Well … here we are. Yes, we all knew this would be the “Super Tuesday” outcome, but even knowing it still does not in any way defer the observation that we do indeed live in “Interesting Times”. While not yet officially endorsed, it’s more or less a done deal now.
Nobody sums it all up better than Seth Meyers did by reading out the rather long rap sheet for the deeply odd weirdo that the GOP have picked …
Moving on, below you will once again find my usual selection of some truly bizarre and extreme claims that have popped up during the last 7 days. Each is laced with my snarky commentary.
It’s like this each and every week, this week is not in any way special.
With my usual hat tip to my various sources, let’s once again dive into this very murky pool of absurdity and stupidity.
State of The Union
The address itself was excellent. The reactions to it from some were also predictable.
Judging by the fact that Glenn Beck called President Biden a “colossal fucking asshole,” we think it is safe to assume that he did not like the State of the Union address.
- I didn’t think Mormons were permitted to use naughty language. It’s also a tad rich because the obvious observation is that this is a rather good illustration of projection. I mean seriously now, the man disliked Trump until he started loosing viewers and cash. When it comes to the fine art of applied assholery, Glenn is a true subject matter expert.
- The fact that Glenn was triggered also adds to the growing body of evidence that Biden hit it out of the park!
Christian nationalist William Wolfe also did not like Biden’s speech: “This ain’t just a political fight, it’s a spiritual war. Heaven and Hell are real. Demons exist.”
- I’m not sure Mr Wolfe fully grasps that he is cheering for team “Demons” to bring hell to earth
- Deploying religious imagery can be applied to literally anything by any side. Example: “Conservatives are Sacrificing the future of all kids to Molech to keep the rich rich, and slaughtering many to appease the NRA“
- Translation: “This is a war between leprechauns and forest gnomes and I know what side I’m on“
- Side Note: People deploying religious imagery are telling you that they don’t have a rational argument to deploy. Tripping over such rhetoric is akin to stumbling upon somebody who did not outgrow Dungeons and Dragons when they were 12. Befuddling at first, but when you give it some thought then what you begin to realise that that it is one of the tools used by Grifters for money and power.
Ann Vandersteel said Biden’s speech was “a declaration of war on the American People.”
- She has a typo there, “on” is really “by”
Over the past few years I have been assured over and over by Fox News that Biden was old and sleepy. They now appear to have changed their tune …
- Cruz’s Real Thoughts. “Damn Biden Was Sharp today!”
Oh, and let’s not forget that Lauren Witzke was outraged about the GOP’s Spanish-language response to President Biden’s State of the Union Address: “This is America and there should NEVER be a ‘Spanish Language Address.’ Don’t know what we’re saying? Go back to your own country.”
- The “crime of the century” by her own team, the deployment of “spanish” … por el amor de Dios.
State of Disunion
We can’t not talk about that official and deeply weird GOP State of The Union response.
- Also, sex cartels are bad, says Katie Britt … which is why she wants you to vote for a convicted sexual abuser and rapist!
Show also told a horrific sex trafficking story. Somebody dug into it all and discovered that she lied …
Katie Britt advises that sex cartels are bad, and that is why she wants you to vote for a convicted sexual abuser and rapist who also enabled the sex cartels to operate in the US …
Kate truly did set herself up for an SNL skit. Oh come now, how could they possibly resist, and yes, it was always going to be a challenge to top the raw comedy of the original …
The Cult of Trump
Cult members are now creating fake pictures …
Nick Fuentes gushes about how “fucking hot” and “Hitleresque” former President Donald Trump is, proclaiming his willingness to “die for the personhood of Donald Trump”: “Trump gives the order, we follow. It’s as simple as that.”
- If there was an actual eruption of violence then you know that this guy would be first … to run for his basement to hide.
- The interesting plot twist here is that Trump is close buddies with Bibi (Netanyahu) and has a bit of a hard-on for Israel, yet Fuentes is deeply antisemitic, so I’ve honestly no idea how that circle gets squared within Mr Fuentes’s rather addled lump of grey matter that occasionally strives and fails to masquerade as a brain.
Eric Metaxas fumes that Christians who refuse to vote for Trump are “childish,” warning that “God will judge you” for not doing so.
- “You will be punished unless you fall in line” … says every emotional abuser ever.
- He is perhaps in once sense correct. If there is a God, people who did not vote for Trump will be judged by God … favourably. To put that another way, if being a Bible-believing Christian requires humiliating oneself by voting for the corrupt sexual assaulter, malicious con-man Trump, then atheism is clearly the high moral ground.
- Metaxas wrote a recently published book about the extraordinary Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stood up against the Third Reich and paid with his life. Yet here is Metaxas shilling for Trump. It’s one thing not to know better, but quite another to have spent years researching ‘better’.
