Wingnut Week In Review

Wingnut Week In Review: Rand On The Run

August 8, 2014

Terrance Heath

Campaign for America's Future

Sen. Rand Paul turned tail and ran away when confronted by undocumented DREAMers. But the GOP has a “Latino problem” it can’t run from, and right-wingers seem determined to make it worse.

Sen. Paul was with fellow-Republican Rep. Steve King in Iowa when undocumented DREAMers Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas confronted King on his immigration stance. King stood his ground, but Paul dropped his burger and scampered away. Sen. Paul later explained to Fox News that he wasn’t running away. He just suddenly had somewhere else to be. Right away, obviously.

It’s fair to say that Republicans have given up on the Latino vote, whether they realize it or not. Republicans once hoped that Latinos were the GOP’s best chance at siphoning a few votes from Obama’s winning coalition.  But it turns out Latinos want a progressive economic agenda, and all Republicans have to offer are immigration policies that range from incoherent to downright offensive, and old-school paranoid xenophobia. 

Rep. Mo Brooks (R, Alabama) told radio host Laura Ingraham that Democrats are waging a “war on whites,” by advocating immigration reform, courting Latino voters, and “claiming that whites hate everybody else.” Brooks doubled down on the “war on whites” in a later interview, accusing Democrats of “dividing America by race,” by “soliciting votes of people based on skin color.” 

Rep. Brooks also said that it would be “race baiting” for the GOP to court Latinos.

• Rush Limbaugh said the influx of immigrants is part of an orchestrated plan to “wrest control of this country away from the white majority.”
• During a conference call with anti-immigration activists, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R, Minnesota) said that undocumented immigrants have declared “war against the American people,” and advocated a “a 100 percent tax” on money that undocumented immigrants send home.
• In an interview with Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg, Rep. Steve King said that Central American migrants can be “delivered to the address of their choice” to wait for their deportation hearings, and “that might be a crack house, it might be an MS13 house, it might be a cat house.”
• California businessman Mark Lane took in a family of undocumented migrants from Guatemala. Now he has to explain to his five-year-old son why his family is getting death threats.

You can run, but you can’t hide from the best of the worst in wingnuttia this week.

• After losing the most bizarre senate primary ever to Thad Cochran, Mississippi Republican Chris McDaniel is demanding a Senate nomination. In a “Focal Point” interview with Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, Chris McDaniel asked the Mississippi GOP to toss out the primary votes, based on a seemly unenforceable law and a poll conducted by his own campaign.Mississippi Republicans told McDaniel to get lost.
• On Mat Stavers “Faith and Freedom” radio program, Valencia College professor Mark Logas claimed that John Kerry declined to contest his narrow loss of Ohio in 2004 because he didn’t want to “exposed the voter fraud in favor of Democrats that goes on in Ohio alone.” But a new expert study finds only 31 incidences of voter ID fraud in 14 years. Put another way, that’s 31 out of more than a billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014. Funny, Prof. Logas never mentioned that.
• A new report from the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee cleared the Obama administration of any wrongdoing in the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, but you won’t hear about from Fox News.
• In fact, right-wingers on Facebook are making “Benghazi” their middle name.
• During an interview on CNBC, Georgia governor Nathan Deal agreed that his state is a “great deal” for business, because workers are paid so little due to Georgia being a “right to work” state.
• Republican banking executive and House candidate French Hill said Arkansas voters can be sure of his frugality because he drives a 1998 Volvo called “Old Blue,” and “watches every penny.” Does that include the pennies Hill and his wife spent on their BMW and Mercedes Benz?
• Governor Sam Brownback is increasingly unpopular in Kansas, but said it’s President Obama’s fault, because “[A] lot of people are so irritated at what the president is doing, they want somebody to throw a brick.” Right. It couldn’t be that Brownback’s tax cuts have left the state a “smoking ruin.”
• After Native American tribes cancelled Ted Nugent’s concerts at their casinos, because of his racially inflammatory comments, right-wing rocker Nugent defended himself in a telephone interview on Blaze TV: “My lifestyle as a white guy — though I’m hard to accept that designation — is more in the Indian tradition than many of the Indians themselves.” There ya go, Native Americans. Here’s one white man whose more “Indian” than you.
• Christian radio host Rick Wiles rejoiced that “Ebola could solve America’s problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion.”
• Fox News Business host Lou Dobbs criticized President Obama for not pointing out that two noted white Ebola victims were “in Africa caring for thousands of black people and they should be saluted and regarded as heroes.”
• Fox News commentator Dr. Ben Carson fear-mongered that “someone” could pay a lab worker $1 million for Ebola-tainted urine, because “Such things have been known to happen.”
• Rush Limbaugh warned his listeners that liberals would politicize Ebola, just like they used AIDS to “undermine” Ronald Reagan. After you, Rush.