The Iraq War lies that just won’t die, another bigoted county clerk, an insipid hissy fit from a Glenn Beck acolyte, and Ted Nugent’s remarkable transformation! 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. Sean Hannity
Some folks learn; other folks, you can’t teach ’em.
Media blowhard-in-chief Sean Hannity must have been trying to boost GOP ascendant candidate John Kasich’s conservative bonafides. When the Ohio governor spoke with the host of the eponymous chatterdome Hannity Wednesday night, they engaged in that regular Fox News past-time of rewriting history and casually smothering facts in a mudslide of smarmy insinuation.
Specifically, they revisited the fantasy of Saddam Hussein’s phantom weapons of mass destruction — a golden calf that Hannity, either disingenuously or betraying a mightily willful ignorance, still worships.
JOHN KASICH: Part of the problem was we got in the middle of a civil war because we thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction–
SEAN HANNITY: I still think he did.
KASICH: Pardon?
HANNITY: I still think he did. I think he got them out in the lead up to the war. And I think he brought them to Syria.
KASICH: Well, you know, maybe he did, but the fact is — you know, look, the fact is that if — well you say he had them, I don’t know. There’s no evidence to say he had them.
Kasich’s sensible nature and apparent grasp of reality served him well in New Hampshire this week. But if he keeps this clinging-to-facts nonsense up, there’s no way he’s going to make it to the convention.
Hat tip and transcription courtesy of Media Matters
Next: Another intolerant county clerk
4. Debbie Allen
Kim Davis’s little stunt is behind is — and while we may not see many more county clerks willing to spend a night in lockup, that doesn’t mean anti-gay public servants are going to let their bigotry go without a fight. Or in the case of a West Virginia clerk, without reducing some newlyweds to tears by telling them their marriage was an “abomination.”
As originally reported by the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Samantha Brookover and Amanda Abramovich went to the Gilmore County Courthouse to make their union official, only to be berated by a deputy clerk named Debbie Allen, who loudly told the couple that God would judge them, even as she was preparing their marriage license.
From the Gazette-Mail:
The clerks don’t dispute that Allen told the couple that what they were doing was wrong and that they would be judged, but they also stressed that they did not view the statement as an “attack.”
“We did not attack them,” Allen said. “We did not yell at them. We were not aggressive with them. I felt I talked nicely to them.”
Brookover and Abramovich, though, say Allen huffed, took their driver’s licenses, made copies, slammed down the copies and then, for two to three minutes, yelled that what they were doing was wrong in her eyes and in God’s eyes and that no one in Gilmer County would ever marry them.
The couple had brought family members. They had the camera ready. It was supposed to be a happy day. Instead, in Brookover’s words, they were “flabbergasted and hurt and angry like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I just told them my opinion,” Allen told the reporter. “I just felt led to do that. I believe God was standing with me and that’s just my religious belief.”
The West Virginia Religious Freedom Restoration Act currently making its way through the state legislature, if signed into law, would presumably allow Mountain Staters to argue that civil rights laws don’t apply to them because of their religion. Until then, it’s good to know that even though Debbie Allen’s “deeply held religious beliefs” are being trampled upon by two gals getting hitched, she was still able to maintain her dignity as a good, practicing Christian.
Hat tip Raw Story
3. Heidi Cruz
Heidi Cruz — whose husband came in first in the Iowa Republican caucus despite her reported antipathy for Hawkeyes — has some interesting ideas about hubby Ted’s campaign.
Chatting with a Palmetto radio host Tuesday, the Goldman-Sachs-exec-turned-full-time-prospective-first-lady explained how Cruz was making the charge to the White House in order to “show this country the face of the God that we serve.”
Right Wing Watch writes:
Heidi Cruz told South Carolina radio host Vince Coakley yesterday that even if she were not married to Ted, she’d be trying to work on his campaign because “this country is in crisis and this individual has an incredible talent to bring us out of this crisis.”
This is in a large part, she said, because “this Christian God that we serve is the foundation of our country” and people need to be reminded that “Christians are loving people, are nonjudgmental people, but there is right and wrong, we have a country of law and order, there are consequences to actions and we must all live peaceably in our own faiths under the Constitution.”
Christian rhetoric is a fixture on the campaign trail, of course — recent ads released by Marco Rubio have shown that even robots believe in life everlasting — but the Messianic self-regard coming from the Cruz camp is a bit much even by those standards.
