The Blaze (yes, Glenn Beck’s site) has a rather amusing article about John Edwards, the “psychic” fraud who makes huge amounts of money preying on the credulous and the desperate. And he tells the fanciful story of how he came to discover his “psychic” abilities and learn of “highly-evolved beings” that were all around us.
Last weekend the NRA held their annual convention in Houston, Texas and the Daily Show predictably had a lot of fun with it. My favorite part of the first video is the introductory video of Rick Perry firing a gun and then looking off in the distance at nothing for no reason with a look of clueless conviction about something unsaid.
Alan Keyes’ Renew America site is not just a birther site, it’s also now pushing the bizarre conspiracy theory that the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut were a false flag operation by Obama to push through gun control. This column by lunatic Laurie Roth lays out the case:
Alex Jones says the government did it. The Worldnutdaily has blamed both North Korea and Iran. Tony Perkins blames sexual immorality. Glenn Beck says Al Qaeda did it and the government is covering it up. But Rush Limbaugh has found the real culprit: College professors.
I wrote recently about David Barton’s latest lie (well, probably not his latest; he seems to lie every time he opens his mouth), about an expert witness in Abington Township v Schempp. Hemant contacted Ellery Schempp, the plaintiff in that case, to get a reaction. And boy, what a reaction it was. Knowing what a nice guy Ellery is, he was clearly peeved about this:
Is it progress if the wingnuts start calling each other Nazis instead of calling liberals that? Probably not, since it isn’t really “instead of” but rather in addition to. But the Tea Party Patriots are now calling Karl Rove a Nazi and even photoshopping him into an SS uniform.
Rand Paul called into Glenn Beck’s show and blathered on about how important it is for people to pray for him. He also says that our problems aren’t political, we need a “spiritual cleansing” because something “really depraved is rising in the country.”
FreedomWorks, the astroturf Tea Party group that was headed by Dick Armey until he was fired and left with an $8 million parachute, is being investigated by its own board. And they’re finding some strange things that went on, like the production of a bizarre video of a panda having sex with Hillary Clinton.
I don’t know who it was that first observed that Glenn Beck has a bad case of Nazi Tourette’s syndrome, the tendency to blurt out “Nazi” as an accusation against those one disagrees with. Tea Party Nation leader Judson Phillips seems to have the same affliction. And even criticizing him for this trait is, to him, proof that someone is a Nazi — even if the person doing it is Jewish. In an email to supporters he writes:
I’m sure it will come as a tremendous shock to you all that the indispensable Chris Rodda has, yet again, caught David Barton flagrantly lying about American history. Barton claimed on the Glenn Beck show that gun accidents didn’t happen during the founding period of the country because kids were all taught how to use guns.
I’ve written before about the right wing’s absurd attempts to reinvent Martin Luther King as a conservative, an effort led by his highly dishonest niece, Alveda King. But Glenn Beck and others have been pushing this idea as well by leaving out a hell of a lot of information that doesn’t fit their agenda. CNN reports on this phenomenon:
Dispatches From the Culture Wars
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