Drama Queens of the right

Photo above: YouTube clip of Sean Hannity patrolling the Rio Grande with Texas Governor Rick Perry,
their hats on backwards like hip-hoppin’ river commandos.

If you’re on Facebook then you know what I’m talking about with this. If you’re not on Facebook … my hat is off to you.

Facebook is great for keeping up with family and friends to a degree that we can’t with just landline, or even cell phone connections. However many family members and friends — actual friends — you have on Facebook, you can keep up and communicate with most of your favorite people through Facebook, without ever leaving your den, living room, bedroom — or car, for that matter.

Although I would like to add this: don’t check your Facebook — or email, text messages, etc. — while driving. Maybe at a red light or if you’re parked in the I-405 traffic jam, but really — don’t. In December 2009 a guy who was texting while driving knocked me off my Trusty Trek. He broke my wrist and sped off, never to be heard from again.

Back to this Facebook thing. It’s great for keeping in touch with family and friends … and hot women (and dudes) building their fan bases for whatever modeling projects they have coming or hope to have. Whether you’re into hot and sexy women or men, it will be a distraction.

If you’re harrumphing about the hot ’n’ sexy thing: let me tell you how many posts I see every day with pictures of Channing Tatum and other hot sexy men, all posted by women I know in my family and circle of friends. And the men are always shirtless.

Abs, I gotta get me some.

So anyway, Facebook is great for keeping up with your family, friends and the hot’n’sexy bodies that distract us on Facebook for hours at a time.

There are other forms of distraction on Facebook: businesses advertising, charities looking for donations and political and social organizations looking for an audience.

Call me a masochist if you like, but I have “Liked” many of the truly crazy right wing nut bar pages from the likes of The Blaze (founded by Glenn Beck), the Media Research Center (Founded by Brent Bozell) and Chicks on the Right (I don’t know or care who founded that one).

Besides having an irrational hatred of President Obama, a penchant for rewriting history and the definitions of various words (“fascism” is now a lefty-liberal thing so President Obama is now a fascist. Who knew?), along with an obsession for every crazy conspiracy theory that cames along (especially the ones including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton); all these right wing nut bar drama queens have this other thing in common:  Every post and headline they put on Facebook is accompanied by a crazy, melodramatic headline, like this one from the Western Center for Journalism. “Megyn Kelly delivered a knockout punch so powerful that the entire Democratic Party felt it!”

Really? I didn’t feel anything and I’m a registered member of the party of the people (as opposed to the Party of No). And I wouldn’t have known about Kelly’s knockout punch if I hadn’t seen WCJ’s melodramatic post.

Just a guess, but most likely the only people in the Democratic Party that noticed Megyn Kelly’s rant were the poor souls tasked with watching Fox News for that hour. Their bosses most likely dismissing it as just more Fox News oral diarrhea.

What would spur the Western Center for Journalism to write such a crazy headline? Okay, maybe that should be a rhetorical question because a right wing nut bar runs the site. His name is Floyd Brown, one of the creators of the 1988 “Willie Horton” ad used by the George H.W. Bush campaign to spur racial fears among white voters. It’s remembered because the ad worked.

So off I went, digitally speaking, to look into this website and sure enough nearly every headline was some melodramatic exaggeration of reality. ”Rush Limbaugh Just Walked All Over Obama in this Crushing Tirade.”

First of all: who takes Rush Limbaugh seriously anymore? The Western Center of Journalism of course and all the other right wing nut bars. But anyone else?

Second: how long has it been since a Rush Limbaugh did anything other than whip up angry protests and successful boycotts, like when he slandered Sandra Fluke? These days Rush Limbaugh is nothing but a drug-addled, has-been, nobody and only crazy right wing nut bars follow that nut.

Then there is this headline: “These Ranchers Just Gave Pelosi A Challenge She Shouldn’t Ignore If She Knows What Is Good For Her.”

Really, if she knows what’s good for her? What are you, ten years old? If she doesn’t go to the Arizona border with Mexico, what’s going to happen to the House Minority Leader? Are you gonna go to Washington and beat her up? Or will you post more whimsically crazy rants on your website?

The biggest drama queen though has to be the guy from Texas. No, not Louie Gohmert or Ted Cruz, although both are right up there.

As you may recall, just one of the crazy things Gohmert said was that Muslim terrorists had “gamed” the American system by having young women give birth to children in America and then indoctrinate the kids in the ways of Sharia Law and Jihad. And then take over America from within!

And Ted Cruz … the Texas Senator who single-handedly tried to shut down the government by reciting, among other things, Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.

This is the state that led the way in teaching a mythological explanation of creation as science. Texas leads all states when it comes to crazy. As Mario Piperni put it so succinctly: “…it appears that a majority of Texas voters like their politicians served with a huge whopping of crazy.”