Glenn Beck recently told Rafael Cruz that he saw the “hand of divine providence” in his son’s birth and subsequent candidacy and the elder Cruz agreed heartily, having previously said that his son was destined to “share the love of Jesus Christ” with “every person in America of every race, color and creed.”
Hat tip and audio courtesy of Right Wing Watch
2. Tomi Lahren
Hah, it’s funny because her hands are up.
Tomi Lahren, a 23-year-old host on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, was very threatened by Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime performance. That’s because the show, you see, was not kind to “little white girls,” at least according to the jejune little tantrum she threw on her show Wednesday.
“First it was ‘hands up, don’t shoot,’” Lahren lamented. “Then it was burning down buildings and looting drug stores, all the way to #OscarSoWhite. And now, even the Super Bowl halftime show has become a way to politicize and advance the notion that black lives matter more.”
First off, please note the “more,” and put your hands together for a slow clap applauding Lahren’s limp, disingenuous way of dismissing a movement meant to call attention to the senseless deaths of men and women. (See also: “All lives matter.”)
According to Lahren, Beyoncé’s politically-charged performance amounted to the artist “ramrodding an aggressive agenda down our throats, and using fame and entertainment value to do so.” Which is true, especially when you consider that Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time performance was the first time an artist has ever used their work to advance a point of view, or used entertainment to reach people’s hearts and perhaps challenge them to confront the ways in which the world has been less than perfectly just and humane.
In fact, her performance, which included references to the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter movement amounted to “ripping off the historical Band-Aid.” Beyoncé chose to “play the victim” rather than “be a cultural leader.” Yes, take another look at Beyoné’s show-stopping number, and be smothered in the noxious vapers of her victimhood.
But shut your mouths, you PC fun police — “This isn’t about equality,” Lahren insists. It’s about how Beyoncé, “like President Obama, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Al Sharpton and so many others just can’t let America heal.” Damn, Beyoncé — how dare you keep telling people that America isn’t perfect?
Lahren thinks America is perfect, Beyoncé. Stop crushing her dreams!
C’mon, Beyoncé — “White people like your music too,” and “Little white girls want to be like you just as much as little black girls do.”
Lahren’s tone-deaf, insipid little hissy fit is worth seeing in all its miserable glory. Video below. Pass the bowl of little white girl tears.
1. Ted Nugent
That gun-lovin’ basket case Ted Nugent has had himself a hell of a time lately.
He kicked the week off right by posting an image to his Facebook page, presenting a graphic suggesting that Jews and “Israeli agents” were behind gun-control efforts. He wrote:
Know these punks. They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic human right to self defense & to KEEP & BEAR ARMS while many of them have tax paid hired ARMED security! Know them well. Tell every1 you know how evil they are. Let us raise maximum hell to shut them down!
Know these punks. They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic human right to self defense …
Posted by Ted Nugent on Monday, February 8, 2016
Media Matters noted that the image originally appeared on the white supremacist site Stormfront in 2014. Nugent was widely condemned for sharing the image, and lashed back by accusing any Jews in favor of gun-control of being “nazis [sic] in disguise” and saying that anyone who couldn’t see that was a “racist prejudiced POS.”
Just when you hope that mankind couldnt possibly get any dumber or more dishonest, superFreaks rise to the occasion….
Posted by Ted Nugent on Monday, February 8, 2016
Media Matters also notes that the Ted Cruz campaign is still touting Nugent’s support.
Finally, just for an encore, in his syndicated column published Wednesday, Nugent claimed membership in the African-American experience in a piece entitled “We Blacks: Democrats’ Modern-Day Slaves,” in which he referred to the Democratic party as “modern slave masters” and enjoined readers to “stop the Democrat scam and celebrate real freedom with a focus on our black future.”
Nugent wrote:
The Democratic Party has preyed on black brothers and sisters for too long. What they have done to black America is arguably a crime against humanity. They have essentially killed the dream of the promised land that brother Martin Luther King spoke about, yet the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus and others still support the Democratic Party. Simply amazing.
Black power begins with recognizing who our real enemies are and who are friends are. The Democratic Party is nothing more than a pack of wolves festooned in shiny, white sheepskin.
So, just to recap: Nugent espoused white nationalist propaganda and then wrote a piece called “We Blacks.” All in one week.
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Image: DonkeyHotey (via Flickr)
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