Adam Weinstein

Engagement Editor

I'm Mother Jones' engagement editor and Tumblrizer, specializing in explanatory journalism and new-media reporting. As a Navy vet and ex-Iraq contractor, I'm also committed to articulating all things martial—good, bad, and weird—to new audiences.

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Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' engagement editor, having previously served the magazine as its national security reporter and copy editor. Before that, he worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and the Tallahassee Democrat. He's written for the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, and Newsweek. A Navy veteran, two-day Jeopardy champion and ex-political scientist, he also did a recession-fueled stint as a military contractor in Iraq. For more about Adam and his writing, click here.

Glenn Beck: God Hates Justice

—By Adam Weinstein

| Mon Mar. 8, 2010 3:36 PM PST

Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Reinhold Niebuhr, even Billy Graham: charlatan hucksters. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference? Anglicans and Episcopalians? The Society of Friends? The Catholic priests who stood at the vanguard of the US civil rights demonstrations and world human rights movements? Freedom-hating commies. If you love America, then you must run from them. No less a theological expert than Glenn Beck has spoken.

Beck took the opportunity on his radio and television shows last week to issue his faux fatwah against churches who espouse social and economic justice. His declaration of jihad—wrapped, as always, in fear, loathing, and repetition—is worth quoting at length:

I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them...are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, the idea - hang on, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! (H/T to First Things; full audio is here.)

And just as the universe tends towards entropy, so, too, did Beck's rant, ending in incoherent bauble about commies and Nazis:

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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Best. Music. Video. Ever.

—By Adam Weinstein

| Fri Mar. 5, 2010 1:12 PM PST

Check out a brief live-action history of painting's masterpieces, set to the song "70 Million" by the French band Hold Your Horses! The Raft of the Medusa and the Death of Marat are eerie; the Mondrian and Magritte—and all that follow them—are simply amazing. The song ain't bad, either. Feast your eyes, then spread the link. Hat tip to the esteemed art historian Stassa Edwards for passing this on (full disclosure: She's my wife).

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

Killer Whales and Living Biblically

—By Adam Weinstein

| Wed Mar. 3, 2010 3:38 PM PST

Last week, Americans confronted a range of emotions on learning that Tillikum, a killer whale at Sea World in Orlando, seized its trainer in the middle of a live show and killed her in a violent underwater frenzy. Dawn Brancheau, 40, died doing what she loved: communing with animals who are awe-inspiring and, by nature, dangerously unpredictable. While postmortems and new precautions are understandable, decorum and a sense of compassion for the deceased would dictate that we refrain from misplaced rage and abject stupidity.

But not if you're the American Family Association, which in its faux-Christian zeal seems to have swapped out the Gospel's teachings of love, patience, and charity for old-school righteous fury. Bryan Fischer, the AFA's recently appointed "director of issue analysis for government and public policy," wrote a post on the organization's blog today titled "Bible ignored, trainer dies." In it, he called for the stoning death of Tillikum in alleged accordance with scriptural law, since he had killed before:

If the counsel of the Judeo-Christian tradition had been followed, Tillikum would have been put out of everyone's misery back in 1991 and would not have had the opportunity to claim two more human lives.

Says the ancient civil code of Israel, "When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable." (Exodus 21:28)

But then Fischer went a step farther: If this were the old days, he wrote, Sea World curator Chuck Thompson would be stoned to death, too:

...the Scripture soberly warns, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn't kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal. To use the example from Exodus, if your ox kills a second time, "the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death." (Exodus 21:29)

Fischer—who moved to the AFA last year from the Idaho Values Alliance, and who is ironically dubbed a "friend of life" on his AFA bio—has never been the smartest parishioner in the pew, whether it's arguing that gay judges can't be fair or that the US military should ban Muslims.

But this is a new low, one that the AFA should probably distance itself from pretty quickly. The organization states one of its goals as "promoting the Christian ethic of decency." As a Christian—a subscriber to a rather rigorous and considered scriptural tradition—I find nothing decent in Bryan Fischer's tirade. Except that his position on killing animals fits pretty decently with this faux-faith organization's position on killing convicts, too.

Please Just Stop, Sarah Palin

—By Adam Weinstein

| Wed Mar. 3, 2010 1:05 PM PST

It feels as if Sarah Palin's been attacking Fox's "Family Guy" longer than she was governor of Alaska. Last night, a desperate-for-ratings Jay Leno gave her another forum to vent about a single line in a February episode of the comedy show. (One of the characters, a learning disabled woman, refers to her mother as "the former governor of Alaska." Palin took that as a dig against her son, Trig, who has Down Syndrome, and happily played the victim via a note on her Facebook account.)

Given the golden opportunity, Palin flat-out lied to Leno:

"...I commented and then that gets out there in the blogosphere, it gets out there in the different forms of the mediums that we have today. And then it's left there, not an opportunity for me to follow up and kind of elaborate on what I really meant and what I really thought of the thing."

Before Mr. Leno went to a commercial break, Ms. Palin said that a fuller opportunity to discuss the incident would have led to a "much healthier dialogue." After the commercial, she did not expand on her remarks. (H/T to the New York Times via The Daily Dish.)

Funny, since we all seem to remember her 6-minute tirade on Fox's "O'Reilly Factor" last month, when she went on at length about the "Family Guy" fake controversy, then parsed Rahm Emanuel's and Rush Limbaugh's uses of the word "retard." She also took the chance to rail against "the Hollywood Fox," apparently to differentiate it from the more-authentically American Wasilla Fox studio.

[Read more in the Riff blog]

Kerry, Swift Boat Kingpin Make Nice

—By Adam Weinstein

| Wed Mar. 3, 2010 2:23 AM PST

Well, if lions and lambs can work things out, why can't John Kerry and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? Politico is reporting that, in his search for support on a climate change bill, the Massachusetts senator is reaching out to an old political foe: the billionaire energy maven (and brillantly named) T. Boone Pickens.

Pickens has acquired some juice, earned or not, in the past couple of years as an advocate for alternatives to fossil fuels. But he was also the overstuffed wallet behind the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry in the 2004 presidential election—a campaign that's become, in many ways, the model for today's GOP and the Tea Parties. At the time, Pickens gave the Swift Boaters $3 million and offered another $1 million prize to anyone who could debunk the group's attack ads. (He subsequently reneged when some former sailors did just that.)

Back then, Kerry was not a happy camper. "It is disturbing that in reaffirming the challenge you issued, your parsing and backtracking seems eerily reminiscent of the entire approach of the SBVT," Kerry wrote in an open letter to Pickens during the campaign. "Say one thing, put out an allegation, then duck and weave, hedge and bob when your words catch up with you."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]