And that is born out by this: their governor for the past 13 years has been Rick Perry. Rick Perry, the first governor to float the idea of his state seceding from the Union a few years ago. The guy who, when running for president in 2011-12, couldn’t remember the third agency of government he would abolish if he were elected president — oops. Rick Perry, the guy who compared homosexuality to addiction to alcohol.

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas who refused to shake the president’s hand and suggested President Obama was in a conspiracy with the Mexican cartels to bring the children from Guatemala, Honduras and elsewhere in Central and South America into the United States … we’re not really sure why, in Perry’s view, the president would be involved in such an operation.

In June, while on the Sunday news program Face the Nation, Governor Perry did say, “We either have an incredibly inept administration, or they’re in on this somehow or another. I mean I hate to be conspiratorial, but I mean how do you move that many people from Central America across Mexico and then into the United States without there being a fairly coordinated effort?”

He avoided walking that back on another Sunday talk show last Sunday.

The thing with the GOP right now is that to win the support of the crazy base a candidate — for any office — has to be just as crazy. Insulting President Obama stirs up the base; they love people that are rude to the president. They love tough-talking politicians that stand up to government — federal government — as long as it’s a Democrat they are defiantly insulting. And Texas leads the Tea Partying pack.

Leading Texas is Governor Rick Perry, the leading Drama Queen of the radical nut bar right.

Texas is the state with the highest number of people without health insurance and much of the population is ecstatic Governor Perry made that happen when he stood up to “Big Guv’ment” when he refused to take the money to expand Medicaid. As statistics have proven year after year: the more uninsured people there are, the more expensive health care is for the people with health insurance. But logic and facts are not really important in Texas, not when it comes to public policy and politics.

Governor Perry won’t be seeking another term as governor, he has his sights on another run for president. Perry is banking on stupid and melodrama trumping intelligence in 2016. And it might work to win the GOP nomination. He was actually the GOP front-runner in 2011 right after he got in the race … and then he started talking and, well, he was sort of whacky, even for the Teabaggers.

So it was no surprise when the drama queen sent the Texas Rangers to patrol the Rio Grande in gunboats, armed to the teeth to combat the children coming across the border from Mexico. By god, if any of those children tried anything funny, the Texas Rangers would blow them to bits.

To top it off the governor invited the top drama queen of Fox News to join him on one of those gunboats patrolling the river — Sean Hannity. There they were, scooting up and down the river looking almost, nearly, sorta, kinda, not even remotely, like Navy SEALS. They didn’t even look like over-armed Texas Rangers.

Sean Hannity looked serious though. “Now the immigration crises in this nation is literally at a tipping point …”

Here’s the big lie the right wants us to believe: the border with Mexico is porous and thousands — millions — of “illegal aliens” are “invading” ’Merica to … what? Get less than minimum wage jobs?

Truth is there are over 20,000 U.S. border agents spread across the frontier with Mexico. There are drones and roving patrols and the closer you are to Mexico the more likely your rights as guaranteed in the Bill of Rights no longer exist. For instance: more than once I’ve been “asked” by a friendly and armed border agent to prove my status as a U.S. citizen. Usually an active driver’s license worked fine and they ask, “Where were you born?”
“St. Luke’s Hospital, Milwaukee, WI.”

The first time was about 40 years ago while taking a bus from Yuma to Phoenix, Arizona while a Marine stationed at Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma. The Border Patrol stopped the bus and checked the ID’s of everyone — including the blondes. I’m not blonde and the one guy wanted to pull me off the bus for further inspection. One of the other agents assured him I was indeed a U.S. Marine. Who else would walk around in public with a haircut like that?

And now the border is even more secure, with far more border agents. In Arizona and Texas we have what are now called “Constitution-free zones” because in the quest to stop undocumented immigrants from getting into the U.S. everyone has to prove he or she is a U.S. citizen — if they fit the profile. Which means U.S. citizens, second and third-generation Americans no less, have to whip out identification and prove their citizenship if a law enforcement official stops them and asks for it. No, claiming you have rights doesn’t work. You could probably win a legal argument in a court of law — after you’ve been arrested and detained.

That is the state of our border security today. There are actually more undocumented immigrants leaving the U.S. than trying to enter. Which means for the poor of Mexico and the rest of Latin America, the United States sucks.

But we’re talking about right wing nut job Governor Rick Perry and his best friend on Fox News, Sean Hannity. There are approximately 50,000 children locked up in federal facilities after entering the U.S. without proper documentation — and peacefully surrendering to the Border Patrol — so Rick Perry and Sean Hannity are riding to the rescue, decked out like midnight raiders, with the Texas Rangers. For them this is the single most calamitous situation in the United States since … who knows? And it is destined to end life in ’Merica as we know it. Letting these undocumented kids stay is an invasion and robs us of our freedoms. Just ask them.

Now that sets the bar a little higher for the rest of the drama queens of the right. Go get’em Rick!