Christian Nationalism
From The Case for Christian Nationalism (pgs 341-342) where Stephen Wolfe explicitly argues a Christian minority should be able to rule the whole of society without majority consent, because non-Christians “are not entitled to political equality.” The earth belongs to Christians.
- This is quite literally and descriptively “holy crap.”
- I’m really not sure if some appreciate how deeply weird this is – Christian Nationalists insist that they are persecuted for their Christian faith, and that’s a bad thing, … yet … simultaneously they insist that they have the right to persecute non-Christians, and that’s a good thing
- We have seen stuff like this before. The Inquisition was famous for the justice, peace and safety they dispensed to any non-Christians they encountered.
- Side question: When he uses the term “Christian”, then how does he define that word, does he include Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, or Jehovah’s Witnesses? Probably not. So what about Catholics? Again, probably not. I also suspect even “Bible Believing” Christians who lean left politically would also be deemed to be heretics. So who gets to decide what “true” Christianity actually is as they strive to rule as dictators? My point is this – his stance is a recipe for a religious war between different factions.
- Meanwhile, I do recall that somebody rather famous once said “My Kingdom is not of this world”. I wonder who that could have been?
Kevin Stitt says that God made him governor of Oklahoma “because I promised to sign every piece of pro-life legislation that hit my desk,” thereby allowing him “to be the governor that banned abortion in the state of Oklahoma.”
- Gods don’t get to vote, only humans do … unless of course he is claiming that god, not an Citizen, and not a voter, meddled in the election to enable him to claim to be the chosen one
- Meanwhile, people can pass as many laws as they wish, but women will continue to get abortions.
- What we also learn here is that Oklahoma exists to ensure that Alabama and Mississippi aren’t 50th in every national metric
Jim Brangenberg of Faith Wins declared that Christians must “get politically active and bring the Kingdom [of Heaven] down to Earth, especially in all 570,000+ elected office in this country.” Then he had the gall to ask, “What is Christian nationalism?” Um, did he not hear what he just said?
- The deep irony here is that the vast majority of elected officials are some flavour of Christian. You would be very hard pressed to find one who is either not religious, or some other religion. What he is really saying is that he wants extremists who are prepared to impose their specific beliefs by force upon everybody.
- Imagine how upset he would be if it was the Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Catholics, who get elected and then proceed to impose their views upon him.
Right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk has become a full-blownChristian nationalist in recent years: No, Charlie Kirk, Our Form Of Government Was Not ‘Directly Inspired By Deuteronomy’
- Yes, he has been drinking the David Barton cool aid by the gallon.
- As for actually following Deuteronomy, you know he will of course be excluding this bit – Deuteronomy 15:11 –“For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’”
- Charlie Kirk is not the only one endlessly repeating the Christian nationalist lie that the Founding Fathers relied on the Bible, particularly the book of Deuteronomy, in creating this nation.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Barton
It is surprising to hear David and Tim Barton claim that Andrew Jackson was one of the worst presidents in American history given their constant praise for Donald Trump, whose own presidency was modeled on Jackson’s.
- LOL
- Having an imaginary history that you believe is real is not exactly a great way to establish your credentials as an actual historian. (Side Note: The Barton’s have no credible academic credentials in History and are well-recognised as pseudo-historians who promote their religious fantasies as historical “truth”. Sadly, way too many evangelicals embrace them as heroes).
- Meanwhile, when actual historians rank US presidents from best to worst, Andrew Jackson ranks somewhere in the middle at 21. For the curious, if you can’t guess, Lincoln was of course No.1, then next was FD Roosevelt, and then Washington. You can also most probably correctly guess who ranks bottom below Buchanan, and yet despite that, the GOP have picked him again as their very best option in 2024.
Four Years Ago
Stefanik: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? The answer is a resounding no
- Ah yes, 2020, a time when we all struggled to buy toilet paper … such good times.
- They are so stupid. Nobody wants to even think about 4 years ago… Trump in office and a DEADLY pandemic was beginning to spread. This series of events ended up changing all of our lives for the worse. MAGA has the dumbest messaging of all time.
Some of us really do remember …
Homophobia on Steroids
Christian hate-preacher Tommy McMurtry says atheists come after people like him because atheists are supporters of “perversion”… like “LGBT, the trans rights, and all that.”
- I do indeed support “perverted” things such as empathy and also not sticking my nose into other peoples lives.
- As for those actually caught doing perverted things, I think he will find that clerics, preachers, and youth pastors have cornered that market and have a bit of a monopoly.
Holocaust denier and Homophobe, Mark Robinson, won the Republican primary for governor in North Carolina. Yes, this guy …
- To help you get to know him a bit better, here is a link to two clips of him defending Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby.
