With 2012 being an important election year, the far right was awash in over-the-top diatribes aimed at President Barack Obama. The level of irrational rhetoric directed at the president seemed to rise as the year dragged on and the election drew closer. In fact, the election results seemed to send some on the right into even more bizarre fits of rage and despair. Check out today’s installment of our review of what the far right had to say in 2012. You can read more quotes from 2012 and previous years here.
“Maybe God will have to bring our nation down to our knees — to where you just have a complete economic collapse. And maybe at that point, maybe people will again begin to call upon the name of almighty God.”
— Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, arguing that President Obama’s re-election placed the country on a path to destruction
“It means during the last seven years, there will be no freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of commerce. America as we know it will be gone by the last seven years of the great Tribulation. America is going to end, the Bible says, because this world is going to end.”
— Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, in a post-election sermon delivered a week after he said President Obama is “paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist.”
“For now, my country is governed by a man many of us feel is a truly unrighteous individual, a race-baiter, a divider, a liar, a destroyer.”
— Joel Richardson, author of various right-wing books, offering what he calls a Christian response to President Obama’s re-election
“Thanks a lot Christians, for not showing up. You disgust me.”
— Victoria Jackson, a far-right Christian activist (and former Saturday Night Live cast member), expressing her frustration with President Obama’s re-election
“Vote for the Mormon, Not the Muslim/The Capitalist, Not the Communist.”
— A message on the marquee outside Church of the Valley in Leakey, Texas
“And so we really have a biblically illiterate group of folks now who claim Christianity and that’s where I put the President; I don’t think the President has ever read the Bible from cover to cover.”
— David Barton, questioning President Obama’s faith
“In fact, it may be growing stronger as President Obama and his cronies in Washington continue their effort to remove any trace of religion from American life. And it falls on us. I mean we truly are Christian warriors, Christian soldiers, and it’s for us as Americans to stand our ground and to firmly send a message to Washington that our nation is about more than some secular laws and activist courts.”
— Texas Gov. Rick Perry, speaking on a conference call with evangelicals
“What if Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaida leaders gave up Osama Bin Laden for the express purpose of making Obama look good?”
— Rush Limbaugh, musing that al-Qaida betrayed its leader to help President Obama get re-elected
“We’ve got a Muslim for a President who hates cowboys, hates cowgirls, hates fishing, hates farming, loves gays, and we hate him!”
— Country music star Hank Williams Jr., speaking at the Stockyards Music Festival in Fort Worth
“He’s going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N., and what is going to happen when that happens? I’m thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we’re not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.”
— Lubbock County Judge Tom Head, suggesting that President Obama might hand over sovereignty of the United States to the United Nations, possibly igniting in a civil war
“President Obama has surrounded himself with morally repugnant political whores with misshapen values and gutter-level ethics.”
— Comments attributed to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in a fundraising letter by the group Citizens United. Huckabee denied that he approved the letter.
“After Barack Hussein Obama suddenly cast-off his Muslim roots, rejected his mother’s disbelief in God, turned tail on the Islam of his early life and converted to Christianity — BLAM — he’s elected President.”
— Republican congressional candidate Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known as “Joe the Plumber,” in a letter he planned to distribute to churches during his campaign
“You have to ask him. I cannot answer that question for anybody … He has said he’s a Christian, so I just have to assume that he is.”
— Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, saying in an interview he cannot say for sure that President Obama is a Christian. Later in the same interview Graham said he is certain that Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum is a Christian. Graham later apologized for casting doubt on the president’s faith.
I think TFN should have titled this piece:
“Fruitcakes on Parade”
And we have a Christian for Governor in Texas who hates anything that isn’t money. We hate him, too.
The Great Derangement continues…certainly makes the label ‘CHRISTIAN’ suspect.