5 Unhinged Right-Wing Moments This Week: Cruz Embraces His Truly Hateful Supporters

While Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spent the week meeting with black leaders in their heated contest for black voters, Republican candidates were also scrambling for high-profile endorsements. In the case of Ted Cruz, having a membership to that club is increasingly questionable.

Here are Cruz's claims to dubious friends, and a few other lowlights from the right-wing loonisphere this week. 

1. Ted Cruz brags about getting the support of some of the biggest haters in public life.

Ted Nugent and Ted Cruz, just a couple of guys named Ted who agree with each other on lots of things. They both dream that Ted Cruz could be president and they are both rabid NRA supporters. One has a long history of making various white nationalist/anti-Semitic claims on his Facebook page, the latest being that Jews supporting gun safety laws are "Nazis in disguise." That came after Nugent posted this charming image on his Facebook page: 

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The other Ted seems untroubled by the first Ted, and in fact, brags about having Nugent’s support in his run for president:

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Perhaps Cruz imagines that having this once-upon-a-time rocker in his corner makes him cool?

Previously, Cruz has touted endorsements from anti-Semitic pastor Mike Bickle, who claims God sent Hitler to kill the Jews, and Kevin Swanson, who holds that gay people should be executed. And that is apparently how you win Iowa.

No joke.

2. RubioBot gets glitchy again.

After his bizarrely repetitive debate performance last weekend, Marco RubioBot shorted out again on the campaign trail. This time the tape loop he fell into concerned what he considers the difficulties of raising children “in the 21st century” in light of “the values they try to ram down our throats.”

Leaving aside the question of who exactly “they” is, the MarcoBot malfunctioned moments later when he uttered the exact same phrase prattling on about how hard it is to raise children “in the 21st century” because of “the values they try to ram down our throats.”

Watch the clip here if you don’t believe us. For a brief moment, at about the 0:26 mark, the bot shows a flicker of consciousness, perhaps a momentary déjà vu-like realization that he has said it all before, and maybe, in fact just said it. How awkward.

Still he is unable to break free from his unending, pre-scripted tape loop of doom.

Might be time to return the MarcoBot to the shop for a tuneup.

3. Fox guest says insane things about Hillary and Bernie.

Crystal Wright, a.k.a. Conservative Black Chick, was invited on Fox after the Sanders/Clinton debate this week in order to be as insulting as possible to her fellow black people. Because if there is one way to assure being invited onto Fox repeatedly, it’s to be a conservative black who hates Democrats and says wildly bizarre and inflammatory things about black people.

Wright played her role perfectly, as newsian Brian Kilmeade knew she would. “Bernie and Hillary, just like Barack Obama and every Democrat before them, has done nothing for black people but tell them lies,” she began, not bothering to mention what exactly those lies were. She went on to charmingly talk about black leaders and the “fight to pimp out the black vote.”

She closed with some carefully worded advice to Republicans who “need to go out there and ask for the black vote. Because blacks should no more vote for Hillary or Bernie than they should the grand wizard of the KKK, because they keep giving us all these bad policies.”

There it is. Because no commentary is complete without a completely unhinged, straight-faced comparison to the KKK.

Or Nazis. Nazis are good, too.

4. Louie Gohmert has a completely bizarre explanation for Bernie Sanders’ rise.

Texas representative and history scholar Louie Gohmert is still really upset about the '60s. It’s quite possible that he, like David Brooks, will never really get over the decade.

This week, on a radio show in Florida, Gohmert blamed the '60s for the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders in his bid for president. While his host, a wingnut named Joyce Kaufman, claimed Sanders was “reading from the Communist manifesto” in this week’s debate, Gohmert preferred to lament the influence of hippies.

Hippies, you see, have had undue influence on our education system.

“That’s also because we let some of the hippies from the ‘60s who created such chaos then start teaching the teachers,” Gohmert said, “and teaching them how great socialism is and just rewriting history and keeping them from realizing socialism has never worked, it will never work in this world, in this life, because if you’re going to pay everybody the same thing then they’re going to quit working.”

There’s every indication that Gohmert, a rabid anti-immigration Tea Partier, really does believe the nonsense he spews. He finished by saying that the survival of the country “is hanging in the balance” in this year’s presidential election.

On that, we agree.

5. Even Huckabee can’t stand Cruz.

Hatred of Ted Cruz is bringing lots of people together. Even Republicans. It’s (sniff) beautiful to see people unite against a common enemy. Makes us want to join hands and sing Kumbaya.

Mike Huckabee joined the “I hate Ted,” bandwagon this week when he took took time out of his podcast to talk about how sleazy Cruz is.

“Ted Cruz apologized for his campaign spreading a false story that Ben Carson had dropped out of the race but he deflected blame to CNN,” Huckabee said. “Dr. Carson, being a good Christian, accepted the apology on a personal level, but he didn’t buy Cruz’s claims of innocent intentions…I can attest to the fact that even in our campaign there were many efforts to try and say that people shouldn’t vote for me or Rick Santorum or Ben Carson. The Cruz people said it would be a wasted vote and they should vote for Cruz. It wouldn’t have made a difference for any of us, but it is the kind of low-life, sleazy politics people truly get sick of.”

So, to repeat. Nobody likes Ted. Except his wife, who thinks by running he’s showing the “face of God we serve.”

And of course that other Ted.