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5 Things to Get Angry About This Week

Sarah Palin
Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin (Creative Commons)

Full disclaimer: the following is the opinion of the opinionator. If a reader fails to get angry, that’s not the Long Island Press’s problem.

Todd Akin steps into the spotlight again. The former Missouri lawmaker has taken back his 2012 apology for offending women with his insensitive comments about abortion and “legitimate rape,” making him an even bigger a-hole than before (if possible).

Todd Akin has written a book “Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith and Freedom,” and the first order of business on his book tour is to un-apologize for saying he was sorry two years ago in his campaign against Sen. Claire McCaskill, the Democratic incumbent. The Republican Congressman had actually said that there was a distinction between real rape (“legitimate”) and pretend rape, when women are just looking to cash in on free abortions. In real rape, goes his twisted logic, God suddenly steps in and “shuts that whole thing down.” The “whole thing” is a women’s reproductive system. Once the media started to hammer him for his ridiculous claim, Akin appeared on television to apologize in order to salvage votes. But it was too little, too late. McCaskill won big, giving Akin ample opportunity for reflection. In all of that time, what he has come up with is that he isn’t sorry after all. He believes his assertion to be, um, legitimate.

Bottom line: You’d think he’d be happy to be yesterday’s news.

Sarah Palin is making noises about President Obama again. This time, she’s pulling out all of the stops, not passing Go, and going directly for impeachment. She sees your frivolous lawsuit, John Boehner, and raises you an impeachment. In Breitbart News, no less, Palin describes the crisis on our southern border as a deliberate undermining of our nation designed by the President to weaken the United States. That, my friends, is taking his executive power too dang far. If a President wants to undermine the entire country by bringing in helpless Central American children, he needs Congressional approval. Boehner would definitely agree with this tack.

Or not.

Bottom line: Why is Sarah Palin still relevant? Oh yeah, because people like me love to write about what an idiot she is.

Rick Perry, aka proof that Texas does not give one shit about basic intelligence in their politicians, gained momentum in Republican circles by refusing to shake the President’s hand when he was visiting Perry’s state recently. The governor’s all “Shaking hands on the tarmac isn’t going to solve everything. Having a meeting with me will do it.” But then Obama agreed to meet with him. Oops. Suddenly Perry had to defend some of his asinine claims, like saying that this border crisis is “Obama’s Katrina.” We learned in 2012 that he couldn’t add. Now he doesn’t look too bright for 2016, either. In other news, Perry has set his sights on Rand Paul, the presumed GOP frontrunner for 2016, criticizing his foreign policy stance on Iraq in an op-ed in the Washington Post, to which Paul responded in Politico in a piece entitled “Rick Perry is Dead Wrong.”

Bottom line: If this guy runs for executive office again, this column is going to get a lot easier.

Dinesh D’Souza has been the target of a vast left-wing conspiracy that implicates the New York Times, Costco, and Google! This June D’Souza hit the streets with a brand new book/movie combo designed to take the conservative world by storm and eradicate liberalism once and for all, exposing Obama as threat to our real American values. The book, “America: Imagine a World Without Her,” released June 2, didn’t immediately jump to The Times bestseller list, thus raising the suspicions that maybe the list is rigged, and just maybe, Obama is behind it.

“They are part of the propaganda arm of the Obama administration,” D’Souza told Secrets from Philadelphia, about The Times. “It’s their newspaper, and they have a right to rig their list anyway they want, but if they are doing it, people should know,” he said.

Adding insult to injury, on July 1, reporting lackluster sales, Costco pulled the unsold copies from its shelves and returned them to his publisher. To complete the conspiracy trifecta, Google is confusing the title of his film “America” with all sorts of things that are not his book, like this country we live in, and also his 2012 right-wing campaign film, “2016: Obama’s America.” This mix-up had a direct impact on the recent release of D’Souza’s movie based on his new book. It only grossed $2.7 million over July 4 weekend because his fans could not find it among all over the other “America” listings on Google.

Bottom line: Could it be that the Obama administration is really out to get him or is it possible that he just sucks?

Eighty-two people were shot in Chicago on July 4th weekend. A Texas man executed six members of a family. The other day in Jersey City a sicko shot down a rookie cop in an ambush just so he could get famous for 15 minutes. Instead of being collectively horrified that gun violence has become a defining characteristic of our nation, we retreat into ideological corners of right versus left, arguing abstract ideas about the Founders’ intentions. We chew and swallow the rhetoric as if it’s constructive while the citizenry of our civilized society bleed to death under our watch. At an “open carry” pro-gun rally in Texas this week, militia leader-turned-blogger Mike Vanderboegh urged a raucous crowd to take up arms against what he deemed a tyrannical government and “vote” with their guns. “Let us first be honest enough to admit first to ourselves and then to proclaim to those domestic enemies of liberty—and thence to the world—that failing all other appeals to peaceful means, that the Founders’ solution to such tyranny is still available, still potent, and still waiting, for when democracy turns to tyranny, the armed citizenry still gets to vote,” Vanderboegh said. “This is the promise, this is the warning,” he continued. “The threat embodied by the Gadsden flag of our Founders: ‘Don’t tread on me,’ it says. Don’t. Tread. On. Us.”

Bottom line: Is there a shared humanity to be found beneath the inflammatory political discourse before it’s too late?