This Thanksgiving, take some time away from the warm hearth of fellowship and family time, and join me as we wallow in the mire of right-wing mendacity, ignorance, and fear. There’s plenty of room.
Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Carly Fiorina
“People of faith make better leaders,” according to Carly Fiorina. Meanwhile, the Republican party would like to remind you that “Sharia law” is hiding under your bed.
We need not delve into the bog of the GOP hypocrisy, in which conservatives spin the false narrative about how the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, and try their damnedest to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state and establish a theocracy at home, while simultaneously demonizing any intermarriage of government and Islam they find abroad. (Except the Saudis, but that’s a whole other can of worm crap.)
But let’s take Fiorina at her word. Right Wing Watch quotes the candidate thus:
I do think it’s worth saying that people of faith make better leaders because faith gives us humility, faith teaches us that no one of us is greater than any other one of us, that each of us are gifted by God [sic]. Faith gives us empathy; we know that all of us can fall and every one of us can be redeemed. And faith gives us optimism, it gives us the belief that there is something better, that there is someone bigger than all of us. And so I think it’s important that we elect a leader of faith and that we elect a leader, as well, who knows that more prayer, not less, is necessary in public life and in all our lives.
With all due respect (which in Carly’s case is very little), “people of faith” seeking the Republican nomination don’t really traffic in “humility” or “optimism” or “empathy.” They espouse division, fear, intolerance, and ignorance. As we shall see, in this week’s special “This Week In Crazy,” devoted exclusively to GOP primary candidates….
Via Right Wing Watch
4. Marco Rubio
Just a friendly reminder that the vast majority of Republicans gunning for their party’s nomination couldn’t give a dram of spit about the rule of law — specifically as it pertains to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell and Roe rulings, which legalized same-sex marriage and abortion respectively.
In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody, Florida senator Marco Rubio insisted that government officials should “ignore” any rulings that contravene “God’s laws.”
“We are clearly called, in the Bible, to adhere to our civil authorities, but that conflicts with also a requirement to adhere to God’s rules,” he said. “When those two come in conflict, God’s rules always win. In essence, if we are ever ordered by a government authority to personally violate and sin, violate God’s law and sin, if we’re ordered to stop preaching the gospel, if we’re ordered to perform a same-sex marriage as someone presiding over it, we are called to ignore that. We cannot abide by that because government is compelling us to sin.”
Lest we forget Rubio has also insisted that he would compel victims of rape and incest to give birth to their attackers’ children. Rubio’s fetid philosophy is shared by many in his party, though…
3. Mike Huckabee
Pastor Huck added a few more chapters to his spurious narrative about a war on Christian faith, while attending the Presidential Family Forum last weekend — a roundtable discussion where GOP candidates try to curry favor with anti-gay activist Bob Vander Plaats.
He trotted out a story about a Christian homeschooling family from Germany who had sought refuge in the U.S. and was about to be deported as proof positive that “there is a war on the Christian faith in this country that is being carried out by this administration.” Even though, according to Right Wing Watch, there is not “a single news article reporting this or a single piece of evidence to back up Huckabee’s claim.”
Like Rubio, he declared that he would flaunt the Supreme Court’s rulings and recriminalize same-sex marriage and abortion. The basis of Huckabee’s philosophy is his utterly appalling fallacy — which he has dribbled out before — that we should ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court and the entire concept of judicial review because “the court cannot make laws.” Under Huck’s flagrant misunderstanding of jurisprudence, until a legislative body actually gets around to writing a law, SCOTUS rulings are pretty much DOA. To accept a ruling from our nation’s highest court would be to submit to the “judicial tyranny” of “five unelected lawyers.”
From Right Wing Watch:
“I’m convinced the next president should ignore the unconstitutional and illegal rulings of the courts, including that of same-sex marriage, because it is not the law of the land,” Huckabee said.
He also reiterated his plan to outlaw abortion with a sweeping presidential decree: “We [should] simply say, there will be no abortion because that unborn child is a person.”
2. Ted Cruz
Almost the entire Republican field is willfully ignorant on the subject of climate change (and science in general), but according to a recent study Ted Cruz is uniquely positioned to be the densest of the miserable lot.
