Who wants to take a shower with Mike Huckabee? It’s bring your gun to school day! Glenn Beck says Rick Perry’s hard rain’s a-gonna fall. It’s “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. Vince Vaughn
Vince Vaughn would like you to know that he is very, very pro-gun:
Vaughn recently did an interview with GQ to promote the second season of HBO’s True Detective, during which he rolled out the old conservative line about how mass shooters only target places where guns are not permitted — even though there’s no evidence to back up this claim.
The answer, for people who believe such nonsense, is always “more guns.” More guns in movie theaters, libraries, and, yes, schools.
Vaughn said:
I support people having a gun in public full stop, not just in your home. We don’t have the right to bear arms because of burglars; we have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government. It’s not about duck hunting; it’s about the ability of the individual.
“Banning guns,” Vaughn continued, “is like banning forks in an attempt to stop making people fat. Taking away guns, taking away drugs, the booze, it won’t rid the world of criminality.”
Thing is, there are plenty of ways to get fat without forks (ice cream?). But how many readily available, widely legal, and sparsely regulated ways are there to kill 26 people in less than 10 minutes?
Incidentally, this Tuesday was National Gun Violence Prevention Day, so the NRA encouraged its members to “splurge on a new gun.”
ViaGQ
4. Glenn Beck
Good Old Glenn thinks Rick Perry, former governor of Texas and GOP presidential candidate, is responsible for the recent flooding that devastated Central Texas. And for that, he should be praised.
After a jolly round of Beck and his co-host Stu Burguiere mocking the whole idea of climate change, Beck reminisces about the drought that preceded the torrential rain, and how Texas began to work its way out of the drought when then-governor Rick Perry prayed for rain in 2011.
“We started ending that drought with that fast,” he said. “He was mocked for it and he went ahead and did it and that was the beginning of the end of the drought. We started having rain right after that, and this state was a desert.”
So changes in weather are still kinda man-made…
ViaRaw Story andRight Wing Watch
3. Erik Rush
The Supreme Court judgment that could settle the matter of same-sex marriage in America is expected at the end of June. And it’s got conservatives wringing their hands — and loading their guns.
In a WorldNetDaily blog post entitled “Homofascists, Christianity and the State as ‘God,'” Erik Rush proposes a response to what he describes as the “de facto criminalization of Christianity.”
The “homofascists” (Rush’s term) with the power of a despotic, lunatic state behind them, are “through deception, incrementalism and outright violation of the Constitution, insidiously maneuvering rational, law-abiding Americans into a position so untenable that at some elusive but inevitable point, violent civil disobedience – vigilantism – may be the only practicable response.”
If you have the stomach, Rush’s piece is worth reading in full, if only to appreciate every stroke of his baroque, sweeping paranoia, bloodlust, and bigotry, which includes Homeland Security stormtroopers kidnapping patriots in the dead of night and an ominous warning of the lengths conservatives are willing to go.
He opens by positing that among the “political left” there is a fear “that the opposition (Republicans, conservatives and Christians) would gladly kill them in a great purge if only they had the practical capacity to do so.” And Rush closes with a warning: “when otherwise rational, law-abiding Americans suddenly realize that the last of their liberties have been legislated, regulated and executive-ordered away, their response just might make the left’s accusations in the opening paragraph a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
2. Rush Limbaugh
Caitlyn Jenner’s debut on the front page of Vanity Fair rubbed a lot of conservatives the wrong way. Some viciously mocked her on the air; others claimed it portended the death of America (these days, what doesn’t?)
On Tuesday’s edition of his radio show, Rush Limbaugh derided the decision to give Jenner the Arthur Ashe Courage Award — because when you acknowledge transgender people in such a public forum, you’re beginning what Limbaugh caustically describes as a “conversation.”
You see, when people talk about needing to have a “conversation” about bigotry and discrimination, Limbaugh said, what that really means is liberals are announcing their intention to “mount an onslaught against the majority. This is a direct frontal attack on what the United States has always been by a bunch of people that don’t like it — for whatever reasons.” (You know, bigotry, racism, homophobia, so on and so forth.)
Limbaugh’s obnoxious screed boils down a defense of what he calls the “norms,” and a rebuke to anyone excluded or diminished by said “norms,” basically telling them to suck it up. Because America, in Rush’s schema, is a place where nothing ever changes, anywhere, anytime.
Via Media Matters
1. Mike Huckabee
Of course Rush wasn’t the only conservative crank to mock Jenner.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee didn’t just jeer her; he took the opportunity to let everyone know how much he would’ve liked to shower with high-school girls.
The GOP presidential candidate and author of God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy (unread by me — I assume it’s a prayer book packaged with a cookbook, with a gun manual tucked inside?) took the stage at the 2015 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tennessee and ripped into what he called the “social experiment” of transgender rights.
“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE,” said Huckabee. “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’”
Haha, yes. Because the best way to approach complex issues of biology, identity, and social politics is to bring up an anecdote about you being a horny teenager. Very presidential.
ViaBuzzFeed.
Photo above: Robert Scoble via Flickr
