While Hillary and Bernie engaged in their most contentious debate, Donald Trump had a quiet week apart from a tantrum about how unfair the whole electoral process is. Ted Cruz said crazy things, but was largely ignored, even by people who paid a lot to come see him talk. The good people of New York will go to the polls on Tuesday, an event with the added benefit of finally ridding the city of the truly annoying presence of Ohio governor John Kasich.
Here are some awful right-wing moments this week, on the campaign trail and elsewhere.
1. Donald Trump matched and possibly outdid his own previously high level of dickishness.
Donald Trump was a little quiet in the early part of the week, perhaps because he was stewing about how unfair everything is, and concentrating on having someone ghost-write his whiny, rage-filled op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that required all of his mental juices. (Presumably orange juices in his case.)
After making a grand show of his outrage on the part of everyday people in that op-ed—because he is, after all, just like them—he went on to hold a campaign rally, maybe to cheer himself up. He and the local Republican Party decided to hold that rally right on the very Long Island street where a Latino man was murdered in a racist hate crime.
Coincidence? It’s hard to think so, given Trump’s relentless vitriol against immigrants, especially from south of the border.
The town is Patchogue, Long Island, which is famous for a string of anti-immigrant attacks and the place where 37-year-old Marcelo Lucero was murdered after being set upon by seven teenagers who were looking for “Hispanics to beat up,” as one testified. Jeffrey Conroy was convicted of the stabbing death of the Ecuadorian immigrant.
Perfect place for a Trump event, local Republican leaders decided. Trump, being his own man and all, ignored cries to move his rally from the nightclub reportedly 200 feet from the spot where Lucero was killed.
“How sad it is that Patchogue, which is about 30 percent Latino, once again has its name associated with xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment,” Paul Reyes wrote for NBC News. “How offensive it is to bring the man who allegedly has incited other hate crimes to the place where Lucero was murdered in cold blood. And how disturbing it is that the Suffolk County GOP has refused to move or cancel the event. As one local resident told CNN, bringing Trump to Patchogue is 'akin to inviting Osama bin Laden to speak at Ground Zero.'"
2. Can we please stop calling John Kasich the reasonable Republican candidate?
John Kasich, the so-called reasonable Republican candidate, managed to be pretty awful this week as well.
During a campaign stop in New York, a college freshman asked Kasich how he proposes to address campus safety concerns, especially the problems of sexual violence, harassment and rape.
He started off okay, if a tad old-fashioned when he referred to women who attend colleges as “co-eds.” He talked about confidential reporting, rape kits and the right to pursue justice. But he just couldn’t help offering some folksy advice to all those prospective “co-eds” out there, including apparently his own twin daughters who are touring colleges while he campaigns: “Don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol.”
Ugh. Really? No advice for young men about, oh I dunno, not raping people? Not to mention the inconvenient reality, as any teen or college student will tell you, that avoiding parties with a lot of alcohol means avoiding all parties. Just saying.
Kasich has a problem with offering impromptu tone-deaf advice. Campaigning at a yeshiva in Brooklyn earlier in the week, he decided it would be a cute idea to condescendingly argue with some Torah scholars about, yeupp, the Torah (or as he calls it, the Old Testament). The topic was whether Abraham or Moses is more important to the Jewish people, and Kasich, of course, knows best.
“What are you talking about?” Kasich responded, with slightly more cranky exuberance than was called for. “Get outta here! The story of the people are Abraham—when God made a covenant with Abraham, not Moses.”
So now, Kasich can add goysplaining to his resume, along with old mansplaining. Yay!
3. Sarah Palin bravely takes on science, and all who espouse it.
Just when it appeared that Sarah Palin's reign as the craziest nonsense-spewer ever to take the stage in national presidential politics had been completely eclipsed, she came roaring back this week.
Damn, she’s good at it.
