Tag: jerry boykin
This Week In Crazy: Michele Bachmann Says Goodbye

This Week In Crazy: Michele Bachmann Says Goodbye

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. Montana Legislature

For years, Republicans have been warning their constituents about the looming threat represented by Sharia law. But some of them might find that they like parts of the rules. Specifically, the dress code.

On Friday, the GOP leadership of Montana’s state legislature sent a memo to members laying out the proper attire for legislative business. The instructions for men take all of 22 words.

But the women’s dress code is a bit more complicated. It takes several bullet points, and contains helpful reminders like “open-toe sandals are not considered appropriate,” “leggings are not considered dress pants,” and “women should be sensitive to skirt lengths and necklines.”

Montana Memo

(Yes, they did forget number 6.)

Unsurprisingly, the instructions sparked controversy. House Minority Whip Jenny Eck (D-Helena) derided it as “right out of the 19th Century,” and wondered “How would it be enforced? Would the sergeant of arms be the clothes police, checking our skirt lengths and cleavage?”

Meanwhile, Florida Republicans are presumably wondering whether or not they could come to work in their Rick Scott dresses.

4. Rush Limbaugh

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush administration triggered shock and outrage across the country. But you may not be shocked to learn that the right-wing media saw things differently.

No one exemplified the far-right reaction better than Rush Limbaugh. On the Tuesday edition of his show, Limbaugh responded with anger — that the Senate ruined “Jonathan Gruber day” with their stupid investigation.

“The lead story today, by design, is the release of…the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture. Dumping on the Bush administration on Jonathan Gruber day,” Limbaugh lamented. “Gruber, whatever’s happening up there, being dwarfed by what is happening with the release of how rotten and horrible this stinking country was when George Bush was president.”

“This is the picture being painted today: As we head into Christmas season, once again, America sucked — and it really sucked during the Bush years,” he added. “On the day that Jonathan Gruber is being questioned about all of the lies that were told in order to pass Obamacare.”

But Limbaugh wasn’t done there. Later, after agreeing with a caller that the outrage over Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s deaths was manufactured to distract the nation from Gruber (and immigration), Limbaugh wondered if President Obama — not torture — is the real “stain on our nation’s honor.”

After all, fraternity pranks are better than Hitler.

3. Peter King

Some Republican politicians also had a difficult time coming to terms with the torture revelations. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took a break from his battle against obesity to remind Newsmax TV host J.D. Hayworth that if Americans hate torture, they also hate America.

“This was really very mild,” King said of the revelations that detainees were beaten, humiliated, and — in at least one case — killed. “Why people have this hate-America-first attitude, this self-loathing, this self-hatred is beyond me.”

The congressman is right: If the hate-America crowd had its way, we never could have stopped that imaginary attack against Fort Knox.

King also agreed with Hayworth (and Limbaugh) that the Senate timed the release of the report to distract from Jonathan Gruber’s Earth-shattering testimony.

“We have to assume that there’s politics involved here when you’re talking about Harry Reid and the Democrats,” he explained.

Just imagine what Dianne Feinstein has planned for the day of the next Benghazi hearing!

2. Jerry Boykin

The most outrageous response to the torture report came God’s gun salesman, Family Research Council executive vice president Jerry Boykin.

During a Wednesday night appearance on Glenn Beck’s television show, Boykin — joined by fake ex-terrorist Kamal Saleem — dismissed the allegations

“I think that this report came from a bunch of sanctimonious hypocrites. This is not torture,” Boykin raged. “I’ll tell you what’s torture. Torture is what we’ve done to the veterans at the VA hospitals. Torture is what we’ve done by having the IRS go after conservative groups.”

Well, when you put it that way… nope, rectal rehydration still sounds worse than being targeted by the IRS. Especially considering that the torturous “scandal” never actually happened.

Maybe if Boykin had compared the torture to President Obama’s psy-ops, he might have had a point.

