The satanic Switzerland tunnel, the classic it’s-not-Trump-it’s-you racism feint, and the Republicans’ devils bargain with the Donald. 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. Jeffrey Lord

Watching Trump supporters have to answer for their orange demigod’s insane and hateful behavior on live cable news has been one of the peculiar pleasures of this election cycle. Under the scrutiny (more or less) of TV anchors, we’ve gotten to see any number of Trump apologists squirm, equivocate, evade, and outright lie through their damn teeth.

In this nascent, but flourishing tradition, we may have just gotten our masterpiece: a f of an interview, as CNN’s resident Trump mouthpiece Jeffrey Lord melted down this week in spectacular fashion. Lord ultimately opted to go with the ever reliable kindergarten rhetorical maneuver “I am rubber, you are glue” in the matter of Trump’s incendiary remarks that District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was unfit to preside over the Trump University case because of his Mexican heritage.

Responding to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s assertion that Trump had been racist, Lord, in turn, exhibiting an utter lack of creativity, called Ryan a racist.

“Speaker Ryan has apparently switched positions and is supporting identity politics, which is racist. I am astonished,” faux-outrage machine Jeffrey Lord said on CNN Tuesday.

“You’re accusing Paul Ryan of racism?” host Carol Costello asked.

“I am accusing anybody who believes in identity politics, which he apparently now does, of playing the race card,” he responded, and proceeded to accuse the entire Republican establishment, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, of also being racist.

You see, in Lordlandia, when you call out someone for being racist, you are playing the “race card,” and that is the real racism. Or something.

Video courtesy of Media Matters

Next: Sean Hannity 

4. Sean Hannity

But maybe I’m being too hard on Lord. After all, the he-who-smelt-it-dealt-it-approach to calling Trump out on his racism was being played all throughout the Trump sycophant cosmos.

Take for instance, Trump’s fawning fangirl-in-chief Sean Hannity, who has made a habit of massively evacuating himself of dignity in a series of greasy, fawning interviews with the Donald for months now. When he isn’t presumably mailing the presumptive GOP nominee locks of his hair enclosed in handwritten sonnets, Hannity is going to bat for him on the air like the obedient horsewhipped acolyte he is.

Speaking to the whole Judge Curiel kerfuffle on his radio show Tuesday, Hannity shot back at Trump’s detractors, sounding like nothing so much as a spiteful four-year-old defending his daddy’s honor from schoolyard bullies.

He insisted that Judge Curiel should have recused himself, before launching into a buffet of false equivalence, accusing the left of “selective moral outrage” in their failure to condemn President Obama’s “radical past” and even went so far as to call the president a racist himself, saying:

I didn’t hear Paul Ryan talk about Reverend Wright being racist, I didn’t hear Paul Ryan making the case that somebody that hangs out with, gave speeches with,sits on boards with and starts his political career in the home of a domestic — unrepentant domestic terrorist isn’t fit for the job. I didn’t hear Lindsey Graham make that case either and it was his buddy John McCain running at the time.

Anything that they can do; I didn’t see the stuff in his two books Audacity of Hope or Dreams of My Father, “white man’s greed runs the world in need” Obama said? Is that worse than Trump’s comments? Everybody’s got selective moral outrage. Everybody’s all offended by words but it only depends on who utters the words that offends them. Because they’ll make all sorts of excuses, time and time again, if they don’t want to pick that particular political fight.

Somewhere, surely, the Donald is tossing Sean a treat.

Audio courtesy of Media Matters

Next: Dennis Prager 

3. Dennis Prager

In his syndicated column published Tuesday, Dennis Prager accused Bernie Sanders of being both a false Jew and a false American.

He writes:

In Sanders’ speeches and interviews, there is virtually no mention of his being a Jew (unless he’s asked about it), and — what’s truly amazing for an American presidential candidate — there are few mentions of America, except to lament American inequality, Wall Street corruption and other American evils.

It is true that, unlike the preening pandering from conservative Christian neotheocrat Republicans, Sanders has kept his religion more or less off the table. Though he has spoken often and emphatically that he believes in a spiritual mandate to improve life for our fellow man — a point he made perhaps most powerfully at a bridge-building speech at Liberty University.

