There are those who say that making fun of Christine O’Donnell for her comments about witchcraft, masturbation, Halloween, evolution, and the like is counterproductive, that these aren’t real issues, that this whole focus is classist and even Villagerish.
I’ll grant that we are unlikely to see any tough anti-Halloween, anti-masturbation, or anti-witchcraft legislation under Speaker Boehner or even under Speaker Pence, though I certainly wouldn’t rule out some non-binding resolutions condemning these profoundly unAmerican activities. But crazy positions on science and reproductive rights are important. Congress has some power over science policy and I don’t think it is at all inconceivable that a Republican government would enact policies that would set back American science a generation. We’ve already seen the beginnings of this with stem cell policy (though only the very beginnings, I’ll admit).
I had lunch yesterday with a cousin of mine who studies ecology. He was explaining why his adviser (and many ecologists) spends so much time studying guppies. The reason is that guppies evolve very rapidly and that the ability to evolve rapidly is of increasing interest as we enter a era of rapid climate change. This involves two things Republicans often explicitly reject — Darwinian evolution and the notion that the earth is warming.
I can’t see how electing anti-science nutjobs won’t hurt American science policy. First they came for the BEAR DNA.
Admiral_Komack
Christine O’Donnell:
“I’ll get you, my pretty…and your little dog, too!”
clone12
and of course if you can demonize scientists as a bunch of people who do nothing all day other than staring at guppies, that’s just extra rightwing win!
chrismealy
“is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice” made me laugh out loud.
Cat Lady
Can someone explain to me, like I’m five, what the essential difference is between what Christine O’Donnell represents and the Taliban? Can throwing acid on schoolteachers be far behind?
Johnny B
My guess is there will be some legislation passed under a Republican Congress that is wildly unconstitutional and forces Obama to veto it or face the nutbags wrath.
It’s just a guess, but I say a federal bill prohibiting federal inmates from practicing Islam. Can you imagine the freak out when Obama vetoes that gem?
MikeJ
Edroso points out that the ol’ perfesser says liberals are anti-wicca and we hate O’Donnell because we don’t accept alternative religions. Unlike the GOP.
Ash Can
The Chairman of the Board FTW.
Zandar
@Cat Lady:
Acid, being made mostly of science (along with explosives, punching people, and other vigorous applications of energy moving into an excited state) would never be used by anti-science nutjobs.
Of course, since that was logical, anti-science nutjobs are completely immune to it, so my guess would be sometime around next Thursday.
El Cid
“Classist”? These were the fucking hallucinatory conspiracy paranoiac fundies who in the 1980s drove people to get tried and convicted at day care centers for supposedly holding vast Satanic and ritual pedophile abuse (they weren’t even Catholic priests!) on hundreds of toddlers and very young children. Also that the Proctor and Gamble logo was a secret Satanic symbol.
I was the same or a lower class young person as this rotten piece of shit, and I called these people for the lunatic assholes they were at the time.
The worst argument to protect the evils of a bunch of non-rich thugs is to call objections and mockery “classist”. Would it be “classist” to decry anti-abortion murder-mongering groups if it happened that their leaders were working class?
[PS: This whole shit about her going on a witch date and a Satanic altar and blood is completely fucking made up. She made up this bullshit like all the other 1980s/90s right wing Christian conspiracy mongering. I don’t think there was any real event from which this was exaggerated, but rather a gossip conspiracy session between her and other paranoiac mean loony fundies in her circle.]
curious
mostly OT but please tell me you’ll be commenting: http://thedailywh.at/post/1138310069/meanwhile-at-the-family-research-councils-values
Ash Can
Uh, yeah. Because the fact that a candidate is fucking batshit, brain-damaged, incapacitated insane has nothing at all to do with whether or not she’s fit to hold public office.
Pangloss
If the GOP can pursue their desire to destroy government funded university research in biomedical and technology fields, we’ll be officially done as a leading world power.
kommrade reproductive vigor
jl
Just making fun of O’Donnell is not a good tactic. I don’t care whether she was into witchcraft, or went out during HS with some people who were into it. Or what her rules are for her private bits.
I think if you make too much of this, then you are going down same futile road of the GOP, and posting pics of Franken’s comedy routines and saying “Wow, Getta loada this!”. That was silly and did not work.
Another example would be signs with pics of Pelosi as some kind of totalitarian wicked witch.
But what her views are now, today, right now, regarding issues related to public policy, which would include evolution, global warming, and, for example, advisability of abstinence only education, her nutty views are all fair game, and should be part of the campaign.
Zifnab
At a certain point, it pays off to openly mock your opponent for sideline beliefs simply to demonstrate that the individual is not the kind of person you want to vote for.
Cris
@El Cid: Two links deep, I love this quote that TPM cites from the Maher video:
I know what they told me they do. Oh, the credulity.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Just “Business and Economics Editor”? Not “Senior Business and Economics Editor”?
