Wingnut Week In Review: Plane Paranoid

July 17, 2014

Terrance Heath

Campaign for America's Future

ourfuture.org

 

Thank heaven for American wingnuts’ short attention span. The apparent shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the Ukraine gave us a respite from the usual sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic rantings. A brief one, but a respite nonetheless.

• Fox News pundits Geraldo Rivera and Todd Starnes seized the opportunity to blame Russian president Vladimir Putin — and of course President Obama — only to get spanked by fellow Fox Newser Greta van Susteren.
• Fox News contributor Charlie Gasparino and Wall Street Journal reporter Simon Constable got into an argument when Gasparino blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for what was thought to be a crash. “You’re so goddamn dumb,” Gasparino said when Constable suggested waiting for confirmation before assigning blame. Who did Constable think he was dealing with at Fox News? Journalists?
• Even as six miles wreckage of flight MH17 smoldered in a Ukrainian field, Fox News contributor Allen West accused President Obama of “purposefully creating drama globally,” in a post on his website. West doesn’t say why he thinks the president is “purposefully creating drama. That’s OK, because Rush Limbaugh already has an answer.
• Rush Limbaugh theorized that the crash was a conspiracy to distract the media from the border crisis. Of course, Limbaugh says Obama is using the border crisis to bus sick immigrants to the suburbs, to punish affluent voters. It’s all connected, dontcha see?

Not to worry, they’ll soon get back to screaming and spitting at busloads of frightened children. In the meantime, here’s the best of the rest in wingnuttia this week.

• Scientists got a big laugh when the Daily Caller used a global penguin population boom to dismiss “global warming scares.”
• CNBC climate expert Professor William Happert said, “the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler. Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.”
• Washington state Republican congressional candidate George Cicotte said that if environmentalists hadn’t “stopped nuclear in its tracks” there would be less greenhouse gas pollution today.”
• Forget reality, conservatives can’t even deal with a comic book. The death of Archie sent right-wingers into mourning. Not because Archie died, but because he took a bullet for his gay friend.
• Remember when then Obama administration called off that expensive renovation of the White House bowling alley. Well, House Republicans passed a bill denying funding to the bowling alley  renovation that the White House already cancelled. They can’t pass immigration reform, raise the minimum wage, or pass equal pay legislation. But this they can do.
• Fox News host Bill O’Reilly called for a Berlin-Wall style fence on our southern border. Unfortunately, the Berlin Wall is no longer available for reference.
• Arizona Republican state representative and congressional candidate Adam Kwasman thought he’d hit the jackpot when he spotted a bus full of child immigrants, but it turned out to be a bus full of kids going to summer camp at the YMCA.
• Rep. Louie Gohmert (R, Texas) said during a speech on the House floor that “our continued existence is at risk,” because we haven’t sent the 52,000 children at our border back home to almost certain death.
• Todd Akin is back to promote his new book, and he can’t stop talking about rape. In an interview with the Daily Caller, Akin blamed his defeat on the establishment GOP’s “censorship of the truth,” and the party’s effort to push an “anti-American agenda.”  In an interview with his hometown paper, the St. Louis Post, Akin compared himself to Joseph McCarthy, as a victim of “media assassination.”  During an MSNBC interview, Akin called former president Bill Clinton a rapist, said that “legitimate rape” is a “law enforcement term,” and debunked his theory that “legitimate rape” doesn’t cause pregnancy by stating that a “number of people” on his staff were conceived by rape.”
• When Republican Study Group discussed reaching out to women voters, Rep. Renee Ellmers (R, North Carolina) told her colleagues, “Men do tend to talk about things on a much higher level.” Rep. Ellmers explained that, “We need our male colleagues to understand that if you can bring it down to a woman’s level and what everything that she is balancing in her life — that’s the way to go,” she concluded.
• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a group of Kentuckians that gender discrimination is in the past, and “most of the barriers have been lowered.” So, women shouldn’t get “preferential treatment.” 
• Given the above, it’s no surprise that a Harvard University study found that aging liberal men have more sex than old right-wing dudes. That’s probably because liberal guys don’t turn women off every time they speak.