Tag: steve deace
This Week In Crazy: ‘May God Have Mercy On Our Nation’

This Week In Crazy: ‘May God Have Mercy On Our Nation’

We are gathered here today not to mourn the death but to puzzle over the life of the Grand Old Party, laid to rest this week when a tangerine-toupeed interloper from the Big City stole the nomination from a host of social conservatives. 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. Tila Hubrecht

A conservative Missouri state lawmaker would like to remind women who have been raped to always look on the bright side of life.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, while arguing in favor of a bill that would grant personhood rights to unborn fetuses — in effect, making any abortion illegal — Tila Hubrecht, a Republican in the Missouri House of Representatives said: “It is not up to us to say, ‘No, just because there was a rape, they [unborn fetuses] cannot exist.”

She continued:  “Sometimes bad things happen. Horrible things. But sometimes God can give us a silver lining through the birth of a child.”

The remarks echo those of Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock, who during his (failed) 2012 run for U.S. Senate, said that if pregnancy occurs following a rape, it should be viewed as a “gift from God.”

Ultimately, the House voted 112-36 to advance the measure. According to the Dispatch, its text states it would “protect pregnant women and unborn children by recognizing that an unborn child is a person with a right to life which cannot be deprived by state or private action without due process and equal protection of law.”

Hat tip LawNewz

Next: Bobby Knight

4. Bobby Knight

Retired basketball coach Bobby Knight bumbled back in the public eye with a series of appearances touting his support of Donald Trump in the days leading up to the decisive primary in his native Indiana.

For instance, the addled septuagenarian with a history of explosive and violent temper tantrums bragged that Trump was the “most prepared man in history” to be President of the United States. He also boasted that Trump was the only candidate who had “the guts” to drop an A-bomb on another country. (That’s what a man does, dammit.)

Speaking to CNN’s John Berman Wednesday morning, Knight was asked to address some of his candidate’s more controversial remarks — to wit, his insistence that we need to ban 1.6 billion Muslims from entering the country.

“I don’t even know what controversial means!” Knight protested. When Berman had to explain that pesky banning-all-practioners-of-a-religion thing to Knight, the coach responded, “Well that’s okay. That doesn’t really mean anything to me right now.”

He added, “We’re talking about a guy that I think can handle things far better than anything that we’ve had recently.”

And clearly Knight knows best — because he’s done his homework.

Next: Jehovah’s Witness 

3. Jehovah’s Witness

The Church of Jehovah’s Witness has upped the creep factor this week with the release of a nasty bit of propaganda: an animated short film that explains, with a silken, Disneyfied touch, just why it is all those nice gays and lesbians need to rot in hell, and what your children can do to save them.

The plot is fairly straightforward: When a little girl explains that her schoolmate Carrie drew a picture of her two happily married mothers, her mother decides to have a Teaching Moment.

“People have their own ideas about what is right and wrong,” the mom helpfully explains, “but what matters is how Jehovah feels. He wants us to be happy. And he knows what makes us happiest. That’s why he invented marriage the way he did.”

“You mean one man and one woman?” asks the credulous little cretin.

“Exactly!” says mom, who proceeds to explain that Jehovah “wants us to be his friend — and live in Paradise forever, but we have to follow his standards to get there,” explicitly likening the path to Paradise to a pre-flight security screening. You can’t bring contraband on an jetliner — and you can’t bring your dreaded, affliction of homosexuality into the Promised Land. Jehovah is nothing less than the Big Blue-Shirted TSA Man in the Sky, apparently.

This is when the little vid delivers its truly insidious punchline: Mommy leans in close to her daughter and explains that she had better go tell Carrie that “people can change,” and that she should tell her friend about “Paradise,” “the animals,” and the “Resurrection.”

And which point the #blessed heterosexual family unit proceeds to practice their talking points to save little Carrie’s soul.

Hat tip Daily Kos

Next: Pat McCrory

2. Pat McCrory

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory is not having a good week.

