This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
The week that began with talk of the socialist pope, ended with right-wing absurdities about Nelson Mandela. Is nothing sacred?
1.
Rush Limbaugh: The pope rips America, causing Obama to orgasm! And then
Mandela really showed those American blacks how to do civil rights!
The
man who has continually raised the ante on outrageousness brought his
A-game this week, starting with comments about Pope Francis and
President Obama. “The pope is ripping capitalism, ripping trickledown
economics, ripping America. And Obama is having an orgasm,” Limbaugh
spewed. “The pope has co-opted Obama.” Because what really gets this
president’s motor going is “ripping this country apart.” (Are you
listening, Michelle?) Obama demonstrated his ejaculatory pleasure in
criticizing America a few days later when he had the audacity to say
that “increasing inequality is most pronounced in this country.” The
nerve!
Nelson Mandela’s death provided fodder for the right-wing
radio ranter to reach new paroxysms of offensiveness and denounce the
civil rights movement in America, which of course helped bring about
Obama’s presidency. Here’s his case:
“Nelson Mandela
actually lived through the indignities, the punishment, the
discrimination, the horrors of the South African apartheid system. Came
out of it — you realize when he was inaugurated president, he invited as
his special guests the white jailers from his Robben Island prison? He
literally did forgive everybody.
“Nelson Mandela would not
qualify as a civil rights leader in this country with that philosophy.
They can’t let it go. It’s become too big a business. They will not let
it go. Mandela let it go. It’s just — amazing.”
Of
course, Mandela went on to decry the ongoing “cancer of racism” in
America and elsewhere. He did not think racism had ended (unlike the
RNC, it seems: see item #3 below).
(h/t: mediamatters)
2. Sarah Palin: Thomas Jefferson and I agree. Those meanie atheists are trying to abort Christ from Christmas.
Sarah
Palin managed to combine those dreaded atheists with abortion,
Christ-killing and the dastardly war on Christmas all in one fell swoop
in a speech at Liberty University. She was, of course, promoting her new
book
Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas, and the former not full-term Alaska governor is nothing if not good at self-promotion.
She
also revealed a new talent for channeling the founding fathers. She
knows exactly what Thomas Jefferson would do if he were alive today:
He’d go on Fox News to complain about the war on Christmas. In other
words, he’d be Sarah Palin.
That’s because—and this might come as a
surprise to those who have read the part of the constitution about
separation of church and state—Jefferson and his buds wrote the
constitution specifically for religious people. Nonreligious people, in
other words, amoral people, are not capable of understanding the
constitution, and they are therefore not able to follow its precepts.
Here’s an excerpt from this marvelous bit of oratory:
“If
you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, then we
will not follow our constitution, there will be no reason to follow our
constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand
that there is something greater than self, we are to live selflessly,
and we are to be held accountable by our creator, so that is what our
constitution is based on.”
There’s some more rambling after that, but you get the idea.
From
there, she jumped back to her favorite topic and the one that promotes
her book, saying Jefferson would agree with her that “angry atheists
armed with an attorney” had set their sights on destroying the religious
themes in Christmas celebrations.
“Why is it they get to claim
some offense taken when they see a plastic Jewish family on somebody’s
lawn—a nativity scene, that’s basically what it is, right?”
A plastic Jewish family. Is that in the scripture?
(h/t Raw Story)
3. Tin-eared RNC: Racism and sexism have ended.
The
national Republicans deftly demonstrated how they can appeal to both
women and blacks this week. They started offering lessons to candidates
on how not to say offensive things about women, especially when you are
running against one, as Todd “legitimate rape” Akin did. Clearly, a
steep learning curve there. Emergency reinforcements may be needed.
Over
the weekend, the RNC declared that racism has ended in a tweet marking
the anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and celebrating Rosa
Parks’ famous act of civil disobedience. “Today we remember Rosa Parks’
bold stand and her role in ending racism,” they said. Hilarious tweets
ensued under hashtag #racismendedwhen, with answers like “when Mr.
Drummond adopted Arnold and Willis,” “when Bill Clinton played the sax
on Arsenio Hall” and “when the Fresh Prince moved to Bel-Air.”
Realizing
their mistake after, well, millions of people ridiculed them, the RNC
amended the tweet, “clarified it,” by saying Parks fought to end racism.
But, let’s face it, they really think racism has ended. We’ve got a
black president and the Supreme Court itself ruled there is no need for a
Voting Rights Act anymore. That ought to settle it.
Does anyone still wonder why more than 90 percent of black America votes for anyone but the GOP?
4. Rick Santorum: Obamacare is like apartheid. And I am like Mandela. O’Reilly: Oh, you mean that commie?
Wow. Flabbergasting things happen when you combine two idiots on Fox with the death of a great man.
Here’s Santorum on Mandela:
“He
was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the
argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this
country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over
and controlling people’s lives—and Obamacare is front and center in
that.”
Apartheid and affordable healthcare. Yes, very
similar. And that would, of course, make you Mandela-like in fighting
this injustice. Amirite? We’ve seen some questionable analogies before,
i.e. Obamacare and Katrina, Obamacare and the Fugitive Slave Act,
Obamacare and the Nuremberg Laws, but this one might be the biggest
doozy of them all. Points for creativity, Rick!
O’Reilly couldn’t top that, so he just kept repeating the one thing he did have to say about Mandela.
