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. Rick Santorum
Former senator, presidential also-ran, and possible criminal Rick Santorum shared his unique brand of economics this week, when he dismissed the term “middle class” as “Marxism talk.”
Speaking at a GOP fundraiser in Rock Rapids, Iowa, Santorum repeated a claim that he made during the 2008 presidential primaries: that the U.S. does not have any classes at all.
“Don’t use the term the other side uses. What does Barack Obama talk about all the time? The middle class,” he said. “Since when in America do we have classes? Since when in America are people stuck in areas or defined places called a class? That’s Marxism talk.”
“When Republicans get up and talk about middle class, we’re buying into their rhetoric of dividing America. Stop it. There’s no class in America,” Santorum added.
While it’s not surprising that a man who becomes nauseous at the mention of John F. Kennedy doesn’t have a totally firm grasp on the meaning of the term “Marxism,” it’s still surprising to see Santorum attack the term “middle class.” After all, as Amanda Terkel pointed out at The Huffington Post, Santorum himself has used the term quite frequently. It appears that — as with attack ads, college education, government-backed mortgages, and a host of other issues — Little Ricky believes that “class warfare” is evil, unless it happens to benefit him directly.
4. America’s Survival, Inc.
Photo: “ario” via Flickr.com
Reports that Fox News plans to replace Sean Hannity with Megyn Kelly in the 9 pm time slot were largely met with yawns — Kelly has long represented the network’s future, and even Hannity doesn’t seem particularly concerned by the news. Not everyone is ready for the change, however.
According to America’s Survival Inc. (ASI), a self-described “public policy organization,” the swap confirms that the folks at Fox News are actually “pro-homosexual” leftists.
“As part of a national journalism conference on Tuesday, August 20, America’s Survival, Inc. (ASI), a public policy organization, is officially releasing a new report on radical changes at Fox News that should cause great concern to pro-family conservatives,” reads a press release ASI provided to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “‘Pushing Sean Hannity out of the 9:00 p.m. slot, to make way for pro-homosexual advocate Megyn Kelly, is another sign of the channel’s left-ward drift and decline,'” said ASI President Cliff Kincaid, a veteran journalist and media critic.”
Accusing Fox News of a “left-ward drift” is a bit like accusing Rick Santorum of studying history too closely. But if ASI is really this concerned about Fox, just wait until someone tells them about Cumulus Media.
3. “GOP Insiders”
Photo: DonkeyHotey via Flickr.com
In March, the Republican National Committee released a sweeping “autopsy” report on the 2012 election, which suggested — among many other conclusions — that the party should exercise much tighter control over presidential debates, in hopes of avoiding another series of “Let him die!” moments.
Five months later, that idea is doing just about as well as the rest of the plan.
According to The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard, “GOP insiders” are now hoping to turn debate moderation over to intellectual luminaries Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin.
“It makes a lot of sense. We’d get a huge viewership, they’d make a lot of news and maybe have some fun too,” one of the insiders told Bedard.
The political damage that would be done by having the three stooges question GOP contenders on which of their Democratic opponents pals around with terrorists, or whether they should be allowed to drop N-bombs goes without saying. But unfortunately, this crazy-stupid idea is unlikely to come to fruition. According to Limbaugh, he’s too famous to moderate a presidential debate.
Oh well. There’s always Trump.
2. Bryan Fischer
Right-wingers have long sought to prevent President Obama from getting any credit for the death of Osama bin Laden, but few have gone as far as This Week in Crazy mainstay Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association’s main mouthpiece.
On his radio show Thursday, Fischer claimed that Obama wasn’t even present in the situation room during the raid. Instead, according to Fischer, Obama was Photoshopped into this famous photo after the fact (just like all of those other times).
Unfortunately, Fischer declined to speculate on how Obama’s hypermasculine homosexual stormtroopers might play into future raids.
1. Erik Rush
Most critics consider Lee Daniels’ The Butler, a new film focusing on an African-American White House butler who served in eight presidential administrations, to be a benign, well-intentioned (if melodramatic) look at civil rights in America. But Fox News contributor Erik Rush is not most critics.
Writing in conspiracy repository WorldNetDaily, Rush asserts that The Butler is actually part of President Obama and Oprah Winfrey’s plan to start a race war.
“There is little doubt that the film will be used in the ongoing effort to rile black Americans,” Rush writes. “As I’ve said in the past, racial tension is one of the many circuits the administration has constructed that, when completed, may be used to initiate widespread civil unrest at the president’s push of a button.”
“It’s having an effect, too – one might say the desired effect,” Rush adds. “As reported in WND, there has been an upsurge in black-on-white crime in the Ivy League region of New England, which is home to many middle-class blacks.”
The Butler won’t even be released nationwide until Friday the 16th, so it seems unlikely that it’s already been the impetus for Obama and Oprah’s Ivy League race war. But that doesn’t matter to Rush — after all, as he’s asserted in the past, evidence is for liberals.
