DownWithTyranny!: Wacko of the Year: Sharron Angle -- A Lesson in the Outer Limits of Republican Lunacy

Candidate Angle doesn't see why she shouldn't be allowed to take only the questions she wants to answer.

“The Federal Department Of Education should be eliminated. The Department of Education is unconstitutional and should not be involved in education, at any level.”

-- Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle

by Noah

"Mommy, why do so many people think Republicans are wackos?

Well, sweetie, take the case of the 2010 Nevada Senate race. You see, Republikooks decided that one candidate, who thought we could pay for medical services with chickens, just wasn’t crazy enough. So they checked every asylum in the state and came up with Sharron Angle! This new face of the Repug Party is a goonie from the endless conveyor belt of Republican goonies. Cuckoo is as cuckoo does!

Sounding not unlike some Koran-twisting Islamic extremist nutball, Angle claimed that her opposition to both Social Security and Medicare isn’t rooted in her view of the Constitution. Instead, she offers that her view of the Ten Commandments tells her to oppose such programs. I musta missed something in Sunday school. Thou shalt not have Medicare? Thou shalt not have Social Security?

Here’s Angle explaing her “thoughts” about phasing out Social Security in favor of a privatized system put in place by Chile’s right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet:

When I said privatize, that’s what I meant. That I thought we would just have to go to the private sector for a template on how this is supposed to be done. However, I’ve since been studying, and Chile has done this.

Angle also sees no reason why the press shouldn’t ask only the questions she wants to be asked, so she can give only the answers she wants to give. When that doesn’t happen, it’s run, Sharon, run! (See the clip above.) Run from those mics and nasty, nasty cameras!

“People ask me, ‘What are you going to do to develop jobs in your state?’ Well, that’s not my job as a U.S. senator.”

Even Angle’s communications directors seem to have had a problem with Sharron’s take on how her relationship should be with the press. In the first week of August, she went through two of them and hired a third in -- just in that one week! Just doing her bit to fight unemployment, I guess. One has to wonder why the third one took the job. Well, jobs are very scarce.

Here’s what greeted Contestant No. 3 on the Angle Loon Show:

We needed to have the press be our friend. . . . We wanted them to ask the questions we wanted them to ask so that they report the news the way want the news reported and when I get on a show and say send money to SharronAngle.com so that your listeners --

Gee, Sharron, sometimes life just isn’t fair. You may be a spoiled Republican Teabag princess, but sometimes things just don’t go the way you want. Even the Fox bozo interviewing her was incredulous. At one point you can see that he’s trying very hard not to laugh.

Angle is utterly clueless about the world -- and she wanted to be a U.S. senator. I wonder if she knew that she’d have to leave her room with the padded walls and go to Washington, DC. She’s really stretching the boundaries. One is almost moved to having sympathy for her. Maybe the people in Nevada could just give her some sort of honorary title like "senator from Area 51." They could trot her out for holiday parades,e on a float with some Teabaggers dressed up as little aliens cruising down the Extraterrestrial Highway.

Call me a compassionate, sensitive lefty. I also have to wonder how she finds her way home at night without having left a trail of bread crumbs or tied a very long string to her doorknob. Maybe one of her ex-communications directors can move in with her and be her minder when she returns to whatever nuthouse she came from. No doubt she’ll always blame the press. I wonder if she’s even heard of the concept of freedom of the press. Perhaps she could borrow a copy of the Constitution from one of her Teabagger buddies, or maybe she and her promoters, like her fans on Fox, would rather our country be like Iran or China, where a reporter can be arrested or worse just for asking “the wrong question.”

Sharron Angle is the kind of thing we get, and the kind of thing we deserve, when we tolerate the likes of Sarah Palin, John Kyl, James Inhofe or any one of a number of other of our typically deranged Republicans. The Republican Party will always push the envelope deeper into Crazyville. We, as a society, did not send Sarah Palin packing. We rewarded her with book deals, TV shows, and endless promotion. So next up was Sharron Angle.

“I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness, what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”

Mentally normally-adjusted people don’t turn into Sharron Angle. She was so bad that Harry Reid beat her. Note that the Secret Service didn’t pay her a call when she threatened the Senate Majority Leader. They let it slide, and for now she's just a profile in Republican lunacy, vintage 2010. Hopefully, she will be locked away and forgotten, but if we tolerate her and make excuses for her, there will be more, and there will be worse.