Donald Trump is poised to win the GOP nomination, with theocratic loon Ted Cruz in second place. What could be worse than these two specimens? Their acolytes. 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. Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck has talked many many times about how he sees the divine hand of providence in Ted Cruz’s candidacy. He has suggested that Antonin Scalia’s death may even have been an intentional gambit by the Almighty to cast into focus how important it was for America to elect Cruz.
Talking on his show Monday night Beck invoked the Old Man Upstairs again — claiming that Himself had Seen Fit to assemble for His Humble Servant, Glenn Beck, the audience that will deliver America by voting for Ted Cruz. Hosts flatter their audiences all the time (“You’re the best crowd, really!”) but Beck’s obsequiousness — playing to his viewers’ faith by informing them that they are “the audience that saves the republic” — is on another level.
Tuning into his show, Beck said, is the Almighty’s method of grooming viewers to stamp their chad for Cruz via His “preparation and sanctification.” That is one hell of an endorsement for your show, Glenn.
It would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. Oh wait. It’s still laughable.
Hat tip and video courtesy of Right Wing Watch
4. Jeffrey Lord
Well here’s a sensible chap.
In an American Spectator article published Tuesday, CNN contributor Jeffrey Lord lays it all out in his first paragraph: “Meet MoveOn.org. The new Ku Klux Klan. The newest leftist incarnation of that old leftist formula that combines racism with violence to push the progressive agenda.”
Although many conservative commentators were quick to demonize protesters for the violence at Trump rallies, only Lord has the audacity and historical illiteracy to draw a straight line from “the 19th and early 20th century Klan” to “the Violent Left” of today.
“This time around they don’t use hoods and burning crosses to rally the terrorists,” Lord wrote, “they use social media instead.” Yes, because MoveOn.org’s social media organization, helping to coalesce a student-led protest against a modern American demagogue, is tantamount to the Klan’s reign of domestic terrorism. Well done, you straw-man-stuffing putz.
Lord’s fallacies and false equivalencies are nothing short of repulsive. He uses the idiot who charged Trump’s stage in Ohio to scapegoat anyone who wishes to protest Trump’s toxic rhetoric. He makes the gross and egregious freshman error of confusing Southern Democrats of the Restoration South with the modern Left because he either chooses not to, or can’t be bothered to, open a book. He says that MoveOn.org “organized a mass shutdown” in the “tradition of the Klan,” neglecting of course to mention that the Klan pursued a decades-long strategy of murder and terror.
His disgusting and ignorant rant is viewable here.
Hat tip Media Matters
3. Kentucky State Senate
The Kentucky State Senate advanced legislation that would allow anyone who feels like it to reject the civil liberties of LGBT people (or anyone, really) under the banner of “religious liberty.”
Per Raw Story:
The measure, Senate Bill 180, passed on a 22-16 vote. State Sen. Albert Robinson (R), who sponsored the bill, called it a “common-sense, live-and-let-live” measure.
The bill, which is now headed to the state House for deliberation, effectively repeals anti-discrimination statutes covering LGBT residents in eight cities: Covington, Danville, Frankfort, Lexington, Louisville, Midway, Morehead and Vicco. It states that ” no statute, regulation, ordinance, order, judgment, or other law or action by any court, commission, or other public agency shall impair, impede, infringe upon, or otherwise restrict the exercise of protected rights by any protected activity provider.”
This is a thinly veiled gloss that gives free rein to anyone to carve out a zone of exemption in their immediate vicinity where civil rights do not apply, and they can discriminate with impunity. No law or ruling can come between a good Christian and his bigotry. How “live-and-let-live,” indeed. According to the Human Rights Campaign, 28 states this year have introduced anti-LGBT legislation under the flimsy premise of “religious liberty.”
Theocracy: An eminently convenient form of government if you happen worship the right god.
Hat tip Raw Story
2. Katrina Pierson
Call her Trump 2.0.
When The Donald himself cannot be available to do a TV interview, the campaign rolls out the next best thing: spokesperson Katrina Pierson. She has clearly studied at the feet of the master and has a knack for emulating many of the hallmarks of Trump’s performances that have endeared him to his fans and exasperated journalists: Pierson is adept at conveying Trump’s incoherent flip-flops, his scattershot recriminations, his bulletproof resistance to logic, and adamantine self-righteousness spouting the most inane and hateful nonsense.
She also has caught Trump’s habit of bending reality — and the candidate’s record — to suit the conveniences of the immediate moment (or interview).
So it was Tuesday when Pierson was called to responds to anti-Trump ads spotlighting his history of ugly, misogynist remarks. Those comments, she said, were not made by the GOP frontrunner — they were “made as a television character.” It’s a brazen about-face, but perfectly in line with what has been Pierson’s tack on cable news shows for months now. She doesn’t miss a beat or break a sweat, as she transmutes the most utter bull excreta into pleasant-sounding bytes.
Doesn’t make her (or her candidate) any less answerable to the facts, or any less full of said excreta.
Hat tip Mediaite. Video courtesy of Fox News.
1. Michael Savage
Paranoid savant Michael Savage gave his listeners a little taste of what a Hillary Clinton presidency will look like (and also what keeps Michael Savage up at night): There will be “armed rebellion” and “a transgender in your soup.”
“She is an absolute dictator,” he said on his show last week. “She will seize guns and make them illegal in any way necessary.” Though Right Wing Watch helpfully notes that Savage has been pulling this chicken-little act for years, telling his listeners that Obama is coming for their guns, and it has yet to happen.
By the by, Savage, along with fellow paranoiac fantasist shock jock Alex Jones, has hosted GOP frontrunner Donald Trump on his show — both men being precisely the sort of dunce whose aimless rage, powerlessness, and passing acquaintance with reality make them ripe for a charlatan like The Donald. No wonder a woman in power threatens them so much.
Hat tip and audio courtesy of Right Wing Watch
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Image: DonkeyHotey via Flickr
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