6 worst right-wing moments of the week — Dick Cheney is the world's biggest liar

Cheney's baldfaced distortions would be funny they it weren't so tragic. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is still terrible

Published June 23, 2014 3:20PM (EDT)

Dick Cheney on "Cavuto," on the Fox Business Network, Dec. 9, 2013.                (AP/Richard Drew)
Dick Cheney on "Cavuto," on the Fox Business Network, Dec. 9, 2013. (AP/Richard Drew)

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

AlterNet1. George Will stumbles around defending his controversial rape column and pretty much says the same thing all over again.

George Will is an idiot. There, we said it. His idiocy and cluelessness have not stopped him from opining at length and in long sentences with fairly large words about things that he knows nothing about.  Things like campus rape.

Well, he does know something about rape. He knows that it is very bad . . . for the reputations of people who are accused of it.

Two weeks after penning a totally absurd column casting doubt on the Obama Administration’s figures on campus sexual assault (one in five women), and coining the now famous description of college sexual assault survivors as enjoying “coveted status” (whee, yes, so fun), a phrase for which he has been deservedly ridiculed, and dropped from the St. Louis-Dispatch, Will is talking about rape again.

It seems that in Will’s Mobius strip of a mind, he is the hero because he’s the only one who actually  takes rape seriously. And by taking it seriously, he means feeling sorry for the guys accused of it.

“This is my job, when dubious statistics become the basis of dubious and dangerous abandonment of due process, to step in and say ‘Take a deep breath, everybody,’” Will told C-SPAN in an interview taped Thursday. What he really means is that it is his job to question Obama Administration statistics by using specious Heritage Foundation statistics. He also blamed alcohol, and “hookup culture,” for the sexual assault problem, as opposed to, say, rapists.

“A lot of young men and young women (are) in this sea of hormones and alcohol, (so) you’re going to have charges of sexual assault,” Will said. “You’re going to have young men disciplined, their lives often permanently and seriously blighted by this — don’t get into medical school, don’t get into law school, all the rest, and you’re going to have litigation of tremendous expense as young men sue the colleges for damages done to them by abandonment of rules of due process.”

'Cause, for sure we need doctors and lawyers who are also rapists.

This concern for the reputations of accused rapists is hardly an original idea. It has been a cornerstone of the men’s rights movement, the one that blames feminism and women who won’t just put out and shut up about it for ruining men’s lives.

But despite this stunning lack of originality, Will persists in seeing himself as a lonely crusader for the truth, one who takes “sexual assault more seriously” than his critics do.

Remember when Susan Sarandon said she thought George Will was kinda hot because he was so smart and egg-heady. Wonder if she still thinks that.

2. Unspeakably shameless Dick Cheney slithers out to blame Obama for Iraq mess that Cheney’s cabal created.

All around the country, people are scratching their heads? Why is Dick Cheney still talking? Why would anyone listen to someone some so demonstrably wrong about Iraq, who bullied and lied and cajoled the country into waging war in Iraq? Someone who Fox’s Megyn Kelly has even said was wrong about “everything about Iraq, sir.”

This week, the still undead Cheney and his failed senate-seat-seeking daughter Liz had the audacity to write a Wall Street Journal op-ed blaming Obama for the fiasco the Cheney gang created.

"Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many," they wrote.

Obviously, the next sentence in this paragraph should contain the word “Bush.”

Ha!

"Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is ‘ending’ the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality."

It takes a higher order thought process to be able to reflect upon and take responsibility for one’s own actions and mistakes, but it is not an ability that Dick Cheney will ever acquire, no matter how long he lives, or how many new tickers he gets. Perhaps his heart transplant also erased his memory of all the lies he told to drag America into this war in the first place.

But we doubt it. He knows. He just doesn’t care.

For a summary of the odious op-ed, click here.

3. Erick Erickson defends anti-gay remark even Rick Perry knows to distance himself from.

Last week, Texas Governor Rick Perry acknowledged he “stepped right in it” when he compared homosexuality to alcoholism. Unlike the aforementioned Cheney Monster, Perry seems to have thought better of something he said and realized on some tiny little pea-brained level the error of his ways.

The problem is that once these idiotic thoughts hit the cold airwaves of reality they take on a life of their own among the other nutcases, and so on Friday, RedState.com founder and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson wrote a column agreeing that homosexuality is a disorder like addiction or alcoholism that sufferers must “struggle” to “overcome,” Media Matters reported.

