Change That Matters
I’m a Tea Party guy. I don’t just go to rallies, I speak at them. And I believed in this less-taxing/less-spending/small-government stuff waaaaay before it was cool. Like, I made Reagan look squishy.
Please keep all that in mind when I say: Christine O’Donnell might just be about 17 different kinds of crazy. Now about 11 of those ways are the exact kinds of crazy I think Washington needs big tons more of — but the other six just leave me scratching my head and wondering how the hell she happened in Delaware. That’s like hearing a DJ spin up “Stairway To Heaven” in a gay club, or that Larry King got picked up on an indecent exposure charge.
But let’s get back on topic with a recap:
1. I’m nuts, always have been.
2. O’Donnell is nuts, even more so than I am.
And yet — O’Donnell raised half a million dollars yesterday.
Half a million bucks.
The woman too crazy for me, even when I was making something of a career out of dating the crazy ones, got half a million dollars in a single day. All so that she can continue to wage a campaign which everyone agrees is just hopeless.
So what happened? Did the United States go insane?
Well, no — not exactly.
It’s just that we’re governed by Democrats.
That can do things to a country.
At least we Tea Partyists know Christine O’Donnell is crazy. Democrats think Al Franken is profound.
…excellent statement
Actually, I believe she’s raised one million dollars so far.
She contested the position. She won. And Palin and DeMint think she has the courage to help drag the USA back to its sanity. Go O’Donnell!
Castle votes FOR TARP and to investigate possible impeachment of GWB for lying…
And you call O’Donnell crazy?
Biden held this seat for years and years.
Christine will do just fine, and probably no one will pay any attention.
The Tea Party movement will come up with a lot of strange weird candidates… as least, strange and weird compared to your run of the mill politico. Think. The smooth politician has had plenty of time to meet the right people, polish up on the right attitudes, get to know and love the local Machine. You keep saying – approvingly – that Tea Party people is full of people who have never been political types, lots of them have never been to political meetings.
You are going to see a LOT of people like O’Donnell in Congress after November. So, get used to it. They just might make some changes in Washington which will not be easy, and is really the job of dedicated crazies.. like O’Donnell!!!
Steve, its Delaware, you have to grade your crazy on a curve there. Those people have elected Biden over and over again for decades, despite regular recorded evidence that he has no brain. You and I go ” hey, thats just crazy!” but not in Delaware, thats perfectly rational in that world.
In our circles, yes, shes got a loose bolt or two in the manifold but in their contextual reality, she is hardly out of the ordinary. Frankly shes right in the middle of the mean of the curve.
Here are some better examples of things you and I think are crazy but some people consider “reasonable and normal”:
Putting Chris Dodd in charge of banks.
Putting Charles Rangel in charge of “Ways and Means”.
Putting Barney Frank in charge of Ethics.
Electing first term Illinois senators to Federal executive office.
Putting Kerry on the Armed Services Committee.
Letting Biden talk on Television.
Letting Teddy drive home after parties.
Inviting the President of Mexico to Congress to chastise the United States Government on Human Rights.
Naming a Nuclear Submarine after Jimmy Carter.
Is voting for O’Donnell really crazier than any of that?
Honestly, I’ve lived most of my life with a Senate populated with full-on jackass crazy folks like Boxer, Byrd, Biden, Helms, Kennedy, Johnson, Packwood and at least half a dozen completely whacked out senators who I seriously wondered about their grip on sanity. Heck, John Warner married Elizabeth Taylor! That my friend is literal crazy eight bonkers crazy( oh sure john, youre the one. Im sure this time its for real!)
Being thought of as crazy is not an exclusionary rule for serving in the Senate, its a friggin pre-qualification.
Try and look at it this way. On the the day after Halloween you can usually find pumpkins splattered all over your neighborhood in a scenic display of harmless mayhem. Now imagine your in the Senatorial cloakroom. Now imagine its not pumpkins but the metaphorical heads of liberal senators exploding as she enters the room in February on her way to take the oath of office.
Makes you wanna hum a new stanza to Lennons song, dont it?
Senator O’Donnell. I can dig it.
Well writ, frank. Well writ. I especially like the image of the pending mess in the cloak room.
Just want to make one point. The Carter is a brilliant naming strategy. It’s the SpecOps boat. Its missions are Top Secret, its location is Top Secret. It will never make the news except (maybe) when it comes home. And while there is a submarine named after Carter there won’t be a carrier named after him. Given there are carriers named after his predecessor and successors there was a real risk our kids would someday hear “Reporting from the USS James Carter…”
In all seriousness, a nuclear sub is the perfect thing to name after Carter. Before he inherited the famous peanut farm, he was actually a submarine engineer, and got into the nuclear sub program right as it was starting. He was scheduled to be the engineer for the second-ever nuclear sub before he resigned to run the peanut farm. He was a modern President, and so he’s going to get some big piece of military hardware named after him, failure or no. Given that, this is genuinely the right call.