The anti-LGBT bill he signed into law has cost his state considerable business opportunities and at least one Bruce Springsteen concert. Even one porn site got in on the fun by blocking Tar Heel viewers from their site. Challenged to justify the law (HB2) on Megyn Kelly’s show last week, the governor blustered and was treated to a lesson from the Fox News anchor in how ladies bathrooms actually work.

And then on Wednesday the Justice Department served the state with a letter informing them that their little piece of legislation is in violation of civil rights statutes. Oh, do the indignities never end?

In a radio interview Tuesday, McCrory blew his top, raging against the gay rights agenda that has wrought such a headache for him and brought such shame upon his state.

The Human Rights Campaign, he said, was “machiavellian, man.” The incredulous governor could not understand why his anti-LGBT law was offending LGBT people. “This had nothing to do with gay and lesbian,” he said. “This had to do with privacy.”

Nonetheless, he insists that a bigot is “the farthest thing” from what he is.

Check out the audio above courtesy of The Greensboro News & Record.

Next: The Tears of the Religious Right 

1. The Tears of the Religious Right

Glenn Beck repeatedly claimed to have seen the will of God manifest itself in the candidacy of Ted Cruz. He even said that Antonin Scalia died at God’s hand, simply to show America how important it was to elect Ted Cruz. Beck was just one of a cabal of social conservatives on the #NeverTrump train which derailed in spectacular fashion this week when the Texas Senator and that guy from Ohio suspended their campaigns, clearing the field for Donald Trump to clinch the GOP nomination.

What an ignominious end to God’s chosen campaign. Social conservatives and Religious Right luminaries took to Twitter in the hours following Cruz’s implosion and the ascendance of Trump to express their frustration and bafflement and to beg for God’s aid and forgiveness in this, their moment of darkness.

A tip of the hat to Right Wing Watch’s Brian Tashman for unearthing many of these.

From TWIC favorite and American Family Association spokesman Bryan Fischer:

From Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol:

From Steve Deace, the Cruz supporter who once vowed to eunuch himself if Cruz showed weakness on the campaign trail:

Deace also posted photo evidence of himself switching party affiliation.

Todd Starnes, writing on Facebook:

But for brevity nobody can match Robert P. George, a luminary of the “religious freedom” movement:

On that, at least, George and I are whistling the same tune.

Illustration: DonkeyHotey via Flickr

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!Get This Week In Crazy delivered to your inbox every Friday, by signing up for our daily email newsletter.

This Week in Crazy: Castratos for Cruz

This Week in Crazy: Castratos for Cruz

Mandatory office guns, a tropical torture chamber, Vladimir Putin battling Satan, and some very dedicated Ted Cruz supporters. 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. Andrea Tantaros

President Obama’s announcement Tuesday that he was issuing a proposal to close Guantanamo Bay was met with the predictable conservative backlash. Count on the hosts of the midday roundtable Outnumbered — Fox News’s high-concept daily show which resembles what might happen if the Plastics from Mean Girls cattily recited conservative bromides — to churn out the most tin-eared and ignorant response. Specifically, co-host Andrea Tantaros referred to the prison complex as a “tropical paradise.”

It’s true that Gitmo is located on an island in the Caribbean, where the climate is likely “tropical.” But it is also true that the site has been a place where America has kept detainees, held and tortured them, some for several years, without trial; a locus for water-boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques;” and a black stain on the country’s reputation domestically and worldwide.

Tantaros also speculated that this was part of the president’s master plan to propose something that he knew would get blocked in Congress, just so that he could issue an executive order, which would, in turn, get challenged in the Supreme Court, “conveniently without conservative Justice Scalia there.” What delightfully smug eel-like illogic, compounded with self-defeating rationalization that somehow a recalcitrant Senate Republican cabal is just a pawn in Obama’s ninth-dimensional chess.

“It’s insanity, it’s illegal,” she concluded, adding, “it’s disgusting,” in what we might charitably speculate was a moment of self-reflection.

