1. Rush Limbaugh: The Nigerian girls aren’t “our” girls... and other atrocities.
Despicable, human-shaped being Rush Limbaugh went full-on evil this week when he decided to mock the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign to bring attention to the school girls kidnapped in Nigeria.
Why? What could possibly be partisan or controversial about wanting to help more than 200 girls kidnapped by radical Islamists and sold as sex slaves and wives?
Well, Michelle Obama held up a #BringBackOurGirls sign—that could be part of it.
“Look at her,” Rush snarled at a picture of Mrs. Obama, “looking all sad.” Also looking sad about the missing girls was Malala, the heroic Pakistani girl who nearly died because she insisted on getting an education. Jesus Christ himself would be ridiculed by Limbaugh if he sided with the Obamas on anything.
Also, Limbaugh felt the need to point out that the Nigerian girls are not “our” girls, so... maybe we shouldn’t care about them so much.
Of course, Limbaugh was deeply offensive on a variety of topics this week, including an assertion that this generation is “the most racist, and the most sexist” ever, because Obama was elected, and Hillary might be. But pitting himself against Malala pretty much took the cake. It prompted Jon Stewart to start a #f*@ckyourush campaign against the hater he aptly described as the “quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque superfund clean-up site that was his soul.”
And that’s on a good day.
2. Laura Ingraham: Nigerian girls were kidnapped because, Benghazi.
As the world now knows, schoolgirls were kidnapped in Chibok, Nigeria. Their cause has become a rallying cry around the world. For Fox Newsian Laura Ingraham, this can only mean one thing: Benghazi. Also, Benghazi. It’s like a buzzing sound, a compulsive tic she just has to blurt out... constantly. Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. During a show this week, she interrupted her guest, who seemed to be actually discussing the situation in Nigeria, to say: “I think part of the problem here is that we have a dead American ambassador, and no one in custody... not to go back to Benghazi.”
That’s good that she didn’t go back to Benghazi when it had nothing to do with the topic at hand.
There, she said it. Benghazi.
Gesundheit.
3. Marco Rubio shifts from climate change denialism to pseudo-science about abortion.
Last weekend the junior senator from Florida said he doesn’t believe human activity causes climate change or that we can do anything to change it. This did not play well anywhere, especially in his home state of Florida, which will be under water soon because of rising sea levels caused by man-made global warming.
So by midweek he changed the subject to his oh-so-scientific views about abortion. “Let me give you a bit of settled science that they’ll never admit to,” he told Sean Hannity Wednesday. “The science is settled, it’s not even a consensus, it is a unanimity, that human life begins at conception. I hope the next time someone wags their finger about science, they’ll ask one of these leaders on the left: ‘Do you agree with the consensus of science that human life begins at conception?’"
In fact, it seems highly unlikely that Marco Rubio has ever met a scientist, as “life” and “conception” in the context of abortion are subjective and quasi-religious terms. As Irin Carmon of MSNBC wrote, “The rights of a blastocyst, embryo or fetus compared to the pregnant woman aren’t up to scientists; they’re subjective, based on personal, religious, or political commitments. But it’s ironic that Rubio should mention science and abortion. He and his fellow Republicans have passed numerous laws restricting women’s health with stated rationales that directly contravene scientific or medical consensus.”
Scientist Rubio also signed onto an amicus brief in the Hobby Lobby case before the Supreme Court claiming that birth control is abortion. So, in fact, Mr. Rubio, life begins before conception. Gotcha!
As long as science is going to mean any damn thing you want it to whenever you feel like it, here’s some science: Shut up, Marco Rubio.
4. N.H. police chief calls Obama the n-word, refuses to apologize saying he meets his "criteria for such.”
Another week, another revolting old white racist raises his lizard-like head. Sometimes two a week. Donald Sterling hasn’t even exited the stage yet, when along comes a police chief in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, who was overheard calling President Obama the “effen n-word.” When residents demanded a retraction and his resignation, by golly, 82-year-old Robert Copeland up and refused.
His answer was this:
"I believe I did use the 'N' word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse [sic]" Copeland wrote in an email to the residents, as quoted by local TV-station WMUR. "For this, I do not apologize—he meets and exceeds my criteria for such."
Chased down by a crowd and a reporter after the meeting demanding his head, Copeland called the reporter a “skunk.”
Wolfeboro has 6,300 residents, and 6,280 of them are white, including, coincidentally, Mitt Romney, who has one of his summer homes there.
Soon, no doubt, Copeland will go on the interview circuit to declare he is not a “racist” because he does after all have “criteria” for calling blacks racist terms, and also he is not a “skunkist.”
