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More Brain Death from the 'Right'
Author: BobR    Date: 05/23/2013 12:54:47

Eating crow and/or one's own foot is something everyone has done. When a politician does it, it is recorded for posterity. When a right-wing politician, activist, or media personality says something stupid, it is often jaw-droppingly astonishing. Let's have a quick run through...

The horrific images of tornado-ravaged Moore, OK still getting play on the news. Every one is already pretty familiar with that state's senator willing to withhold federal aid until other cuts are made in the budget to offset the aid (one has to wonder how many votes he'll get next election from the people of this town). Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK, of course) is doubling down, and explaining how this is actually good for the children pulled from their destroyed school:
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on Wednesday reiterated his opposition to a federal aid package for tornado victims without budgetary offsets, saying a bill that doesn’t include spending cuts elsewhere would saddle the children who survived the storm with additional government debt.

“Look, my constituents don’t want us to charge our everyday living expenses to their kids,” Coburn said on "CBS This Morning."

“The very kids that were rescued from the school, the very kids we’re interested in — why should we saddle them when we’re wasting money?”

“It’s just not an appropriate way to run the future for our children,” he added.

See? He's only thinking of the children. That's just a little "tough love" for the kiddies...

With regards to that tornado, leave it to nut job Alex Jones to find a government conspiracy in this, calling it a weather weapon:
Conspiracy talk show host Alex Jones, increasingly a favorite of conservative media for his extremely vocal support of gun rights, outed himself Tuesday as a tornado truther by telling a caller on his show, “Of course there’s weather weapons stuff going on.”

Jones, a longtime proponent of the idea that the U.S. government can manipulate and even produce weather systems like tornadoes and hurricanes, went on to say that if people saw helicopters or small aircraft in the area, then “you better bet your bottom dollar they did this.”

“But, who knows if they did?” he asked. “You know, that’s the thing. We don’t know.”
[...]
Jones is being increasingly treated as a serious voice within the Republican Party, and lawmakers in statehouses across the country and in Congress are beginning to parrot his views, however bizarre they might sound. Even Fox News hosts and Republican freshman Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has appeared on the Alex Jones Show, much like his father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), continues to do.

That last part is a little scary. Hillary Clinton was derided by Republicans for saying a "vast right-wing conspiracy" was targeting her husband when he was president. Yet they embrace this lunatic who creates absurd theories, and then disclaims them by saying "We don't know".

Another favorite loon of the Right is Glenn Beck, who uses a horrible crime against (mostly) women to describe the current "scandals" that the Republicans are trying to drum up out of thin air:
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck on Wednesday compared the U.S. government to “rapists” over recent so-called scandals, from the Internal Revenue Service’s practice of scrutinizing conservative groups to last year’s terrorist attacks in Benghazi.

In a bizarre rant on his radio show, Beck said that he didn’t know why Congress was bothering with an investigation into the scandals because the federal government had been building a massive spying database in Utah.
[...]
Beck added: “The American people have just been raped. Why are you asking rapists to hurry up with the swab test?”

Along with the misappropriation of "rape" as a metaphor, there's the trivialization of it as well, like comparing it to car accidents:
Right to Life president Barbara Listing said Wednesday that women should purchase additional health insurance if they feared being raped, because the sexual crime was like a car accident.

“Nobody plans to have an accident in a car accident, nobody plans to have their homes flooded. You have to buy extra insurance for those,” she told reporters.

Would that insurance cover Plan-B or other emergency abortion coverage? It would have to, because the right-wing is on a mission to prevent health insurance from covering abortion, even though the ACA prevents federal funds from being used for said legal medical procedure.

Finally, bringing it home to Virgina, we have the Republican Lt. Governor candidate who makes "The Cooch" (the Gov. candidate) look positively moderate. E.W. Jackson has come out swinging hard against LGBT rights. That's okay, he says, because he's a Christian:
The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Virginia says that he is a Christian and has no reason to apologize for his history against of hate speech against LGBT people, liberals and abortion providers.

It was only after African-American minister E.W. Jackson won the nomination at the Virginia Republican Party Convention last week that many became aware of his history of saying gay people were “perverted” and “sick people psychologically.”
[...]
He has also called Democrats “slave masters” and compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that’s a fact,” Jackson said in a 2012 interview.
[...]
“I say the things that I say because I’m a Christian, not because I hate anybody, but because I have religious values that matter to me,” Jackson told reporters during a campaign event in Fredericksburg, according to The Washington Post...

How many people in VA will vote for this pig? Come November, I think I will be sadly surprised. People care more about party than about what their candidates (and advocates) say.
 

114 comments (Latest Comment: 05/23/2013 20:05:41 by Raine)
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