Reason’s Mike Moynihan:
At Sunday’s Tea Party rally in Washington, I overheard a few effusive endorsements of Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, the longshot conservative running against the very moderate Republican Congressman Mike Castle for Vice President Joe Biden’s old Senate seat. The race was once considered an easy layup for Delaware Republicans, but with the rise of O’Donnell, a crackpot of the first order, it looks increasingly likely that Democrat Chris Coons will be packing the U-Haul for D.C. in November. As stats wizard Nate Silver points out, if O’Donnell wins today’s primary, the Republicans lose the seat in November: “Whereas Mr. Castle is nearly a 95 percent favorite against the Democratic nominee, Chris Coons, according to last week’s FiveThirtyEight forecasting model, Ms. O’Donnell would have just a 17 percent chance of winning a race against Mr. Coons.”
And the intellectual case against O’Donnell is overwhelming. A précis for those who have avoided the Delaware drama: O’Donnell lied about attending a Master’s degree program at Princeton University; claimed that her political enemies are creeping in the bushes outside her house; is opposed to the sinister habit of masturbation; is a supporter of the “ex-gay” movement, despite the inconvenient revelation that her former staffer Wade Richards “returned” to homosexuality and denounced those peddling “cures” for his sexuality; filed a $6 million lawsuit against the conservative group ISI for “gender discrimination”; was denounced by her former campaign manager as a “fraud” who uses campaign donations to pay rent and utility bills; and has implied that her Republican opponent is gay. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
As the former head of the clumsily named Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT), O’Donnell was the Tipper Gore of the 1990s, attending lewd and lascivious rock concerts just to tell stoned, Satanist teenagers that they were going to hell. “Walking through the crowd I also noticed more pentagrams than crosses around the teenage necks,” she gasped. At a 1997 music festival in Washington, D.C., the Catholic killjoy “distributed thousands of brochures with information on the failure rate of condoms, on AIDS, on sexually transmitted diseases, abortion, pornography and the movement of former homosexuals.”
Can anyone explain to me how this description of O’Donnell’s views is substantively different from pretty main stream views within the current GOP? They are certainly no different from the insane gibberish you hear and see on t-shirts and signs at tea party events or C-PAC or anywhere on a Focus on the Family flier.
Hell, over half that stuff could be attributed to the Queen Bee herself, Sarah Palin, but you would have to throw in exorcisms and witch doctors and membership in a separatist movement. Paranoia? Palin openly worries about “moles in the crowd,” let alone outside in the bushes, but if you ask Graeme Frost, you can find wingnuts in the bushes, too. Did Moynihan miss the McConnell primary, where they openly whispered that he was gay? Ask Lindsey Graham about that. Making a buck or two and living rent free- has he not heard of the C-Street house where lots of folks lived rent free and used interns as servants? Is he unaware that the last Republican administation spent hundreds of millions fighting porn and funding abstinence only education?
None of the things listed in here that make O’Donnell “crazy” are any different from commonly held beliefs in the current Republican party. Is Moynihan just now realizing that the “limited government advocates” that make up the tea party are the same batshit insane people running the GOP? And that these are the crazies they have been fluffing the last year? There is a “reason” I am exceptionally volatile with the smirking retardation that passes as thought at Reason magazine these days- these are the people you are empowering. O’Donell isn’t an outlier.
Or is it just because O’Donnell is going to lose?