Trump-mania, gun-nuttery, and the world’s scariest reality show. 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. Lou Dobbs
The Fox Business host, who previously was chased out of CNN for being such an overbearing anti-immigrant conspiracy nut, has turned lately into a full-throated fire-breathing pro-Trump zealot.
Randomly sample a dozen or so of Dobbs’ tweets from the past several months and behold the missives of a man on a holy mission, heedlessly sheering himself of even the most nominal pretenses of objectivity in his quest to herald the coming of The Donald. To take just one example, Dobbs suggested recently that Paul Ryan was unfit to be House Speaker for showing even the slightest reluctance to support Trump as the nominee of his party.
Eric Bolling and Sean Hannity may be smug and persistent in the oily, obsequious manner in which they roll out the carpet for Trump, but nobody matches Dobbs, whose unbridled devotion to the man resembles the frenzied, speaking-in-tongues ardor of someone who has touched the feet of God. (Seriously, just look at some of these.)
You know you’ve reached a low point in the annals of cable news bombast when Bill O’Reilly, of all people, has to be the one to bring you to task. And yet, so it was on the Factor Wednesday night when O’Reilly challenged Dobbs on his blind devotion to Trump and demanded to know if Dobbs was capable of saying anything critical about the candidate.
When Dobbs grumbled and blamed the mainstream media, O’Reilly shot back, “If he’s Jesus, how can you analyze him?”
He concluded, “According to Dobbs, Donald Trump is Jesus… And Jesus never put out his tax returns!”
4. Ted Nugent
A board member for one of the most powerful and influential lobbying groups in America has suggesting that the frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president should be shot in cold blood. That’s just kind of where we are right now.
“I got your gun control right here, bitch!” Ted Nugent wrote to Hillary Clinton in a Facebook post published Tuesday, linking to a YouTube video depicting the former secretary of state being gunned down by Bernie Sanders.
Right Wing Watch notes that “this sort of gleeful violence is nothing new to Nugent, who in a 2007 onstage rant relished the prospect of killing Clinton and then-candidate Obama,” proclaiming “Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun,” while carrying two machine guns.
Nugent also told his Facebook followers that President Obama “should be tried for treason & hung. Our entire fkdup gvt [sic] must be cleansed asap,” a few short months ago. The man has long been the patron saint of American gun nuts, and of unhinged threats against people in power. Good thing he doesn’t hold any positions of influence — right?
3. Tennessee
As some states are learning, passing anti-LGBT legislation into law can cause a real headache.
Two weeks after Tennessee passed a controversial law empowering psychologists to refuse service to gay patients under the pretense of “religious liberty,” two conventions in a row canceled their events in the Volunteer State
In protest of a state law they say is an affront to the profession of counseling and the worst legislation the group has tracked in decades, the American Counseling Association has canceled its annual conference scheduled for Nashville next year.
[…] For Nashville the loss of the convention at Music City Center could cost the city more than 3,000 visitors next year, $4 million in combined local and state tax revenue and a local economic impact of up to $10 million.
The American Counseling Association’s CEO said the law was “in clear violation” of the group’s ethics code. He added: “No other state has a law like Tennessee’s.”
Then the Colorado-based Centers for Spiritual Living, which had planned to hold a conference in Nashville, piled on. Its leader told The Tennessean: “There are a lot of LGBTQ people that are involved in the world, period, but (also) in our organization. We did not think in the practice of openness and inclusivity that that law would serve them very well. They felt violated in the action of that, so we chose to take a principled stand. It’s against what we hold to be true and believe. We believe in the equality of all humanity.”
2. Paul Manafort
Remember when people were hailing Trump’s hiring of Paul Manafort as an indication that his campaign was going to shift toward becoming more serious? Never mind!
“This is the ultimate reality show,” the campaign manager of the presumptive GOP nominee said. “It’s the presidency of the United States.”
Manafort made the dubious remarks during a Tuesday night appearance on Hardball.
He said that Trump had run “the first modern campaign in the social media era. He understood how to use earned media instead of paid media. Instead of using 30-second spots, he had a dialogue with the American people, both through his access to the media and through his campaign appearances. And he also had a vision of what the American people wanted.”
Hat tip and video courtesy of Media Matters.
Next: Troy Newman
1. Troy Newman
There was much hand-wringing from the Religious Right when a crass, big city, philandering, secular totem like Trump all but walked off with the GOP nomination. To a purist Christian theocrat, of the sort that rallied behind Ted Cruz, Trump’s record on abortion and LGBT rights is dubious to say the least.
But just as the “establishment” and “moderate” flanks of the party are learning to swallow their poison and get behind the Donald, so too will the religious extremists. This week we got an early indicator of that shift in Troy Newman, an anti-abortion extremist and a weathervane for the sort of feeble about-face we can expect to see from the Religious Right, which is on its way to making a Devil’s bargain with Trump.
Right Wing Watch’s Miranda Blue writes:
Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue and a driving force behind last year’s series of videos smearing Planned Parenthood, writes today that although Donald Trump “has said and done many things that most Christians would find despicable,” he will vote for him — although not formally endorse him — in the presidential election.
Newman articulates his shift in the form of a “pithy” acronym: He supports the Donald because he will Take back the Supreme Court; Remove and Replace [ObamaCare]; Undo! [everything]; Make America Great Again [like the baseball cap sez]; Prosecute Planned Parenthood. (RWW has reposted the acronym in full here.)
That last point may be a curious one to anyone who watched Cruz inundate Trump with criticism for his stated belief that Planned Parenthood has done some “very good work for millions of women.”
But perhaps this is just another reminder that this election shall serve to make feckless hypocrites of everyone on the right who once condemned Trump: from the moderates to the extremes, everyone is getting in line behind Donald.
Hat tip Right Wing Watch
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Illustration: DonkeyHotey via Flickr
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