1. Michele Bachmann

When the 113th Congress departs on Friday, so too will its craziest member: this week’s “winner,” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

On Tuesday night, Bachmann took to the podium to deliver her farewell address to a nearly-empty House chamber. And her Bible-thumping stem-winder did not disappoint.

Among the highlights:

• Bachmann went on at length about the phrase “In God We Trust,” claiming that:

These words were mouthed by the founders of our country. Those who decided to leave the comforts of their home to come here to what was essentially an untested, untapped world where there were people — the Native Americans who populated this land — but where a brand new culture that was about to be born. One that would be, again, the fulcrum to bless the entire world.

(One imagines that the Native Americans didn’t feel so blessed.)

• She also claimed that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments so that Americans could one day grow wealthy:

We know those laws, those laws are the fundamental laws of mankind, and here in the United States, the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses is the very foundation of the law that has given happiness and the rise of the greatest prosperity that any nation has known before.

Mr. Speaker, it could be no coincidence that this nation, knowing and enjoying the heights of such great happiness and such great prosperity, that it could be built upon that foundation of the Ten Commandments and of the law given by the God in whom we trust.

• Bachmann also took a moment to praise our greatest citizens: “My favorite Americans are people who didn’t know they were Americans. They were the Pilgrims.”

Video of the speech can be seen below:

This Week In Crazy will miss you, congresswoman. But don’t worry, readers: There’s always 2016.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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Pandering To Bigotry With Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, And Jerry Boykin

Pandering To Bigotry With Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, And Jerry Boykin

Observing the Values Voter Summit from a happy distance, it is clear that America’s most vocal haters are coming down especially hard on Muslims this year. Bringing their own special brand of crazy, as ever, are such popular figures as Rep. Michele Bachmann, who warned that America is engaged in “spiritual warfare” against Islam; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who defined Islam as “the total opposite of Christianity”; and Jerry Boykin, the retired Army general rebuked personally by President George W. Bush in 2003 for declaring, among other things, that his God “is bigger than” Allah.

What is most repellent about the annual religious-right gathering isn’t the extremist, un-American rhetoric emitted by the celebrity wingnuts buzzing around there – many, like Boykin, oppose the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of worship, especially for Muslims – but the perennial pandering of the Republican politicians who appear there.  The most abject example so far is David Dewhurst, the two-time Texas loser, delivering a speech that claimed Islamic “prayer rugs” supposedly found near the border prove that ISIS terrorists are infiltrating.

It is especially disgusting, however, to see United States senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz nurture their ambitions by sucking up to this bigoted crowd.

Boykin wins the sensitivity prize for his urgent advice — just in time for Jewish New Year celebrations! — that the Jews in Israel should all convert to Christianity, immediately if not sooner. That must go for his neoconservative fans, too.

Photo: jbouie via Flickr.com

This Week In Crazy: Obama Is Brainwashing You With Psy-Ops, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Obama Is Brainwashing You With Psy-Ops, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

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. Pat Robertson

On Wednesday, the U.S. Air Force announced that Airmen will now be allowed to omit the words “So help me God” from enlistment and officer appointment oaths, if they so choose.

It may not shock you to learn that Pat Robertson was not happy.

On the Thursday edition of his show, Robertson slammed the Air Force for giving in to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s Mikey Weinstein, who advocated for the change.

“There is a left-wing radical named Mikey Weinstein who has gotten a group about ‘people against religion’ or whatever he calls it and he has just terrorized the Armed Forces,” Robertson raged. “You think you’re supposed to be tough, you’re supposed to defend us, and you’ve got one little Jewish radical who is scaring the pants off of you. You want these guys flying airplanes to defend us when you’ve got one little guy terrorizing them?”

How did Weinstein even find time to terrorize the military when he has all those diamonds to polish?

4. Glenn Beck

On Thursday, Scotland voted to remain a part of the United Kingdom. But American prophet Glenn Beck couldn’t wait that long to warn us about the horrible implications of an independent Scotland.

In a roundtable discussion featuring goofy graphics and bored staffers on Tuesday, Beck explained what Scottish independence would really have meant: “Civil war all over the world.”

