“I’ve seen the video. It looks to me like you don’t need to bother with that particular factor because they all appear to be of a single, you know, of a single origin, I should say, a continental origin might be the way to phrase that.”- Steve King (R-IA), explaining why there is no need to look into racial-profiling in Ferguson, Missouri
When was the first time you felt like an “adult”? Can you remember? I think I can. I guess it would have been the day I moved out of my childhood home into my own “place.” I felt a peculiar combination of giddy excitement and impending doom. I realized, for the very first time, that I had to start making decisions that meant looking far in advance, instead of fixating on the usual temporary and selfish moments of my young-adult world. I now was responsible for paying rent, some bills, and had to start worrying about the nebulous future. I can remember walking into my living room and sitting on a ripped-up couch cushion, placing my feet gingerly upon a basket masquerading as a table and thinking, “this is really cool…” A few seconds after that, waves of terror enveloped me. I may have even quietly gasped.
Sometimes being an adult is hard.
I bring up the subject of acting as an “adult”, because it leads me to the topic of today’s hideous blog. This migraine-maker is, I suppose, more a rhetorical question.
Is there one adult left in the Republican party? One? Just one?
How about sane people? Any lucid thinkers out there for the right to hold up as statesmen?
Helloooooo? Anyone?
Rhetorical or not, my query is completely sincere. The quote at the beginning of this particular, hideous blog by the wingiest of wing-nuts King, is exhibit “A.” There are some days I look at my Twitter feed and honestly feel frightened for our future as a nation. I understand we are a diverse country (and polarized unfortunately), but as I sit and type this piece, I am always struck by the vast truth– and more so–sanity divide between our citizens (we really do have a “truthiness” problem ).
There are those who get a lot of their news and information about the state of the world from The Wall Street Journal, Infowars, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News. There are also some who enlist the New York Times, MSNBC, NPR, and Amy Goodman (I’ll cop to the latter grouping). I also freely admit when I need to catch up on the week’s happenings I unabashedly turn to Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert, and more recently, John Oliver, who at least get their facts straight while skewering the particular bad actors, which is not the case with our friends on that channel that is named after a carnivorous mammal known for being “cunning” (although that network is so farcical that I laugh as heartily during Fox and Friends as during The Daily Show, sometimes).
Not for nuthin’ though, WTF is up with the Republican party and their supposed “leaders”? Literally, and not figuratively, every day there is one bat-shit crazy statement after another uttered by the usual suspects. If you don’t believe Blithering Idiot that the Republican Party has gone off the grid, here are some tasty nuggets compiled by Norm Ornstein in an article he wrote for The Nation:
- “Sex that doesn’t produce people is deviate.” —Montana state Rep. Dave Hagstrom.
- “It is not our job to see that anyone gets an education.” —Oklahoma state Rep. Mike Reynolds.
- “I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don’t represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not going to save us. We’re going to take this country back for the Lord. We’re going to try to take this country back for conservatism. And we’re not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in!” —Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert, at a tea-party rally.
- President Obama has “become a dictator” and needs to face the consequences of his executive actions, “whether that’s removal from office, whether that’s impeachment.” —Iowa state Sen. (and U.S. Senate candidate) Jodi Ernst, one of a slew of elected officials calling for impeachment or at least putting it front and center.
- “I don’t want to get into the debate about climate change. But I’ll simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that. Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There’s no factories on Mars that I’m aware of.” —Kentucky state Sen. Brandon Smith (fact-check: the average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees).
- “Although Islam had a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology. It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protections.” —Georgia congressional candidate Jody Hice.
- “Slavery and abortion are the two most horrendous things this country has done, but when you think about the immorality of wild, lavish spending on our generation and forcing future generations to do without essentials just so we can live lavishly now, it’s pretty immoral.” —U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas.
- “God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big-bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.” —U.S. Rep. (and M.D.) Paul Broun of Georgia.
- “Now I don’t assert where he [Obama] was born, I will just tell you that we are all certain that he was not raised with an American experience. So these things that beat in our hearts when we hear the National Anthem and when we say the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t beat the same for him.” —U.S. Rep. Steve King of Iowa.
