A Children's Treasury Of Derp: So Much Crazy, So Little Time

 
 Somehow, the end of the week brought us a flurry of stories that are all special wonderful snowflakes of stoopid, and while they're all worthy of pointing and laughing at, we just can't devote an entire post to each of them. After all, we have a full day of coddling radical Islam to get to! And so, here's a collection of shorts. If this format proves popular, we may make it a semi-regular thing, giving everyone a chance to get into Wonkette's shorts.

• Alabama congressional candidate Dean Young wants everyone in his GOP primary race to sign a pledge against gay marriage, so there's no chance the state's Republicans will accidentally nominate someone who's soft on sodomy. In a proud fuck-you to the Constitution's ban on religious tests, the pledge includes the lines

  • "I believe the Biblical condemnation of homosexuality and thereby gay marriage."

  • "The tenants [sic] of my church oppose gay marriage."

• Ohio congresscritter Dave Joyce explained that the main reason unemployment is so high isn't that the economy is weak or even that there aren't enough jobs. There are plenty of jobs out there, he says, but employers "can’t find people to come to work sober, daily, drug-free and want to learn the necessary skills going forward to be able to do those jobs." Obviously, this is objectively true, and we have no problem with it.

• The loons at Judicial Watch released a report claiming that a Department Of Defense Equal Opportunity training manual "depict[s] conservative organizations as 'hate groups'" and portrays the Founding Fathers as "extremists." They also include a link to the full document (PDF link; detail-nerds can find the relevant section on pp. 33-47), which is far less scary than they claim, but that's fine, since most rightwing blogs dutifully took Judicial Watch's claims at face value.

  The money quote is a claim that the Pentagon is teaching students that "extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place," which sounds pretty scary when divorced from its context. The line appears in a section explaining that the "standard hate message has not changed, but it has been packaged differently" and noting that hate groups have adopted the language of mainstream politics:

  "Nowadays, instead of dressing in sheets or publicly espousing hate messages, many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place."

  So, no, dear, Obama is not telling the military to teach soldiers that everyone who talks about "individual liberties" is a dangerous extremist. Rather than calling mainstream conservative values extreme, the manual says that extremists sometimes pretend to hold mainstream values. We know, subtlety is haaaaaaard.

• Pennsylvania congresscritter Tom Marino said Thursday that there's a simple reason that Barack Obama is such a big darn socialist all the time: Obama, you see, was "raised by the federal government his entire life and he wants to implement his socialist programs and that’s all he knows." This is just logic, people. Congressman Marino has been a fulltime state or federal government employee since 1992, except for the period between the end of his term as U.S. Attorney in 2007 and his election to the House in 2010.

• A nice lady at a Ted Cruz town hall explained that while she's pretty sure Barack Obama cannot legitimately be President because he was born in Kenya, she's not worried about Ted Cruz's eligibility, because "Canada is not really foreign soil." Thanks a LOT, South Park!

• Gun fondler Larry Pratt, head of Gun Owners of America, warned that Obamacare will almost certainly force gun owners to undergo electroshock therapy to cure them of their dangerous beliefs in individual liberty. He knows this because he saw a newspaper article about the use of electroconvulsive therapy in treating bipolar disorder, and because the voices in his head told him that it was so.

• David Usher, the president of the "Center for Marriage Policy, warned that legalizing gay marriage will lead to a plague of lesbian couples tricking men into getting them pregnant, and then enslaving them through demands for child support. For some reason, he thinks married gay men will be especially susceptible to the wily lesbian “reproductive entrapment” plot, creating a "marital underclass." So we have to ban gay marriage for teh gheys' own good, and also because all the lesbians' children will become hooked on government handouts, unfairly enslaving decent heterosexual taxpayers. Uh, do we even need to add a joke here?

• A Tennessee church explained that the 21-year-old son of a pastor would no longer be allowed to work with kids after an incident in which he held down a 13-year-old boy at church camp, climbed onto him, and put his penis on the boy's crotch. The young man's lawyer explained he was "disciplining" the boy, because the boy had been using sexually charged language -- which we think we all agree definitely mandates the young man's threat that he would "come down there and sleep with you naked." A member of the church committee investigating the incident said they believed it was "a case of horseplay gone wrong, which we deeply regret." A spokesman for the horse community said he resented the implication, adding, "Nossir, I don't like it."

• A rightwing Wisconsin blog ran a profile of Democratic state Rep. Brett Hulsey. They do not care for his terrible progressive bad behavior, which includes such offenses as "facilitate[ing] a liberal protester’s violation of the Wisconsin Capitol building rules against posting signs," mispronouncing words, and scaring children at a beach (the blog really tries hard to suggest something sexual, but the writer is apparently aware of libel laws). And then it humorously suggested that all should be forgiven "in light of his latest “constituent service": He wore a Speedo "man thong" while participating in a triathlon, and nefariously paid the entrance fee from his campaign fund. And then we get the incriminating photos:

State Representative Brett Hulsey (D-Bananahammock).

[ Huffpo / RawStory / Judicial Watch / Buzzfeed / RawStory / Rawstory / RightWingWatch / RawStory / BadgerPundit ]