What's fascinating was the way that the schedule of keynote speakers progressed, with pretenders and fakers splitting time with the mad and the irrelevant, a stream of supposed thinkers and leaders, all treated equally. So you could go from RNC chair Reince Preemie...Priebus, whatever, to Donald Trump to Rick Santorum to the crazed patriarch of the Duck Dynasty family, Phil Robertson. And it is here that the Rude Pundit wants to pause, just before huckster Wayne LaPierre and future loser to Hillary, Jeb Bush. Because Robertson, a man who made his fortune by making ducks want to fuck him so he could kill them, serves as an avatar for the entire conservative "movement," such that it is.
Standing at the podium, telling us how we all need to live our lives according to his book of faith, Robertson looked like Osama bin Laden in a post-9/11 video...oh, what, you think that's too hyperbolic? Fuckin' please, motherfucker:
Anyways, Robertson was so batshit crazy that actual bats thought, "He's making us look bad." What makes Robertson's speech, to a crowd that applauded, cheered, and laughed, so symbolic is that he said plainly what so many of the other conservatives tried to hide with a veneer of respectability. It's a good thing that Robertson's a dumb shit because he doesn't need to bother counting how many fucks he gives. So Robertson is free to be the rampant id, delighting the gathered misanthropes by tellin' 'em what's what.
Lecturing from his worn-out Bible from notes that have gotta be hilarious to read ("1. Jesus, 2. Gunz, 3. Don't fuck less yer marrd, 4. consteetooshun"), Robertson rambled for nearly 30 minutes, well past the scheduled time. He was there to pick up the, no shit, Andrew Breitbart Defender of the First Amendment Award. It's like if they gave a Nobel for being a racist, homophobic asshole.
Sure, he went on about gay marriage, about how we need to be more Christian, about how he can dress himself. But, mostly, he just didn't want anyone to catch the herp or any STDs: "What do you call the hundred and ten million who have sexually transmitted illnesses? It's the revenge of the hippies! Sex, drugs, and rock and roll have come back to haunt us, in a bad way." By the way, if you never had the pleasure of watching Duck Dynasty, the theme song was "Sharp-Dressed Man" by fellow beard enthusiasts ZZ Top. It's about how you can get laid if you dress well. It's from the album Eliminator, which features odes to fucking every which way, marriage not required.
Robertson wasn't done with the medical advice: "I mean, I'm reading this stuff from the CDC and it says, 'How many sexual encounters does one have to have to catch a sexually transmitted illness?' It said one. I'm figuring out the odds on that one. How many seconds does it take to get genital herpes? It said 30 seconds. I'm like, whoa, that's pretty quick." And he offered advice if you don't want to get any diseases: "You want a Godly, biblical, medically safe option—one man, one woman, married for life."
Oh, what else needs to be said? That Phil Robertson only wants women who are lesbians to run for office? "For you potential candidates, to keep you out of trouble and to keep the scandals down, let me give you a little word of advice. Carry two things with you wherever you go in case one of you gets to be the president of the United States. Make sure you carry your Bible and your woman." Well, either lesbians or he doesn't think women should run for office, but, surely, CPAC wouldn't invite someone so backwards to a prime speaking spot and a free speech award.
And, in an awesome bit of history, Robertson said, "Stand on the Bible. Stand on the Constitution. Don't budge. Hold onto your weapons. We had to have all three to run the Brits back to where they came from. We had to have all three when the Nazis reared their head. You say the Nazis? World domination was what Hitler had on his mind. Territorial conquest. There was no Jesus, none!" If you were there, you might have thought, "Um, I don't think there was a constitution when we were fighting the British, at least not the first time." But you're a beatnik who only wants to spread diseases with your hippie jizz.
The point here is not just to beat up on a rich man in redneck drag, a kind of cracker minstrel pushed out to dispense crazed backwoods wisdom. It's also to say that the crowd that embraced him (and right-wing websites were overjoyed with his speech) is never going to be won over by "logic" or "facts" or anything that we believe can use to convince people. They are invested in a monolithic lie that some kind of Christian morality will make everything better.
But what they don't see, and what they'd deny until the end of time, is that their desire for a nation based on biblical principles would make the founders they revere recoil in horror from them. And that the dude up there in the photo under Robertson would totally understand where they're coming from.
