Bartholomew's Notes

ASSIST Ministries is an unusual mix: some decent reporting of religious news and profiles unavailable elsewhere amid some mildly conservative cultural analysis and a spattering of credulous items on faith healings and such. However, I’ve just noticed that it also provides a platform for NewsMax pundit Tom Marsland:

Former heavyweight wrestler, corporate CEO and major market radio talk show host, Tom Marsland’s been a guest of both the White House and the West Wing Press Corps. Tom’s a volunteer for Pres. Bush’s Faith Based Initiative and is U.S. correspondent to New Zealand’s Nation-wide Radio Rhema.

Marsland’s topic this week is Michael Moore, and he asks, with great subtlety:

Is Michael Moore the New Leni Riefenstahl?

…Like Riefenstahl, Moore claims to seek the very truth he often violates. This is indeed curious, as lying is what he endlessly castigates Pres. Bush for. Perhaps he is familiar with the art of prevarication himself? Just as the Nazi film maker claimed that “reality does not interest me,” perhaps it doesn’t interest Moore either. Lastly, like Frau Leni, Moore too calls his film op-ed a documentary.

So Moore is just like a Nazi! This inspired me to look up some of Marsland’s other critiques. Also on his hate list is the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which promotes gun control. In May 2003 Marsland hilariously showed (piece reposted from an uncredited site) what the paper really stands for with crushing mockery of the paper’s name, which should really be the:

Minne-soviet Star & Sickle

In an undated piece for ASSIST (also only available via a reposted site), atheists are attacked for their, er, Islamic fundamentalism:

How can anyone silently stand by and watch, much less participate in the murder of children and the elderly? Ask an atheist. They’re often in ideological league with folks who have no problem with sacrificing children, whether on the streets of Jerusalem, or in Roe-V-Wade abortion mills.

Though these anti-religionists claim absolute ‘non-belief,’ they just happen to ‘believe’ very strongly in the essential goodness of man, a humanist value. I guess they must have slept through the whole Hitler thing in Mrs. Johnson’s history class. Their eyes apparently remained closed through Mao Tse Tung, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Stalin, and even the most recent batch of mass murderers, as in Arafat, Saddam, and Osama. Fools educated to the point of ignorance, plain and simple.

Last February in NewsMax he also denounced Dan Rather, for his interview with Saddam Hussein just before the war on Iraq:

He called the mass murderer Hussein “Mr. President” and disrespectfully referred to his own President Bush as simply “Bush.”

Marsland, drawing again on his extensive historical knowledge, pointed out that Hussein is like Hitler, so Rather was like someone fawning to Hitler.

Around the same time, Marsland also weighed and found wanting Europe, in thrall to secular humanism. Europe should know that:

The abbreviated list of secular humanist failures in the past century have included the former USSR, Communist China, Hitler’s National Socialism, Castro’s Cuba, Central American communism, Japanese imperialism and Mussolini’s Italian fascism.

Marsland concludes that:

Europe is now first hog at the secular humanist trough, with little appetite for our Creator. If I lived in Europe, I believe I’d duck every time I heard thunder and lightning strike.

But I fear Marsland’s advice on how to appease a roaring, wrathful deity comes to late: due to the godless European education system, people there take thunder and lightning for natural phenomena caused by static electricity, and merely avoid carrying umbrellas on hilltops during storms.

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