare.

But here in the real world where American troops are involved in guerrilla wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that's not very useful advice. One of the particular challenges of counterinsurgency warfare is to find ways of protecting your troops while targeting guerrillas, avoiding civilian casualties and proceeding with normal government and development, all at the same time.

Yeah, it'd be grand if them there "Baathist diehards" and "Taliban remnants" would come out and fight like a regular army so we could kill 'em quick. But they just don't seem to be cooperating in that plan.

And just identifying the enemy is also a big factor in counterinsurgency. If you go blasting away indiscriminately at small bands of guerrillas ("shoot at the enemy every time you see him and you keep on shooting"), especially in urban settings, the troops are likely to kill civilians or friendly police. Which has already been happening in Iraq way too much as it is. And large-scale guerrilla warfare requires lots more than quick-and-easy battles that make exciting stories on Fox News. It requires police, paramilitaries and a regular army from the country where the insurgency is going on.

But Chuckie thinks they all need to be quick and easy:

And then, after he is thoroughly beaten and you can deal from a position of absolute authority, sit down at the peace table with him, work out something sensible, and get our troops the heck out of there.

If we're not willing to go all out to define and attain victory, we should never, ever get into another war.

"Absolute authority" - there's that Old South touch again. But isn't that what Bush and Rummy have already done in Afghanistan and Iraq? In both cases, the enemy government collapsed so completely there was no one to sit down with at the peace table. But our troops haven't been pulled "the heck out of there." Bush and Rummy also still seem to be working on that defining and attaining victory part. Does anyone know how to tell when we've won in either Iraq or Afghanistan?

Yet Chuckie's still cheering for both wars. And I can't help thinking that reconstructing Iraq to be a model democracy for the Middle East - which Chuckie's hero Bush still says we're going to do - may be a little more complicated than "working out something sensible."

In other words, Chuckie's macho formula for winning wars is just a bunch of bluster and hot air.

Tags: charlie daniels, charlie daniels soapbox, chuckie, chuckie watch, iraq war

Chuckie Watch 1: Chuckie and the Muslims

Our friend CHARLIE DANIELS likes to talk about what a devout Christian he is. But he's not really into all this ecumenical nonsense you hear talk about. Chuckie's Soapbox column of 09/02/03, "Not the Same" is about Islam versus the True Religion (Chuckie's version of Christianity). Chuckie says, well, heck, the Christian God's name is Jehovah, and them there Muslims call their god Allah. So they obviously ain't the same!

This is all silliness, of course. Jehovah is an English translation of the Hebrew name for God in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), more commonly rendered now as Yahweh. "Allah" is just the Arabic word for God. The Hebrew Bible uses other names for God, too, such as El Shaddai and Adonai.

Yes, Islam borrowed elements of pre-Mohammedan "pagan" religion. But so did Judaism borrow from Canaanite, Egyptian and Babylonian religious ideas. Just as Christianity was later influenced in various way by Greek philosophy and other religions with which it came into contact and competed.

Chuckie illustrates his theological depth by asking, "Why do the Arabs hate the Jews?" And answers by explaining that Abraham's son Ishmael was banished from Abraham's household, a biblical story which he evidently reads quite literally as history. "Ishmael became the father of the Arabs and [Abraham's other son] Jacob became the father of the Jews and the enmity has existed every since."

The irony of this explanation is entirely lost on Chuckie, I'm sure. But in crudely identifying Arabs with Islam and tracing their history back to Abraham and Ishmael, he is closer to conservative Muslim claims about the origins of their religion than to most modern Christian readings, not to speak of secular historians.

But Chuckie, promoting hostility between Muslims and Christians, can't admit the common origins of the three "Abrahamic" religious traditions. Actually, the ideas of Jewish Christian communities may have influenced Mohammed's religious ideas. Anyone who reads the Koran can see the influence of the Hebrew scriptures.

Instead, Chuckie promotes a crudely ethnic and unhistorical notion of the present-day hostilities between many Arabs and Jews, and specifically between Israel and its Arab neighbors, that is offensive to good sense and to any kind of honest Christianity.

- Bruce Miller

Hearing: Jackson Browne, "Casino Nation"

Tags: charlie daniels, charlie daniels soapbox, chuckie, chuckie watch

Introducing the Chuckie Watch

One of the things I plan to do here regularly is the Chuckie Watch. This will be a commentary on the ravings of the country singer CHARLIE DANIELS, which he posts regularly in his Soapbox at his Web site.

I capitalize his name because he is known for writing e-mails in all caps. Which fits, because he's basically a loudmouth blowhard.

So why would I want to write about him? For one thing, Chuckie seems to picture himself as a Nashville political guru, especially for determining what's Patriotically Correct.

For another, Chuckie's Soapbox rants show one stage of how rightwing ideas get dissiminated, from the superficially respectable forums like Fox News and the American Enterprise Institute and the Weekly Standard through the Rush Limbaughs and his many clones on hate radio to the kind that you find tossed in your face, usually by people who should know better.

Of course, Rush and Chuckie and the rest of that crowd don't represent regular folks. They represent a nasty minority who spew rightwing fantasies over the airwaves and the Internet.

If the Republicans want to try to make country music a partisan affair, as they did with the ludicrous campaign against the Dixie Chicks, regular country fans certainly don't have to sit still for it. Chuckie may think that Enron Republicanism and mindless jingoism represents the spirit of country music. But anyone who loves the music of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family and the many others who gave birth to this form of music will find that hard to accept.

First installment: Chuckie and the Muslims

- Posted by Bruce Miller

Hearing Hearing Shakira Mebarak, "Moscas en la Casa"

Tags: charlie daniels, charlie daniels soapbox, chuckie, chuckie watch