RWW’s Paranoia-Rama takes a look at five of the week’s most absurd conspiracy theories from the Right.
With the election less than two weeks away, conservative commentators are making some pretty terrifying predictions about how President Obama will serve out the remainder of his term. But last-minute Obama-bashing won’t distract them from their other, equally important, job: attacking gays and lesbians.
5. Ernst Goes There
Since securing the GOP nomination for her state’s open U.S. Senate seat, Iowa state Sen. Joni Ernst has been trying to downplay her extremist record.
But the Republican candidate is having a hard time running away from her past remarks on such issues as the danger of the UN’s Agenda 21 and the ability of local law enforcement to arrest federal officials implementing Obamacare.
In the latest example of Ernst’s record catching up to her, a video surfaced this week of the candidate telling an audience at a 2012 NRA event that the reason she takes her gun “virtually everywhere” is because she is afraid of not only violent assailants but also the government: “I believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”
Ed Kilgore explains the thinking behind Ernst’s claim: “The idea here is to intimidate liberals, and ‘looters’ and secular socialists, and those people, that there are limits to what the good virtuous folk of the country will put up with in the way of interference with their property rights and their religious convictions and their sense of how the world ought to work. If push comes to shove, they’re heavily armed, and bullets outweigh ballots.”
4. Obama Will Kill Us All!
If you wonder where Joni Ernst gets her ideas about an imminent government crackdown that may require a violent response, look no further than Fox News, where just this week Sean Hannity hosted conservative pundit Mark Levin to discuss President Obama’s nefarious agenda.
Levin told Hannity that Obama is imposing “quintessential statism” on America that “is a disaster,” Media Matters reports.
“The country has gone to Hell under this president and under the Democrat [sic] Party,” Levin said, warning that after the election, “with Obama it’s going to get worse, you’re going to see his full Mussolini coming out.”
Wayne Allyn Root, another conservative commentator, managed to top Levin’s remarks in an interview on the “Point of View” radio show, where he claimed that Obama “was sent here to destroy this country,” possibly by the “communist forces” of the Soviet Union or the Bilderbergs, and is “taking down the entire America.” Root added: “We’ve got to remove him from office and fast before he kills all of us.”
3. Latest Voter Fraud Menace
We keep hearing stories about Republicans increasing their outreach to African American and Latino voters, but their enthusiastic efforts to prevent people from registering to vote and from casting ballots may not be helping their case.
Take a recent incident in Arizona, where a GOP official and conservative media outlets fumed that an activist with a progressive group dropped off a box of absentee ballots at a polling center, which is completely legal. Immediately, conservatives accused the activist — a Latino man — of committing voter fraud through “ballot stuffing” and wondered if he was a violent “illegal alien.”
Of course, not only is delivering ballots on behalf of voters legal in Arizona, but Wonkette notes that Republicans brought in Mitt Romney to host a ballot drop-off campaign event this very week.
Thursday night, Mitt Romney made an appearance in Mesa, Arizona, to campaign for Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Ducey. A graphic on a couple of conservative blogs, reproduced up top, urged attendees to “Bring your Early Ballots!” so GOP get-out-the-vote volunteers could collect them and get them to the county elections office.
Just remember, it’s only okay if Republicans do it, otherwise it’s voter fraud.
2. Beware Gay Plants, Or Something
Matt Barber’s website BarbWire today published an unintentionally hilarious piece by columnist Lee Duigon, who compares gays to super-plants from outer space that eat people.
“Gaydeology,” the dogma that “sexual liberation” is the highest moral value, presses forward aggressively on all fronts. Christians are to be punished by the state if they refuse to knuckle under. But the militant “gays” are only the street muscle for a “progressive” project to beat down church, family, and anything else that competes with the secular, God-denying state for the loyalty of every citizen. This vision for America, and for all the other countries of the Western world, has roots in the 19th century that sprouted into man-eating plants in the 20th, to become a worldwide plague in the 21st.
It is reminiscent of “The Day of the Triffids,” a classic horror movie about plants from outer space that infest the earth and strike blind anyone who gets too close.
Well, we have been blind, haven’t we? Blind to threats to our freedom, blind to the vast incompetence of government, and blind to its insatiable lust for power. Worst of all, we have been both blind and deaf to God our maker and our Father, whose blessings have been the lifeblood of America.
Maybe that should be the rallying cry of the anti-gay movement: Beware the triffids!
1. Gay ‘Terrorists’ Out To Get Us
Pat Robertson, who once warned viewers that they could become the victims of a gay ‘AIDS ring’ attack, lashed out at gay rights advocates on “The 700 Club” this week and accused them of trying to throw their opponents in jail.
Robertson didn’t hold back, warning that gay “terrorists” are launching their own Spanish Inquisition: “These people are terrorists, they’re radicals and they’re extremists. No Christian in his right mind would ever try to enforce somebody against their belief or else suffer jail. They did that during the Inquisition, it was horrible, it was a black mark on our history, but it isn’t being done now.”
Of course, Robertson’s argument relied on a twisted reading of a legal case in Houston, Texas, but that didn’t stop him from attacking the “monstrous” gay rights movement.
