6 worst right-wing moments of the week — Michele Bachmann is back with a vengeance

The Minnesota congresswoman hasn't given up on higher office. Meanwhile, Sean Hannity is a horrible, no-good bully

Published July 28, 2014 12:35PM (EDT)

Michele Bachmann                                  (AP/Carolyn Kaster)
Michele Bachmann (AP/Carolyn Kaster)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

AlterNet1. Hannity invites Palestinian guest on his show and proceeds to yell at him the whole time.

Fox’s Sean Hannity’s position on the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is that if you have any sympathy for Palestinians including civilians in Gaza, you sympathize with terrorists. Or maybe you are a terrorist. All the more so if you are a Muslim. And so, perhaps, it should not have been surprising when he invited Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development and its educational program, the Palestine Center, on his show in order to shout at him, and not let him speak.

The exchange, and we use the word 'exchange' loosely, went something like this:

“Is Hamas a terrorist organization?” Hannity asked.

“Do I get to actually speak now?” Munayyer answered.

“You have to answer the question, it’s a simple yes or no question,” Hannity said.

“Sir, you invited me on here as a guest,” Munayyer said. He continued to try to speak, but Hannity wasn’t having it.

“I’m asking a question. Is Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, is that a terrorist organization?” Hannity shouted. “That’s a yes or no question.”

“Thank you for your question, now I will provide an answer,” Muayyer said.

Hannity kept shouting. Somehow Munayyer could be heard saying:  “It’s very telling to me, and it should be telling to your viewers as well, that the moment you have a Palestinian voice on your program who begins to explain the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians, not just Hamas...”

Hannity cut off Munayyer, shouting at him to answer the question. At one point, Munayyer said that “the United States certainly considers Hamas a terrorist organization we all know that.”

“Is Hamas a terrorist organization? What part of this can’t you get through your thick head?” Hannity said.

Yeesh, rude much?

At the end of the exchange, Munayyer asked again if he would “get to say anything in this conversation.”

Hannity responded, “You had your chance, you didn’t say Hamas is a terrorist organization. Goodbye.”

That’s dialogue, Hannity style.

Watch the video here.

2. Michele Bachmann: Gays want to ‘freely prey on little children sexually.’ Oh, and she might run for president in 2016, yay!

Praise the Lord! Uber-Christian Michele Bachmann said this week she is contemplating a run for president in 2016. She said things like “Practice makes perfect,” since she tried this once before, raised lots of money and attended 15 debates. In February, she said that she didn’t think the country was ready for a woman president. Guess she changed her mind. Or maybe she just doesn’t remember saying that.

Because she does have some very important things on her mind, like her delusion that LGBT people are trying to make it legal to rape children in the U.S. and impose their “deviancy” on the entire country. She shared this hysterically insane view with a Christian radio show called Faith and Liberty.

Right Wing Watch also reported that Bachmann claimed that the “gay community” is taking steps to “abolish age of consent laws, which means we will do away with statutory rape laws so that adults will be able to freely prey on little children sexually. That’s the deviance that we’re seeing embraced in our culture today.”

Oblivious to the fact that she is inciting hate with these statements, she also said that “national hate crime laws” are a form of “tyrannical” oppression that liberals will use to silence Christians in this country. Self awareness is not her strong suit.

And of course, she’s upset with the Supreme Court for striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. When she’s president, things like that won’t happen, and marriage will only be between men and women, possibly multiple men and women, but definitely men and women.

3. ESPN commentator says women should take responsibility for being abused, and is then annoyed by the fact that women "misconstrue" his meaning.

Save a spot for ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith in the club for men who just don’t get it. The co-host of “First Take” rambled on about domestic violence this week and how deplorable it is, and eventually asked why women  don’t take more responsibility when they are violently assaulted by their partners. He also voiced his bewilderment about why society doesn’t pressure women to “prevent the situation from happening,” and by “situation” he means being violently attacked by a male mate.

Hmmm.

There was, of course, an uproar on the Internet, and that really pissed Smith off, because he thought he made it abundantly clear that he thinks it is totally wrong for men to lay hands on women.  Why was everyone focusing on the part of his monologue where he said: “We also have to make sure that we learn as much as we can about elements of provocation. Not that there’s real provocation, but the elements of provocation, you got to make sure that you address them, because we’ve got to do what we can to try to prevent the situation from happening in any way. And I don’t think that’s broached enough, is all I’m saying.”

