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: Alan Keyes
Alan Keyes — the perennial Republican candidate and former host of the ironically-named MSNBC show Alan Keyes Is Making Sense — appeared on The Talk to Solomon Show on Wednesday to explain the real motive behind the Obama administration’s gun safety push: mass murder.
“They are going to cull the herd,” Keyes warns of President Obama and Senate Democrats, “so that instead of having billions, we’ll only have hundreds of millions of human beings on the face of the planet.”
“Their project for disarmament is intended to make sure that people will be slaughtered by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands,” he adds.
4: Idaho State Senator John Goedde
Goedde, the Republican chairman of the Idaho Senate’s Education Committee, introduced a bill on Tuesday that would require every Idaho high school student to pass a test on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in order to graduate.
“That book made my son a Republican,” Goedde said when announcing the legislation.
Goedde later decided not to schedule a hearing on his bill, saying, “It was a shot over their bow just to let them know that there’s another way to adopt high school graduation requirements.”
When House Majority Leader Eric Cantor singled out education as an area in which the Republican Party could rebrand itself, this is probably not what he had in mind. Paul Ryan, however, is presumably thrilled by the idea.
3: Kevin Swanson
(Image via)
Generations Radio host Kevin Swanson continued the right wing’s proud tradition of outrageously inaccurate junk science on Friday, when he claimed that “certain doctors and certain scientists” have found that women who use birth control pills have “these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb.”
“These wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies,” Swanson added. Right Wing Watch has audio of the crazy rant.
Even Todd Akin must think that Swanson should brush up on his science.
2: Skeet Shooting Truthers
After the White House released a photo of President Obama skeet shooting at Camp David, the right wing immediately exploded with conspiracy theories “proving” that the photo is a fake. New York magazine has a good rundown of the theories — which run the gamut from “the gun’s angle isn’t right” to “since when does Obama have a potbelly??” — but the craziest take probably belongs to WorldNetDaily’s Phil Elmore.
After spending several hundred words doubting the photo’s veracity, Elmore makes an abrupt about-face. “But none of this is the point,” he writes. “The point is one of the many Photoshopped images, in which Obama’s shotgun has been digitally replaced with a Predator drone.”
Well, that clears everything up.
1: Mississippi State Representative William “Tracy” Arnold
Arnold, a Republican from Booneville, “wins” this week by introducing his a bill to outlaw the creation of “human-animal hybrids.”
As WAPT News explains, “The bill defines a human-animal hybrid as embryos that contain human and non-human cells, nuclei or chromosomes; embryos that were created by fertilizing a human egg with animal sperm, or vice-versa; or a nonhuman life form ‘engineered’ with a human brain.”
In case any Mississippians were wondering why their tax dollars are being used to keep the Magnolia State from becoming the Island of Dr. Moreau, Arnold is happy to explain: it’s actually about abortion. “I think the attention has actually kind of moved to a sci-fi type of thing, but really the goal of this is to protect those embryos,” Arnold told WAPT.
Coincidentally, while the Mississippi legislature is busy stopping mad scientists from engineering animals with human brains, the state remains last in the nation when it comes to educating students in science.
