Once again I find myself in agreement with Jonathan Chait: Rand Paul’s Plan to Save Ukraine is Completely Nuts. But then, I’ve long considered Rand Paul to be the latest manifestation of a weird trend of bad craziness in US politics.

The biggest victim of the Ukraine crisis - other than the Ukrainians themselves, of course - may be Rand Paul. Since bursting onto the national scene four years ago, he has labored steadily and shrewdly first to shed his kook label, to make himself acceptable to the Party’s establishment, and then to steadily tug its policy agenda in his direction. His high-profile attacks on the Obama administration’s foreign policy agenda have excited conservatives and made traditional hawks do a slow boil.

But the return of a classic Cold War scenario has awkwardly exposed the dissonance between conservatives’ still-strong nationalist impulses and Paul’s isolationism. Paul has an op-ed in Breitbart’s “Big Peace” weakly making the case that Ronald Reagan was more dovish than you think, and pleading against his critics, “splintering the party is not the route to victory.” Concurrently, he has an op-ed in Time laying out his plan of action in Ukraine. The Time op-ed is where Paul truly lets loose his long-suppressed inner kook.

Everything about Paul’s argument is weird. Part of the weirdness is conveyed by the prose, which is bereft of specific facts, repetitive, and reads as if it were run through a foreign-language translation program (“This does not and should not require military action. No one in the U.S. is calling for this … I have said, and some have taken exception, that too many U.S. leaders still think in Cold War terms and are quick to ‘tweak’ the international community. This is true.”)

Click to open the videos:

Comedy Central

Comedy Central

Any show that can get the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue to defend the Inquisition is OK in my book: “COSMOS” SMEARS CATHOLICISM - Catholic League.

At first I thought he was just going to deny the Catholic Church had anything to do with the Inquisition, but no — he actually defends it as a force for “order and justice.”

The propagandists involved in this show, represented most conspicuously by Seth MacFarlane, told viewers last night that “the Roman Catholic Church maintained a system of courts known as the Inquisition and its sole purpose was to investigate and torment anyone who dared voice views that differed from theirs. And it wasn’t long before [Giordano] Bruno fell into the clutches of the thought police.”

The ignorance is appalling. “The Catholic Church as an institution had almost nothing to do with [the Inquisition],” writes Dayton historian Thomas Madden. “One of the most enduring myths of the Inquisition,” he says, “is that it was a tool of oppression imposed on unwilling Europeans by a power-hungry Church. Nothing could be more wrong.” Because the Inquisition brought order and justice where there was none, it actually “saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.” (His emphasis.)

As for Bruno, he was a renegade monk who dabbled in astronomy; he was not a scientist. There is much dispute about what really happened to him. As sociologist Rodney Strong puts it, he got into trouble not for his “scientific” views, but because of his “heretical theology involving the existence of an infinite number of worlds—a work based entirely on imagination and speculation.”

In short, MacFarlane, who is no stranger to the Catholic League, has once again shown his true colors.

Funny Or Die

Also see:
Right-Wing Media Indignant Over President Obama’s Funny or Die Interview

The Mighty Glenn Greenwald gave a presentation at Austin’s SXSW gathering of dudebros today, and since I know LGF readers are busy adults who don’t like to waste time with inconsequentialities, here’s the condensed infographic version of his speech about the perils of being the most honest and moral journalist in the world, courtesy of the very creative and talented folks at imagethink.net.

@ggreenwald @Mlsif the #graphicrecording of your talk is now posted!! Thanks for the insight at #SXSW14 #ggreenwald pic.twitter.com/WQuzsrN6YV

— ImageThink (@ImageThink) March 10, 2014

Here’s the full-sized version (click to enlarge):

I absolutely love how “RUSSIA” is sort of stuck in, way over in the bottom right corner with some squiggly lines and a generic silhouette and no other text, like they had an afterthought as they were running out of room. “Oh yeah, Russia. I guess we ought to at least mention that.”

Sums it up very well.

SoundCloud

The latest Republican crackpot to come out in defense of the Koch brothers and their big, big far right money: the always fully-deranged Michele Bachmann.

Bachmann advocates using the RICO Act against people who criticize the Koch brothers.

I just thank God that there’s a billionaire or two on our side. All the billionaires seem to be on the radical left, so I’m glad that we have a couple on ours. I hope we get a few more that are willing that come out but realize also this is an intimidation movement, I’m sure that the donors on our side don’t like to have their names vilified and that’s what this is about, intimidating people from giving money to our cause, that’s it. There’s something called the RICO statute, the racketeering law, that should be applied against them for doing this.