Craziest Conservatives of the Day: G. Gordon Liddy and Gary Bauer

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Quite a pair these two make, the fascist and the christianist, generally speaking, and there they were today on Liddy's radio show today spewing the usual right-wing bullshit about Obama:

LIDDY: I'm convinced that despite his protestations to the contrary, that Barack Obama is a Muslim. I don't believe that he's a Christian at all. I believe he's a Muslim.

BAUER: Well, you know the church that he famously or infamously attended was, was odd in many ways. Not only the rantings of its pastor, the clear racist rantings of its pastor, which the President chose to listen to year after year with his family and his children. You know something that still in my view has never been adequately explained. But it was also a church that had some real strange ideas about Islam and Christianity. I've seen a number of suggestions that there were many people in the congregation that considered themselves both Christian and Muslim. Something that I’m sure both real Christians and real Muslims would deny is possible.

No matter how many lies I hear from conservatives, it still amazes me that anyone can say with a straight face that Obama is a Muslim. To these bigots, though, it would seem that anyone who isn't fervently hostile to and hateful of Muslims, and of Islam, may be a Muslim. It could be that even being friends with, and perhaps even shaking hands with, a Muslim makes one a Muslim.

And, make no mistake, bigotry it is. During the conversation, Bauer lamented the "accommodation of Islam" in "our schools." By that, presumably, he meant acceptance and perhaps just simple toleration of Islam, and by "our schools" he surely meant Christian schools.

See what's going on here? The problem for conservatives like Liddy and Bauer isn't just Nidal Malik Hasan, it's the very existence of Islam in America. And they see it everywhere, a ubiquitous enemy threatening their fascist-christianist utopia, so much so that they've come to believe their own lies, if they've ever been able to distinguish their lies from the truth, which is doubtful, lies they direct at Obama, making allegations without a trace of evidence, all to reinforce their bigotry, and that of their followers.

It's easy to write of Liddy and Bauer, and especially the former, as crackpots on the fringe, but, on the right, the fringe is increasingly the mainstream, conservatism having succumbed to crackpottery. As well, both men are fairly popular on the right, if more with the Republican base than with the Republican establishment. And so they speak not just for themselves but for those who support them -- in Liddy's case, all those who listen to what is a fairly popular radio show.

I don't like paying so much attention to a wacko like Liddy, but it's important that we call out such craziness. Because if it's sheer craziness you want, along with bigotry and paranoia, you don't have to look any further than what's popular among conservatives these days.