Hat tip and video courtesy of Raw Story

Next: Steve Deace 

4. Steve Deace

When it comes to being loyal to a candidate… there’s commitment, and then there’s commitment. And then there’s people who are willing to cut their own nuts off.

Ted Cruz apparently knows how to inspire that latter — one devoted follower went so far as to threaten to “eunuch myself” if it would boost Cruz’s performance.

That dedicated fellow is Steve Deace, who, according to Media Matters, “was part of Cruz’s Iowa leadership team and has given his advice and name in support of the senator, has gone on a tirade against Cruz on social media, his nationally syndicated radio show, and in two parts on Conservative Review. He has denounced Cruz’s current messaging and stance against Trump as weak, despite explaining that he is still a ‘Cruz guy.'”

Speaking on his eponymous show Monday, Deace was aghast at the Texas senator’s third-place showing in South Carolina, but even more perturbed by the fact that his golden calf of a candidate has pulled one too many about-faces lately, apologizing to the Carson and Rubio camps for shady campaign trickery. (Even Cruz’s non-apology apologies, it should be said, come softened by the most assiduously carved out qualifications, deflections, and distortions. The oily senator has never truly owned up to his chicanery.)

“I love him, we are friends,” Deace said, “but I don’t believe in victims.” Apparently, Cruz’s mealy-mouthed back-pedaling is a sign of weakness, and by not catapulting him to first place in South Carolina, Palmetto voters were sending the Texas senator a message “that they want him to go back to being that alpha male conservative leader that people fell in love with.”

He continued:

If anyone with the Cruz campaign ever apologizes to Ben Carson again, I may eunuch myself, which will make my wife very, very upset. I am desperate at this point. I will do anything, name it, name the price. As a Cruz guy, I will do anything the universe demands, that they never apologize to Ben Carson or really anybody else again.

He added that voters “don’t want nice,” they want brutal and effective. He illustrated his point by invoking a curious fable of a fireman with dark secrets who comes to rescue your family when your house is in flames:

When your home is on fire, you have no idea, you have no idea when the firemen comes crashing through your front door to rescue your kids, you have no idea if he has kiddie porn on his computer at home. You don’t know if he has got a tongue ring and a john account online. You don’t know that and you don’t care.

Hat tip and video courtesy of Media Matters

Next: Mandatory Guns 

3. Lance Toland Associates

We hear a lot about how the nefarious Left wants to take away our right to have guns. Less often, we hear about someone trying to take away our right not to have a gun.

File this under the “Guns Make Everything Safer and Better” insanity: one Georgia business is now insisting that all of its employees show up for work packing heat.

Lance Toland Associates, an aviation insurance company with several offices throughout the Peach State, is instituting a new policy requiring all workers to obtain concealed carry permits.

“A lot of my clients are high-fiving when they hear this. They think it’s the best things for a company to mandate gun ownership and be responsible,” business owner Lance Toland told WSB-TV in Atlanta.

LawNewz writes:

The owner says after employees get their license, Toland gives them a gun known as the “governor,” which is made by Smith & Wesson. Toland contends the weapon is one of the most effective for self-defense. Toland says his company’s gun mandate came as a result of a surge in crime in the Atlanta metro area.

Toland says the gun he distributes is “a 5 shot .410, just like a shotgun and you call it hand cannon.”

If nothing else, it offers a quick, effortless way to resolve workplace disputes.

Hat tip LawNewz

Next: Alex Jones 

2. Alex Jones 

Alex Jones — the Michael Jordan of shock jocks, whose idea of hard-hitting investigative journalism is dressing up like a blood-spattered clown to unmask the Pope’s pedophilia ring — has some theories about Donald Trump.

Jones is a professional conspiracy theorist who can sniff out a good false flag in the most seemingly straightforward stories. You might assume, reasonably, that he could unmask the well-connected billionaire with longstanding ties to the Clintons who is currently leading the GOP race for some sort of establishment goon. But the fact is, Jones has thrown his weight so completely behind The Donald that he’s willing to wage war against the mogul’s demonic foes who’ve lined up against him.

