I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your governor is bugfuck insane:
Transcript via RightWingWatch.org:
Somebody asked me yesterday, I did an interview and they said, “Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive? That we would ever be able to recover as a nation? And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ.
But I will tell you this: I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren.
I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away.
Sounds like Bevin is saying the fat-assed white fundamentalist Christians attending the Values Voters Summit he was addressing will have to team up with Bevin’s nine tots to take up arms against the tyrannical Hillary Clinton. But nah — he clarified later:
Bevin later told the Lexington Herald Leader that he was referring to the sacrifices made by members of the U.S. military.
“Today we have thousands of men and women in uniform fighting for us overseas and they need our full backing,” he said in a statement. “We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms.”
I don’t doubt for a moment these folks’ bowels seize up at the sight of a burkini. But damned if they aren’t making me skeert of my husband’s pickup truck and the ungrammatical church marquee down the street. These people are fucking nuts.
Corner Stone
They noticed. They also noticed when he said he was going to remove access to health insurance coverage.
He still achieved the title Gov.
Hmph. Imagine that.
Yutsano
Zandar has been all over this on Twitter. Hell I almost thought he wrote this. And the worst part is this is exactly what Kentucky voters said they wanted. Welp there it is as soon as he’s done taking away their healthcare.
encephalopath
So if Clinton becomes president, members of the military will have to die to atone for our national sins?
I don’t think that clarification helped any.
Miss Bianca
There’s such a bucket of deplorables in the Republican governor’s chairs these days, I’m finding it hard to keep track of who is most despicable. I mean, Scott Walker? Rick Scott? Brownback? I thought ambulatory bowling ball LePage had finally taken the cake for sheer nasty, in terms of racist rhetoric combined with disastrous policies for his state.
But now here comes the Great White Boar, Matt Blevins, pulling out from the back of the pack and leading by a nose in the Race to the Bottom!
Anoniminous
2015 voter turnout estimate: 30.86%. Bevin won with 52.5% of the vote or 16.2% of registered voters in Kentucky.
Decisions are made by those who show up.
smintheus
“radical Islamic extremists”
I don’t get this fetish. Are there any radical extremists who aren’t Islamic? Any Islamic extremists who aren’t radical? Or radical Islamists who aren’t extremists?
SiubhanDuinne
Matt Bevin.
Paul LePage.
Rick Snyder.
Rick Scott.
Scott Walker.
Sam Brownback.
Pat McCrory.
That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are others who belong on the “bugfuck insane governors” list. (And no, even though I can’t stand him, I don’t include my own Gov. Nathan Deal.)
EDIT: Or what Miss Bianca posted at #4 while I was putzing around with formatting.
Betty Cracker
@smintheus: Yep. Bevin sure sounds like a radical extremist to me.
Brachiator
@smintheus:
Yes, they’re called Trump supporters.
Shell
The rule of three. It makes it more special.
Anoniminous
@smintheus:
“Radical Islamic extremists” to distinguish them from radical Christian extremes who advocate violence and murder if somebody they don’t like is legally elected.
ETA: I can’t type today
schrodinger's cat
They want Apartheid America.
Citizen Alan
@Miss Bianca:
Yeah, as a Mississippian, it astounds me that the GOP governors nationwide are so awful that the utterly despicable Phil Bryant barely even gets noticed.
hovercraft
@Miss Bianca:
Might I add my deplorable governor ‘Fat Boy’ Christie.
EDIT : While he may not seem as bad as those others, remember we are a very blue state. So for us trying to cut off planned parenthood, preventing the banning of 50 caliber bullets and other rightwing fever dream stuff is just not copacetic. Ripping off the pension system, violating the terms of his deal with the teachers union. I could go on……
Betty Cracker
@Citizen Alan: I kinda feel that way about the thoroughly horrible and possible alien shape-shifter from Planet Reptar Rick Scott. It’s shocking to consider there are other sitting governors who are worse than he.
1,000 Flouncing Lurkers (was fidelioscabinet)
@SiubhanDuinne: Poor Bill Haslam, he was just a rich guy who wanted to run shit. Now he has to meet these people at conferences and pretend they aren’t trying to offer him a secret handshake.
Yes, the governor of Tennessee exerts a moderating force on his legislature. Poor bastard.
MomSense
Bevin may have just been jealous of all the attention LePage has received lately and wanted some for himself.
Citizen Alan
@schrodinger’s cat:
“They want Apartheid America.”
