David Horowitz, who is genuinely nuttier than a fruitcake, has started a petition drive to counter efforts to have Michele Bachmann, who is equally nuts, taken off the intelligence committee. And he actually calls it, in a manner that would make Bryan Fischer proud, a “witch hunt.”
I’ve already given Glenn Beck the Bryan Fischer Award for hammering Alex Jones as a conspiracy theorist. Here he is outright saying that you can’t trust conspiracy theorists. Seriously, he’s become such a master of projection that he should get a job at a movie theater. Watch it to the end. The lack of irony is simply breathtaking.
There have been many movies, all of them terrible, with the plot of two people magically changing places (parent and child, a man and a woman, a black man and a white man, etc). The religious right seems to be repeating that plot in their absurd claims to be the victims of their own past behavior, now perpetrated by liberals.
I’m sure you’ve heard by now that evangelical minister Louie Giglio has withdrawn from giving an invocation at President Obama’s second inauguration after it came out that he’d delivered the usual fundie sermon about gay people being evil sinners doomed by God. And on Planet Wingnuttia, that means he was prevented from speaking due to liberal bigotry. I’m sure it will come as no surprise that the Worldnutdaily is promoting this framing.
I think we have a new meme being created on Planet Wingnuttia. On the very same day, both Ted Nugent and Bryan Fischer declared that they — gun owners and anti-gay bigots, respectively — were the new Rosa Parks, at the vanguard of a non-existent struggle for their own civil rights. First, Nugent:
There’s a part of me that feels bad for the wingnuts, having to continually one-up their own inflated rhetoric to keep the folks in the pews scared enough to open their wallets. When you’ve claimed that health care reform is the second coming of Adolf Hitler, there’s not a lot of room after that. And since they’ve routinely called Obama and the Democrats “Marxists,” now they have to argue that they’re even worse than those cuddly old commies. Here’s Don Critchlow talking to Phyllis Schlafly:
If there’s anyone who reads the Worldnutdaily — and a variety of other far-right sources as well — more than I do, it’s the folks at Right Wing Watch. They actually listen to every Glenn Beck and Bryan Fischer show too, which surely must place them in line for some sort of medal. And now they’ve even put together a list of the ten most absurd WND stories of all time, which they rightly call a “Herculean task.” Here are a couple of my favorite, which I’ve linked to here as well:
Bryan Fischer had Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance, the wingnut world’s go-to guy for anti-environmental idiocy, on his radio show last week and they had their typically ridiculous conversation. They said that not using all the coal, oil and natural gas that God provided for us is an insult to God, just like being negative when you get a Christmas present you don’t like. Oh, and God buried them really deep because he likes to watch us find them.
A federal court has granted summary judgment for the Colorado Department of Transportation in a lawsuit in which a fundamentalist Christian employee claimed harassment and discrimination based on nothing more than the fact that the agency accommodated the religious beliefs of Muslim employees. You can read the full ruling here.
Our old friend Pat is upset. Mighty upset. He doesn’t like it that I make fun of him every once in a while and, being the weapons grade dumbass that he is, he thinks that’s stalking. Of course, he always did have a problem with that idea and a Bryan Fischer-like ability to project his own behavior on others.
Eugene Volokh is one of the top First Amendment scholars in the country and he was asked to testify at a hearing for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about the civil liberties environment for Muslims and Arabs in America after 9/11. He has been a strong advocate for the equal rights of Muslims, strongly criticizing those who tried to stop the Park 51 mosque, for example. But he also points out that we have had problems with attempts to censor anti-Muslim speech as well. Here is the text of his testimony:
It took less than 24 hours after the election for conservatives to start talking about leaving the Republican party to form a new conservative third party. I was a bit surprised, though, to see it come from Herman Cain. He went on Bryan Fischer’s radio show and pushed for exactly that:
Select your answer to see how you score.
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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