Likewise, just as you’d assume a beacon of journalistic integrity like Jones — a luminary in the fight for individual freedom and American values — would take issue with a demagogue like Vladimir Putin, the radio host is pretty enamored of the Russian leader, because he “is putting up a fight… in the face of just absolute pure evil.” He points to the fact that Russia has supposedly banned genetically-modified foods (one of the Dark Lord’s darkest designs) and that “You tune into Russian TV now, it’s like I’m hosting it.” Forget about the very real dangers that real journalists face in Putin’s Russia.

As reported by Right Wing Watch, Jones went on a tirade about the forces of Satanic darkness embodied by a cabal of globalists who “want to deform us and jack with the food and mutate everything” and the forces of God and light, represented here by the merry trio of Jones, Trump, and, yes, Putin.

This needs to be seen to be believed:

Hat tip and video courtesy of Right Wing Watch

Next: Ben Carson 

1. Ben Carson

Paging Dr. Carson. Your book tour is over.

Your campaign is in shambles, after months of hemorrhaging talent and crawling in at or near rock bottom in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.

A recent report from Vice depicts one of your recent rallies as a cold and plodding slumber of the damned. You never actually spent those funds you raised from credulous voters on much real campaigning, preferring to tour the country, touting your latest book, and dash away from vital early-voting to states to grab yourself a fresh pair of slacks. Does it ever trouble you that you took money from people whom you duped into believing you were an actual candidate?

Why are you even running anymore? You’ve said “this is just the beginning” after you came in sixth (out of six) in South Carolina. You’ve likened yourself to the tortoise in Aesop’s fable. And yet your most reliable debate tactic of late has been to talk about how much shut-eye you’ve been getting in between questions, suggesting a closer resemblance to the lethargic hare, who improbably surged to the top of the polls early on, but is now smugly content to lie etherized upon the podium.

In your fitful, straining first year of political life, you have demonstrated a persistent and stubborn allergy to reality. And while I have little love for the likes of John Ellis Bush or Chris Christie, it must be noted that these men read the numbers, watched the coverage, heard the bell toll for them, and acted accordingly.

This is no longer an operation, Dr. Carson. It is an autopsy.

Time to call it a day.

Image: Steve Rotman via Flickr

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!Get This Week In Crazy delivered to your inbox every Friday, by signing up for our daily email newsletter.

This Week In Crazy: Michele Bachmann Is Very Disappointed In Jewish-Americans, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Michele Bachmann Is Very Disappointed In Jewish-Americans, 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

Noted scientist Pat Robertson checks in at number five, for counseling a woman who wrote in to his 700 Club program on Wednesday that her friend should feel free to marry her first cousin — as long as she speaks to a genetic counselor first.

You may think that this is uncharacteristically sensitive advice from the conservative televangelist. You’d be wrong.

“There’s nothing in the Bible that says you can’t marry your first cousin,” Robertson counseled. But there are risks.

“You don’t want to have some mongoloid child,” he added.

Noting his co-host’s disapproval, Robertson quickly backtracked, acknowledging “I shouldn’t say Mongol.”

No, Pat. No you shouldn’t.
4. Steve Deace

Steve Deace

Right-wing commentator Steve Deace pulled off an impressive Tea Party double play on Monday, when he managed to combine two of the far-right’s favorite topics into one absurd conspiracy theory.

Writing in the Washington Times, Deace raged at the attention that openly gay NFL draft prospect Michael Sam received at the NFL draft combine.

“This is Michael Sam. The leftist media’s latest contrived attempt to distract the American people from the daily failures of the president who they cover for daily,” Deace wrote.

But from what are the leftists trying to distract us? If you guessed “Benghazi,” you’re correct (and you may have been reading This Week In Crazy for too long).

