Huh?

A dubious creativity abounds among Repubs looking for new ways to bash the more liberal, sane members of our political spectrum -- namely the Democrats and the causes they stand for.

Sometimes they can sound downright deranged in the stretch to come up with something new:

1. Senator John McNothing claims that the vast wildfires raging through Arizona were set by illegal immigrants.

“They have set fires because they signal others, they have set fires to keep warm, and they have set fires in order to divert law enforcement agents and agencies from them. The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border."

A Forest Service employee said there is no evidence that the fires were caused by illegal immigrants. Maybe McNothing is confusing them with the aliens from outer space -- don't they have a lot of them there . . . oh, no, actually I believe that's not Arizona but Roswell, New Mexico where they have all the UFO sightings.

2. Rick Santorum claims that global warming is a liberal conspiracy to put government in control of your lives. He told this to Rush Limbaugh in an interview in early June:

. . .it's a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm. It's been on a warming trend so they said, "Oh, let's take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it's getting warmer," just like they did in the seventies when it was getting cool, they needed the government to come in and regulate your life because it's getting cooler. It's just an excuse for more government control of your life . . .

3. Rick Santorum (again) claims that the abysmal scores on standardized history tests by our high school students is the fault of "the left." Not of teachers, parents or even the students themselves, but of "the left." Here's the quote:

"This is, in my opinion, a conscious effort on the part of the left who has a huge influence on our curriculum, to desensitize America to what American values are so they are more pliable to the new values that they would like to impose on America."

Hmmm . . . so what about the Texas school board rewriting textbooks to conform with their view of history and science? Imposing their theocratic, unscientific views on school curricula; extolling Phyllis Schlafly and Billy Graham, but not Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr. Creationism. That's OK?

4. But Nut Gingrich may be the champion of the deranged claim. He's toned it down a bit since he wants to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate -- but that hasn't worked out too well for him either. Here are some of his doozies from the past:

a. The Democrats . . . are “left-wing radicals” who lead a “secular socialist machine," who have produced “the greatest political corruption ever seen in modern America.” Plus: “The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."

b. He compared the Muslims who wanted to open an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan to the German Reich, saying it “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

c. Last year, he called for a federal law to stop the (nonexistent) onslaught of Sharia on American jurisprudence and accused the left of refusing to acknowledge its “mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”

d. He said that Barack Obama displayed “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”

e. Advocates for gay rights are imposing a “gay and secular fascism” using violence and harassment, blacks have little entrepreneurial tradition, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the Supreme Court is a "Latina woman racist."

Somewhat sadly, I take note that soon we may not have Nut to kick around any longer. Financial reckoning comes with campaign financial reports due at the end of June. And his campaign is not even on life support. They can't afford it -- or maybe they're charging it to the Tiffany account.

Ralph