Were I them, I’d cringe reading about the things they said at the 2015 South Carolina Republican Party State Convention on Saturday. Shouldn’t you save the really stupid stuff for where nobody can hear you?
Apparently not, as the Fabulous Five, Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, and Ted Cruz, got together and agreed to collectively sound like Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
To show you the kind of brain power we are talking about here, CNN reveals that Rick Perry “got perhaps the biggest applause of the day when he said ‘the best defense against crime is an armed citizen.'”
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
This is demonstrably untrue, but then the entire Republican agenda is based on things that are demonstrably untrue, but which they wish were true, so this is hardly surprising.
The audience loved it, of course. You would expect them to. “The dumber the better” seems to be the cry for 2016.
And Ted Cruz proved it. The guy who can’t be bothered to show up for his job, who has introduced only one piece of legislation and failed to vote on most others, said loftily:
2016 isn’t going to be an election about whoever’s got the loftiest rhetoric. Folks are going to look past at what people are saying and look at what you’ve done.
He better hope not, cause he’s done nothing except talk.
But it is Lindsey Graham who may have won the Hasselbeck Prize when he said that, “I see a Republican Party” – this is the same Republican Party whose policies are in large part responsible for the Baltimore riots – “giving people in Baltimore and nearly every other big city hope like they haven’t seen in past eight years.”
Rick Perry told the be-dumbed, “The great issue of our time is a battle between western values of freedom and this totalitarian world view of Islamic fanatics.” And Lindsey Graham said, “They want to purify their religion and they want to destroy ours.”
Wow, I could almost forget the Republican Party’s own purity drive. And wasn’t it Rick Santorum who said mainline protestants are actually serving Satan these days, and aren’t even really Christians?
Graham went after Islam. No doubt tired of hiding under his bed from ISL, he complained, “I’ve never seen so many threats to our homeland as I see today.”
There are more terrorist organizations with more safe havens, more capability, more weapons, more men, than hit us on any time before 9/11.
Ted Cruz, not to be outdone, said,
We need a president who’s not an apologist for radical Islamist terrorism, suggesting that it’s just like the Crusades and the Inquisition. We need a president who says ISIS is the face of evil and we will stop it.
But as Bloomberg pointed out, it was Santorum who “led the Republican charge in South Carolina on radical Islam.”
Santorum agreed to forget all about his own past in particular and the GOP’s obsession with the past in general:
You can’t defeat ISIS unless you define the enemy for who it is. This is an enemy that wants to bring back a version of Islam that was popular in the 7th Century, a radical idea about beheading and crucifixions.
Ready for the punchline?
“This is not a modern Islam. It’s a 7th century Islam. So I have a suggestion: Let’s bomb them back to the 7th century.”
Like whatever bastardized abortion of a religion they’re promoting is somehow a modern-day Christianity. These guys sound like the Christian monks who murdered female mathematician and philosopher Hypatia in fifth century Alexandria, Egypt, for standing up for actually thinking, rather than believing.
Her murder effectively replaced the questing spirit of Hellenistic philosophy and science with the “Do not ask questions, just believe,” paradigm, which last until the Renaissance.
If any group does not have the right to call another religion backward-looking, it is the Religious Right.
One resolution which came up at the convention was “Cold War Victory Day” which would replace “May Day” on May 1, because May Day is, you know, so Communist, even though it’s been a festival since before Christianity.
They had a whole bunch of resolutions to consider, like teaching the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in public schools (presumably until they auction the public schools off to the highest bidder), and then violating the Constitution by letting the Senate have a say in the president’s negotiations with Iran (you immediately see the need to teach the Constitution), and of course, pledging loyalty to Israel.
Kinda wish they’d pledge loyalty to the United States of America, but I suppose that would be too much to ask.
Photo: Twitter @SCGOP
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
