John has already covered the loopy character that Move America Forward’s Melanie Morgan presents on TV, but two posts over at Marshall’s place (one each by JMM and Benen) really highlight the ludicrous position of rightwing thought in America today.
Wolf: It gets back to what I was saying earlier about the nature of lying. Let’s not forget that they got us into this war on the basis of a series of lies…. This weaving out of lies was a pretext for an invasion that served their own political purposes. In the wake of the invasion, they were able to terrify the American people, subjugate the American people, drive through a series of laws that dismantled key checks and balances, allowed overreaching executive power, and completely eviscerated what the founders set in place, thus weakening America.
Morgan: Keep attacking, keep attacking Naomi, because you’re going to look great in a burka. You’re going to look super in a burka.
Believe it or not this isn’t the first existential invasion threat that the rightwing fringe has worked itself up over in the last year. Who can forget Reconquista, that dastardly Mexican plot to take back the southwest by infiltrating millions of agents disguised at cheap workers? Mexicans are Catholics who don’t like burkas any more than we gringos. Presumably they wouldn’t apprecate it if the Islamic hordes take America first.
Call me crazy, but a solution just popped in my head. Why don’t we let the two imaginary armies fight it out between themselves? Whichever group wins can have Texas.
r€nato
Shouldn’t it be, whichever loses gets Texas???
craigie
Texas is already controlled by imaginary people.
Mary
And now I’m nostalgic for Pennsic, where the loser gets control of Pittsburgh.
“One day, almost 30 years ago, Cariadoc of the Bow, the King of the Middle, got bored with peace and declared war upon the East, loser to take Pittsburgh. The King of the East read the declaration of war, filed it away and forgot about it. Time passed. Cariadoc moved to New York and subsequently became King of the East, whereupon he retrieved the declaration from the file cabinet and said, ‘Let’s fight.’ The Middle won, and Cariadoc has the distinction of being the only king who declared war upon himself and lost.”
Punchy
Fuck Texas. Give them Alabama and Mississippi. Watch the national IQ, SAT, and MCAT average scores double.
incontrolados
/rant
It’s gone. I bet this one goes throught like that (snap).
The internets (or my ISP specifically) hates me.
Can an argument be made that perhaps it shouldn’t be Texas, but rather California or Florida? (That’s what got zapped.)
Fine, blame Texas. None of the Bushes are from here. Rove isn’t. Cheney isn’t. Melanie’s not in Texas. Neither is the guy in the border video. DeLay used to be, but now he’s thankfully gone.
This is the home of Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, Molly Ivans, Bill Moyers, Jim Hightower, and yes Keith, Bill White.
We’re trying here to get things straight. Perhaps you all will be pleasantly surprised in ’08. Or perhaps you’ll just keep ragging on my state.
ThymeZone
Melanie Morgan appears to be a sociopath.
Why are we still talking about her?
incontrolados
See, I knew it.
Have any of you thought (I know I’m not the first by a long shot) that what happened in Texas is what happened to our country, writ large? (And far more dangerous and deadly.) Do you think anyone except the “in crowd” thought it was a good thing?
myiq2xu
I’m in the process of re-reading John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience and he really nails these nutjobs. They aren’t conservatives, they’re authoritarians.
His book is based on the work of Bob Altemeyer which is available in an online book.
Lying, hypocrisy, bigotry, self-rightousness, agression, dogmatism and self-delusion are just some of the common characteristics of douchebags.
We shouldn’t get mad at them, they can’t help being insane.
But we shouldn’t let them play with matches or run the country either.
RSA
Hey, you’re right, Tim F. “You’re going to look great in a burka” is exactly analogous to “I hope you like talking in Spanish.” Which, come to think of it, isn’t too far off from “They’re okay to work with, but you wouldn’t want one living next door or marrying your daughter, would you?”
AkaDad
FWIW, I look pretty good in a burka…
jake
It’s a shame there’s no real cure for paranoia. If you removed all of the “dangerous” people from the planet, these loons would start up about little green men. “You’re going to look great with an alien probe stuck up your butt.”
grumpy realist
A sizable percentage of the population likes feeling it has an enemy to fight. Just like the early Christians running around demanding to be martyred. Makes them feel important.
