Rand Paul may have assumed the mantle of Wacko-in-Chief this week, but
lots of lesser known right-wing nutjobs had banner weeks as well.
This
might come as news to the grieving survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the
Philippines: the cause of the powerful storm was abortion. Not
necessarily their abortions, but just the fact that anyone has
abortions, especially legally, even though abortion is illegal in the
Philippines. God is very, very pissed about that, and that’s why he sent
a typhoon that killed all those Filipinos on its way to Vietnam. He’s
vindictive like that. That is why he is causing all these very
destructive and scary storms.
What is not causing any of this
climatological havoc is global warming—not that it even exists. Burning
fossil fuels is something God actually wants us to do more of. So goes
the theory of Christian denialist, oops, we mean “historian” David
Barton. The blanket explanation for all this “climate stuff that we
can’t explain,” he said this week in a
,
as well as murder and pedophilia, is legalized abortion. America voted
for politicians who support abortion rights, and in doing so “opened the
door to the curse.”
Here is the historical background. In the
good old days, when America was first starting out, Barton explained
that if there was really bad weather, leaders would “call for a national
day of repentance, humiliation, fasting and prayer … and today we’re
saying, ‘Oh no, it’s global warming.’”
That’s how we lost God’s protection. We chose to lose it. What did we expect?
Sports
are for men, and Richie Incognito is a man, acting manly in a man’s
world. And if you don’t like it, ladies, you can lump it. That is the
short version of a nine-minute tirade against women in sports this week
by
.
after
his alleged (and apparently legendary) harassment, bullying and threats
against teammate Jonathan Martin drove Martin from the team.
Here’s how the tirade starts:
“A
lot of sports has lost its way and I’m gonna tell you, part of the
reason is because we’ve got women giving us directions. For some of you,
this is going to come across as very misogynistic. I don’t care,
because I’m very right. I’m willing to share my sandbox, as long as you
remember you’re in my box. I didn’t slip into your box….”
Allowing
women to “slip into the box” of professional sports has pretty much
ruined sports, Bruce thinks. It has feminized men and made it hard for
men to bond the way they like to bond—by being assholes. That’s what
Jonathan Martin didn’t understand. Incognito was trying to bond with him
when he called him racial slurs and threatened to rape his sister.
Here’s
Bruce’s sage advice to women sports journalists who can’t hack it: “If
sports get too gruesome for you, go write a restaurant column. Go write a
housekeeping column.”
Sweet of him to be concerned.
3. Rand Paul overtakes Ted Cruz as chief Republican wacko bird.
This
is a tightly contested race—neck and neck. Lately, Texas Tea Partier
Cruz has been relatively subdued since his widely ridiculed Obamacare
filibuster which led to the widely reviled government shutdown.
So,
Kentucky libertarian Paul was good enough to step into the breach to
fulfill the role of what Senator John McCain coined as “chief of the
wacko birds.” Paul has distinguished himself in the last week or so with
his passionate defense, or is it ignorance, of plagiarism, challenging
Rachel Maddow to a duel for repeatedly pointing out that he lifts
passages from Wikipedia wholesale for speeches, articles, books,
whatever. She’s impugning his honor by doing so, “spreading hate” on
him. Besides libertarians don’t attribute stuff; that’s for big
government suckers.
A plagiarism scandal, or multiple plagiarism
scandals, need not be devastating. Hey, mistakes happen. Admit them and
move on, we say. But no, Paul started talking “duel” during an interview
with ABC’s “This Week.”
“If, you know, if dueling were legal in
Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge.
But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”
Note to Paul: Toto, you’re not in 19th-century Kentucky anymore.
4. Antonin Scalia brings up the devil in case about prayer.
It’s
almost as if there’s a little red guy with horns and a tail sitting on
the shoulder of the Supreme Court’s most verbose right-winger, making
him say really off-the-wall things. Justice Antonin Scalia just keeps
seeing the devil and his worshippers everywhere, bringing them up during
oral arguments in a case about the constitutionality of legislative
prayer. This, just weeks after a somewhat embarrassing interview in New
York magazine in which he gleefully affirmed his belief in the
Antichrist. And what’s wrong with that?
During this week’s case,
fellow conservative jurist Samuel Alito was asking questions about
whether any kind of prayer would be permissible before a legislative
session, one that would not offend Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Hindus.
“What about devil worshippers?” Scalia interjected. Laughter ensued. He’s such a card.
His
larger point was that not letting people pray before legislative
meetings deprives them of their religious freedom, and that it is
impossible to design a prayer that satisfies all faiths—not to mention
lack thereof.
“What is the equivalent of prayer for someone who is
not religious?” Scalia asked. “There are many people who do not believe
in God. … If you had an atheist [town] board, you would not have any
prayer. I guarantee you.”
After all, who do you think makes people atheists? Guy with the horns, we’re talking to you.
5. Louie Gohmert: Shutdown was necessary to save people from Obamacare.
Two
quick refreshers: 1) Obamacare is the “worst law known to man,” worse
than slavery, Nuremberg laws, Indian removal act—you get the idea; and
2) Tea Partiers received a drubbing in this week’s election, but seem
not to realize it.
Texas Tea Partier Louie Gohmert was out
stumping this week, bizarrely bragging that the devastating shutdown was
necessary because people would “suffer and potentially die” because of
the Affordable Care Act. Yup, nothing kills people faster than health
insurance. It is deadly stuff.