This. A few years back when that book came out about the “coming Democratic Majority” that would inevitably arise due to demographic changes, I just shook my head. Because a lot of people failed to note that you could delay that coming majority for quite a while if you brought back Jim Crow voting laws, and you could delay it for a long time indeed if you instituted American Apartheid.
Hal
Yikes. Wear a condom, dude.
Anoniminous
There are states with off-year and off-off-year governor elections exactly because there are lower and much lower voter turnouts for the election and TPTB in the state can more/better control who is in charge.
Miss Bianca
@hovercraft: Oh, hell, yes. But even he looks merely venal next to the true evil of some of these other goat-fuckers. (How could I have forgotten Rick Snyder, for example?)
All these pasty, hateful white men doing their best to screw over the most vulnerable of their constituencies. But hey, they’re not RACISTS!
ETA: I see your point about Christie now that you’ve brought back a litany of his Worst Hits. Yeah, he goes on the list. It’s just sad that he ends up looking like a moderate by comparison to his brethren.
Ryan
We’ve totally given up on plausible deniability at this point. We need better wingnuts.
Ryan
@smintheus: And shouldn’t there be a comma between radical and Islamic?
jonas
…referring to servicemen and women and the fight against ISIS. Riiiiiight.
bobbo
Don’t these people believe that the blood of 30 million innocent unborn babies has already been shed? Shouldn’t that be enough for the Tree of Liberty?
CONGRATULATIONS!
No, he wasn’t. He said what he said, and that was that the fundies and psychos should kill everyone not like them.
Some of us have not lost our hearing, Governor.
Mnemosyne
If Bevin has 9 children in 2016, he needs to learn to keep his pants zipped.
smintheus
@Ryan: Yes, the syntax is a mess too.
Trollhattan
@Hal:
I’ll chime in to say that dear old dad should have, back in the day.
This crap makes me so very grateful for Jerry 2.0. He may be a rare bird but he’s also the governor for something like a ninth of all Americans, so we at least have that. Not that long ago it was Das Governator and Meg Whitman really, really wanted his chair.
smintheus
@Anoniminous: I’m reliably told that extremism in the defense of the baby Jesus is no sin.
Mnemosyne
@efgoldman:
Our last election here in CA had one of the lowest turnouts in our history and we still managed to re-elect Jerry Brown, so I have even less sympathy than you do.
smintheus
@Brachiator: Aka basket cases.
Citizen_X
@SiubhanDuinne: How DARE you leave Gregg Abbot off the list! This is an insult to Texas, and I will duel you, madame, as soon as Trump and Attorney General LePage re-legalize dueling.
smintheus
@Betty Cracker: With his health insurance policies, I’ll bet Bevin ends up killing more Kentuckians than Islamists ever do.
Corner Stone
@Citizen_X: And I will proudly serve as your second, suh.
The fields of honor! At dawn!
rikyrah
He never hid it, and they voted for him anyway.
Betty Cracker
@smintheus: Ain’t that the truth! Rick Scott already has a lot of blood on his hands for that reason.
Corner Stone
But really, I just wish Kentucky would go ahead and fucking secede already. You wanna have your civil war? Then start it by just getting the fuck out.
Citizen_X
@Miss Bianca: In the spirit of “We’re gonna need a bigger basket,” I think we need something much yuuuuger. Say, a container ship of deplorables.
Major Major Major Major
@Ryan: not if it’s in reference to the noun-phrase “radical Islam”.
JMG
His voters so much wanted to see others suffer they were willing to screw themselves.
hovercraft
@Mnemosyne:
A few of them are adopted, 4 from Ethiopia. So that is one positive thing to say about him. Unfortunately for the kids Bevin is their father, and they are home schooled.
Major Major Major Major
@Citizen_X: that kind of implies deplorables are fungible when it comes to storage and transport in a way that basket doesn’t. Are they?
cintibud
Geeze, 15 years ago Gov Kasich would be leading the wackadoodle parade. Now he can’t even get on the list! Dems just say we really dodged a bullet when he didn’t get nominated or it would be Game Over Man!
smintheus
@Major Major Major Major: Wouldn’t it have to be hyphenated if it’s turning a noun phrase into an adjective?
SiubhanDuinne
@Citizen_X:
If it’s pistols at dawn, I’m afraid I can’t make it. I’m retired and enjoy sleeping in most mornings.
:: waves cheerfully and dances off ::
Iowa Old Lady
Bevin needs a visit from the Secret Service. Or maybe he already got one, which is why he’s walking things back. But you can’t unsay something like that. You can’t make people unhear it.
