Mandatory office guns, a tropical torture chamber, Vladimir Putin battling Satan, and some very dedicated Ted Cruz supporters. 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. Andrea Tantaros
President Obama’s announcement Tuesday that he was issuing a proposal to close Guantanamo Bay was met with the predictable conservative backlash. Count on the hosts of the midday roundtable Outnumbered — Fox News’s high-concept daily show which resembles what might happen if the Plastics from Mean Girls cattily recited conservative bromides — to churn out the most tin-eared and ignorant response. Specifically, co-host Andrea Tantaros referred to the prison complex as a “tropical paradise.”
It’s true that Gitmo is located on an island in the Caribbean, where the climate is likely “tropical.” But it is also true that the site has been a place where America has kept detainees, held and tortured them, some for several years, without trial; a locus for water-boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques;” and a black stain on the country’s reputation domestically and worldwide.
Tantaros also speculated that this was part of the president’s master plan to propose something that he knew would get blocked in Congress, just so that he could issue an executive order, which would, in turn, get challenged in the Supreme Court, “conveniently without conservative Justice Scalia there.” What delightfully smug eel-like illogic, compounded with self-defeating rationalization that somehow a recalcitrant Senate Republican cabal is just a pawn in Obama’s ninth-dimensional chess.
“It’s insanity, it’s illegal,” she concluded, adding, “it’s disgusting,” in what we might charitably speculate was a moment of self-reflection.
Hat tip and video courtesy of Raw Story
4. Steve Deace
When it comes to being loyal to a candidate… there’s commitment, and then there’s commitment. And then there’s people who are willing to cut their own nuts off.
Ted Cruz apparently knows how to inspire that latter — one devoted follower went so far as to threaten to “eunuch myself” if it would boost Cruz’s performance.
That dedicated fellow is Steve Deace, who, according to Media Matters, “was part of Cruz’s Iowa leadership team and has given his advice and name in support of the senator, has gone on a tirade against Cruz on social media, his nationally syndicated radio show, and in two parts on Conservative Review. He has denounced Cruz’s current messaging and stance against Trump as weak, despite explaining that he is still a ‘Cruz guy.'”
Speaking on his eponymous show Monday, Deace was aghast at the Texas senator’s third-place showing in South Carolina, but even more perturbed by the fact that his golden calf of a candidate has pulled one too many about-faces lately, apologizing to the Carson and Rubio camps for shady campaign trickery. (Even Cruz’s non-apology apologies, it should be said, come softened by the most assiduously carved out qualifications, deflections, and distortions. The oily senator has never truly owned up to his chicanery.)
“I love him, we are friends,” Deace said, “but I don’t believe in victims.” Apparently, Cruz’s mealy-mouthed back-pedaling is a sign of weakness, and by not catapulting him to first place in South Carolina, Palmetto voters were sending the Texas senator a message “that they want him to go back to being that alpha male conservative leader that people fell in love with.”
He continued:
If anyone with the Cruz campaign ever apologizes to Ben Carson again, I may eunuch myself, which will make my wife very, very upset. I am desperate at this point. I will do anything, name it, name the price. As a Cruz guy, I will do anything the universe demands, that they never apologize to Ben Carson or really anybody else again.
He added that voters “don’t want nice,” they want brutal and effective. He illustrated his point by invoking a curious fable of a fireman with dark secrets who comes to rescue your family when your house is in flames:
When your home is on fire, you have no idea, you have no idea when the firemen comes crashing through your front door to rescue your kids, you have no idea if he has kiddie porn on his computer at home. You don’t know if he has got a tongue ring and a john account online. You don’t know that and you don’t care.
Hat tip and video courtesy of Media Matters
3. Lance Toland Associates
We hear a lot about how the nefarious Left wants to take away our right to have guns. Less often, we hear about someone trying to take away our right not to have a gun.
File this under the “Guns Make Everything Safer and Better” insanity: one Georgia business is now insisting that all of its employees show up for work packing heat.
Lance Toland Associates, an aviation insurance company with several offices throughout the Peach State, is instituting a new policy requiring all workers to obtain concealed carry permits.
“A lot of my clients are high-fiving when they hear this. They think it’s the best things for a company to mandate gun ownership and be responsible,” business owner Lance Toland told WSB-TV in Atlanta.
The owner says after employees get their license, Toland gives them a gun known as the “governor,” which is made by Smith & Wesson. Toland contends the weapon is one of the most effective for self-defense. Toland says his company’s gun mandate came as a result of a surge in crime in the Atlanta metro area.
Toland says the gun he distributes is “a 5 shot .410, just like a shotgun and you call it hand cannon.”
If nothing else, it offers a quick, effortless way to resolve workplace disputes.
Hat tip LawNewz
2. Alex Jones
Alex Jones — the Michael Jordan of shock jocks, whose idea of hard-hitting investigative journalism is dressing up like a blood-spattered clown to unmask the Pope’s pedophilia ring — has some theories about Donald Trump.
Jones is a professional conspiracy theorist who can sniff out a good false flag in the most seemingly straightforward stories. You might assume, reasonably, that he could unmask the well-connected billionaire with longstanding ties to the Clintons who is currently leading the GOP race for some sort of establishment goon. But the fact is, Jones has thrown his weight so completely behind The Donald that he’s willing to wage war against the mogul’s demonic foes who’ve lined up against him.
Likewise, just as you’d assume a beacon of journalistic integrity like Jones — a luminary in the fight for individual freedom and American values — would take issue with a demagogue like Vladimir Putin, the radio host is pretty enamored of the Russian leader, because he “is putting up a fight… in the face of just absolute pure evil.” He points to the fact that Russia has supposedly banned genetically-modified foods (one of the Dark Lord’s darkest designs) and that “You tune into Russian TV now, it’s like I’m hosting it.” Forget about the very real dangers that real journalists face in Putin’s Russia.
As reported by Right Wing Watch, Jones went on a tirade about the forces of Satanic darkness embodied by a cabal of globalists who “want to deform us and jack with the food and mutate everything” and the forces of God and light, represented here by the merry trio of Jones, Trump, and, yes, Putin.
This needs to be seen to be believed:
Hat tip and video courtesy of Right Wing Watch
1. Ben Carson
Paging Dr. Carson. Your book tour is over.
Your campaign is in shambles, after months of hemorrhaging talent and crawling in at or near rock bottom in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.
A recent report from Vice depicts one of your recent rallies as a cold and plodding slumber of the damned. You never actually spent those funds you raised from credulous voters on much real campaigning, preferring to tour the country, touting your latest book, and dash away from vital early-voting to states to grab yourself a fresh pair of slacks. Does it ever trouble you that you took money from people whom you duped into believing you were an actual candidate?
Why are you even running anymore? You’ve said “this is just the beginning” after you came in sixth (out of six) in South Carolina. You’ve likened yourself to the tortoise in Aesop’s fable. And yet your most reliable debate tactic of late has been to talk about how much shut-eye you’ve been getting in between questions, suggesting a closer resemblance to the lethargic hare, who improbably surged to the top of the polls early on, but is now smugly content to lie etherized upon the podium.
In your fitful, straining first year of political life, you have demonstrated a persistent and stubborn allergy to reality. And while I have little love for the likes of John Ellis Bush or Chris Christie, it must be noted that these men read the numbers, watched the coverage, heard the bell toll for them, and acted accordingly.
This is no longer an operation, Dr. Carson. It is an autopsy.
Time to call it a day.
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Image: Steve Rotman via Flickr
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