“Not to be outdone, a flailing president who seemingly has no time to give answers to the families of four dead Americans at Benghazi, or the millions he broke a promise to that they could keep their current health insurance if they liked it, couldn’t wait to jump on Mr. Sam’s bandwagon,” Deace explained.

“This is the same president who said if he had a son he wouldn’t let him play a dangerous sport such as football,” he added. “Mr. Obama cares about Mr. Sam so much he wants him to risk life and limb playing football. With friends like that, who needs fundamentalist Christians?”

Stay tuned for Deace’s next column, in which he reveals that openly gay NBA player Jason Collins is actually the first step in Obama’s march towards fascism (actually, scratch that joke — he’s already written it).

3. CPAC

Although the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference is only one-third complete, there has already been no shortage of crazy moments. But with all due respect to Wayne LaPierre’s absurd vision of America’s dystopian present, the craziest speech of the day belonged to Donald Trump.

For the second consecutive year, Trump used his speech to attack immigration reform (although this year he didn’t propose an exception for the children of his white, European friends).

“Immigration, we’re either a country or we’re not, we either have borders or we don’t; you have a border, you have a country and if you don’t have a border, what are we, just a nothing? A nothing,” Trump said, ripping a page from the Ron Paul playbook.

He also took a moment to mock President Obama’s 54 percent approval rating — not mentioning that Trump has a 68 percent unfavorable rating in his home state of New York — before comparing Obama to the “late, great Jimmy Carter” (who is, for the record, not dead).

It’s almost hard to believe that this guy is losing to Andrew Cuomo by 44 percent.
2. National Security Action Summit

As crazy as CPAC may be, the real fringe action was taking place at former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney’s alternative conference on national security issues.

Gaffney, a noted islamophobic conspiracy theorist, was banned from CPAC in 2011 for his unhinged attacks against his fellow conservatives (Gaffney would later claim that he was boycotting the event because it was infiltrated by the Muslim brotherhood.) He then launched his own summit to compete with the annual conservative gathering.

Think about that for a moment: Frank Gaffney is too crazy for CPAC.

As Right Wing Watch documented, the speeches at Gaffney’s event reflect its founding father rather well.

There was Rep. Steve King comparing immigrants to animals (again).

Phyllis Schlafly took a break from her war with the brewery that shares her name to lament the apparent decline of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who really knew how to persecute immigrants back in the ’50s:

But the real star of the show was God’s favorite gun salesman, Jerry Boykin, who reminded America that the greatest threat facing our country is President Obama’s non-existent Benghazi conspiracy:

In case you were wondering who would provide a platform for such an outrageous gathering, by the way, the answer is exactly what you’d think: The good, conspiracy-minded folks at Breitbart News.


1. Michele Bachmann

Michele Bachmann 427x321

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

This week’s “winner” is once again Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), whose Monday appearance on fellow This Week In Crazy favorite Tony Perkins’ radio show was just as absurd as you’d hope.

During the interview, Bachmann accused American Jews of selling out Israel by supporting President Obama in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

The Jewish community gave him their votes, their support, their financial support and as recently as last week, forty-eight Jewish donors who are big contributors to the president wrote a letter to the Democrat [sic] senators in the U.S. Senate to tell them to not advance sanctions against Iran. This is clearly against Israel’s best interest. What has been shocking has been seeing and observing Jewish organizations who it appears have made it their priority to support the political priority and the political ambitions of the president over the best interests of Israel. They sold out Israel.

Although Bachmann told Perkins that President Obama’s policies will lead to a “final war, destroying and reducing [Israel] to rubble,” thankfully Jewish-Americans won’t have to live with their guilt for long. After all, as the deranged congresswoman loves to point out, we’re in the Biblical End Times.

Despite the characteristic insanity of her argument, Bachmann is actually slightly more qualified to rant about Israel than she is on most other topics — after all, she once lived in a socialist commune there (and apparently had a heck of a time). But don’t expect to hear that little factoid in her inevitable post-Congress career on the Tea Party scam circuit.

Audio of Bachmann’s comments is available atRight Wing Watch.

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