We spend a lot of time here at Red Alert Politics shaking our heads at stupid things on the internet, but our weekly roundup of those fun stories was interrupted last Friday by the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
While there were plenty of interesting panels and speeches at CPAC, some moments at the conference left us going “#SMH.” Enjoy some of our favorite ridiculous moments and feel free to share your own if you attended or followed any of the coverage.
What’s an upcoming presidential race without a “serious” White House bid consideration from America’s resident rich guy?
That’s right. Donald Trump is again considering running for the Republican nomination for president. He’s not only “very seriously” thinking about pursuing the Oval Office in 2016 — he’s specifically 75-to-80-percent sure of his campaign’s possibility. That’s pretty specific, but numerical specificity is likely appreciated by individuals who spend sleepless nights counting their cash.
During his speech at CPAC Friday, Trump hinted at his potential presidential campaign and managed to touch on nearly all the issues he would have to address in a Republican debate before revealing the “theme” of his unborn campaign: “Make America great again.” And rich.
Trump even presented his solution to the ISIS terrorists: “I would hit them so hard and so fast that they wouldn’t know what hit them,” he said, echoing a previous statement he made on Fox News. In fact, hard and fast hitting and pounding seemed to be at the center of his hypothetical anti-terror campaign.
Apparently, Trump didn’t catch Jon Stewart’s segment last week where the comedian ripped the businessman for this strategy.
Regardless, Trump is thinking hard and fast about running … again.
“Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson doesn’t have a filter. It’s one of the reasons CPAC honored him with the Andrew Breitbart Defender of the First Amendment Award.
But sometimes that means that instead of politics and the conservative movement, Robertson is going to talk about sexually transmitted diseases and the “revenge of the hippies” that helped spread them around.
“I don’t want you, America, to get sick. I don’t want you to become ill. I don’t want you to come down with a debilitating disease. I don’t want you to die early. You’re disease free and she’s disease free, you marry, you keep your sex right there. You won’t get sick from a sexually transmitted disease,” Robertson said during his speech.
Then just in case his reasonable argument against STIs didn’t work, Robertson decided to try a scare tactic courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“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 the out the odds on that one,” he said. “How many seconds does it take to get genital herpes? It said 30 seconds. I’m like, whoa, that’s pretty quick.”
Just keep fighting the good fight Phil.
Anti-pot activists often trot out marijuana’s negative health effects as an argument against legalization. But one health statistic, wielded Thursday evening by Ann Marie Buerkle, a commissioner for the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, was so outrageous it caused former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson to literally collapse on the floor:
“You have a one in five higher chance of a heart attack within the first hour after you smoke marijuana,” she declared, during a legalization debate with Johnson. Johnson promptly threw himself to the ground, clutching his heart, while the room erupted in laughter:
Buerkle was not amused, snapping, “The governor has had great fun with his humor, but it isn’t funny.”
Since we’re expected to take this statistic super seriously, let’s look at the actual study Buerkle appears to be referencing—a 2001 Harvard study, based on patient self-reports, which did indeed find a person’s risk of heart could increase nearly five times within the first hour after smoking.
But once that risk factor is put into context, even the author himself, Murray Mittleman, didn’t consider his findings too worrisome. According to an interview in the Harvard Gazette, “Mittleman doesn’t foresee an epidemic of pot-triggered heart attacks. For a 50-year-old baby boomer without other risk factors, like high blood pressure or high cholesterol, the absolute risk of having a heart attack in the crucial first hour after smoking marijuana is one in 100,000.”
In fact, behaviors that put you more at risk for a heart attack, says Mittleman, include “a spurt of exercise for a couch potato.” Ban exercise!
People argue about politics. This is a fact of life. They do not “discuss” politics (bad for ratings), they do not “talk about” them (too dull), they do not joke about them (isn’t today’s political satire what most people would call “venting?”). They argue about them. They are especially prone to argue about them on the Internet, because like Vegas or rumors about Trump For President, the Internet never sleeps.
This is why, contra the usual #SMH nature of these posts, Jezebel’s “Loving the Shit Out of America: Everything Good About CPAC” article is one of the most noteworthy and consequently funny things to happen in “political media”. If you are familiar with Jezebel, you know it is not a website that skews right. But two of its writers devoted nearly 2,000 words (Word counted them for me) to praising, sort of, certain elements of the conservative conference that is otherwise Jezebel’s ideological adversary.
“… I even found myself agreeing — ON POINTS — with Rick Perry. Or was it Rubio? One of those sub-Mason Dixon dudes with dark hair who just spoke about the older generation bankrupting younger people.”
Peace in our time. It’s happening.
Loving the shit out of America: Here’s everything good about CPAC http://t.co/HoNQC1eiIZ
— Jezebel (@Jezebel) February 27, 2015