According to Beck, tyrants like Vladimir Putin were “licking their chops over this,” because it would have give them an excuse to violate all manner of international norms.

“This is what my gut’s been telling me,” he said. “There’s something wrong here. There’s something really big … there’s a really huge consequence to this. That’s what it is. This leads to global destabilization.”

Notably, even though Beck believes that Scottish independence would have led to global catastrophe, he still supported the movement.

3. Rush Limbaugh

Noted gender-relations expert Rush Limbaugh, who has claimed that “most women are actually intrigued” by sexual objectification, and that rape culture is “just the way of the world,” weighed in on Ohio State University’s new sexual assault policy during the Monday edition of his show.

It did not go well.

After complaining that the new mandate, which requires affirmative consent for sex, “takes all the romance out of everything,” Limbaugh got to the meat of his argument.

“How many of you guys, in your own experience with women, have learned that no means yes if you know how to spot it?” Limbaugh asked.

In fairness to Limbaugh, he probably has heard plenty of women say “no” to his advances.

Limbaugh’s comments sparked immediate outrage and renewed calls to remove him from the air. They may have made an impact; by Thursday, Limbaugh had moved on to the much less controversial topic of domestic violence.

2. Gordon Klingenschmitt

It was another busy week for Colorado state House candidate and militant-gay fearer Gordon Klingenschmitt.

On Saturday, Klingenschmitt sent an email to members of his Pray in Jesus Name Project claiming that New York is “banning Christian worship,” and making sure that Christians “cannot worship Christ during a wedding, unless they also worship and participate equally in sodomy in their own home.”

On Sunday, he warned that by attempting to overturn the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, “Democrats are literally trying to outlaw Christianity.”

But he saved the main event for Wednesday, when he revealed who’s really to blame for a federal appeals court’s recent decision to uphold New Jersey’s ban on sexual orientation conversion therapy.

You guessed it: Demons.

“There is a demonic spirit of persecution that is in some politicians,” Klingenschmitt lamented. “I’m not saying that politicians are the Devil, but I’m saying the Devil is influencing them to persecute Christians, and they’re using the courts to do it, they’re using these laws to do it. They want to silence the prophets!”

Prophets? That’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about Marcus Bachmann.

1. Jerry Boykin

Screenshot: YouTube

Screenshot: YouTube

Although President Obama has obviously commited hundreds of impeachable offenses, there has never been any serious legislative attempt to hold him accountable for his treasonous actions. Thanks to this week’s “winner,” Family Research Council executive vice president Jerry Boykin, we now know why.

According to God’s gun salesman, Obama — who is somehow simultaneously America’s “first ‘Red’ president,” and “a king” — is using “psy-ops” to get away with murder.

“First of all, the Islamists are running an influence campaign, trying to change our thinking,” he explained during a Tuesday interview with fellow This Week In Crazy favorite Rick Wiles. “And look, you saw the evidence of that when the president stood up last week and said ‘ISIS is not Islam.’ You know, that’s an influence campaign. That’s influence, and that’s brainwashing the American people.”

“But you see that also with the Marxists,” Boykin added, “and the LGBT lobby is doing the exact same thing. Bombarding us with this messaging that is really about changing the way we think.”

One would think that if President Obama, ISIS, the LGBT lobby, and the Marxists were all brainwashing Americans, he might have a higher approval rating.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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This Week In Crazy: Jesus Wants You To Buy An AR-15, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Jesus Wants You To Buy An AR-15, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

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. Dwayne Stovall

Genuinely crazy U.S. Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) has earned much of the press coverage in Texas’ Republican primary for U.S. Senate — with good reason — but he is not the only absurd Tea Party challenger to Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX).

Dwayne Stovall’s Senate campaign flew under the radar until this week, when he released this epically weird attack ad:

In case Stovall’s talking dog’s love of turtle soup somehow didn’t make things clear, he also released an image depicting Senator Cornyn as a muscular pig-man with a Karl Rove tattoo:

If Rep. Stockman wants to keep his title as the craziest candidate in Texas, it appears that he has some work to do.