Aardvark Cheeselog
“Charity toward all, and malice for none” seems not to have worked so well. Maybe next time we should swap the prepositions?
Because it’s this kind of talk that’s making “next time” seem more and more likely.
Mnemosyne
@hovercraft:
Ugh. White fundamentalist Christians adopting kids from Africa rarely ends well. That’s one of the ways Rachel Dolezal ended up so crazy — she had to wrest custody of a couple of her African adoptive brothers from her nutty fundie parents and, um, got a little TOO into identifying with them.
AliceBlue
@SiubhanDuinne:
You’re right, Deal isn’t bug-fuck insane. He used to be a Democrat, so he probably still possesses a few molecules of decency.
raven
@Iowa Old Lady: Iowa City boy here.
Iowa Old Lady
@raven: What a great article about in interesting man. I love people who are brave and independent enough to shape their own lives, even when the shape sometimes gets bent a little.
raven
@Iowa Old Lady: I hoped you’d like it.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Mnemosyne:
Er, um, methinks the jury is still out on that one. Wait another ten years when the wavelet of fundie African adoptees hit college age and we’ll have a better picture. I say this because I have a work colleague who has done exactly that. He’s in his mid-40s and has 4 daughters when he adopted a young boy from central Africa. While I don’t agree with him on anything political and I’m as far from a fundie as you can get, he’s good people and I have little doubt this child will be raised with love and care.
It’s all anecdotal right now.
catclub
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
When was it tried?
Or as Gandhi put it when asked his opinion of western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”
Major Major Major Major
@smintheus: I can’t really think of any examples one way or the other…
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
He’s a standard product of Southeast Christian Church, one of the three shithole megachurches that have absorbed the last of the fundamentalists/evangelicals left here in the People’s Democratic Soc!alist Republic of Louisville. Smaller congregations are pretty much wiped out, and there might be about 60,000 True Believers left in this oblast – the rest being liberal Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox, liberal protestants or just people who ride recumbent bikes along designated bike lanes to organic farm markets, art fairs and poetry collectives on Sundays. Anyway, I count two old friends among his inner circle of strategists – one a high school classmate that I spent 4 years with that I no longer speak to, the other a law school classmate that I can barely tolerate.
Anyway, that’s my story.
Go Cards, beat the ‘Noles!
eric
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: are you going?
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@eric:
Damn straight I’m going. I have a second ticket though, and all my friends have season tickets too; wife is traveling in India. Maybe I can find a date.
Mnemosyne
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
I do draw a line between evangelicals and fundies. I don’t often agree with evangelicals, but they tend to be earnest, well-meaning people. Fundies are a whole different kettle of fish. Hopefully your co-worker falls on the evangelical side of that line and the worst that happens is that his son gets horribly spoiled by his four big sisters. ?
I will add that fundie homeschooling of adopted kids with possible developmental disorders is almost always a disaster, and has sometimes been fatal for the kids.
BruceJ
@Corner Stone: They KNEW he was going to take away their health insurance and they still voted for him because ‘hey we gotta shake things up’. When did the Heath Ledger “Some men just want to watch the world burn” Joker become ‘normal American Republican voter’???
Mnemosyne
@efgoldman:
I think you’re mixing up Pete Wilson — the Republican who pushed for Prop 187 and mobilized a generation of Latino Democrats — and Gray Davis, the Democrat who got recalled because he tried to sue Enron. (Voters got pissed because he raised the car registration tax, but Arnold was put in specifically to stop the Enron suit, and he did.)
Turns out that voters on the state level get REALLY PISSED when their legislators decide to stonewall everything, including the budget, and directly affect their constituents’ schools, libraries, and fire stations. The ongoing budget crisis was really what broke the Republicans here. People finally got sick of the obstruction.
catclub
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
I attend church virtually every sunday, and I just cannot fathom having an interest in a mega-church.
EriktheRed
In my state, Bruce Rauner has been relatively quiet lately. Look for him to ramp up his own assholishness starting next year.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@catclub:
I was going to suggest that you should google it, but I see that my memory is treacherous! The actual historical usage was “Malice toward none, and charity for all…”
SFAW
At times like this, I am consoled by the old description of Rethugs: “Crazy/Stupid/Evil — Pick three”
Wait .. “consoled”? I meant “depressed.”
I don’t believe in Heaven, or Resurrection, but I sometimes miss Bill Sherman. (As long as raven and other BJers down there are out of the path, of course.)
ET
Hmmm if the SPLC hasn’t been watching Bevin, they are now.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
I wish I could gloat about my state and its Governor.
