Real Parody

This is hysterical — today the Onion has been perpetrating a running gag about members of Congress holding some visiting schoolchildren hostage. They started with tweets about gunfire heard in the capitol building, then ran this article

Shaken witnesses reported that the ordeal broke out around 10 a.m. this morning, when in the midst of a Capitol building tour, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) suddenly burst into the National Statuary Hall with a pair of black panty hose over his head and began firing a Beretta 9 mm handgun into the air, shouting, “Everybody down! Everybody get the fuck down!”

Apparently the tweets caused some panic.

Somewhere in satirists heaven, Orson Welles is laughing his ass off.

Perry’s Peak

If this video were a parody, it would be brilliant. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is.

Anyway — Perry has dropped from first to second place in the most recent Fox News poll. The most recent CNN poll still has him on top, although he’s lost a couple of points.

But the anti-Latino faction of the Right is zeroing in on Perry now, and I think this kind of thing could kill his candidacy — the probably psychotic Tom Tancredo writes in the Daily Caller,

Or Perry’s poor showing in the Florida straw poll might have something to do with a recent report about the highly touted “Texas jobs created by Perry’s pro-growth policies.” The Center for Immigration Studies has discovered that 81% of the 279,000 jobs created in Texas from 2007 to 2011 went to non-citizens, a high number of them illegal aliens.

What is not yet as widely known about Perry is that he extends his taxpayer-funded compassion not only to illegal aliens but also to Muslim groups seeking to whitewash the violent history of that religion. Perry endorsed and facilitated the adoption in Texas public schools of a pro-Muslim curriculum unit developed by Muslim clerics in Pakistan.

Perry’s connections to Muslim groups in Texas are well documented. A recent Christian Science Monitor story said, “Perry has attended a number of Ismaili events in Texas, brokered a few agreements between the state and Ismailis (including the legislation introducing Islamic curricula into Texas schools), and even laid the first brick at the groundbreaking ceremony for an Ismaili worship center in Plano in 2005.”

That last bit is being picked up and repeated by what appear to be hundreds of rightie blogs today. None I have seen, including Tancredo’s piece, links to the Christian Science Monitor, and I have done searches on CSM and cannot find that bolded quote, so I suspect it’s a fabrication. And as scornful as I am about Perry’s jobs claims, even I seriously doubt that 81 percent of Texas jobs went to non-citizens.

Like I said, Tancredo could be psychotic. However, if this catches on among the baggers, Perry is toast.