CC of the day - Jim Porter, President of the NRA

not all crazy conservatives work in congress or state houses around the country.  some have some real power.  meet Jim Porter, incoming new President for the National Rifle Association.

Porter refers to the civil war as the "war of northern aggression".  while most of us know that rural southerners often call it that, we would hope that people put in positions of power would know better.  the notion that the civil war was anything other than a terrible blight in American history is outrageous.  to think that some may be nostalgic for the same thinking that brought it upon our country is akin to blasphemy.  yet here we have Porter invoking Jefferson Davis at a rally of like minded anti-government assholes.

wait, it gets worse.  continuing his paranoia induced rant, Porter goes on to suggest that citizens need to be trained with military style weaponry in order to prepare for uprising against a tyrannical government.  if this doesn't shock you, sadly you've been paying attention to the news lately.  a recent Farleigh-Dickenson poll found that 44% of republicans believe that armed insurrection would be necessary in their lifetime.  one might assume they mean soon.  stoking this fear is portly Porter, a man who would likely hide at a Waffle House while his compatriots were gunned down by Apache helicopters (if it ever came to that).

now i'm not some anti-gun liberal.  i own several guns, including a 9mm pistol for defense.  i've been shooting since i was 7 years old.  i hunted and even killed a deer.  what i can't fathom is a mindset where a group of people collectively decide to buck the democratic process that they claim to love so much, ignoring the constitution which they claim to love so dearly, and threaten to kill people when they claim to love the bible so dearly.

all of which brings me back to Porter.  since he's not in public office i can't say definitively which party he belongs to.  although since the NRA has become a partisan faction i can reasonably assume Porter is a republican.  he is, however, most certainly a conservative.  one who, like 44% of his brethren, believes that a second civil war may be necessary to thwart a tyrannical government.  what constitutes a tyrannical government they don't say.  but considering the rhetoric which conservatives use relating to our current administration, it may be that they believe it to already be upon us.

CC of the day - Jeff Duncan (R-SC)

today's pick for Craziest Conservative (CC) of the day is - Jeff Duncan, a Republican from South Carolina in the US House of Representatives.  mr. Duncan is certainly not the craziest, but his inclusion on the list is relevant today, so i'll go with him.  that's not to say he isn't batshit - because he is - and we'll get to that in a moment.

but today's news is particularly special.  at first blush, it's so out there that i couldn't even understand what nefarious plot he was spooked by.  i mean, conservatives by their very nature are scared of their own shadow, but who'd have thunk that boring old economic data would spook them?  

well, it has.  Mr. Duncan, along with 10 co-sponsors have introduced legislation that would bar the US Census Bureau from conducting all surveys except the ten year population survey.  

for those of you who don't pay close attention to economic data, the US Census Bureau collects all sorts of information, from unemployment stats to gross domestic product.  economists and lawmakers (presumably, at least) use this information to make policy.  for example, if GDP growth is weak, Congress could (should) propose legislation that would bolster the economy.  now i realize that our current Congress has not been doing this, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't.  and it certainly doesn't mean that we should just stop collecting the information and ignore the situation altogether.  

unless, like mr. Duncan here, you're of the opinion that gov't has no role in these things. and conservatives do think that.  we have a Federal Reserve that has been actively pursuing strategies to help the economy by keeping interest rates low and expanding monetary policy - and conservatives freaking hate it.  forget that it's working, these people don't trust the gov't.  my working assertion is that they aren't smart enough to know how it all works, so its better off just left alone.  

which i suppose is the purpose of the Bill -  "stop collecting this useful information since we don't want to do anything about it anyway."  me thinks that congressmen like mr. Duncan are in the wrong business.  

so has Duncan done anything else to warrant a place on this list.  of course he has!  just a few weeks ago he took to Facebook to explain why expanding background checks (supported by roughly 90% of Americans) is a non-starter.  his rationale - that creating a gun registry is a progressive plot to create a Rwandan style genocide against gun owners.  

forget the fact that no one was proposing any kind of gun registry, comparing the genocide which occurred in Rwanda to anything here in America is like comparing progressives to conservatives - there just isn't anything in common.  

he's also compared immigrants to vagrants and animals, and questioned the Sec'y of Homeland security about an infowars and Glen Beck conspiracy theory about the Boston Marathon bombing.  

welcome to the list Mr. Duncan.  your spot as my first CC is well deserved.  

inaugural entry

crazy.  the noun form of the word  means a mentally deranged person.  for some reason, over the past half decade or so, i've noticed a whole lot of crazy in a place one would least expect - congress.  i'll expand that to state congresses all over the country.  we expect our politicians to be greedy, lying, cheating, stealing, pandering...well, you get the picture.  but we suspect that most if not all of them are both reasonably intelligent and mentally sound.

no longer.

there is a mental disorder occurring in our country, and it's growing like a weed.  let's call it modern conservatism.

surely i must be hyperbolic, you say.  actually, not so much.  sure, there are those that label themselves republicans who are completely mentally healthy, although how they see their party behave in such ways and continue to support them is a mystery to me.  but true conservatives are a "special" group.  in a less tolerant/democratic society they would likely be rounded up and tossed into asylum.  in America, we elect them to office.

this blog will be dedicated to exposing the bizarre, the insane, the fake crazy, the real crazy, the stupid, the ignorant, and the insanity which is modern conservatism.  i will be posting a "crazy of the day" (if i can keep it to just one), as well as thoughts on the conservative movement in general.

as for me, i've been a politically neutral observer for most of my life.  i'm 39 years old, and didn't really start paying attention to politics until about 4 years ago.  i'm a registered Independent, have voted for republican candidates in the past, am willing to do so in the future, and am completely flabergasted by what's happening with both republican lawmakers and their constituents.  i need an outlet.  this will be that.

there's already plenty of blogs and websites dedicated to exposing right wing insanity.  what i hope to achieve, besides typing a blog with almost no capital letters (a personal preference of mine), is to expose just how batshit nutso conservatives today are.  i will use sources a plenty - from liberal watchdog sites to conservative sites where normal people really should not venture to email conversations with my very very very conservative step-father.  i will provide commentary to accompany the "news" as it is.

there will be not attempt to be fair and balanced.  quite frankly, i don't think there is anything remotely equivalent on the left, at least as far as elected officials is concerned.  maybe that will change, but as of today i feel that debating how both sides are nuts is a false equivalency.  i will not be championing liberal causes, at least not primarily.  it may happen over the course of time, but the primary goal here is to expose the fact that today, in 2013, with so much information available at our fingertips, many Americans CHOOSE to elect people who don't understand 4th grade concepts such as fact vs. opinion, who believe in conspiracy theories, who don't believe in science, who ignore or don't understand basic economic principles, who pretend that teenagers can shut down their libidos, who rewrite the history of our founders, and who simply cannot understand nuance.

i don't know what's caused this epidemic.  all i know is that it's spreading.  what used to be fringe is now mainstream.  reasonable analysis has been replaced by incoherent flamethrowing.  basic tenants of human decency are no longer valid.  conservatism has become a virus of the mind -where reality goes to die - and it spreads not through human contact, but by radical ideology that has been allowed to be mainstreamed.

 i've had it.