Didn't Ronald Reagan used to say, "Mr. Gorbachev, put up those walls"?

Invisible Hand vs. Regulator
Can Invisible-Hand-of-the-Free-Market Man ever be stopped -- or lose popularity?
BY TOM TOMORROW

[Don't forget to click on the cartoon to enlarge it.]

by Ken

Just this morning Howie was writing once again about the craziness of this election season, and quoted this nugget from Digby, who's been chronicling the craziness perhaps more closely than any still-sane person might sensibly dare:

This is an ugly election-- one of the worst I've ever seen-- financed by billionaires who are very happy to let the GOP run completely wild as long as it takes care of the owners. But it isn't ugly because the Democrats have been hurling mud. It's ugly because this ugly political movement is fighting as dirty as candidates can fight.

The craziness is so extreme and so widespread and so widely accepted as, apparently, the New Normal that outside of the people we all read and watch, it's going virtually unremarked on. Oh yes, the infotainment newsterriers may occasionally yip good-naturedly over some little gaffe, but to step back and note the blanket ignorance, incompetence, and sheer craziness of this lot of wackos? Not so much.

So we have to turn to the alternative media -- to, for example, AlterNet's Adele Stan writing about the astonishing surge in the Colorado governor's race of the godfather of Major-Party Wackadoodlery, former Rep. Tom Tancredo (links onsite):

If the latest Rasmussen survey of likely voters is to be believed, in the Colorado governor’s race, anti-immigrant gadfly Tom Tancredo is polling within four points of the frontrunner, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat. The Rasmussen poll shows Hickenlooper at 42 percent, Tancredo at 38 percent and Republican Dan Maes at just 12 percent.

When Tancredo jumped into the Colorado gubernatorial race, most political analysts simply rolled their eyes. After all, this was the guy who, at the Tea Party Nation convention in Memphis earlier this year, advocated a return to literacy tests for voter registration, a practice that was used and abused for decades in the South to keep African-Americans from the voting booth. And this was the guy who called Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor “a racist” who should be “disqualified” from serving on the bench, and a member of “a Latino KKK.” The most Tancredo could hope for, the thinking went, was to be a spoiler by splitting the right-wing vote between himself and Maes, the Tea Party-backed candidate who won the G.O.P. nomination in an upset.

If you think his rhetoric is scary, consider this: To make his third-party bid, Tancredo signed on with the American Constitution Party, which despite its secular-sounding name, is a party based upon the principles of Christian Reconstructionism, whose adherents seek to have biblical law — including the execution of LGBT people and the stoning of adulterers — instituted as the law of the land. (Both Rand Paul and Sharron Angle have links to the Constitution Party, as we reported here.) . . .

Also on AlterNet, there's a post by Brad100 called "Christian Conservative Leaders Ignore Their Values in 2010 Election," pointing out that those reliably right-wing "religious leaders" such as Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Focus on Family, Moral Majority, and Family Research Council, who could always be counted on to go all fire-and-brimstone on any pol in whom they detected (or if necesssary imagined) any moral shortcoming, have lost their voice in the face of people like lech and perv Carl Paladino, the R candidate for governor of New York; WWF depravity entrepreneur Linda McMahon, the R candidate for U.S. senator from Connecticut; and the apparently former witch Christine O'Donnell, the R candidate for U.S. senator from Delaware.

Then there's Crazy Joe Miller, the official R candidate for U.S. senator from Alaska. Howie was writing just this morning about Joe:

Sunday night, during a town hall in Anchorage, crooked Tea Party thug Joe Miller -- who has already announced he will not be answering any questions about his shady background -- had members of his private militia attack and kidnap Tony Hopfinger, a journalist who asked him some embarrassing questions. Do you think any conservatives have come out and chastised Miller? Let me know if you find any. After all, Miller's professed love of the Constitution is just a talking point, nothing something he or his followers take seriously.

Unfortunately, we haven't heard the last of Crazy Joe. Today on Greg Sargent's Plum Line blog featured a post by The American Prospect staff reporter Adam Serwer, which began:

Joe Miller, tear down this wall

Yesterday, my colleague Tim Fernholz had this to say about the news that bodyguards of Alaska Senate Candidate Joe Miller had handcuffed a journalist:

What is it about the fear of big-government fascism that makes Tea Party candidates act like big-government fascists?

For Miller, this irony doesn't end with his private security handcuffing reporters he sees as hostile. As a way to stop illegal immigration, he suggested emulating Communist East Germany by simply building a wall:

"The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. ... East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could do it, we could do it."

This seems to be one of those moments where it's worth reflecting on what the reaction at Fox News would be if a liberal, sarcastically or otherwise, suggested replicating the "triumphs" of East German communism, or had his private security detain a journalist they thought was being hostile.

None of which is to suggest that in other years we are vouchsafe nothing but, or even large quantities of, candidates radiating wisdom and mental health. But really, are there limiits? Well no, apparently not.

My impulse is to leave it at that, but I think I had better finish the thought of Digby's which I quoted above.

Where I began quoting, she had just written:

When this new progressive movement started, one of its tenets was that if progressive candidates would take risks, would be aggressive against the Republicans, would shake up the establishment and stop being the milquetoast campaigners that had turned the Democratic party into an embarrassment -- we would get their backs. Some of them believed us and they went outside the normal cautious "don't make trouble" approach and came out swinging. It's risky, and sometimes it misses. But taking risks is what we asked them to do and that's what we signed up for.

Here, then, is the full paragraph that follows:

We have two weeks to go and some of these races are very, very tight. They may all lose, some might win, we just don't know. This is an ugly election --- one of the worst I've ever seen --- financed by billionaires who are very happy to let the GOP run completely wild as long as it takes care of the owners. But it isn't ugly because the Democrats have been hurling mud. It's ugly because this ugly political movement is fighting as dirty as candidates can fight. Some Democrats aren't rolling over and playing dead. The least we can do is have their backs as we promised we would.

Digby went on to provide a link for donating to the campaign of Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Jack Conway, the target of the savage campaign being waged on behalf of quasi-libertarian Rand Paul, whose libertarianism disappears whenever it becomes inconvenient to his financial backers and Teabagger fans.

The link is for the Blue America "Senate Candidates Worth Fighting For," including Scott McAdams, the Alaska Democrat running against Crazy Joe Miller (and, as a write-in candidate, incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, current representative of the state's famous family of political kleptomaniacs) -- and also including Roxanne Conlin (IA), Paul Hodes (NH), Elaine Marshall (NC), and Joe Sestak (PA). Imagine what a different place the Senate might be if they all won.

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