Mark Potok at Hatewatch, the Southern Poverty Law Center's blog, has collected ten "truly extraordinary examples of asinine activities from the benighted denizens of the radical right" for 2008. It makes for some hilarious reading.
My two faves:
8. Worst International Travel Plan
Jerome Corsi — the insult-spewing WorldNetDaily “reporter” who helped lead the Swift Boat defamation of John Kerry and also wrote a fawning tome glorifying anti-immigrant vigilantes — had a plan. His new target was Barack Obama, and Corsi, who’d just been exposed on this blog for his appearance on a white supremacist radio show, decided in October to go to Kenya to track down “deep dark ties” between the Democratic presidential nominee and various Muslim politicians there, including the prime minister. Corsi apparently forgot that most people in Kenya, where Obama’s father was a well-known economist, thought quite a bit of the man who would be America’s first black president — and he also neglected to get a work permit. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when authorities snatched up Corsi, who likes to call Muslims “Boy-Bumpers” and “RAGHEADS,” and put him on the next plane back to the United States. Never one to be deterred by the facts, Corsi had also just published a book falsely claiming that Obama is secretly a Muslim.
5. Least Sanitary Nativist Award
This one was very much a judgment call, what with the thousands of truly unpleasant immigrant-bashers who populate the land. But it was hard to resist the indefatigable “Buffalo” Rick Galeener, 58, the former professional singing cowboy who has pledged to defend America against corruption and all manner of other ills from south of the border — in part, apparently, by peeing in front of a Hispanic lady (and her 2-year-old son) who he’d earlier insulted as part of his endless demonstrations against Latino day laborers in Phoenix. In December, after months of fighting the charge, Galeener pleaded guilty to urinating in public (prosecutors had originally charged him with indecent exposure) and was fined $194, according to Phoenix New Times. The director of the day labor center Galeener loves to picket told New Times that it would have been different if Galeener had been Latino and arrested by Joe Arpaio, the local sheriff who is widely accused of racial profiling: “If any day laborer had done that in a white neighborhood, they’d probably be in Arpaio’s jail as a sexual predator.”
The best thing about the far right is that the vast majority of them are too hapless to actually cause any serious damage. Most of the time, their nastiness goes hand in hand with sheer ineptitude. This is a good thing.