That was all he was saying.

Still, in his eyes, people “misconstrued” his meaning by saying he was blaming women in some way when he laid out the classic abuser's argument that the victim somehow provoked the abuse. He composed quite a long tweet about how ANNOYED he was at that, and how he wasn’t BLAMING women for anything, proving just how much he continues not to get it.

Frankly, he felt a little provoked by it.

h/t Salon, Part. 1.

And Part 2

4. Fox & Friends does not think 9-1-1 should respond to calls from non-English speakers. 'Cause they might not be citizens.

Fox & Friends found a unique, and uniquely mean-spirited angle on the undocumented immigrant/unaccompanied minor story this week. Host Brian Kilmeade grilled a Texas official about providing emergency services to undocumented migrants. Kilmeade wondered if calls from immigrants have to be answered, "even though for the most part, when you get there, you realize they're not even American citizens."

The oh-so-fair-minded discussion was about how in Brooks County, Texas, immigrants are positively "bombarding" the police department with 911 calls. On the positive side, Kilmeade likes this because maybe those pesky immigrants are learning the hard way that crossing the border is no picnic. But on the other hand, can’t the emergency service people just ignore those calls?

To illustrate this humanitarian point, Fox & Friends aired two emergency calls from Spanish speakers who were both identified on-screen as "Immigrant." In one, a clearly distressed man asks for help for a cousin who he describes as turning blue. In the second, a man and a woman are telling the operator that they have not had access to water for a few days.

Why do you have to answer those? Kilmeade heartlessly wondered.

No joke, just a WTF is wrong with these people?

h/t mediamatters

5. Steve King: Obama not American because he was not raised with the “American experience.”

With the whole birther thing pretty much laid to rest except for the most out-there reality-refusers, like Donald Trump, xenophonic Obama haters must come up with another way to attack the president’s American-ness. Enter Steve King, the immigrant-hating, tea-partying Congressman from Iowa who has hit on another way to suggest the president is foreign.

“His vision of America isn’t like our version of America,” he told a crowd at an immigration reform rally this week, a crowd which, shall we say, was somewhat predisposed to disliking 1) immigrants; and 2) black presidents. “Now I don’t assert where he was born, I will just tell you that we are all certain that he was not raised with an American experience. So these things that beat in our hearts when we hear the National Anthem and when we say the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t beat the same for him.”

Those three years Obama spent not living in America turned him into a furriner, all right.

And Steve King, who 'knows for a fact' that immigrants are just drug mules in disguise with their “cantaloupe calves” is also the world’s foremost expert on what makes the president’s heart beat.

6. Pat Robertson: Your son’s pregnant girlfriend is ‘stained.’

Ever the voice of compassion and reason, televangelist Pat Robertson urged parents whose son had impregnated his girlfriend not to kick her out, despite the fact that she is a “stained woman.”

So kind. And so modern.

Yes, Uncle Pat acknowledged. There was a time when people would have kicked out this "stained woman," and he was a bit nostalgic for that.  In an email, a viewer coincidentally also named Pat told the 700 Club preacher that he and his wife had allowed the unmarried couple to live in their house because they were expecting a baby. But Pat, the email writer, and his wife were very upset because they suspect the son and his “stained woman” were having sex in the house.

The horror. The fornicators.

“It seems like fornication to us,” he wrote. “What is the line for us to help but not enable continued sin? Are WE sinning by allowing them both to live in our house?”

Robertson was most sympathetic and just as upset as the writer that times have changed (about fifty years ago.)

“You know, the old thing was the little girl would show up on the doorstep with a baby, and the harsh father would slam the door in her face and say, ‘Go forth, you stained woman,’” Robertson said. “Look, that kid is going to be your grandchild, and it’s not a question of the fact that you’re now trying to keep them from having sex, they’ve already had sex, and they’re going to have a baby.”

Good that he cleared that up. Also, he was helpful on the definition of the word 'bastard,' which is what that kid is going to be.


By Janet Allon

MORE FROM Janet Allon


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Alternet Conservatives Fox & Friends Michele Bachmann Pat Robertson Sean Hannity