4. Steve King

When U.S. Representative Steve King (R-IA) warned that “For every [DREAM Act beneficiary] who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” the bipartisan response was essentially “shut up.”

But according to King, he got the last laugh.

In a Thursday interview with the Spencer Daily Reporter, an Iowa paper, Rep. King claims that his “cantaloupes” comment actually won the debate over the DREAM Act.

“Sometimes, I’ve made the point for years and they weren’t listening, so I’ve found another way to get them to pay attention,” King explained. “For example, Dick Durbin, as far as I know, no longer describes the DREAMers as ‘valedictorians.’ We’ve corrected that major flaw and sometimes we have to, otherwise it distorts the public’s understanding.”

King went on to stress that “What I’ve said is objectively true,” adding (hilariously), “When they start calling names, they’ve lost the debate.”

Right Wing Watch has the video:

Back in reality, if the debate over the DREAM Act is settled, King certainly didn’t win it. And when it comes to Steve King, the only person who’s speaking the “objective truth” is probably John Boehner.

3. Republican Party Of Sarasota

tedcruzsmiles

Photo: jbouie via Flickr

The Sarasota GOP checks in at number three, for its inspired choice of “Statesman of the Year:” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Cruz, whom the Sarasota GOP calls a “conservative champion” and “a passionate fighter for liberty, economic growth, and the Constitution,” accepted the award at a reception on Thursday night.

The Tea Party hero, who has devoted much of his brief tenure in the Senate to sabotaging the government’s ability to function in an attempt to prevent it from paying its bills, seems like an odd choice for the nation’s top statesman. But in comparison to the Sarasota GOP’s previous two Statesmen of the Year — Donald Trump and Sean Hannity — the pick actually seems downright sane.

Perhaps the party should take the advice that its former chairman gave on his way to prison: “Politics can be a contentious and sometimes bruising exercise, but it should be truth-based.”

2. Alex Jones & Phyllis Schlafly

When conspiracy king Alex Jones and old-school bigot Phyllis Schlafly get together, you just know that something crazy will happen.

The deranged duo did not disappoint during Schlafly’s Tuesday appearance on Jones’ Infowars. After Schlafly reiterated her concern that immigrants are plotting to vote Democratic and destroy “freedom and prosperity” in America, Jones upped the ante.

“And then they’ll support literally making those of us that produce their slaves,” he said, adding that George Soros and Warren Buffett will lobby to raise taxes on the middle class, which will take us “back to a democracy where two wolves can vote to eat the sheep for dinner.”

“It would be a joke if it weren’t so really tragic,” Schlafly said.

Schlafly is wrong about at least one thing: Although Jones’ concern about immigrant slave-drivers isn’t quite as outrageous as her fear of polygamous Muslim welfare queens, it’s still pretty freaking funny.

1. Jerry Boykin

Jerry Boykin

This week’s “winner” is retired lieutenant general and current Family Research Council vice president Jerry Boykin.

Boykin, who was last seen on this list fawning over his image of Jesus Christ as a “man’s man” with “big bulging biceps” and a “thin waist,” has added another accessory to his fantasy Christ: An AR-15!

“The Lord is a warrior and in Revelation 19 is says when he comes back, he’s coming back as what? A warrior. A mighty warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe,” Boykin told the WallBuilders’ Pro-Family Legislators Conference on Tuesday. “I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies ’cause he’s coming back as a warrior carrying a sword.”

“And I believe now — I’ve checked this out — I believe that sword he’ll be carrying when he comes back is an AR-15,” he continued.

After explaining how the Second Amendment came straight from Jesus, Boykin gets back to his main point.

“The sword today is an AR-15,” he insisted, “so if you don’t have one, go get one. You’re supposed to have one. It’s Biblical.”

I believe  — and I’ve checked this out — that maybe Boykin should stop taking history lessons from David Barton.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!