David
Sounds like something Elizabeth Edwards would say, doesn’t it?
David
Ironic. The people fanning the “burka” hysteria are the same ones who would gladly return to the days of “bare feet, pregnant, and in the kitchen”…
scarshapedstar
What’s all this bullshit about how the Arabs are gonna take over? Don’t these wingnut fucks have guns? I always get the impression that they’re so scared of the brown hordes that they rush to put on a burka if they see a Sikh sneeze. If the Islamofascists really did load up into a boat or something and invade, sure, I’d fight back. But I’m not so sure about these guys. Their obsession with a general surrender on the part of the white race has almost become some kind of fucked-up fetish. Wouldn’t trust them for a moment.
Redleg
Morgan and these other wingnuts are nothing but a bunch of bedwetters- afraid of the brown-skinned boogey men who aim to invade our country and force us to bow to Islam.
CalD
I think we should just give Texas back to Mexico.
CalD
Who says “super?”
BIRDZILLA
As the robot on LAST IN SPACE said DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON ALEINS APPROCHING ALEINS APPROCHING and in STAR TREK is was INDRUDER ALERT INTRUDER ALERT were being invaded by forgein crinimals STAMP OUT THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION ITS TREASON
Josh G.
I wish someone had followed up this ludicrous statement by asking Morgan exactly how she expected this hypothetical Islamist takeover to occur.
How are random terrorists going to conquer a nation with over 10,000 nuclear warheads (enough to destroy the planet several times over), nearly half the entire world’s military spending, plus 300,000,000 privately-owned guns?
Cyrus
I think there are two theories, but I don’t know which one Morgan believes. The first is that if we lessen our vigilance in the Middle East, a resurgent caliphate could unite the Muslim world “from Spain to Indonesia”, to quote Bush himself in the crazification proof. Even if this caliphate only stretched from Morocco to Pakistan, it would still be a powerful nation. I don’t know how that caliphate would come into existence and replace the 30 or so separate countries now in that part of the world, and I don’t think any right-wingers do either, but if it did, it would indeed be a new superpower.
The second theory is that Americans, or maybe just America’s leaders, are so easily cowed that frequent and severe terrorist attacks would lead to popular support for capitulation and significant concessions, like recognizing terrorist groups as legitimate actors or sharia in American jurisprudence or something. There was a comic book set 10 years in the future or something starring Sean Hannity in which Osama bin Laden has become Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, for example.
I didn’t say they were good theories.
Thomas Allen
And so it was that the armies of the Reconquista did battle with the vast Islamic horde.
scarshapedstar
Isn’t that the greatest irony ever? Despite all their bragging about how they understand the threat because they know the history of Islam (from LGF and Tom Friedman columns, I guess) they evidently have no idea that the original Reconquista was fought by Spanish (or, for John’s illegal immigrants readers, español) speakers against the jabbering Berbers! Mexifascists versus Islamofascists! WW0.5! Clash of civilizations! et cetera.
Bibblesnæð
It astounds me how scared right wingers are of everything. It seems weird, as they make such a big show of MANLINESS! and COURAGE!, but I guess it makes sense, really.
They’re scared to death of gays, though I don’t know why; maybe they fear that if we give gays any more leeway, they’ll hit on the righties and they righties will find out they’re really gay and they’ll start behaving all gayly and get boyfriends and want to decorate houses or design women’s clothes.
They’re scared to death of terrorists coming to kill them all or at least take away their freedom, so they want to hand over to the government (as long as it’s run by Republicans) the right to take away their freedom.
They’re scared of Mexicans coming here and not speaking English; I guess they’re scared they’ll have to learn Spanish, but they’ll speak it badly and look dumb, I don’t know.
They’re scared to death of everything, to the point that they want to trash everything about the U.S. that has made it something worth sticking one’s neck out for 200 odd years.
They’re like little children, and they want the government to come look under their beds every night for monsters.