Ten Sure Signs The Right Wing Has Lost It

I’m afraid even I’ve become upset by putting these 10 items together — mostly because they were just too easy to find.

1. A GOP State Senate candidate in Iowa dropped out of the race last week to join the Senate of an imaginary parallel country instead. Randi Shannon, of Coralville ”… released a four-page message Friday saying she is now the senator of the ‘Republic of the United States of America’ and the Republic for Iowa.” The group believes that America’s original form of government, a collection of republics, was usurped in 1871 by a corporation called the United States Corporation. You really should browse this group’s website. It’s jaw-dropingly insane. They even have their own U.S. President, Congress, Supreme Court, and a Secretary of Security who is currently arranging for “implementing the American Ranger Plan.”

2. The “2012 Republican Party of Texas, Report of the Platform Committee” states that there should be no more teaching of “critical thinking” in Texas Public Schools. And that the party platform unequivocally opposes the U.S. Senate’s ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The only other country that has not ratified the convention is Somalia. But I hear they’ve been distracted by not having a government and all.

3. The Republican loon who currently serves as the Governor of Maine recently compared the IRS and the Affordable Care Act to the Gestapo and the Holocaust. Yes indeed, providing access to healthcare for an additional 35 to 40 million Americans is almost exactly like rounding up millions of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, then performing horrible medical experiments and killing them in gas chambers. Almost exactly the same.

4. In Texas, Tea Party favorite and former presidential candidate Rick Perry leads an effort to establish a ban on the mere mention of “abortions” by doctors. From the Dallas Observer: “the Texas Attorney General’s Office made it very clear in a letter to the 5th Circuit judges this week that in their WHP [Women’s Health Plan] doctors would be banned from even discussing the existence of abortion with their patients.”

5. Across the country, one in five state GOP platforms calls for the teaching of “creation science.” Can laws against wizards casting spells and using the “dunking test” for witches be far behind?

6. Tea Party darling and former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has joined forces with Rep. Louie “Goober” Gohmert in an effort that makes Joseph McCarthy look pretty good by comparison. They want to launch an “are you now, or have you ever been?” style of investigating Muslims, focusing on people in the State Department. They’re especially interested one of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top aides, who was born in Michigan and is married to a Jewish former member of Congress. But hey, she’s Muslim, isn’t she?

7. In Michigan, the GOP platform calls for any and all biological fathers to get a veto on a woman’s “choice.” The platform declares that it should be “the father’s inalienable right to decide against any unilateral or preemptive decision to terminate his child’s developing life.” In other words, a biological dad gets to make the call on any and all terminations of pregnancy, even if the mom is married to someone else at the time, and no matter what the woman may wish to do. The biological dad gets to make that call because … he gets sympathy labor pains? Will this power to make the call be extended to angry ex-husbands, jailed rapists, and sperm donors, too?

8. Wes Riddle is a Republican Tea Party candidate who wants to impeach President Obama over something that happened in 1991 in George Walker Bush’s administration. Riddle is running for an open House seat in a newly created district in Texas. According to his own Facebook page, if he wins, the first thing he wants to do is begin the process of impeaching Obama for “giving away seven strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands to Russia.” He knows it happened because it’s on the Internet. But according to the non-partisan FactCheck.org, one of the problems Riddle faces is the fact that the U.S. negotiated a treaty acknowledging Russia owns those islands more two decades ago during the first Bush administration. And the U.S. Senate “ratified [the] treaty … on Sept. 16, 1991.”

9. GOP quasi-presidential candidate Donald Trump was recently named “Statesman of the Year” by the Sarasota Florida Republican party. The Donald immediately showed his statesman-like chops by declaring that the new American Olympic uniforms manufactured in China should be burned. No word yet on what The Donald would have us all do with his own line of clothing, which is manufactured in China. (He says he just gets stuff made there because “it’s cheaper.”)

10. In Texas (again), Republican Senate hopeful Ted Cruz vows courageously to make the world safe for golf. He is running for a vacant U.S. Senate seat and on his website, he expresses the paranoid fever dream that he will bravely combat the UN’s Agenda 21, which “attempts to abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.” I know this is not really true — and may just seem quite laughable. But, Cruz believes it, and he is leading in the polls. Which is really sad.

So there you have it. This is not, by any means, an exhaustive list, and I invite you to top me. Go ahead. Ruin my day.