I can’t
My hometown (Evansville) is right across the Ohio River from Kentucky and my Governor is Mike Pence.
Me: “My name is Darrin and I’m a Hoosier”.
Crowd: “Hi, Darrin”
grrljock
@Miss Bianca: I thought “ambulatory bowling ball” was good, then you came up with the Great White Boar. Slow clap. I second Citizen_X in the call to add Greg Abbott to the list, with a nice nickname, pretty please?
Jeffro
@jonas: exactly… He sure as hell was not talking about the military. Anyone who thinks so is being purposefully ignorant here.
catclub
@Aardvark Cheeselog: I do know that the guy recommending that approach was assassinated.
Hence my question.
Mnemosyne
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman):
My Republican brother is going to retire to Indiana (his wife’s family lives there) as soon as his youngest kid goes off to college.
I think he’s going to experience some cultural shock between Southern California Republicans and Indiana Republicans.
Chip Daniels
I’m just wondering how this works, to initiate a comment like this.
Like if I said that it was the patriotic duty of Americans to gun down Matt Bevin and his family.
Would anyone consider that noteworthy, or in bad taste?
Davebo
@Mnemosyne:
4 of the children are adopted Ethiopians after the state refused to allow the couple to adopt because they already had 5 kids. Also at least one, who died at 17 was from his wife’s previous marriage.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Mnemosyne:
If he moves to Bloomington or West Lafayette, maybe not.
If he winds up in Hamilton, Vanderburgh, or Warrick counties he’ll be in for a shock.
When moving to Indiana, if avoiding Republican whackjobs is important look at Dave Leip’s state by state maps and choose the least red counties. :)
jake the antisoshul soshulist
@Hal:
In fairness, some of his children are adopted.
Unlike many Republicans, he does believe in family values and small government. And he is going to prove conservatism works, even if it kills 25 % of the populace
Mnemosyne
@Davebo:
Yeah, that’s not sounding like a good situation. Comrade Scott’s coworker sounds normal — had four girls, wanted a son but didn’t want to gamble on another natural childbirth, so they adopted. Being evangelicals gave them an extra incentive to adopt from Africa, but the initial impulse was probably personal rather than religious.
There’s a weird thing with fundies where they think they have a duty to adopt kids from Africa and “civilize” them — basically, missionary work from the comfort of their own homes. That sounds like what Bevin did, and that’s the kind of attitude that tends to go very wrong, especially if any of the kids is in any way “rebellious” or “ungrateful.”
les
@efgoldman:
Unfortunately in Kock stronghold KS, that’s not the problem. The majority wants him, or somebody just like him.
jonas
@Mnemosyne: It’s not just fundamentalist Christians with the doogooder impulse vis-a-vis third-world children. See too, e.g. Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt, Madonna, etc.
If Matt Bevin had chosen to adopt, say, children out of Kentucky’s public foster care system, maybe he’d learn a little bit more about what it’s like for children who have to survive in his state’s skinflint public services system. We did that (in another state) and boy-howdy do you ever get to know the courts and social services inside-out. It’s not pretty.
evodevo
Yeah. WE know….not much we can do about it at this point ….Ky is just that schizoid. 25% of them on welfare/Obamacare, but can’t be bothered to vote, and 50% nutjob anti-abortion Xtian wingers. Dems only succeed in Lexington and Louisville, where rationality rules sometimes. Most of the people I know in MY county (Scott) have good jobs at Toyota or subsidiaries, and hold the attitude involving sparrows and curtain rods that Davis X Machina once enunciated – sigh ….
evodevo
@encephalopath: It didn’t, because it was a weasel-worded walk-back. He meant every word of the threat. Half the state has that slogan on their pickup trucks.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@catclub:
The approach he advocated was adopted though, at least to the extent of not proscribing the traitors.
Mnemosyne
@jonas:
At the risk of giving you nightmares, when it comes to the fundie and Quiverfull obsession with “saving children from Africa,” it’s WAY worse than you think. AFAIK, Angelina Jolie is not beating her adopted children or leaving them outside to die of exposure for being “disobedient.” It goes way, way, WAY beyond what child collectors like Jolie or Madonna do.
J R in WV
@Chip Daniels:
Not the kids, they didn’t pick a nut-case for a dad. Mom did, tho. Picked him out of the crowd for her only. Bad girl~!! Bad…
SFAW
@jake the antisoshul soshulist:
Wouldn’t that be considered “Mission Accomplished”? I mean, as long as they’re the right type of people to let die.