Right Wing Watch reported with a video Monday that Marion said on "The 700 Club" that day:
"I believe it was Lyndon Johnson that said, 'Don't these people realize if they push me over to an extreme position I'll lose the election? And I'm the one who will be supporting what they want but they're going to make it so I can't win.' Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They're forcing their leaders, the frontrunners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election. ... You appeal to the narrow base and they'll applaud the daylights out of what you're saying and then you hit the general election and they say 'no way' and then the Democrat, whoever it is, is going to just play these statements to the hilt. They've got to stop this! It's just so counterproductive!"If anyone understands extreme statements on the campaign trail it's Marion, who himself ran for president in 1988. During the campaign he claimed that Cuba had Soviet nukes; said about a strong showing in the Michigan caucuses, "The Christians have won. What a victory for the Kingdom"; was rebuked by President Reagan himself when Marion said that his Christian Broadcasting Network knew the whereabouts of American hostages in Lebanon; proposed selling the Post Office to its employees; and sued a former congressman for libel.
Yet, Jon Stewart pointed out on The Daily Show on Tuesday that the issue with Marion's comments isn't that what the candidates are saying is wrong or ridiculous: Michele Bachmann's moronic statements on everything from Yemen and vaccinations to the United Nations and taxes? Herman Cain's Islamophobia and "a joke" about an electrified border fence? Rick Perry's gun fetish and brush with birtherism? Newt Gingrich comparing Obama's policies to Nazism and Soviet Communism? Rick Santorum's homophobia? Oh no, it's that these policy positions and comments will hurt Republicans' chances on Election Day.
"What he's telling the GOP field is this, if you tell people what you honestly believe, an electoral majority of those people will freak the f--- out," Stewart observed. "He's saying the first rule of Right Club – don't talk about Right Club."
The lawsuit (which is actually titled Tilikum, Katina, Corky, Kasatka, and Ulises, five orcas v. SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment) took a five-member legal team 18 months to research, The Associated Press reported Wednesday. "By any definition, these orcas are slaves — kidnapped from their homes, kept confined, denied everything that's natural to them and forced to perform tricks for SeaWorld's profit," said PETA's general counsel.
Did 620,000 Americans really perish in a four-year Civil War to free the whales?
SeaWorld, having suddenly found itself compared to Simon Legree, listed in a statement the many laws and regulations it must obey, from having to offer public education/conservation programs to endangered species laws.
Animal rights activists point to ocras' communication skills, problem-solving talent, and cognitive abilities of a young child. In fact, a law professor who has proposed that legal standing be expanded to chimps said that although he thinks PETA will lose, he nonetheless supports the lawsuit.
Maybe PETA is on to something. After all, the Thirteenth Amendment doesn't explicitly protect people. And Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas argued in 1972 that nature and inanimate objects should have legal standing.
Yet, one of the orca plaintiffs, Tilikum, killed her trainer during a performance last year when it dragged her underwater. If the whales have a legal status under federal law and the Constitution, then Tilikum should be arrested and prosecuted — with full due process rights protected, of course.
Van Cleave said his organization is planning demonstrations at Virginia colleges to protest campus firearm bans, in response to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's opinion that the University of Virginia can only ban concealed weapons by regulation rather than by policy. The Roanoke Times reported Wednesday that the VCDL is planning a protest at the worst location imaginable on Nov. 17: Virginia Tech, the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Extremists like Van Cleave would argue that if just one student or teacher was armed that day, the gunman might have been stopped or deterred. Of course that suggests that at all the victims in the classroom building wanted to be armed. One student told the Times last week, "A lot of students are still shaky and paranoid about guns controlled by people who weren't authorized to use them. It's still a really, really sensitive subject here."
College campuses are exceptionally safe: The violent crime rate for campuses is nearly one-tenth the national average; students at urban colleges are safer on campus than off; college suicide rates are half the national average; and most campus homicides are disputes among acquaintances or drug deals gone bad. One criminologist observed, "The chances of being murdered on campus are about as likely as being fatally struck by lightning." Even Van Cleave was even forced to concede, "Crimes, from murder, rape, robbery, to violent assaults happen in and around campuses. Though the risk is generally low, there is still some real risk."
The problem is a lack of imagination: If the issue is on-to-off-campus safety, then students and colleges should consider options like mass transit, carpools, or police escorts so they won't come face to face with a possible assailant to begin with. Van Cleave has remarked that a university "is nothing more than a bunch of buildings on a hill" and "just buildings with people in them," which further demonstrates his level of respect for institutions of higher learning and their communities.
But there's more. Van Cleave may have slipped when he said that the Virginia Tech gunman "followed all the Virginia laws to get his guns": The state didn't submit the gunman's mental health record to the federal background check database, and, without any additional required vetting or licensing, he bought his weapons from two gun dealers with ease; he didn't steal them or get them from a trafficker. Van Cleave's solution? No licensing for people to carry weapons in public. Because it worked so well in Arizona to prevent a madman from shooting a congresswoman and killing six this year.
If a mentally ill, suicidal madman has such easy access to gratuitously deadly firepower and opens fire on innocent people, even if he is taken down, then we have already lost.
That's Philip "Guns are people, too!" Van Cleave, today's Worst Virginian in the World!
