Bill and I were super busy yesterday, so I didn’t have time to blog. However, I did find some time to discover new personalities on YouTube. I’ve written about Jim Bakker before– if you were around in the 1980s, you might remember him as one of the leaders of the PTL channel (Praise the Lord). He and his late ex wife, Tammy Faye, were in huge legal trouble for embezzling money from their ministry to pay for an extravagant lifestyle. Jim Bakker was later sentenced to 45 years in prison, but only ended up doing almost five.

Bakker was also known for his sexual dalliances with Jessica Hahn, a church secretary. He paid her $279,000 to keep silent about their shenanigans, but the truth eventually came out.

I was a teenager when all of that was happening. I grew up in the Tidewater area of Virginia, not too far from the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Portsmouth headquarters. Jim and Tammy Faye got their start at CBN, which is where Pat Robertson reigns supreme. I don’t remember following the story of the scandal closely when it was going on, but I do remember it well. It was national news.

Years later, I read and reviewed an excellent and comprehensive book about Jim Bakker. In 1989, author Charles E. Shepard published Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry. The book is out of print now, or at least it was when I managed to score a used copy of it. Although it took a long time to finish reading it, I found Forgiven a very juicy read. I was left fascinated by televangelists like Jim Bakker.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about how Jim Bakker and his wife, Lori, are now hosting a new show. They are selling shelf stable buckets of food for the end times. Bakker cries about how the world is going to end soon and there won’t be enough food. You can protect your family by buying his overpriced buckets of slop for your food storage. They supposedly last for 25 years.

Thanks to YouTube, all of this is easily discovered online… along with some true comedy gold. Yesterday, I discovered two guys who have a show called Good Mythical Morning. Rhett and Link bravely “tasted” the apocalypse era food so you don’t have to. Behold this…

Jim Bakker is just fucking nuts, but people are still watching his tripe. Sadly, some people actually believe what he says. Someone is bankrolling his show, after all. I haven’t sat through a whole episode yet, because it mostly seems to be about his end times prophecies and selling this bucketed slop. You can use the buckets as tables, too. Seriously, they show you how to do this. How thrifty!

These guys cracked me up so much yesterday. They seem to enjoy the same kind of juvenile humor I never managed to grow out of. Case in point, they started off this video with a ten word story… “Well, I just went number two in a large bucket.” Ha ha ha… maybe they rehearsed that… but it seems spontaneous. And I dig ten word stories about taking a crap.

I think my favorite part of these videos is when they show Bakker tasting this crap in front of everyone. You can watch Bakker almost choke on faux potato soup as he tries to convince everyone how delicious it is. When you consider how convincing Bakker must have been in the 80s when he managed to separate so many gullible people from their rare and hard earned dollars, you know that trying to look like he’s enjoying the slop he’s selling must have been super difficult. In fairness, these guys don’t totally diss the slop. They say it’s kind of like what you’d eat on a camping trip.

Anyway… I see Rhett and Link do a lot of food reviewing. Some of the stuff they try is truly bizarre and disgusting. I love that they taste tested Jim Bakker’s apocalyptic slop, though. My liberal friends have been posting about Bakker a lot lately, since he’s been putting out all kinds of bullshit about the end times and how Christians are soon going to start killing each other. In fact, I think I was even prompted to watch this silliness because I recently read an equally silly story about how Bakker thinks “Christians will die” if Trump loses in 2020. He’s not the only one who has made such ridiculous declarations about the slaughter of Christians. Rick Wiles, host of TruNews, has also made stupid comments about this.

The prospect of another four years with Trump in charge is terrifying to me. I’m glad Good Mythical Morning is around to make me laugh as I try not to ponder the United States’s slide into complete lunacy at the hands of religious wingnuts and narcissistic sociopaths like Trump.

After watching Jim Bakker’s slop taste test, I think you should explore Vic Berger’s hilarious videos, comically edited to show everyone how nuts Bakker and his ilk are…

I know what I’d like to do with Bakker’s particular brand of doo doo… At least they hire decent musicians, even if their songs are ridiculous.