Rick Perry is obviously very conservative, but I didn't realize that he'd be soliciting policy advice from a certifiable lunatic like Andrew McCarthy. I want to be clear about this. I use synonyms for "crazy" pretty often, which I find to be necessary in a world in which one of the two major parties holds to such beliefs as global warming is a hoax and tax cuts increase revenue. But even by the prevailing standards of the contemporary Republican Party, McCarthy is truly off his rocker.
Here's McCarthy on Barack Obama's radicalism:
Obama’s radicalism, beginning with his Alinski/ACORN/community organizer period, is a bottom-up socialism. This, I’d suggest, is why he fits comfortably with Ayers, who (especially now) is more Maoist than Stalinist. What Obama is about is infiltrating (and training others to infiltrate) bourgeois institutions in order to change them from within — in essence, using the system to supplant the system. A key requirement of this stealthy approach (very consistent with talking vaporously about “change” but never getting more specific than absolutely necessary) is electability.
Here he is, in an interview, on the Islamist character of health care reform:
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What do health-care reform and “the Grand Jihad” have in common?
ANDREW C. McCARTHY: They both enjoy the support of Islam and the Left.
Here he is peddling debunked claims about Obama's Kenya ties:
Barack Hussein Obama Jr. spent very little time in the United States Senate after his 2004 election. In a flash, he was eyeing the White House. All told, he spent about 140 days in attendance at congressional sessions -- at times, even seemingly confused about his committee assignments.
But he did make times to spend six days in Kenya. They were six days spent campaigning for the candidate running in opposition to Nairobi's pro-American government -- in outrageous contravention of U.S. policy and, probably, federal law. That opposition candidate was Raila Odinga, the communist Luo who was seeking the presidency, who agreed to impose sharia law in Kenya in order to win the support of Islamists, and who threw the country into murderous mayhem when his bid fell short. It was one of the most dangerous, destabilizing, disgraceful performances in the history of the U.S. Senate -- but you've probably never heard about it, because the Obamedia chose not to report it.
[...]
In the Washington Times, Mark Hyman reported that Odinga had visited Obama in the U.S. in 2004, 2005, and 2006, and that Obama had sent an adviser, Mark Lippert, to Kenya in early 2006 to plan a trip by the senator that summer, timed to coincide with Orange Democratic Party campaign activities. Obama followed through in August. For six days, he was nearly inseparable from Odinga as they barnstormed the countryside. [pages 213-214, 214-215]
Here he is dissenting from National Review's editorial denouncing Birtherism.
There’s speculation out there from the former CIA officer Larry Johnson— who is no right-winger and is convinced the president was born in Hawaii — that the full state records would probably show Obama was adopted by the Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro and became formally known as “Barry Soetoro.” Obama may have wanted that suppressed for a host of reasons: issues about his citizenship, questions about his name (it’s been claimed that Obama represented in his application to the Illinois bar that he had never been known by any name other than Barack Obama), and the undermining of his (false) claim of remoteness from Islam. Is that true? I don’t know and neither do you.
Here's McCarthy suggesting that Bill Ayers may have ghostwritten "Dreams From My Father." Here he is defending Sarah Palin's "death panels" attack.
The man is a walking clearinghouse of right-wing conspiracies. Needless to say, I haven't even begun to describe his policy views, which are rather extreme. (Here's McCarthy advocating that President Bush openly ignore the courts and deal with suspected terrorists any way he pleases.) It's pretty surprising that even a Rick Perry would take his advice.
(Photo: Obviously a different Andrew McCarthy.)