uncomfortably numb: 5 Crazy Right-Wing Freak-Outs in Just One Glorious Week

Monday, October 5, 2009

5 Crazy Right-Wing Freak-Outs in Just One Glorious Week

By Brad Reed, AlterNet. Posted October 5, 2009.

For reasons that I don’t understand -- perhaps it’s subconscious karmic payback for murdering children in a past life -- I feel compelled to read a lot of right-wing blogs.

The wonderful thing about them is the window they offer into the pulsing id of the conservative movement -- up close and personal and without the filters of focus groups or dog whistles. For instance, do you think that Glenn Beck is insane? Oh puh-lease. Beck has precisely nothing on your typical Red State diarist or NewsMax columnist, each of whom is likely to support abolishing women’s suffrage or launching a military coup against Obama at any given time.

To give you an idea of the level of madness we’re looking at here, I’ve decided to share with you the five stupidest, craziest and most inflammatory things that right-wingers said over the span of a single week. When you read these things, keep in mind that these are the sorts of people Republican officials have to interact with on a regular basis. Indeed, the following five crazed tirades are almost enough to make you feel a little sorry for those staffers. Most of them came to Washington to act as soulless money funnels for corporate interests. Instead, they end up spending much of their time taking angry calls from some screamer who wants to privatize his local police force.

Number 5: John Derbyshire takes a bold stand against women’s suffrage

Last week, John Derbyshire, the National Review’s resident British crank, outlined a bold strategy to help Republicans return to power: by denying women the right to vote. The Derb explained that the trouble with women is that “they want someone to nurture, they want someone to help raise their kids, and if men aren’t inclined to do it… then they’d like the state to do it for them.” In other words, uterus-afflicted individuals should be barred from voting because they’re more likely to vote for people who disagree with John Derbyshire. Democracy in action!

Derb tried to show that he wasn’t completely out to lunch, however, by acknowledging that it’s highly unlikely that women will ever give up their right to vote. Of course, if women ever did find their right to vote repealed someday, Derb also said that he “wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep” over it.

What is refreshing about Derbyshire is that he doesn’t try to hide his bigotry or to disguise it with code words – he just has it right out there. Derbyshire has been known to openly game-plan future race wars, to declare that blacks and Latinos are too stupid to educate and to write entire columns declaring his hatred for Chelsea Clinton back when she was just 20 years old. So in this respect, it’s not shocking that Derbyshire opposes women’s suffrage. What’s shocking is that it took him this long to say it.

Number 4: Erick Erickson threatens to dissolve his own town’s police department

Erick Erickson, the founder and managing editor of RedState.com, has a second gig as a city councilor in his hometown of Macon, Georgia. And apparently, the police force in that town is upset by low pay and long hours and they want to form a union. Erickson’s response? He threatens to simply abolish the entire department!

Writing at the PeachPundit blog, Erickson said that he actually asked the city attorney about the possibility of dissolving the police department. The attorney replied that police unions in the state of Georgia cannot strike or collectively bargain, meaning that any union the police formed would be essentially worthless. This didn’t deter Erickson entirely, however, as he said he’d still rather “contract out to the sheriff’s office than see a union come in” because unions “breed inefficiency, corruption, and taint.”

Regardless of how this ultimately turns out, you have to seriously question the intelligence of a man who talks openly of canning his entire police department. It’s almost as if he’s begging to be pulled over and subjected to multiple anal cavity searches.