That said, I did enjoy Jeff’s argument more than the legit one.
Stephen
Crazy is as crazy does.
We just sued our own state, because it wanted to protect its own borders from invasion….and then, we turned them over to the U.N. for “human rights” investigation.
We suffered our worst loss of life of civilians, in a deliberate mass murder attack on our soil…and we have the President, the Vice President, nearly the whole of the Party that holds the Congress…saying WE are the bad people, because a shrine to the event is being contemplated on the ashes of our countrymen who died there.
Barney Frank and Chris Dodd (as well as much of the far left Democratic Congress) took down an entire economy, jamming through loans underwritten like drunken sailors on shore leave. Then…they tried to blame the Republicans for the economy, and to show they meant it, they borrowed money from us, our children and our grandchildren, like crack addicts. Then, they say they “inherited” the problem.
We are racing toward a nuclear Iran, Turkey has completely gone off the reservation as an ally, …and the one guy we treat like dirt and leave to dine alone in the White House, is the leader of Israel, the only true friend we have, in the region.
We have a mass media apparatus that has a secret society that openly targets ANYONE who takes an opposing view, hurls slander at them, makes up charges of racism, dreams of throwing them through a plate glass window, hides facts from the public, distorts the facts it does supply in order to bury the truth, and then joins with the Democrats in vilifying “right wing” pundits and creating a wholly untrustworthy information stream, upon which, we the people…must depend to self-govern this land of ours.
Our last President stood against a brutal, tyrannical mass murderer in Iraq. He said that there was evidence BY THE BRITISH AND THE FRENCH, that this insane mass murderer had weapons of mass destruction. We know this, because HE USED THEM ON HIS OWN PEOPLE. This was the SAME evidence that prior President Clinton had. The WORLD signed resolutions about it. Yet, the far leftist Democrats and their mass media stooges, made our own President out to be a liar about it. They tore at him based upon a pack of lies. They sullied our name and our honor on a daily basis. Some of them rooted for the enemy. They attacked our men and women in uniform and called them every filthy name. And now, they call Iraq one of THEIR greatest achievements.
They passed legislation without reading it, arrogantly shoved it in our faces, pulled every stunt to get around the rules for installing it and told us we were too stupid to understand why it was “good for us”. Now, they admit they were not telling the truth about it “saving money”. And, that we can keep our own doctors. And, that it really helps anyone in the first place.
I could go on and on, Stephen. Maybe I don’t agree with Christine O’Donnell on a number of issues. But, I know which side she’s on. She doesn’t think an American flag is the “wrong kind” of patriotism. She doesn’t think that the people of this land of ours are “mean”, “homegrown terrorists”, “bitter clingers”.
As a natural born centrist, I have had to compromise the whole of my life…because nobody that ran represented everything I believed or stood for or against. This COUNTRY is a CENTRIST country. It may be center right most of the time, but it still is CENTRIST. We, the people…are used to making compromises. Her opponent left us…we didn’t leave him.
I am a centrist, but I am a devoted anti-leftist. I think rampant, unchecked leftism the greatest threat to this country. I think Michael Moore, who believes our enemies are heroes and minutemen, who believes that a monument ought to be built ON Ground Zero…is a traitor. I believe George Soros is a grave threat. I believe that the mass media apparatus and their intentional lies, deceit and distortion are CRIMINAL offenses against this land of ours.
Christine O’Donnell isn’t our biggest problem, Stephen. Her win is a gigantic spotlight on the problem…and people seem to want to avert their gaze. Too many people can’t see the forest for the trees.
Or perhaps, they are too dazed and confused about the “return message” being delivered by We, the People. They don’t get it and keep quoting Clara Peller…”Where’s the beef?”.
Here’s the beef. We. Don’t. Want. To. Be. Lied. To. Or. About. Any. More.
Perhaps they will soon stop quoting Clara Peller, when we keep shouting…”Can you hear me now?”
Way to lay it out in a nutshell. I printed it out for my refrigerator.
I say a hearty “Hear, hear!!!” to cfbleachers above, and add one comment. Christine O’Donnell had some tax problems, and she paid them off. Until she took that final step, she was qualified to be Treasury Secretary in the Obama Administration.
Stephen, I need to contact you about a matter unrelated to this post but I don’t have your e-mail address and I can’t find an e-mail link here. Could you e-mail me please? Thanks.
Is she crazy in any way that would matter in the government we hope she helps us achieve?
For instance, in the government I’m shooting for, the candidate’s opinions on masturbation can be as crazy as she wants because they will have as much relevance as the candidate’s favorite ice cream flavor or her position on wearing white after Labor Day.