Palin mustered all of her considerable verbal fire-power to take aim at a powerful and evil enemy this week: the children’s television personality, Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Perhaps sidelined by her buddy Donald Trump, for whom she has not been much of an asset, Palin was out there campaigning hard against science, while promoting a film titled Climate Hustle, which makes the entirely believable claim that this whole climate crisis is a giant conspiracy on the part of the government and actually carbon emissions are good for the planet. (No, this is not a mockumentary.) “Bill Nye is as much a scientist as I am,” Palin told the crowd at the premiere. “He’s a kids’ show actor. He’s not a scientist.”
Even more depressingly, this event was hosted in Congress by Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House committee on science, space and technology, though science-denier Smith was not there. Then again, the setting for this circus makes sense, since congressional Republicans (and Sarah Palin) are just about the only people in the world who still believe climate change is a hoax.
Palin went on to caution parents against letting their children submit to the kind of mind-control that evil meanies like Bill Nye are perpetrating when they try to teach kids actual facts.
Time to repin the crazy crown back on Palin’s head, its rightful, everlasting perch.
4. Bill O’Reilly finds another black man to lecture about racism.
Last week, Bill O’Reilly patiently explained to Tavis Smiley that Smiley does not understand what racism is when he calls Donald Trump a “racial arsonist.”
This week, O’Reilly explained to black people that the debunked myth of the “superpredator” is real. And he intends on using it whenever he talks about black people, cops and criminals. So there!
He did so in the context of a conversation with a black man who is arguably more conservative than O’Reilly himself: Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Even though Riley was inclined to blame black people for their problems and say things like, “there is not an institution that cares more about black people than cops,” O’Reilly still interrupted him numerous times to whitesplain to him exactly what black people’s problems are.
“Black people have to rise up,” O’Reilly lectured. They have to rise up and embrace that term “superpredators.”
A snippet from the exchange courtesy of MediaMatters:
BILL O’REILLY: Don't you think most African Americans know there are super predators among their ethnic group? Don't they know it?
JASON RILEY: Everyone knows the truth. They know that cops are not the biggest threat to young black men. They know other black men are the biggest threat to young black men. Everyone knows this. This is obvious. But the left is pushing a political narrative here. They want to pretend that our morgues and our cemeteries are full of young black men because cops are shooting them. Everyone knows that is not the problem.
Not for a second did O’Reilly listen to his guest, for that is not what O’Reilly does. He spews. Guests sit there and listen, dammit.
O’REILLY: The bulk of the African American community makes up 13 percent of the American population. You’re telling me that when they are lied to, because this is a lie. I mean, describing gang members who murder other people as superpredators is accurate. It's not a racist statement.
Both agreed it is the left wing’s fault that people don’t understand the accuracy of this word (which even the people who coined it have abandoned). O’Reilly also thinks even Republicans have become cowardly about using such accurate terms.
O’Reilly later self-righteously asserted that even if people call him racist, he’s going to keep speaking his “truth.”
Brave Bill O'Reilly, waging a lonely battle for the good of all mankind.
5. And from the lunatic Christian fringe, this just in.
The mystery of Stonehenge has been solved, at long last. Turns out that giants created by Satan built it.
Yeah, that makes sense.
This exciting revelation—and when we say "revelation" we mean it in the biblical sense—comes courtesy of televangelist Jim Bakker, who hosted one Dennis Lindsay on his program on Wednesday in order to discuss Lindsay’s latest "discovery" in the realm of Creation Science.
So what happened was, Satan made these giants who moved those big ol' rocks into the structure we now call Stonehenge. That was pretty smart of Satan to create a supersized labor force.
That's the reasonable part. Here's how Lindsay explained how the devil wants to destroy God's creation, Israel, and "contaminate the whole human race," per RightWingWatch:
Satan wants to “have his own seed and make his own family,” Lindsay explained, and so he created a race of giants who would attack Israel.
“He build his little squatter’s hut up there on the Temple Mount, you know that temple, because he knows what the Bible says about that place,” he said. “I weaved through why and what is the evidence for giant beings on this earth. We all know about Stonehenge, right? That’s just one of hundreds and hundreds of gigantic places around the world that testify that some sort of supernatural power or giants were involved in its construction.”
So there you have it. Satan has a "squatter's hut" and you have Satan's giants to thank for those all those "gigantic places in the world."
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