This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
While Hillary Clinton caught massive amounts of heat for stating accurately that many Trump supporters are “deplorable” people, a bunch of lovable racists, sexists and homophobes gathered to spew venom in Washington D.C. At the Family Values Voter Summit gathering of right-wing evangelicals, very holy people like Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, Michelle Bachmann, alt-right racists, former John Birchers and Donald Trump all gathered to pray for the right to discriminate against gays, ban refugees and deport families, and for Clinton’s imminent demise.
Here are some of the lowlights there and in other parts of the right-wingosphere.
1. Louie Gohmert, the pot, calls the kettle black.
Louie Gohmert, a strong contender for stupidest person currently serving in Congress, took his turn at the mic at the Values Voter Summit Friday. The Texas Tea Partier obnoxiously claimed he was not one to mock people with special needs (unlike, say, Donald Trump who readily does), but he’d make an exception for Hillary Clinton.
“You don’t make fun of people who are impaired, have special needs, and whether you like her or not, Hillary Clinton has made clear that she is mentally impaired and this is not somebody you should be making fun of,” Gohmert said to the assembled prayerful chucklers.
Apart from possibly losing a few IQ points every time she has to debate her willfully ignorant opponent (who always spews the “best words”), Clinton, it hardly needs to be said, shows every indication of being sound of mind.
“I get the impression that in law school and along the way, she’s been very, very smart, but I don’t know, maybe it was the concussion, the fall back when she did, or maybe, who knows? They won’t tell us what really is going on with her,” Louie continued.
Gohmert, who favors food metaphors when he speaks in tongues, said Clinton’s brain was in a blender during a Thursday appearance on “Fox and Friends.” He apologized for that and said it was because he had a song stuck in his head.
He still has not explained what induced him to blurt out “don’t cast aspersions on my asparagus” in a congressional hearing with Attorney General Eric Holder. Perhaps he had a song stuck in his head then too?
2. Donald Trump just basically echoed what Michele Bachmann said about the end times.
As a public service announcement, we wish to remind you that Michele Bachmann, a woman who would get along famously with men in white coats, is an adviser to the Trump campaign. Like, someone they actually listen to.
This became abundantly clear this week, when Donald Trump literally repeated an insane statement of Bachmann's laying out her doomsday scenario. For Bachmann, of course, the end times are always nigh and very real, and have been ever since the nation scarily elected a black man president. Both she and Trump share a fear of the blackening and browning of America, mostly because people of color don’t seem terribly inclined to vote for Republicans.
In a perfect example of how Trump does not filter anything he hears and repeats inanities, claiming, “people are saying it,” the GOP standard-bearer just up and repeated verbatim Bachmann’s looneytunes statement that this may very well be “the last election ever.” Trump’s version added the clause, “if I don’t win.”
Whatever has brought about this bout of apocalyptic thinking? Why, it’s just as that great sage Bachmann said: If Clinton wins, “you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote and once that all happens you can forget it,” Trump told the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody.
“You’re not going to have one Republican vote,” he said. “And it’s already a hard number. Already the path is much more difficult for the Republicans. You just have to look at the maps.”
It’s worth repeating his whole insane rant at this point:
“I think it’s going to be the last election that the Republicans can win. If we don’t win this election, you’ll never see another Republican and you’ll have a whole different church structure. You’re going to have a whole different Supreme Court structure. That has to do a lot with what we’re doing because the Supreme Court, as you know with Justice Scalia gone, I think you could probably have four to five judges picked by the next president. Probably a record number, David, probably a record number of judges. If they pick the super-liberals, probably to a certain extent, people that would make Bernie Sanders happy, you will never have a Supreme Court, we’re going to end up with another Venezuela, large-scale version. It would be a disaster for the country.”
Yes, and this guy has a shot at being president. Just to reiterate.
What he really means is that Republicans, hopefully already on the ropes with the country’s shifting demographics and a shrinking pool of old white racists to support them, may have a more difficult time winning elections.
That’s not an apocalypse. It’s a little thing called democracy.
3. Don Lemon perfectly demonstrates false equivalence.
CNN’s Don Lemon expressed shock and dismay after Hillary Clinton called half of Donald Trump’s supporters exactly what they are: deplorable. Deplorables in a basket. Basket o’ deplorables. How dare Clinton call racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic white supremacists such a mean name!
Clinton hastened to add that many of Donald Trump’s supporters have legitimate grievances and feel left out and left behind by the government, the economy and the establishment, but that observation is not what has garnered her all the hate this weekend.
Don Lemon’s intro to Hillary’s now much-parsed comments was a masterpiece of ridiculously false equivalence, a media contortion that is running rampant these days. “Donald Trump was not the only one making questionable statements tonight,” he told guest Van Jones before replaying Clinton’s speech.
Let’s see, Trump had very reasonably suggested Hillary Clinton could “shoot someone in public and not get arrested,” and praised Vladimir Putin to the hilt this week, and Clinton said some of Trump’s supporters might be xenophobic.
Yeah, those things are about the same.
4. Mike Pence is so mad at Hillary he could spit.
Donald Trump’s running mate was allowed by his master to speak Saturday, and the arch-conservative Indiana governor was foot-stomping mad. He couldn’t quite remember what Hillary Clinton said, but he was sure that Donald Trump’s supporters were not in a basket or any other porous container. Improvising at the podium at the Values Voters Summit, Pence sputtered that Clinton had described Trump supporters in “the most deplorable of terms.”
Yeah, almost as bad as, oh, we don’t know, calling Mexicans rapists and murderers.
“She referred to those people as irredeemable," Pence said. (It should be noted that Clinton did also add that some Trump supporters, are, she’s sure, nice people.)
"The truth of the matter is that the men and women who support Donald Trump's campaign are hard-working Americans. Farmers. Coal miners. Teachers. Veterans. Members of our law enforcement community. Members of every class of this country who know that we can make America great again," Pence robotically intoned.
What they may not be, perhaps, are people who favor women’s health, voting rights, not having millions of immigrants rounded up and deported, most black people, all Muslims, or people who think and are educated.
Pence wasn’t done. His best zinger was yet to come. "So let me just say, from the bottom of my heart — Hillary, they are not a basket of anything.”
Ooh, burn.
5. Britt Hume is still just very confused about why he can’t call Hillary Clinton shrill.
A couple of Fox News fellas, Britt Hume and Tucker Carlson, were having a little chat about what they can and cannot say about Hillary Clinton. It’s so frustrating being a white male these days. Everybody’s always picking on you, trying to take away the privileges to which you’ve become accustomed.
They were discussing the whole outrage of Clinton not smiling enough while she was talking to the families of dead soldiers during the "Commander-in-Chief" forum. Carlson said he admires Clinton's toughness, but thinks she undercuts that when she mentions the sexism in the media's coverage of her. How so? Not sure.
But poor Hume just doesn’t even know what he can say anymore; everything has become so unfair.
You know at the Democratic convention, I was on after her speech, and it struck me that she did some things effectively in that speech, particularly her critique of Donald Trump. But she seemed — and she has at other times in the campaign — to be kind of angry and joyless, and yes, unsmiling. I said that on the air, and I really caught it on Twitter from people who said, "You're just a sexist, I can't believe somebody's saying that." But it raises this question, Tucker, in America today, is it possible for a woman to be shrill, and if so, or joyless, or unsmiling, is it possible for somebody to say that without ending up in jail?
When will this persecution end?
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