“He
was a communist, this man. He was a communist, all right? But he was a
great man! What he did for his people was stunning!…He was a great man!
But he was a communist!”
So, uh, wait? Does that make Santorum a communist?
5. Fox News: Sharia law is here and the proof is that Muslim girls are taking swim classes at the Y.
Head
for the hills. Sharia is here and it’s coming after your women. Fox
continued its quest to stoke the fires of Islamaphobia when it targeted a
seemingly harmless YMCA swim class in St. Paul Minnesota that offers
hour-long
swim practice once
a week for Muslim Somali-American girls between the ages of 5 and 17.
The YMCA (that’s “C” for Christian, hello) even makes considerations for
the girls’ modesty and religious beliefs. On Fox & Friends, an
outraged Heather Nauert said this is just one more piece of evidence
that “Sharia law is now changing everything.”
Modesty
considerations have long kept observant Somali-American Muslim girls
from learning even basic swimming skills, which, of course, is the
problem that the program is designed to overcome. This pernicious
tolerance trend is spreading all over the Midwest, Fox reports.
Thankfully, Nauert promised viewers that Fox will keep an eye on it.
We are sure they will.
6. S.C. Sheriff refuses to fly flag at half staff for Mandela.
Another
great American with a modicum of power and a desire to use it, Rick
Clark, the sheriff of Pickens County, S.C., is taking a bold stand
against… ummm… Obama’s tyranny? Sheriff Clark is refusing to lower the
flag to half staff in honor of Mandela on December 9, 2013, as the
president ordered.
Now, we know what you are thinking, but this
has nothing to do with race, Clark swears. It has to do with Amurrica.
“Nelson Mandela did great things for his country and was a brave man but
he was not an AMERICAN!!!” Clark wrote on his Facebook page. “The flag
should be lowered at our Embassy in S. Africa, but not here.”
Clark
knows full well when it is appropriate to lower that flag. He did it
last Friday in honor of a deceased deputy, and on Saturday in honor of
Pearl Harbor Day. But then it’s straight back up for Ole Glory. Unless
another Amurrican dies.
7. Texas Republican Rep.: Minimum wage, schminimum wage.
Sometimes
the best defense is a good offense. So, in a week when low-wage workers
went on strike to demand an increase in the minimum wage, and President
Obama finally acknowledged that inequality is the defining challenge of
our time, Rep. Joe Barton decided to be deeply offensive.
Abolish
minimum wage, he told the National Journal. “I think it’s outlived its
usefulness,” he said. His view is that it was only useful during the
Great Depression.
Raising the minimum wage is bound to be on the
list of things not to do in the Republican obstructionist playbook, now
that Obama has announced making structural inequality the focus of the
rest of his presidency.
Think Progress reports:
“At least 67 Republicans who
are still serving in Congress today supported an increase under
President George W. Bush, including Alexander and Ryan. Yet House
Republicans unanimously voted down an increase in March.”
But while many of them won’t raise it, Barton’s going one better.
Let them eat cake!
8. House Chair of Science Committee Lamar Smith: Climate change, no way; aliens, sure.
Rep.
Lamar Smith (R-TX), who chairs the Science, Space, and Technology
Committee, has no use for climate change science, and less use for the
efforts to regulate carbon emissions. Setting standards for polluting
power plants is partisan politics, he recently argued, blasting the EPA
for trying to do so, not science. And the petroleum industry favorite
knows from science. He’s using one of the seven days left on the
legislative calendar to talk about extraterrestrials in a hearing
called, “Astrobiology: Search for Biosignatures in our Solar System and
Beyond.”
Well, if there are aliens out there living on some other
planet, that could help give people a hint about where to go when the
Earth becomes uninhabitable due to global warming, which isn’t
happening, of course, no matter what 97 percent of scientists say.
9. California GOP-er: It’s part of Middle Eastern culture to lie.
Rep.
Duncan Hunter must have been a cultural anthropology major. He
displayed his deep knowledge of Middle Eastern culture in an interview
with CSPAN this week when he expressed his opposition to the recent
treaty with Iran. They lie, he said, in essence. Not only do they lie,
they revere lying. Here’s how he knows. He’s heard about how bargaining
goes on over there. “In the Middle Eastern culture it is looked upon
with very high regard to get the best deal possible, no matter what it
takes, and that includes lying,” Hunter said.
His interlocutor
gave him the chance to add some nuance to this keen geopolitical
observation, and asked if he meant “all Middle Eastern countries are
this way.”
Yep, he said: “They like to barter there.”
In
damage control mode later, his communications director clarified that
Hunter was talking about Middle Eastern political leaders, not all the
people, especially Iranians.
Furthermore, Hunter, who also thinks
U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants should be deported and
opposes gays in the military, recommends using a nuclear bomb on Iran if
necessary.
“I don’t think it’s inevitable but I think if you have
to hit Iran, you don’t put boots on the ground, you do it with tactical
nuclear devices and you set them back a decade or two or three.”
Then you can go back to the bargaining table.
(h/t
TPM)
10. GOP Rep: “I wake up every day not thinking about social issues.”
Virginia
Rep. Scott Rigell is up for re-election next year, and he just wants to
clarify what does and what does not keep him up at night. He apparently
told Politico: “I wake up every day not thinking about social issues.”
You have to admire his succinctness!
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