Is Joe Miller More Of A Crackpot Than Palin, Angle & Aqua Buddah?

As you know, Sitka Mayor/Democratic Senate nominee Scott McAdams will be the Blue America guest at Crooks and Liars this coming Saturday. You can contribute directly to his campaign here. And with the Alaska Libertarians having withdrawn their offer to allow corporate shill Lisa Murkowski to run on their line, this is looking like a head-to-head race between a populist Democrat and a... well... I can't think of a word that works better to describe Joe Miller than "crackpot," although I guess "extreme right-wing ideologue" works too.

As TPM pointed out, Miller washes up better than kooks like Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Kent Buck, Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson, but he's at least as far off the mainstream as they-- or any of the Jim DeMint candidates-- are.

Among Miller's views: He wants to eliminate the Department of Education, believes the government shouldn't pay for unemployment insurance and says of climate change on his campaign site that it "may not even exist." Among the more mainstream GOP positions he's taken: Miller would cut welfare; eliminate health care for the poor by scrapping Medicaid; and the Anchorage Daily News reported that he has called for sweeping cuts to Medicare and Social Security with a goal of phasing them out entirely in favor of total privatization... Miller is backed by the Family Research Council and opposes abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, a view far to the right of the mainstream of the GOP.

... Miller told ABC's TopLine in July that he wants to look at the constitutionality of the government paying for unemployment benefits. He's also said he would repeal health care reform entirely, a view differing from most GOP leaders who want to just repeal the unpopular parts and keep the rest.

"I don't think Alaskans are that crazy, and Miller is very fringe," an Alaska Democrat backing Democratic nominee Sitka Mayor Scott McAdams told TPM in an interview. The source added that McAdams is "not a flaming liberal" and can appeal to sensible members of both parties, adding a predication that because Murkowski supporters are mainstream, they will flock to McAdams in November.

Another source who has worked in Alaska Democratic politics said Miller is "radically outside of the mainstream" and "makes Sharron Angle and Rand Paul look normal."

That may be stretching the point since it would take a lot more than a picture of Joe Miller crawling around on all fours on a dark Alaska night scraping up the permafrost to bury guns in his backyard to make Angle or Mr. Aqua Buddah ever look "normal." Nonetheless, yesterday's Anchorage Daily News carried a very damaging report on Miller's calls for Alaskans to ween themselves off federal subsidies. I suspect a lot more Alaskans like the theory of no government handouts and no pork than who actually want to see America's biggest welfare recipient and pork state go without. His call for actual "belt tightening" might not have the same ring when Alaskans start thinking about what he's talking about.

Miller holds that position, articulated throughout his campaign against incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, despite Alaska's historic reliance on federal resources, needed to develop the vast territory of the young state.

"The government is going bankrupt. I don't think anybody can deny it," he said in an interview on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday. "I think the answer to this is to basically transfer the responsibilities and power of government back to the states and the people. That is really the only answer, I think, out of this crisis."

Meanwhile, Miller is showing himself to be delusional and paranoid by running around insisting that John Cornyn of the NRSC is trying to steal the election for Murkowski. He's come pretty close to saying that if Murkowski is declared the winner-- an unlikely event in any case-- it will only be because of fraud and he'll go dig up the guns he buried in his yard. This guy is really... well, like I said, a crackpot.