Driverless cars may not be for you if you have a conservative bumper sticker and don’t wish to be driven off the road by a malevolent computer programmed by spiteful liberals. 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. Pat Buchanan
Erstwhile conservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanan is, at least, being as honest and up front as he physically can be when he calls Donald Trump “The Great White Hope.”
In his syndicated column published May 26, Buchanan writes that Trump is the panacea for all of the country’s ills, among which he counts the emphasis on “diversity,” affirmative action, the disparaging way white working-class males are portrayed in Hollywood films, and the fact that we teach schoolchildren about how this nation was “discovered” by people who occasionally practiced slavery and genocide.
In other words, the demonization of white men is the root of all of our problems, and it has utterly corroded our nation’s most pure soul. To bolster his point, Buchanan notes (correctly, I’m afraid) that “Lincoln and every president had been a white male.” Until Obama, of course. Check mate, liberals.
He concludes:
“Angry white male” is now an acceptable slur in culture and politics. So it is that people of that derided ethnicity, race, and gender see in Donald Trump someone who unapologetically berates and mocks the elites who have dispossessed them, and who despise them.
Is it any surprise that militant anti-government groups attract white males? Is it so surprising that the Donald today, like Jess Willard a century ago, is seen by millions as “The Great White Hope”?
4. Rush Limbaugh
Limbaugh, like everyone else, had an opinion about the incident in a Cincinnati zoo that left a gorilla dead.
Limbaugh being Limbaugh, he used it as a springboard to tear into some other, tangentially-related issue that his frenzied detonation of neurons were screaming about at that moment. To wit: the Theory of Evolution, which holds that all species — including whatever humanoid aberration Limbaugh represents — can trace their origin back to a single-celled ancestor.
Limbaugh said in his show Tuesday:
A lot of people think that all of us used to be gorillas. And they’re looking for the missing link out there. The evolution crowd. They think we were originally apes. I’ve always — if we were the original apes, then how come Harambe is still an ape, and how come he didn’t become one of us? “Well, that’s why were looking for the missing link, Mr. Limbaugh, your question is absurd.”
Politico reported recently that Limbaugh’s business is in turmoil because of a series of terrible calls that have alienated advertisers and affiliates (like calling a Georgetown Law student a “slut” in 2012). Maybe if he sticks to hot-button issues like whether or not evolution is real, he’ll offend fewer people. Doesn’t make him any less of a fool.
3. Brent Smith
There may be valid arguments against driverless cars, but I’m not sure I saw any in the column from Brent Smith’s tittering tin foil dispatch in WND this week.
Smith maintains that driverless cars are a bad idea because they are built by companies that are controlled mainly by liberals. Liberals will be tasked with writing the code that determines the car’s protocols for decision making; its “morality,” in other words. And you know you can’t trust liberals to determine the morality of the four-wheeled death machine you use to get to Golden Corral.
So the morality of a driverless car, for want of a better term, is and will be determined by geeks at Google and Microsoft and Apple. What do we know of these individuals? Maybe not much except that 99.8 percent of them are lefties.
As a demonstrable conservative, this scares me. Are these the same liberals who write algorithms that limit access or exposure of conservatives on the Internet? Who’s to say some programmer won’t build in a conservative kill code into the car’s CPU that causes it to drive off a bridge or run it into oncoming traffic?
He also not-entirely-insincerely suggests that liberals could use the technology as a way to literally murder conservatives.
How could a car know if you’re liberal or conservative – I mean other than that Bernie Sanders bumper sticker? These cars, like a lot of things, will eventually have electronic I.D. like a fingerprint scanner. Within five seconds of scanning your fingerprint, that car will know your voting record and which sites you visit on the web. That’s when the secret algorithm is activated, and it’s bye-bye right-winger!
Smith, whose previous scoops include “Trump Will Just Be A Better Dictator Than Obama” and a screed against electric cars for being anti-American, wraps up by trying to pass off his idle paranoid fantasia as “just a fun conspiracy theory.”
“You’re probably saying to yourself – this guy is nuts,” he writes.
I’ve seen nuttier, but all things considered, I’d rather not share the road with him.
2. Larry Pratt
Larry Pratt, executive director emeritus of the lobbying group Gun Owners of America, would much rather solve problems at the ballot box — but, you know, if he has to, he could just shoot you.
That’s basically what he said on his “Gun Owners News Hour” radio program this weekend, arguing that it was vital for Republicans to elect a conservative president who would make a number of vital Supreme Court appointments. But if that fails, there’s always the “bullet box,” which could be interpreted as a large cache of ammunition, or maybe just a coffin, I suppose. In any event, the people who beat him at the ballot box probably don’t want to find out.
It will surprise no one that Pratt is a purveyor of Obama conspiracy theories and a fervent cheerleader for Cliven Bundy.
Right Wing Watch‘s Miranda Blue writes:
Pratt was interviewing Robert Knight, a senior fellow at the American Civil Rights Union, who warned that “if a liberal Democrat is elected president, then there goes the Supreme Court, it could be two, three, four justices, and I think the Second Amendment would be in great peril if that happens.”
Pratt responded that if such a court interprets the Constitution in ways that conservatives don’t like, they may have to restore “proper constitutional balance” through the “bullet box”
“And at that point, we would have to come to an understanding, which we’ve been sort of taught, it’s been taught out of us, that the courts do not have the last word on what the Constitution is,” Pratt said. “They decide particular cases, they don’t make law. Their decisions, unlike the Roe v. Wade usurpation, don’t extend to the whole of society, they’re not supposed to. And we may have to reassert that proper constitutional balance, and it may not be pretty. So, I’d much rather have an election where we solve this matter at the ballot box than have to resort to the bullet box.”
Hat tip and audio courtesy of Right Wing Watch
1.Roy Moore
In the latest twist in his long, warped crusade against gay rights, Alabama’s suspended chief jurist Roy Moore has filed suit against the state ethics board that kicked him off the bench.
Here’s some background on Moore’s little holy war. Moore ignored a January 2015 federal court ruling that found Alabama’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional and ordered probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. When the Supreme Court made its landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015, that should have settled the issue. (Really, the federal court ruling should have settled the issue, but we’ll move on.)
In an interview last July, Moore spoke with characteristic good sense when he said it’s “not time to secede” from the nation just yet (oh, thank goodness)— but he maintained that officers of the court do have to “take a stand” and not “obey an unlawful order.” In his defense, he invoked the Nuremberg logic that Nazi soldiers had the duty to honor a “higher law” than what their superiors told them. In another earlier interview, this one with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, he invoked the Dred Scott decision, checking off another box on the list of spurious conservative comparison cliches.
Since the Obergefell ruling, Moore has performed all kinds of legalistic gymnastics to try to get out of having to allow gay marriage, which I’ve written about on this page before.
Finally, earlier this month, he was suspended by the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission, who wrote in their complaint that “Moore flagrantly disregarded and abused his authority. Moore knowingly ordered (probate judges) to commit violations … knowingly subjecting them to potential prosecution and removal from office.”
And now Moore has filed suit against said commission, demanding that the ethics charges be dropped and his place on the state’s highest judicial seat be reinstated. He is represented in his action by Mat Staver, who also represented Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis in her own little legal tussle with progress last year.
“We are asking the federal court to strike down the automatic removal provision in the Alabama State Constitution and we are asking that Chief Justice Moore be immediately reinstated,” Staver said.
I’ll say this about Moore: The guy does not quit.
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Illustration: DonkeyHotey via Flickr
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