He made the statement at a nursing
home in East Texas, where he hoped to scare the bejeezus out of seniors
so they won’t sign up for the dreaded healthcare coverage. “Anybody that
thinks the Affordable Care Act helps seniors doesn’t really understand
what’s unaffordable to seniors,” Gohmert helpfully and misleadingly
explained. “It makes most of the Medicare Advantage plans go up, but
you’ve got to remember, Obamacare actually cut $716 billion from
Medicare and seniors rely on Medicare.”
That, of course, is either a lie or make-believe, or both, but since when has that stopped the opponents of Obamacare?
6. Rep. Steve King knows personally—don’t ask him how—that Saddam Hussein purchased uranium from Niger.
Who
can forget the fiction that fueled the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was building the bomb, and was
ready to use all of it against us or Israel. He got his uranium from
Niger, high-level intelligence said. President George Bush even said so
in a speech.
Cut to a couple months after “Shock and Awe” and not
even Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or President Bush was standing by that
statement. They were misled by some bum intelligence. Sorry. Our bad.
But
crazy Iowa Rep. Steve King still believes it because, as he said on Jan
Mickelson’s radio show this week: “I have had hands-on evidence that
what George Bush said in that State of the Union address was the truth.”
What
Bush said was: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
When
the claim unraveled, the Bush administration had to eat crow and admit
the so-called intelligence was “bogus,” documents “forged.” Spokesman
Ari Fleischer admitted the statement should never have found its way
into the president’s speech. But nobody took the war back.
But King has “hands-on” knowledge. He just does.
7. Illinois Rep.: Marriage equality has nothing to do with rights; it’s about the Bible.
As
the Illinois legislature began to debate whether to join the growing
number of enlightened states that have legalized same-sex marriage,
State Rep. Dwight Kay, R-Glen Carbon, pointed out that everyone has it
bass-ackwards. Our nation was built on “the scriptures, then came the
Constitution. Is that not right?”
It was, of course, a rhetorical
question. “I think it is,” Kay continued. A brief course in American
history could clear this up for the confused legislator, but never mind.
Kay
is at a loss to understand why everyone keeps talking about human
rights, and civil rights, and equal rights all the time when they talk
about marriage equality. What do human rights have to do with a nation
built on scripture? Who you gonna believe, that Constitution with its
Bill of Rights written by men, or the word of God?
8. Larry Pratt: Trayvon Martin’s broken family is what killed him.
It’s
never too late to pile more pain onto the grieving parents and loved
ones of slain teenager Trayvon Martin. His killer is free, Trayvon has
been blamed for his own death, and now, taking it one step further,
Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America has suggested that Martin’s
dysfunctional family is responsible for the boy’s death.
That’s
what he said in an interview with NewsMax’s Steve Malzberg this week:
Trayvon Martin was killed because he had a “broken family.”
Who
else can you blame? Triggerman, neighborhood-watch volunteer George
Zimmerman was just lawfully “standing his ground” when he shot unarmed
Martin. “Stand Your Ground” laws can’t be to blame because, as Sen. Ted
Cruz explained to Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton in a Senate hearing on
the controversial law, she’s just “mourning the loss of her son.”
Stand-your-ground laws in fact “protect those in African-American
communities,” he said.
Facts be damned, gun nuts and Tea Partiers agree. According to Right-Wing Watch, a recent “
Tampa Bay Times analysis of stand-your-ground cases in Florida found
substantial racial disparities in
the application of the law, including that ‘people who killed a black
person walked free 73 percent of the time, while those who killed a
white person went free 59 percent of the time. A
national study found a similar disparity.”
But, it’s Trayvon Martin’s family’s fault he’s dead. Probably his mother’s.
9. White, anti-LGBT Texan wins office by pretending to be black.
Dave
Wilson, a Houston electrician, has become pretty adept at creating
literature for the causes he believes in. While not rewiring people’s
homes, he long pursued his sideline of mailing
homophobic fliers to thousands of Houston voters attacking the city’s lesbian mayor Annise
Parker. His argument is pretty simple. Open homosexuality is bad. It
leads to extinction. (Closeted homosexuality, not so much.)
Recently,
Wilson expanded his literary efforts into fiction, when he got himself
elected to the Houston Community College Board of Trustees by
out-and-out pretending to be someone else. He pretended to be a black
man, defeating longtime incumbent Bruce Austin, who actually is black,
in an overwhelmingly African-American district.
According to
Right-Wing Watch, “Wilson’s campaign fliers were filled with black faces
that he admits to simply pulling off of websites, along with captions
such as ‘Please vote for our friend and neighbor Dave Wilson.’ Another
flier announces that he was ‘Endorsed by Ron Wilson,’ which is the name
of an African-American former state representative. Only by reading the
fine print will voters discover that the ‘Ron Wilson’ who actually
endorsed Dave is his cousin. The cousin lives in Iowa.”
Wilson is fine with this whole deception thing. After all, lying is what politicians do, he points out.
10. Nutjob former classmate of Obama reminisces about his cocaine-snorting, gay-hustling high school days.
Scott Lively’s “Defend The Family”
website got a real scoop this week with an interview that nutjob preacher
James David Manning conducted
with Mia Marie Pope, who says—and why would we not believe her?—that
she knew President Obama back in high school in Hawaii in the 1970s,
when he was a foreigner (this is a birther website, after all) and a gay
druggie.
“He very much was within sort of the gay community,”
Pope claimed.
“And we knew Barry as just common knowledge that girls were never
anything that he ever was interested in … He would get with these older
white gay men, and this is how we just pretty much had the impression
that that’s how he was procuring his cocaine. In other words, he was
having sex with these older white guys and that’s how he was getting
this cocaine to be able to freebase.”
That clears a lot up.