If those comments aren’t enough to make you run screaming into the hills, how about some really fun straight-jacket material from my two favorite Congress people, Louie Gohmert and Michelle Bachmann?
In the last couple of weeks, these ding-bat, bookends weighed in on evil Obama’s secret plan for those brown children “invading” our country (remember, always use the red-meat words like “invaders” to sufficiently scare the bejesus out of the easily spooked right-wing).
With the “muscle” of the right-wing operation operating in the background, (the self-appointed “Minutemen Project,” had a call to arms from it’s great leader to grab their penis extensions and stomp around on the border in some kind of self-aggrandized and delusional fantasy that they are going to protect us from the brown scourge), Bachmann and Gohmert are going to give us the what-what on how this is going down.
First up, Louis Gohmert (R-Texas), who is a cacophony of stupid, and says so many idiotic things, so often, you could probably keep great time to his pearls of wisdom. Some of Gohmert’s latest gems :
“The congressmen (Gohmert) went on to say that “the penetration of criminals and terrorists across our southern border” represents a threat to the U.S. comparable to the threat of a nuclear strike from Iran against Israel.”
“He likened the immigrant “invasion” to D-Day, warning that undocumented immigrants were responsible for over six hundred thousand crimes in Texas over the past five years, including thousands of homicides and sexual assaults.”
“Gohmert called President Obama’s immigration policy the real “war on women” because it allowed immigrants to cross the border to rape women.”
“This administration doesn’t have the desire, doesn’t have the will to actually stop it,” Gohmert told radio host Tim Constantine. “Because they see people coming across as undocumented Democrats. And so, they want to keep the surge of people coming in illegally, even though it includes a big spike in Other-Than-Mexicans, OTMs as we call them.”
“It includes a spike in people from countries where terrorism abounds,” he continued. “We have people coming in from countries where Ebola is located.”
Now for his counterpart in a skirt. Not to be outdone, Bachmann (R-Minn) took lunacy to the next level (I keep thinking we are running out of levels like Donkey Kong, but now I’m not so sure):
“”Now President Obama is trying to bring all of those foreign nationals, those illegal aliens to the country and he has said that he will put them in the foster care system,” Bachmann said. “That’s more kids that you can see how – we can’t imagine doing this, but if you have a hospital and they are going to get millions of dollars in government grants if they can conduct medical research on somebody, and a Ward of the state can’t say ‘no,’ a little kid can’t say ‘no’ if they’re a Ward of the state; so here you could have this institution getting millions of dollars from our government to do medical experimentation and a kid can’t even say ‘no.’ It’s sick”.
The fact that comments like those cited above are even thought of, let alone spoken, is terrifying enough, but what is more disconcerting is that there is never any real condemnation of them by the party leaders. I find this interesting because it is usually the radicals on the right who wail and screetch that “Mooslims” never decry the acts of their extremists enough.
So, I ask once again, “where are the adults in the room”? Why don’t I hear or read about condemnations from the Republican party when these remarks are made?
It has gotten so bad that more and more lifelong Republicans are leaving the flock. A few in the media who are, or were, professed Republicans, are speaking out about the wing-nuttery that has infested the party.
Josh Barro, a Republican and the politics editor of Business Insider, spoke out on this subject towards the end of last year. He admitted that part of the problem is the “conservative bubble” that too many right-wingers kowtow to, in order to keep their jobs. Barro is very honest when he admits the Democrats were “right” on some “key issues” regarding the economy, but what is more intriguing are his comments about how the party now functions in Washington:
“So the last few years at the federal level, Republicans have just not been offering good solutions to the problems that we face. And then we’ve seen over the last month that because they don’t like the things the other side is doing, they start temper tantrums and do things that are very damaging to the economy. And so I don’t know why I should look at that and say anything other than these people are crazy and awful and shouldn’t be trusted with power.”
“Crazy.” Awful.” “Shouldn’t be trusted with power.”
Thanks Josh Barrow. I think I found an adult in your party.
Now was that so hard?
Blithering Idiot 