It is no secret that we regularly listen to “WallBuilders Live” as part of our monitoring, and we do so because that is where we learn interesting things from David Barton like how people are on welfare because they are not reading the Bible, how prayer stopped the BP oil spill in the Gulf, and that there are no grocery stores in the city of Detroit.
But not every episode contains these sort of informative nuggets because sometimes Barton and co-host Rick Green dedicate the program to talking with our nation’s veterans about their harrowing experiences fighting in past conflicts. Today was one of those days, and though the program was actually rather interesting, these types of episodes generally don’t produce much that is of use to us in terms of blog content – except in this case Barton and Green gave us a nice shout-out at the end while bizarrely taking delight in the fantasy that we would be extremely uncomfortable listening to this show about “a guy who loves God and country”:
Barton: We got to do a little shout-out to our listeners that nobody knows about: Right Wing Watch. I mean, these are the radical left social guys and they listen to every program and these are the kind of programs that drive them crazy. I mean, what do you do with a guy who loves God and country, etc … ’cause they’re always beating on us – and by the way, in addition to them doing all their little releases, they always find a little clip here and there out of our program they can release to the Huffington Post. I also, and you may not know this, I made the top 25 this year – I think it’s the top 25 for the Southern Poverty Law Center and I’m apparently one of the 25 greatest terrorist, domestic terrorists in America ’cause just way too much of this God/country kind of stuff, you know patriotism now makes you a terrorist.
Green: Well congratulations.
Barton: So I’m curious to see how Right Wing Watch is going to handle a program like this where you’ve got such patriotism because now patriotism makes you a domestic terrorist.
Green: Yeah, because we’re loving our country more than some other country, we’re honoring the sacrifices …
Barton: Yeah, we’re not trying to be like France or Europe or those guys, yeah, you’re right. What can we say?
Green: Well, sometimes I like to irritate people, so let’s irritate Right Wing Watch a little bit with honoring these guys!
For what it is worth, it is not episodes such as this in which WWII vets recount their experiences serving in combat that irritate us – both of my grandfathers served in WWII, after all – it is Barton’s flagrant misrepresentations that irritate us; misrepresentations like claiming that he was listed among “the 25 greatest domestic terrorists” when, in reality, he was merely included in a SPLC report highlighting “30 New Activists Heading Up the Radical Right.”
Only in Barton’s warped view is a SPLC article proof that “patriotism makes you a domestic terrorist” while our efforts to point out his incessant lies means that we harbor some sort of absurd hatred for our nation’s veterans.
