5 reasons we dodged a bullet yesterday, all of them Sharron Angle

So you’re upset about the election results yesterday. Let me tell you a few things, friends. It could have been way worse. There are many reasons why Prop 19 could have been a world of trouble for California pot smokers and the Republicans could have taken the Senate if they had made a few wiser choices. Delaware is a great example. A traditionally blue state could have easily swung right if Mike Castle had won the primaries. Christine O’Donnell was a gift to the Democrats. Her unelectability gave the Dems back a seat they would have surely lost.

But there was one candidate who most got under the skin of the reasonable, perhaps because she was the ‘O’Donnell-esque’ candidate most likely to win. Here’s 5 reasons we celebrate Harry Reid’s defeat of the deplorable Sharron Angle.

5. Angle’s absolute refusal to appear before the media, vicious confrontations with reporters, inability to debate and masking of her funding is part of the worst aspects of the Tea Party trend. Their anti-transparency positions make them highly suspect. A government that hides from its constituency isn’t only dishonest, it shows that they, not the liberals, are in fact the elitists trying to run things against the will of the people.

4. The Tea Party is an ill-defined movement. In some parts of the country it’s code for some sort of modified libertarianism, think Rand Paul. In other parts, it’s anti-establishment (which may mean further right) republicanism, like Marco Rubio. But for many candidates like Miss O’Donnell, Michelle Bachmann and Sharron Angle, it’s just another name for the ever shape-shifting Christian Conservative movement. See, Christian conservatives know that at the end of the day, no matter how many Christians and conservative voters there are, they’re not what America is about. So they try to deceptively slink their way into government. When they couldn’t get creationism taught in public schools they tried to mask their intents by renaming it ‘intelligent design’ and pretending it was science. Now, they’re one of the many factions trying to hijack this Tea Party movement and Sharron Angle is one of it’s foot soldiers.

Here’s the text of an audio clip from an interview Angle did before she declared a media blackout:

Angle: I’m pro responsible choice. There is choice to abstain choice to do contraception. There are all kind of good choices.

Manders: Is there any reason at all for an abortion?

Angle: Not in my book.

Manders: So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?

Angle: You know, I’m a Christian and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.

Revealing that she has faith that there’s a god who has a plan for us, and that that plan never involves going to an abortion clinic, exposes Angle as just another church/state violator waiting to happen.

3. Although that last example used, as an example, her abortion stance, the point was really to show that her Tea Party was no different than that old Christian Right that put Bush in office. But her stance on abortion is appalling unto itself. Angle famously suggested to those raped, underage, victims of incest, people with medical emergencies, expecting mothers who would certainly go through a painful and devastating stillbirth if forced to carry to term, the terminally ill and desperately poor who wouldn’t be able to provide for a child:

Make lemons out of lemonade

2. It’s a political cliche to call a candidate out of touch with the American people, but Sharron Angle is soooooo out of touch. While conservatives in Florida are electing the son of refugees and more and more Republicans are supporting ending don’t ask don’t tell and are backing gay marriage, Angle’s bigotry sticks way out. Angle, who in the 1990’s was one of the founders of the Independent American Party in Nevada, has a long history of distributing viciously anti-gay literature with that group, including pamphlets that refer to homosexuals as sodomites and perverts and argues that there’s no constitutional right to be ‘a sodomite.’

In addition, Angle’s attack ads against Sen. Harry Reid included this famously racist ad depicting scary brown people…..sneaking over the ….uh, Mexico/Nevada border?

1. Republicans expose what businesses they are in debt to when they betray common sense. The government works for the people and it’s in the interest of the people to eradicate certain ailments, especially when an epidemic is sweeping the nation. Who came out against all the public funding Jonas Salk received when he discovered the Polio vaccine? He was put through college on the state’s dollar, his research was funded by the government and millions benefited. What selfish, heartless, child-hating, buffoon would say that the public funding of this research wasn’t vital to this nation’s continued success? Yet, Angle seems to think she knows more than every medical professional out there when it comes to our current epidemic: Autism.

Autism effects something like 1 in every 110 children born in the U.S. today. Far from asking for the government to fund research into it, like we did for Polio, all that we want is to mandate that health insurance companies insure this condition. We just don’t want them to be able to refuse service to children with autism. That is, unless we’re Sharron Angle. Instead of being sympathetic to the people whom this country is of, for and by, Angle is sympathetic to those poor health insurance companies who might not be able to use the extra $10 million dollars to fund campaigns like hers, because they’ll be busy using it to insure a child’s health. Whoever heard of such a thing!?

“They just passed the latest one. Everything they want to throw at us is covered under ‘autism’ so that’s a mandate that you have to pay for,”

‘Autism’ is in quotes there because during a speech Ms. Angle threw up some air quotes around the term as if it’s some ill-defined catch-all i.e. ‘Tea-Party.’