Oh those funny, funny rightwing nuts

Who knew the Teapublicans were so funny?

These past few days it’s been one thigh slapper after another.

First there was Herman Cain saying if he is elected president he would put up an electrified fence between Mexico and the United States with a sign on the other side saying “This will kill you,” presumably in Spanish.

Then on a Sunday talk show he said he was joking.  Then on Monday, after meeting with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, he kind of took the “It’s a joke” part back.   Maybe he thinks he can get the Hispanic vote on even-numbered days and the anti-immigrant votes on odd-numbered days.

Mike Huckabee is hilarious too.  He urges supporters of an Ohio initiative to roll back union rights to suppress the votes of its opponents.

“You just make sure that they don't go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That's up to you how you creatively get the job done."

That was a joke too, Huckabee now insists.  What a kidder!  And it’s a “joke” he’s made before.  In 2009 he said pretty much the same thing here in this video while campaigning for Bob McDonnell in Virginia:

 "One, get all those people who are going to vote for Bob out to the polls and vote. If they're not going to vote for Bob, you have another job. Let the air out of their tires, and do not let them out of their driveway on Election Day. Keep 'em home. Do the Lord's work, my friend. I'm giving you an opportunity ... yes, do the right thing."

Do the lord’s work, indeed!  Keep those Democratic, Godless Commie bastards out of the voting booth. In some, no doubt humorless, circles, Huckabee’s little joke would be considered a federal crime, a violation of the Voters Rights Act of 1965. 

By the way, that ploy, “tell them the election is a different day” has been pulled all around the country in recent years, most recently in the Wisconsin recall elections.  Not by Democrats.  Also, “Tell them they’ll be arrested for parking tickets or outstanding child support if they try to vote” was actually tried in Philadelphia in 2008.

Speaking of the Lord’s work, Rush Limbaugh must have been joking when he expressed his support recently for the Lord’s Resistance Army:

“Lord's Resistance Army are Christians.  They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan.  And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them,” Limbaugh said.

You would think Limbaugh or his producers would at least Google an organization before going on the airwaves to defend it.  If he had, he might have learned what the evangelical magazine Christianity Today thinks of the LRA:

“The perpetrators commit atrocities with such malevolence that even the most irreligious people familiar with their acts describe them as ‘unrestrained evil.’  The targets of the butchery are children. They rape, mutilate, and kill them with a rapaciousness that staggers the imagination.  Worse, they compel children to kill one another and their own families, fighting as ‘soldiers’ in an armed force deliberately composed of children.”

Sometimes sticking to your principle of opposing every last thing the (Democratic, Godless, secret Muslim, Commie, Socialist, half-black) president does can really lead you down strange byways, but that’s Rush, clueless all day, every day.

The “merry prankster” of the nutwing right has also been up to some new high jinx, but without much joy.  James O’Keefe, he of the Acorn, NPR Muslim Brotherhood and Mary Landrieu hilarity, has been trying to pass himself off to the Economic Policy Institute as a researcher for a hedge fund manager who is interested in funding a study showing that cuts to education would hurt students.  In other words, he was trying to get a progressive think tank to agree to buy bogus research results so that he could “prove” that the left will do anything to support its causes (unlike the Republicans, of course).  Luckily EPI was on to him.

"He was trying to get me to say, yeah, give me the money and I will come up with a report that says cutting back on school funding is going to hurt school kids," said EPI President Lawrence Mishel. "Which actually is the truth — I could have given him evidence that shows that."

O'keefe also made a video at Occupy Wall Street in which he passed himself off as a banker who was approached by a “protester” to invest in a company.  O’Keefe pleaded guilty to entering property belonging to the United States under false pretenses in May and was sentenced to three years of probation.

Keep 'em coming, you kings of comedy, you!