“I largely agree with Governor Rick Perry and appreciate him speaking up,” Erickson said, perhaps unaware that Perry had retracted his statement.

“Whether one is born gay or not does not mean God made a person gay,” Erickson said.  “And whether it is the unrepentant alcoholic, homosexual, adulterer, liar, or any of the others the Duck Commander listed, none are going to be saved on the last day without repenting.”

So repent, yee sinners repent. Be holy and homophobic like your brothers on ‘Duck Dynasty.’ The kingdom of heaven will open its pearly gates to those who hate the ones who love differently.

Yah mon.

4. Rep. Mark Meadows: Obamacare should not cover pregnancy because I’m a guy, I’m 50, and I just don’t need it.

Remember that whole “war on women” problem the GOP has? How the party of old white men was really going to try to change the perception that their policies go out of their way to harm women? Not really working out. The memo does not seem to have circulated widely enough.

Either Rep. Mark Meadows is just stupid or he is just a colossal jerk. Or, perhaps both. He is part of the Republican posse that is still hopelessly flailing around, throwing absolutely anything at the wall to get Obamacare repealed. And if that means picking on pregnant women, so be it.

Here is the North Carolina Congressman badgering pregnant doctor Mandy Cohen, who works for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and is due to give birth in about two weeks, in a hearing targeting Obamacare.

MEADOWS: So you have to buy maternity, even though you may never have a child?

COHEN: That is correct.

MEADOWS: Are there other things you have to buy that you may never use?

COHEN: It depends on your personal family situation and your medical situation. I’ll say as an internist, and a primary care doc, that sometimes you don’t know what that medical situation will be going forward, and that’s the nature–

MEADOWS: But maternity is one that you can probably analyze pretty well for someone who’s in their 50s.

COHEN: Right, but it’s a minimal essential benefit we wanted to make sure that all Americans had access to.

Of course, there are plenty of things that health insurance covers that primarily affect older people—and not even all of them, like cancer, dementia and heart trouble—but they are included, and you don’t hear Meadows complaining about that. No, the oh-so pro-life Republican party just wants to exclude pregnant women.

h/t: ThinkProgress

5. Donald Trump continues being utterly despicable about the wrongfully convicted Central Park Five.

Back when the rape and beating of the Central Park Jogger grabbed headlines and horror, and the city’s collective rush to judgment helped arrest and convict five young black and Latino men for a crime they turned out not to have committed, Donald Trump was a leader of the wolf-pack. In a full-page ad in the New York Times, Trump called for the young men, ages 14-16, to be put to death. (This was before they were even wrongfully convicted.)

You might think that after they were exonerated completely, with DNA evidence and the real perpetrator’s confession, one having lost 13 years of his life in prison, that a certain amount of contrition on the part of the comb-over would be forthcoming.

Ha! Wrong universe!

Not only did Donald Trump never ever express the slightest regret for calling for the death of 5 youngsters who were coerced and terrified into confessing to a crime they did not commit, he’s pissed that they are now, finally, after all these years, getting a settlement from the city which robbed them of a good many years of their lives.

The shameless, birther-believing, stubby-fingered, spray-tanned, right-wing egomaniac has now penned an op-ed published in the New York Daily News Saturday, calling the $40 million settlement the city agreed to pay Antron McCray, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana, a “disgrace.”

Why? Because Trump says that the Central Park Five were not angels. How does he know that? He doesn’t. He just assumes it. As he assumed their guilt in the attack. He does not need evidence. His opinions are what count.

Last year, TheGrio.com reported that Trump tweeted, then deleted, the question: "what were the men doing in the park, playing checkers?”

They were in the park, while black, a capital crime in Trump’s warped little mind.

h/t: Huffpo 

6. Steve “Cantaloupe Calves” King becomes hysterical about Redskins decision.

We are truly worried about Iowa Tea Party Rep. Steve King’s mental health. After the Patent Office (USPTO) ruled that the “Redskins” name is both a racial slur and therefore not something a national football team can own the trademark for, the immigrant-hating, somewhat high-strung King tweeted this:

"Obama raids Redskins by weaponizing USPTO. Cancels Redskins logo! Free people will not tolerate a Kim Jong POTUS."

Time to call in the men in white coats.

 


By Janet Allon

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