This week saw Trump’s very super Tuesday, the whole-hearted embrace of the GOP frontrunner by the white supremacist community, and perhaps the most unhinged, vulgar Twitter feed in Texas getting elected to the Republican party establishment. 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:
4. Trump’s Pummeling Fox News Into Submission
We’re in the “bargaining” phase now. While some establishment Republicans are belatedly scrambling to sabotage Trump’s path to the nomination, Fox News honchos have heard the fat lady and are hopping on the Trump train.
Tweeting the morning after Trump took seven states on Super Tuesday, Rupert Murdoch, who chairs Fox News’ parent company, wrote: “If he becomes inevitable party would be mad not to unify.”
As predicted, Trump reaching out to make peace with Republican “establishment”. If he becomes inevitable party would be mad not to unify.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) March 2, 2016
Similarly, the network’s executive chairman Roger Ailes has pulled the plug on his previous support of Marco Rubio, disenchanted by the Florida senator’s flagging performance in the polls, at debates, and in the delegate count. According to New York, Ailes told a Fox host: “We’re finished with Rubio. We can’t do the Rubio thing anymore.” The report continues:
Already, there are on-air signs that Fox’s attitude toward Rubio has cooled. This morning, anchor Martha MacCallum grilled Rubio about his poor Super Tuesday performance. “Is that a viable excuse at this point?” she asked, when he tried spinning his second-place finish in Virginia.
[…] Ailes is now back to searching for a candidate the channel can rally behind. “He’s thinking, What do we do about the whole damn thing?” one of the news executive’s friends said.
What indeed? It’s almost as though stoking paranoid, xenophobic, hateful, extremist sentiment has… consequences?
3. Robert Morrow
Happy Texas Independence Day, everyone! The jubilee occurred on Wednesday, the 180th anniversary of the state declaring its independence from Mexico.
One of the newest additions to Texas Republican party establishment rang in the holiday by going on a social media spree, calling Rick Perry a “rampaging bisexual adulterer,” mocking Bill Clinton’s genitals, challenging Chelsea Clinton’s parentage, labeling Hillary Clinton an “angry bull dyke,” praising George W. Bush’s fellatio technique, calling his father George H. W. Bush “a homosexual pedophile being provided boys by [a] pedophile ring,” and chastising Marco Rubio for attending lots of “gay foam parties.”
Meet Robert Morrow, the newly elected chair of the Republican Party of Travis County, Texas! He is already winning the disgust and animosity of his fellow GOPers for his volatile, extreme, and crude social media ramblings. (As of this writing, he’s still going.)
According to Morrow’s vice-chair, who is exploring options to have Morrow removed, “His social media account is something that no child should see. He is a total disaster.” But according to Morrow, his vice-chair and his cronies “can go fuck themselves.”
Also, Morrow’s apolitical tweets tend to focus on his preoccupation with — and feature pictures of — large breasts. But you see, this is all perfectly acceptable for a member of the contemporary political scene. “I’m like Donald Trump,” Morrow explained to the Tribune. “I like women.”
Ahh, that explains it. It also explains why Trump operative Roger Stone (who co-authored some book with Morrow) takes credit for Morrow’s ascendance:
I have inserted my man @RobMorroLiberty as Travis Co GOP Chairman @MattMackowiak @mmfa
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) March 2, 2016
@RogerJStoneJr I would like to thank co-author Roger Stone for masterminding my election as the chair of Travis County Republican Party!!
— Robert Morrow (@RobMorroLiberty) March 2, 2016
2. Ben Carson
Here we are in the final sputtering days before the inevitable and long overdue suspension of his DOA campaign. And Ben Carson is milking these final moments when people care what he says for all they’re worth.
Speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters Forum last week, Carson repeated his usual theocratic malarkey about how the United States is a fundamentally Christian nation and that religious liberty really only exists for the benefit of Christians. Same-sex marriage, naturally, is to be condemned in such a schema, and Christians should be permitted to flout civil rights laws under the dubious guise of “religious liberty.”
As reported by Right Wing Watch:
Carson told host Eric Metaxas that “the First Amendment gives you the right to live according to your faith without being harassed,” adding that “separation of church and state is not in the United States Constitution, it was a Supreme Court ruling a few decades ago where it actually entered the lexicon.” In fact, the phrase was used by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
Carson’s exegesis of the First Amendment is the kind of patent nonsense we’ve come to know and abhor from the retired neurosurgeon whose mastery of cognitive functions apparently is limited only to brains not his own. As he has done before on diverse subjects — from the purpose of pyramids to the role of the Supreme Court — the good doctor can never pass up an opportunity to make gross display of his ignorance.
If he does choose to sit out the rest of the presidential race, perhaps he can at least carve out a role for himself as an author of historical fiction.
Hat tip and video courtesy of Right Wing Watch
Next: Trump and the White Supremacists
2. Trump’s Love Affair with White Supremacists and 1. Vice Versa
Donald Trump is a “unifier.” Just ask him.
Right now, he’s unifying all manner of white supremacist groups to his side. It’s not just David Duke, who credits his endorsement with Trump’s surging poll numbers. In the midst of all the renewed attention Trump received from the ex-KKK grand wizard’s thumbs-up, Washington Post last week updated and re-published an article from December explaining how the Trump movement has stoked new life into America’s white supremacist movement.
And then of course, there’s the fact that Trump’s camp recently granted press credentials to James Edwards, a man who hosts a white nationalist radio show called The Political Cesspool, which lists among its principles support for the Confederacy and the rejection of abortion, feminism, homosexuality, non-Christians, and immigrants.
Edwards also sits on the board of directors for the Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known as the White Citizens Council) where he spends about four hours a week, according to the group’s most recent tax filing. It is to this esteemed member of the media that Donald Trump Jr. granted a 20-minute interview. The Southern Poverty Law Center has called Edwards’s show “a leading forum for neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and white supremacists,” which shows off his penchant for “smoothly injecting white nationalist ideology into national mainstream media discussions of race relations and crime in America”.
That Trump attracts white nationalists and white supremacists to his rallies — and that violence breaks out at those same events — is nothing new. Recently, white nationalists were reported to have pummeled a black woman at a rally, and also to have chanted: “You’re scum, your time will come, you’re scum, your time will come.” White nationalist activist Matthew Heimbach confirmed that he was the one pushing the woman seen in the video, because “White Americans are getting fed up and they’re learning that they must either push back or be pushed down,” he said.
He also told the Washington Post: “This is the first time since Buchanan in the ’90s and George Wallace in ’68 where you have a guy outside the mainstream speaking to white interests.” He added that Trump “has opened this floodgate that I don’t think can be restrained regardless of what happens in the 2016 elections.”
Then again, it truly does take a unifier to somehow win the endorsement of both Louis Farrakhan and David Duke.
Hat tip Raw Story and Media Matters
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Image: DonkeyHotey via Flickr
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