Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Steve Stockman
Genuinely crazy Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) returns to the list at number five, for suggesting (again) that President Obama is a secret Muslim, and a terrorist sympathizer.
“This guy, the president, apparently has a grudge against the military and the American people,” Stockman said during an appearance on the Steve Malzberg show.
Obama has a “propensity to fall again and again on the side of terrorists,” Stockman later added. His explanation? “A lot of people say he’s not something…we can’t say it on the radio, but if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, I think it might be a duck.”
This duck, presumably.
Earlier in the interview, Stockman also took a moment to suggest that Obama should trade Susan Rice to the Mexican government in exchange for Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, who is being held in prison in Tecate on a gun charge. It’s understandable that Stockman may have jail on the brain; this week the House Ethics Committee reported that it has “substantial reason to believe” that Stockman violated federal laws and ethics rules.
4. Joni Ernst
Once it became apparent that state senator and hog castrator Joni Ernst was going to be Iowa’s GOP nominee for U.S. Senate, Republicans did everything possible to push back against the narrative that Ernst is a Tea Party extremist.
There’s only one problem: Joni Ernst.
On Thursday, the Iowa Democratic Party shared video of Ernst vowing that, if she is elected as senator, she will finally put a stop to the United Nations’ evil Agenda 21.
In reality, Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntarily implemented UN resolution meant to promote sustainable development. In right-wing fever derams, Agenda 21 is actually a conspiracy through which the UN will abolish all property rights (and, according to Senator Ted Cruz, ban golf).
“The United Nations has imposed this upon us, and as a U.S. senator, I would say no more,” Ernst said. “No more Agenda 21.”
“One of the implications to Americans, again, going back to what does it do to an individual family here in the state of Iowa, and what I’ve seen, the implications that it has here is moving people off of their agricultural land and consolidating them into city sectors. And then telling them, ‘You don’t have property rights anymore,'” Ernst continued. “These are all things that the UN is behind, and it’s bad for the United States, it’s bad for families here in the state of Iowa.”
If this whole Senate thing doesn’t work out, maybe Ernst could have a future in Ron Paul’s think tank.
3. Gordon Klingenschmitt
Gordon Klingenschmitt, who recently exposed liberals’ devious plan to visually rape America’s daughters, took the logical next step on Tuesday: Mind rape!
While discussing the debate raging in Scotland over whether teachers and students should be able to opt out of classes that discuss gay marriage, Klingenschmitt got choked up over the children who will be “recruited into perversion.”
“So in other words, every child has a right to be raped,” Klingenschmitt said. “At least in their mind, by somebody who is going to pervert them and recruit them into sexual immorality. This is how liberals think.”
It’s not all bad for mind rape victims, though. At least George Will thinks they’re getting a pretty sweet deal.
2. Kevin Crow
Photo via GoWithCrow.com
Politicians often invoke the founding fathers to illustrate whatever political point they are trying to make at the time (with occasionally hilarious results). In these analogies, the founders are usually the heroes, paragons of virtue whose legacies we are failing to honor.
Dr. Kevin Crow, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma, decided to go in a different direction. According to Dr. Crow, the founding fathers actually caused the Rwandan genocide.
Crow made his strange charge during a debate on Friday.
“The job of America is not to be the exporter of liberty. That’s not our job. Our job is to look after ourselves. Let me explain what happens when you become the exporter of liberty,” Crow said. “Jimmy Carter tried that in Iran, and remember the brutal Shah? You saw where that got us. The Belgians tried that when they pulled out of Rwanda.”
“‘Well, we need to teach them that all men are created equal,'” Crow continued sarcastically. “Then all the Hutus started saying, ‘The Tutsis, they don’t treat us equal, so let’s get back at them.’ And what we had was a slaughter.”
“Taking the idea that ‘all men are created equal’ to a culture that doesn’t have a heritage of constitutionalism — it leads to genocide,” he concluded.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Crow is barely registering in polls of the Republican primary. So if Oklahoma wants a senator who radically misunderstands foreign policy, they’ll have to keep settling for Jim Inhofe.
1. Scott Esk
Photo via AskForEsk.com
It says a lot about Oklahoma that Dr. Crow is not the Sooner State’s craziest politician of the week. That honor goes to this week’s “winner,” state House candidate Scott Esk.
On Tuesday, Oklahoma magazine The Moore Daily reported that last summer, Esk endorsed stoning gay people to death.
“I think we would be totally in the right to do it,” the Tea Party candidate wrote on Facebook. “That goes against some parts of libertarianism, I realize, and I’m largely libertarian, but ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.”
The Moore Daily reached out to Esk for clarification, and found that he really has no misgivings about the stoning plan.
“That was done in the Old Testament under a law that came directly from God and in that time there it was totally just. It came directly from God,” Esk said.
“I have no plans to reinstitute that in Oklahoma law,” he added. “I do have some very huge moral misgivings about those kinds of sins.”
As The Raw Storypoints out, Esk says that “if it helps any,” he believes that states should be allowed to decide for themselves whether to stone gay people to death.
“I would hope that libertarians who don’t think perversion should be punished in any way between consenting adults would be open-minded and look at the different results between a state that ignores it and [one] that punishes it severely,” he said. “And within a state, cities and communities may well have different policies, and I cheer that. That way, people can decide for themselves whether they want to live in a particular community based in part on how things like this are dealt with.”
Memo to Esk: That didn’t help any.
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