And now, another exciting episode of "ALAN KEYES, BATSHIT-CRAZY DOOFUS".
I swear, if Alan Keyes didn't exist, I would have to invent him. Every time he opens his mouth, something both wondrous and terrifying comes out. And the best part is, the GOP can't disown him or minimize him the way they can a Falwell or a Robertson, because Keyes is one of the few black allies they have. So they gotta use him, like they're using him now in the Illinois Senate race.
Even though he thinks God speaks to us by ramming planes into buildings. For Keyes, it's obviously time to adjust his dosage, but here at YAD, it's even more obviously ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!"
"Now, you think it's a coincidence that on Sept. 11th, 2001, we were struck by terrorists an evil that has at its heart the disregard of innocent human life? We who have for several decades killed not thousands but scores of millions of our own children, in disregard of the principle of innocent human life -- I don't think that's a coincidence, I think that's a warning. I don't think that's a coincidence, I think that's a shot across the bow. I think that's a way of Providence telling us, 'I love you all; I'd like to give you a chance. Wake up! Would you please wake up?'"
At least when Falwell blamed 9/11 on the feminists, gays, and abortionists, he had the common decency to do it on the 700 Club, where that kind of thing is only seven to eight percent beyond the pale. Keyes, on the other hand, is angling to be one of 100 people who sort of kind of try to help run things in our wonderfully representative democracy, so perhaps saying shit like this is a bad idea.
What cracks me up the most about this is that the ultra-right, anti-choice, blastula-suffragites won't have a problem with this, even though, in essence, Alan Keyes just called Almighty God a terrorist. Because what is a terrorist? A terrorist is an individual who commits acts of violence against innocent people in order to make a political statement. It seems to me that arranging for the death of 3,000 people in order to send America a special political message about how awful abortion is fits that definition quite nicely. Hell, Keyes is accidentally better at identifying terrorists than John Ashcroft is. Ashcroft's busy chasing software pirates and hackers and porn peddlers and calling 'em "terrorists", when according to Keyes, the biggest terrorist of all is the Big Guy Upstairs.
If I were Ashcroft, I'd jump all over that. After all, Osama Bin Laden's only in one place, and we can't even figure out what place that is. God, on the other hand, is EVERYWHERE, or so I'm told. Makes him easier to find, albeit tougher to capture. At least you don't have to send him to Guantanamo Bay, since he's already there.
As a result of being completely fucking insane, Alan Keyes is having a difficult time being elected to the Senate. Luckily, Keyes is a crafty planner who is never without a backup strategy.
"The balance is utterly destroyed when the senators are directly elected because the state government as such no longer plays any role in the deliberations at the federal level." What Keyes wants to do is repeal the 17th Amendment, which basically arranged things so that senators would be elected. Before that, senators were chosen by the state government. It is, to be fair, a brilliant strategy for someone who can only get 33% of the people to even remotely consider voting for him.
I mean, the fact that Keyes is even RUNNING shows that politicians favor party affiliation over, oh, not being a complete fucking wack-job. Ergo, once those pesky voters are eliminated from the equation, a Republican state government would thus be given the choice between an intelligent, sane liberal like Barack Obama, and the GOP's own "Mad Dog Murdoch", Alan Keyes. And someone's chances of a cushy Washington office job would suddenly improve dramatically.
Alan Keyes, ladies and gentlemen. The only man in America who thinks the voting public isn't doing a crappy ENOUGH job of sending psychotic, ideological, fanatic idiots to the Congress. And that's just DUMB.