The Associated Press recently commissioned a study in which “eight climate and biological scientists graded for scientific accuracy what a dozen top candidates said in debates, interviews and tweets, using a 0 to 100 scale.”
To try to eliminate possible bias, the candidates’ comments were stripped of names and given randomly generated numbers, so the professors would not know who made each statement they were grading. Also, the scientists who did the grading were chosen by professional scientific societies.
Based on his public statements, Cruz, rounding out the bottom with a score of 6, seems to possess the cognitive faculties of a freshly excavated quarry, or in the more delicate language of Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University meteorology professor involved in the study: Cruz “understands less about science (and climate change) than the average kindergartner,” and moreover, the Texas senator’s “sort of ignorance would be dangerous in a doorman, let alone a president.”
Despite (or thanks to) his cynical pandering to the lowest, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-women’s rights elements of his base, the Princeton- and Harvard Law-educated Cruz is running one of the savviest campaigns of any GOP contender. Even if he’s only playing the fool, he’s playing it better than anyone else.
Hat tip Gawker
1. Donald Trump
Donald Trump has had himself a hell of a time the past few days. He’s managed to top even his own outrageous performance last week — when he advocated for the wholesale surveillance, databasing, and persecution of Muslims.
The GOP frontrunner has upped the brazen lies, the demagogic incitements to violence, and the borderline fascistic and racist pronouncements. This week The Donald’s dog whistle became a bugle.
A New York Times editorial Tuesday catalogued some of Trump’s egregious fabrications, including:
The United States is about to take in 250,000 Syrian refugees; African-Americans are responsible for most white homicides; and during the 9/11 attacks, “thousands and thousands” of people in an unnamed “Arab” community in New Jersey “were cheering as that building was coming down.”
Trump’s race-baiting tweet disseminating the fictitious “data” about black-on-white violence has been debunked as fallacious excreta of the lowest order, pilfered from the dregs of talk radio and citing a nonexistent crime stats bureau. Trump was called to account by Bill O’Reilly (of all people), who chided the tycoon for not checking his facts and for giving “the other side” the ammunition “to tell the ill-informed voter that you are a racist.”
Trump’s response: “Hey, am I gonna check every statistic?” (Trump still has not removed the tweet.)
Furthermore, Trump and his camp have doubled- and quadrupled-down on the paranoid fantasy that there were “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in the streets of New Jersey cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, and even accused the media of covering it up.
He has maliciously distorted the issue of Syrian refugees, by claiming Obama’s administration wants to bring in 25 times more refugees than is the case, and that there are no protocols in place to screen them — when in fact, Syrian refugees go through the most stringent vetting procedures. He further asserted that the president was intentionally foisting refugees on states with Republican governors — which PolitiFact has rated a “pants-on-fire” lie, basically The Donald’s tonic note. (The fact-checking site has yet to catch Trump telling a single full truth.)
Oh, and then there’s the matter of him voicing support for his supporters who pummeled a Black Lives Matter protestor at one of his rallies. Granted, a protestor should expect to be escorted off the premises by a burly man with an earpiece and a stern demeanor, but not knocked to the ground, kicked repeatedly, choked, and called “ni**er” and “monkey” by a mob of Tea Party troglodytes shouting “All lives matter.”
But wait — there’s more. Trump enjoined his supporters at a rally in South Carolina to report their Muslim neighbors to the authorities, even though “you’ll be wrong” most likely, but “that’s okay.” He also found time in the same rally to excavate his old Obama-birther bunk, saying: “There’s something we don’t know about” the president, while members of the audience audibly shouted that he was a Muslim.
It was during the same 90-minute performance that Trump mocked the former Washington Post reporter (now at the New York Times) Serge Kovaleski, whose 2001 article Trump has used as the basis for his “Muslims celebrating” claims, by flailing his arms in crass mockery of the congenital physical condition Kovaleski suffers from. Then just for fun, he said he was cool with bringing back waterboarding — because even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.”
What a week. Donald Trump: Make America Hate Again.
Happy Thanksgiving to all. Have a great day and look forward to the future. We will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! A photo posted by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on
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Photo: Linda Khachadurian via Flickr
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