I agree with tim maguire. Most of this stuff is irrelevant. One area of concern for me, though, is biomedical research, an area likely to be affected by Senate appropriations. O’Donnell has reactionary views on cloning and medical research that might mark her as an adversary of life-extending technological advances. That’s a big deal to me, because it might actually affect important policies.
Tim Maguire and Nathan. +1
In the words of Malcom Reynolds: “Lady, you’re my kind of crazy.”
It’s “stupid.” And don’t I feel that way now.
The Republican establishment has been actively opposing conservative candidates in primaries of the last ten years (i.e. Toomey v. Spector, et al.) Here is the message of Ms. O’s win to the establishment: Stop it!!
You don’t like Ms. O, then support conservative canditates that you do like instead of forcing us to choose between a Democrat and a liberal with an R after their name. It’s that simple, dude.
Ohhhhh, longer than that. I’m sure some of the older ones still think Rockefeller could’ve beaten LBJ in 1964.
The Republican establishment has been actively opposing conservative candidates in primaries for the last ten years (i.e. Toomey v. Spector, et al.) Here is the message of Ms. O’s win to the establishment: Stop it!!
You don’t like Ms. O, then support conservative canditates that you do like instead of forcing us to choose between a Democrat and a liberal with an R after their name. It’s that simple, dude.
What Frank and cfbleachers said. Yeah!
Um, isn’t the guy in the race a former (he says) Marxist? I think we have enough of those in the Senate already. Besides, aren’t we getting most of what we know about this woman from the MSM? I decided that source was polluted a long time ago.
Just exactly how high do you suppose nutty Joe Biden set the bar for a Delaware Senator? It’s not a high hurdle to leap.
Let’s face facts, the reason there is a TEA Party, is not because of the Democrats. It is because the Republicans completely failed to represent the fiscal conservatives who have been voting for them based on their promises of fighting for budget cuts, and then breaking their promises by voting for more spending. The TEA Parties have had to take the unprecedented tactic of taking over the local Republican Party apparatus in order to get a Republican Party they can support. All because the Republicans have been the Party of TAX AND SPEND LITE for decades.
Victory in one or more battles is much less important than winning the war, and voting for a Republican just because they are not as bad as the Democrat, has not been a successful strategy for the fiscal small government conservatives. Politics may be a matter of ratcheting things in your direction, but ratchets are slow and designed for constricted spaces, and many in the TEA Parties feel we have a really big wrench right now and plenty of room to use it. Are the TEA Parties going to lose battles? Well Duh. Clearly the Republicans of DE would rather take a risk on anyone else rather than a known RINO in Castle. The howling of establishment Republicans like Karl Rove is music to my ears, CAN YOU HEAR US NOW! The TEA Parties don’t much like you, just a little bit more than the Democrats, and what your smelling now is the TEA Parties farting in your face.
All the squishy Republicans have had to move in the TEA Party direction, but they didn’t do it because they are true believers and have principles. They did it because they have “gone Washington” love the power and want to hang on to it. And once this election is over they will go back to expanding government and hence their power, unless they continue to feel threatened. Defeating and Replacing Castle, Crist, Bennett, et al and their establishment Republican support is the only way to repair the broken Republican Party.
The TEA Parties no longer trust Republican promises, and are working to replace most of the Republicans in office. The alternative is to start a new party, and I hope we don’t have to, as that would be a much more difficult fight, and it is already hard enough fighting the entrenched big government Republicans as well as the socialist Democrats.
I’m a little curious, Steve – what do you label as “crazy” behavior?
Her position on pornography, which is held by most conservative Christians?
Her position on masturbation, which is held by some conservative Christians?
Her position on evolution, which is held by some-to-most conservative Christians?
Are you saying that such people are crazy? If so, then good luck persuading them to vote your way. Why antangonize people who could be allies to you? After all, I (
Jefferson said: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” I suggest that it also does no injury to you for Christine O’Donnell to believe as she does, as long as she doesn’t tell you “stop wanking/viewing/evolving, or I’ll have you put in prison!”
Nathan,
From what I have heard and read, it appears that therapies using stem cells taken from your own body are a much more promising tool for fighting medical problems than are stem cells from embryos.
They do not have the problem of rejection, defeating which in the case of embryonic stem cells requires serious weakening of your immune system if it is possible at all. The undifferentiated nature of embryonic stem cells mean that as far as we now know, they are as likely to produce a cancer as to regenerate an organ.
There are therapies that already seem to work involving adult stem cells.
Thus, paradoxically, government sponsorship of embryonic stem cell research will have the effect of diverting research from the much more promising area of adult stem cells, and will more than likely postpone any clinical deployment of stem cell research to beyond your lifetime.
Thus, the ‘reactionary’ attitude of people like Ms. O’Donnell, is actually the soundest from a medical point of view.
You will of course never read this in the press.