Even Weirder
Awaken Church San Diego Claim: “Breast cancer runs in your family? It’s not your genetics, it’s a demonic spirit of infirmity that has attached itself to your family line causing a generational curse“
- Genetics (the stuff that is evidence based) is dismissed and replaced with superstitious nonsense that has exactly zero evidence – what could possibly go wrong?
MAGA pastor Mark Burns has launched his military academy, where students will not be “exposed to woke teachings or a sexually perverted lifestyle.”
- Seems like a fitting move for a Trump cultist who falsified his own military & academic record.
- Since his students will not be “exposed to a sexually perverted lifestyle,” I guess that means that they are not going to hear anything about either Donald Trump or vast swathes of the GOP.
Former U.S. Ambassador for Religious Freedom Sam Brownback says God “gave us religious freedom.”
- Would that Religious “Freedom” have come from the same God that demands …“Thou shalt have no other gods before me…Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God…”
- Many in God’s fan club also gets more than a tad twitchy when they encounter even the slightest variation of very minor beliefs.
Rick Joyner reports that he had a “significant dream” last night in which he saw that … “a major part of the ‘woke’ agenda would be defeated by the U.S. Constitution. For example, the criminalizing of the wrong use of pronouns was declared a violation of both the freedom of speech, and religious liberty, as the Scriptures command us to speak truth to one another, and to call someone a pronoun that was not who they really are is not true.”
- When it comes to making “I have a dream” speeches, then clearly he is rather crap at it.
- His dream is the establishment of a literal grammar police … “Raise your hands in the air, put down that pronoun, and step away from the keyboard”
- “Scriptures command us to speak truth to one another” … well OK then Rick, by your command you obnoxious asshole.
- As for “speaking truth”, yea, this guy has absolutely no problem supporting Dear Leader, the liar-in-chief.
David Kupelian asserts that multiple members of the Biden administration are “genuinely insane”: “It’s increasingly clear that many of America’s current leaders are, to put it plainly, stark raving mad.”
- But “he links to “evidence””, you might quip. Er yes … to himself, his other WND articles, which in turn cite … yea, you got it.
Radical right-wing broadcaster Stew Peters declares that “everything that’s going wrong in every sector of life, the person that is leading it happens to claim to be Jewish.”
- The claim that it’s all the fault of the Jews is a very old medieval trope, and yet here is Peters brushing the dust off Nazism 101 and rolling it out.
- The Right Wing mixture of things in play here is bizarre. It’s a blend of vigorous support for Israel, and yet at the exactly same time, the embrace of hatred for, and conspiracies about, the Jewish community.
- Meanwhile, this past week Stew also went into full Nazi Apologetics mode by saying that Nazi book burnings were “awesome” and Adolf Hitler was a “hero.”
It should come as no surprise that Jon Miller’s followers believe that “blaspheming Christ” should be “punishable by death.”
- Blasphemy … the “crime” that literally has no victim.
- Give it some thought and you rapidly discover that from the viewpoint of every variation of belief, every other variation of belief or non-belief is “blasphemy”. You would need to punish every single human on the planet … no exceptions.
Since we are on the topic of “Blasphemy”, then here is that hilariously funny Blasphemy clip from the Life of Brian …
Being Evasive
60 minutes interviewed those who seek to ban books and asked a very simple question, “What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into? What is your fear?” … and they can’t answer it, so just ignore questions and revert to talking points ...
Not accepting a Trump IOU
She got the bond, but before she did, they tried for an IOU, and got a lot of pushback (rightly so) …
Some Excellent News
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs plans to cancel $2 billion in medical debt for up to 1 million residents.
- At least two other states — Connecticut and New Jersey — have moved to erase medical debt owed by their residents, in addition to a growing number of municipal and county governments across the nation.
Extremism is also proving to be unpopular
The Ballot box renders judgement upon a few well deserving candidates this past week…
- Bianca Gracia, who introduced Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys to Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers in a D.C. parking garage the night before the Jan. 6 insurrection, failed to win her GOP primary in Texas.
- Right-wing pastor Allen Mashburn, who ran for lieutenant governor in North Carolina in hopes that he could “stand strong” with his close friend Mark Robinson in the governor’s office, failed to advance in the GOP primary.
- Radical right-wing preacher Joshua Feuerstein was likewise trounced in his bid for the Texas legislature in the primary.
If you are wondering who Joshua Feuerstein is, Hemant kept a few receipts …
Finally…
Apparently Obama is calling the shots …
“I don’t like it and I don’t support it, but I have no idea what it actually is” …
Finally, some genuinely love their spouses, and it’s sweet, sincere, and damn cute. These are the kind of people you want in charge …