5. Karl Rove says, then “unpologizes” for saying, that Hillary Clinton has brain damage.
In a desperate move to remain relevant, Karl Rove ventured the totally unsubstantiated claim that Hillary Clinton has brain damage. He asserted that she spent 30 days in the hospital (wrong—it was three days) and emerged wearing sunglasses “that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury."
It was quickly pointed out that those “brain damage” sunglasses are the same ones Clinton has been wearing since way before her hospitalization. And that subsequent to her hospitalization, she testified with admirable command of detail and analysis in the “Benghazi” hearings that supposedly laid that matter to rest. Ha!
Rove then “unpologized,” (Stephen Colbert’s term) on Tuesday on Fox, natch, by saying concerns about Clinton’s age and health are legitimate. Anything to derail her not-yet-declared run for presidency is, obviously.
It has been suggested that Rove may have suffered some brain damage himself, possibly a rare condition called “coprocephalus,” or as Colbert helpfully translated, “shit for brains.”
6. Utah lawmaker: Bring back firing squads.
Rep. Paul Ray, a Republican from the northern Utah city of Clearfield, has a great idea for avoiding future fiascoes and public relations nightmares like the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.
His suggestion is not to outlaw the barbarous death penalty, but to bring back firing squads. That’s so much less barbaric.
Ray plans to introduce his brilliant idea during Utah’s next legislative session in January. Similar proposals in Wyoming and Missouri went nowhere, but Utah actually has a grand and fairly recent tradition of execution by firing squad, having successfully shot Ronnie Lee Gardner to death in 2010. More famously, Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah by firing squad in 1977, after requesting it.
"It sounds like the Wild West, but it's probably the most humane way to kill somebody," Ray, who has never been shot to death, said. "It sounds draconian. It sounds really bad, but the minute the bullet hits your heart, you're dead.”
Of course, sometimes inmates move, and sometimes shooters miss, and somehow humane and execution don’t exactly belong in the same sentence.
Maybe we should ask how those other humane countries that execute people in similar numbers as the U.S. like to kill them: Iran? China? Saudi Arabia?
7. Bill O’Reilly: There’s no such thing as white privilege and if there is, I’ve never benefited from it because I’m kind of obnoxious.
Bill O’Reilly finally said a true thing: that he is "kind of obnoxious." (Well, not kind of obnoxious, ragingly obnoxious.)
O’Reilly doubled down on his claim that there is no such thing as white privilege this week, and if there is, he has not benefited because he grew up poor, and everyone hates him.
The hateful Fox Newsian was reading some of his hate mail on the air this week after asserting that white privilege doesn’t exist, and shooting down people who disagreed with him. To one, he lectured: “Few on the marketplace have bestowed favor on me because I’m an independent maverick, and kind of obnoxious. I do not believe you are granted favorable treatment in this country because you are white. You have to work for your success.”
So, being obnoxious and holding “maverick” views that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch agree with is very, very hard work.
So is getting your head out of your ass every morning.
H/t: MediaMatters
8. Donald Sterling still misunderstands concept of racism and being recorded.
Seems like forever ago, but Donald Sterling said a bunch of incoherent, ridiculous and yah, racist, things in his interview with Anderson Cooper this week. This was part of his redemption tour, in which he whined, "I am not a racist... Aren't I allowed to make one mistake.... The girl set me up," and other stupidities.
His soon-to-be-ex-wife says he’s senile, but surely he remembers his previous series of mistakes where he discriminated against black and Latino tenants while building his real estate empire that enabled him to buy a basketball team full of players he can insult.
The fool went on to insult Magic Johnson some more: "What kind of a guy goes to every city, has sex with every girl, then he catches HIV? Is that someone we want to respect and tell our kids about?" Sterling said. "I think he should be ashamed of himself. I think he should go into the background. But what does he do for the black people? He doesn't do anything."
Well, that definitely should clear up any lingering suspicions that Sterling is racist.
9. Fox’s Keith Ablow: Schools should ban leggings because they distract my son.
In Ablow’s medical opinion (yes, he’s Fox’s medical contributor), girls who wear leggings are kind of asking for it. He was agreeing with an Illinois school's ban on leggings on girls (boys can still wear them, apparently).
Some more of Ablow’s considered medical opinion: Leggings are distracting to his son who really wants to learn.
And, of course, he did finally get around to the thoroughly medical and scientific assertion that “boys will be boys” and girls wearing leggings are kind of asking for it.
Verbatim: “I don’t know that we can restrain boys from being boys,” he said. “So the long stare, the offhand comment, you have to — what do you do, excuse it? Because it was certainly provoked. And I think girls put themselves in the line of fire that way.”
H/t: Rawstory
Shares