1. Ted Cruz has a banner week.
Ted Cruz is rising in the polls. He cannot catch Donald Trump, who according to CNN has 36 percent. But Cruz has cruised to second, with 16 percent by CNN's count, edging out the once-popular Ben Carson, whose gaffe-filled couple of weeks (Hamas is not to be confused with hummus) has been amusing but costly to the good doc. Cruz’s formula for newfound success with the ever-wise Republican base? Just be as big a douchebag as possible—in other words for Cruz, be yourself. No one does it better.
Cruz picked up some nice gun-wingnut support by hosting a celebration of gun culture just days after the San Bernardino killings. Technically, he had scheduled his National 2nd Amendment Coalition at Crossroads Shooting Sports in Johnston, Iowa in advance of the California tragedy, but his timing could not have been better. (For its part Crossroads Shooting Sports has said that part of its mission is to "glorify God in all we do.” Glorifying God by shooting things, where have we heard of that before?) In any case, when it comes to Cruz’s timing, the sad fact is you don’t have to be exactly prescient in this country to schedule a gun celebration to coincide with a mass shooting. Because guns, like America, are great. That’s why we’re number 1.
Cruz found plenty of other topics to be creepy about this week. He talked to supporters about how condoms are readily available, and how he’s glad because he and his wife have two daughters instead of 17 of them. Despite the fact that no one in the entire world, including Ted Cruz supporters, wants to hear about his sex life or envision it in any way, he rattled on about the lack of a “rubber shortage” and how he—well, not him, but people—could just buy condoms right out of a machine in dormitory bathrooms in college. (Seriously, do those machines ever work? Definitely not when they’re dispensing tampons.)
Cruz capped off yet another week of stellar ass-hattery by asserting to his supporters that the “overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats,” apropos of nothing and based on even less.
And the primary voters lapped it up.
2. New York Post openly peddles racism.
There was absolutely no subtlety to the blatant hatemongering Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post engaged in the day after the mass shootings in San Bernardino. Rather than call it mass murder, or even a bloody massacre, which is more tabloidy and would have sold papers, the Post went all in for Islamophobic race-baiting with the gigantic headline, “Muslim Murder,” over a picture of a female victim’s bloody, partially undressed body.
Does this signal a new editorial policy on the part of the paper to feature crime perpetrators' religion over all else? Can we expect headlines about Christian robbers and Jewish killers? No, we all know we cannot. Do the editors of the New York Post think for a second about their utter hypocrisy and their deliberate endangerment of hundreds of thousands of innocent, peace-loving people just living their lives in America?
No, it is safe to say they do not.
3. Louie Gohmert has a theory and it all makes perfect sense.
As is fairly well known now, Texas tea partier Louie Gohmert is not a terribly clever man. Unless by clever you mean capable of cooking up absurd conspiracy theories about immigrants and President Obama. The less than intellectually gifted Republican representative claimed Friday that the Obama administration has purposely “let loose” criminals and brought “massive” numbers of “violent terrorists” into the country so that the mean old president can tell Americans to “give up your Second Amendment rights because I let all these terrorists in.”
Riiiiight.
Gohmert described this elaborate and diabolical plot on the part of the president (and would-be president Clinton) at great length while guest-hosting crazy Christian crusader Tony Perkins’ “Washington Watch.” Gohmert's rant was just as fact-free and scare-mongering as you might imagine, with claims that refugees have been brought into this country and charged with terrorism and that the people pouring over our “porous border” are committing crimes in mass quantities. Yet the sole example of an undocumented immigrant harming someone is the shooting death of Kathryn Steinle—which authorities have said was a tragic accident.
It’s not just the porous border, Gohmert further claimed; the Department of Homeland Security is in on the plot too, and is deliberately distributing criminals all over the country.
Jiminy cricket!
It’s all part of one gigantic brilliant plan to restrict gun sales to terrorists just so the gub-mint can take all the guns away from everyone and impose Sharia law.
Amen brother. It all makes total and perfect sense when you lay it out like that.
4. Nevada lawmaker posts festive, armed-to-the-teeth Christmas card.
Nothing says Christmas like a family cradling their firearms.
Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore captured the true meaning of Christmas with her 2015 family Christmas card, which she posted on Facebook this week. In it, every member of her clan above the age of toddlerhood is packing. And so many different kinds of weapons to choose from! There’s a Beretta, some Glocks, a Walther P22 for 5-year-old Jake, and for Michele, a Serbu Super-Shorty 12-gauge shotgun. Woohoo.
This marvelous public servant was a big supporter of wonderful, law-abiding Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy. She told MSNBC, "Don't come here with guns and expect the American people not to fire back."
For the holidays, she went with a much sweeter tone. "It's up to Americans to protect America,” her festive message said. “We're just your ordinary American family.”
Oh, good God, no.
5. Kim Davis' right-wing Christian lawyer thinks she should be Time magazine’s person of the year.
Because, of course he does.
Just not for the same reason that sane people think she might merit that distinction.
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