Robert Ripley created his famous newspaper feature "Believe It or Not" almost 100 years ago. Today, I wonder whether he would have accepted some of these items as true:
Believe it or not, years after poor Terri Schiavo was treated like a political piñata by then Gov. Jeb Bush and his right-wing posse of nonmedical specialists in Florida, all of whom insisted, despite overwhelming medical evidence to the contrary, that Schiavo was sentient, and not, as was later conclusively confirmed, brain-dead, that he'd do the same thing again in the future to some other poor soul if given the opportunity.
Let's hope he's never given that chance.
Believe it or not, despite the fact that the crime rate has plunged to new lows all across the country, the sale of guns has never been higher, largely due to the fact that more people feel less safe than ever before. The appropriate phrase that fits this craziness: "It is not what is real that matters, but what is perceived to be true."
Believe it or not, former Nazi concentration camp guard Oskar Groening known as "the accountant of Auschwitz" for his role in relieving Jews and other inmates of their money as they were stripped and led to gas chambers at that notorious death camp, justified his actions by calmly explaining that "they didn't need money anymore."
My punishment for this 93-year-old war criminal? A 30-year jail sentence.
Believe it or not, Bill O'Reilly and the crazies at Fox News Channel have decided that their looney yearly campaign they label the War on Christmas deserves a second nonsensical companion controversy, so they are now peddling the bizarre notion that white Christian males are "under siege" all across America.
Ah, if paychecks, prison populations and corporate boardrooms are any indication, being a white Christian guy is not exactly a huge obstacle to success in the United States.
Believe it or not, 100 years later and the U.S. government still refuses to officially acknowledge what the rest of the world except for Turkey has accepted as historical fact: The
Turks perpetrated a massive holocaust on Armenians back during World War l.
Shame on President Barack Obama, and kudos for Pope Francis for admitting the obvious.
Believe it or not, maybe the sharpest and funniest political observation of 2015 has been the observation of a Boston newspaper columnist Joan Vennochi that at Bain Capital, which recently hired liberal former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, "... There is no red America. There is no blue America. There is only green America."
Brilliant.
Believe it or not, it didn't take long for the recently deceased hatemonger head of the Westboro Baptist Church to be replaced by an equally noxious bigot spouting hateful bile in the name of religious freedom.
Preacher Brother Dean Saxton, the head of a tiny church of wackos in the Topeka, Kan., has gone from harassing female students at the University of Arizona for their inappropriate dress that he says justifies their being targets of rape, to standing in front of a mosque in Tempe, Ariz., where he rips out pages of the Quran and stomps on them after they fall to the ground.
Nobody said it was easy to come from a country where virtually all nonviolent hate speech is protected speech, but I'm glad I do.
Believe it or not, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, one of a dozen or more Republican candidates this year who'll never be president of anything, let alone president of the United States, won this week's edition of "who can say the dumbest thing on the campaign trial," when he opined that, "young Americans planning to join the military should wait until President Obama leaves office because his administration has an 'open hostility to the Christian faith.'"
OK, assume for fun Huckabee is right. What would President Obama's alleged antipathy to Christians have to do with anyone joining the military?
Is Huckabee afraid Christian soldiers would be sent into battle without a gun as punishment for being a Christian?
Or maybe if you're a Christian you get a gun, but no bullets.
And this guy is running for president.
Can Brother Dean Saxton be far behind?