Apparently that’s not good enough for Prager, who appoints himself arbiter of who is and who is not Jewish enough based on the number of times they flaunt their religiosity. He aligns Sanders with other “radical non-Jewish Jews” like George Soros and Noam Chomsky, whose spiritual failings (in Prager’s estimation) lead to immoral political actions.

[N]on-Jewish Jews are far more likely to work to weaken Christianity in America than Jewish Jews, especially religious Jews. Religious Jews celebrate religious Christians. The same holds true for American non-Jews who have rejected any identification with Christianity, many of whom in fact seek to weaken Christian influence and identity in America.

He concludes that “the radical non-Jewish Jew and the radical non-American American… hurt real humans, especially Jews and Americans.”

There you have it. If a Jew does not meet the minimum threshold on the Prager Jew Criterion Index, you actively weaken America and cause injury to other Jews.

Next: Who’s afraid of a little modern dance? 

2. Conservatives Scared of Performance Art

Switzerland marked the occasion of the opening of the largest and deepest tunnel in the world with a ceremony that included “an extended modern dance sequence — featuring stony-faced dancers dressed in orange construction gear and boots, dancing on and around a flatcar. Another sequence featured dancers in white briefs and one figure with wings and an oversize head, while yet another sequence had people covered in suits resembling a cross between a pompom and a hay bale,” according to NPR.

But if you’re a conservative Christian, it was nothing less than a godless carnival of the damned, an oblation to demonic demigods, a harbinger of a global decline in moral values, and a wake-up call to god-fearing Christians that they are coming under assault.

Charisma had the courage to ask: “Was the Gotthard Base Tunnel Opening Ceremony an Illuminati Ritual Intended to Honor Satan?” Michael Snyder writes from the comfort of the nest under his bed:

For a very long time, global secret societies have conducted their dark rituals out of the view of the general public, but we appear to have entered a time when they are becoming much bolder.

These days, we are seeing these sorts of “Illuminati rituals” just about everywhere. We have seen them regularly at major awards shows, in music videos, in television shows and movies, and even at the Super Bowl.

So why do these same themes keep popping up over and over again?

Darkness is rising, and it isn’t going to be satisfied until it has gripped the entire planet. And at this point the elite have become so bold that they aren’t even hiding what they plan to do to us anymore.

In a column published this week in WND, Leo Hohmann spoke to at least one Christian author who said the dance was a harbinger of the apocalypse. “In watching this ‘dedication ceremony,’ one can almost imagine what the streets of Sodom must have looked like in the days of Lot,” Florida pastor Carl Gallups said.

And of course there’s Joel Richardson, author of “When A Jew Rules the World,” who told Hohmann that “The decay of popular Western culture continues at a rapid pace,” and that this was precisely the End Times chaos that Paul the Apostle warned about.

Everyone’s a critic.

Next: Michael Savage

1. Michael Savage

With no small competition, Michael Savage still manages to come out on top in the conspiracy crankery race among radio shock jocks.

On his program this week, he spun another one of his exhaustive fantasias about how President Obama had been raised since birth to conquer America. He had been “polished very carefully for many years as a candidate for the left” in order “to invade America and convert us into a semi-socialist, semi-communist nation,” Savage said.

His invasion will of course be stewarded by a coalition of roving mobs, financed by George Soros naturally. Savage has been whistling this theme about nonwhite  “street thugs” overthrowing the nation for some time now, or as he once called them, the “Army of the Night.”

They will be able to do this because, of course, Hillary Clinton will come to take your guns. (Another recurring motif of his.)

Savage said (as quoted by Right Wing Watch):

“One, guns will be taken away, she will make it illegal either through ammunition or registration, your guns will be seized, guns will be criminalized,” he said. “Two, she will criminalize speech, talk radio will disappear, she will pass it under the guise of the Fairness and Communications Act, and I will be gone, as will everyone else who dares to speak the truth to these left-wing fanatic vermin. That’s number two. If you think the internet will be your refuge, you are mistaken. Hillary Clinton and her illegitimate cohorts will criminalize the internet as has been done in Europe under the dictator Merkel and as it is being done around the world by the greedy pig who owns Facebook.”

“It’s either Trump or nothing, we have nothing left,” he concluded.

Savage: doing his small part to make America grate again (and again).

Hat tip and audio courtesy of Right Wing Watch

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Illustration: DonkeyHotey via Flickr

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