Bella Q
She’s also managed again to demonstrate her ignorance (shocked, aren’t we) by conflating satanism with wicca. Those (wiccans) who would be called “witches” by her crowd have nothing to do with a satanic altar with blood around it. Chances are most satanists don’t either, but I don’t know any satanists.
But of course all those who aren’t rabid Jeebus lovers are evil, so what does accuracy matter? Surely she is unelectable? Please.
jrg
Like I care what a guppy rights activist thinks.
/inbred wingnut
Roger Moore
Then they came for the volcano monitoring and fruit flies. Something tells me that this won’t end well.
Culture of Truth
I’ve seen more than one politician go down because they became an object of ridicule.
Did Republicans say hey, “let’s not make fun of Dukakis in the tank, let’s focus on his economic policies!”
ppcli
“business and economics editor for Balloon Juice”
I think “Distinguished Senior Fellow for the study of Business and Economics at the Balloon Juice Institute” has an even nicer ring.
kommrade reproductive vigor
All the woman’s done is say crazy crap and work with various groups of reactionary loons (and sue one group for being a bit too reactionary).
Can’t check her website for her position on the issues right now. So, WTF are we supposed to talk about; her hair style? That would be sexist and demeaning. I guess we’ll just have to give this fReichtard nutbag a pass and not ask any questions because anything else would be UNCIVIL.
p.a.
The decline of the Italy, Spain and Portugal and the rise of Northern Europe can be explained (in part) by the migration of scientific talent north in response to the Inquisition.
These things do have consequences.
jake the snake
I am such a baaaad boy, but may we should change
O’Donnell’s theme song from the Divinyls’ “I touch Myself”
to the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman”.
schrodinger's cat
I think I saw this on Sullivan’s blog, a few days ago I think, there is a conference on how Galileo was wrong. These fundamentalist crazies don’t won’t to return to the 1950’s but I think the 1550’s.
TooManyJens
@ppcli:
I just contemplated how FYWP would handle such a long name, and died a little inside.
lamh32
Anybody watch the President’s townhall on CNBC just now. I’m hearing he was pretty good, but I’ll admit to ready only “biased” responses.
I’m at work, so can’t watch it til I get home. How’d he do?
Mark S.
Michelle Malkin’s defense of O’Donnell:
I think people are making fun of the ridiculousness of going to a movie and then a picnic on a Satanic altar. Most people don’t actually believe in witches and warlocks.
jl
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
the byline makes no sense:
“by DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.”
And around here, being a business and (especially) economics editor sounds like the most insulting demotion one could get.
But, this guy, ‘DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice’ whoever he is, has been putting up some good posts lately.
gex
Ah you know the old rule. Tone, civility and propriety rule the day when critiquing the right. Of course, critiquing the right violates tone, civility, and propriety rules in and of itself, which is useful in avoiding any debate about the batshit insane and their imposition of their insanity on the rest of us.
If you consider that some states want sodomy laws back, and most states impose their religious beliefs on gays in some way or another, the idea that critiquing these things is rude is simply a way to stifle debate on meaningful issues. The fact is that our politicians, especially those on the right, spend way too much time talking about people’s personal lives and less time talking about the systems that rule our lives.
Bill Murray
@kommrade reproductive vigor: well she also has FEC complaints against her for misuse of campaign funds. That could be more substantive than dabbling into witchcraft
losingtheplot
Showing my age: who remembers the Henry Huggins story about breeding guppies, and what was the title?
mpowell
If you can’t tell the difference between preening about the poor organization of the Obama WH’s social calendar and pointing out obvious lunatics who are running for office, you are part of the problem.
scav
So she opposes witchcraft because she has had “first-hand experience with what they do. So, she tried it. She rejected it. And she learned from it.” And, thus, we should believe here.
But we are to believe her views on masturbation and sex for presumably entirely the opposite chain of logic.
Got it.
kay
@El Cid:
True. The day care center mass-panic also had a real element of ” the children of working mothers are punished for their mother’s modernity ” theme, and that came from the religious Right, too.
Christine O’Donnell doesn’t have a real historical sense of the Right wing in this country. She’s not tracking.
The smarter and more savvy conservatives blame liberals for the ginned-up insanity of the satanic/day care nonsense (Dorothy Rabinowitz in the WSJ, ahem).
O’Donnell doesn’t even know that none of it actually happened.
Paris
Christine O’Donnell is a money grubbing, lying, scam artist. If she weren’t white, she’d be locked up. That’s the ‘real’ issue. She will be exposed and the tea party discredited. Instead of defending themselves from charges of racism, the baggers will have to prove that they are all not witches and ‘lying thieves like that Christine O’Donnell person’.
El Cid
The O’Donnell-style paranoiac liars who made up charges against real people of Satanic child abuse at day care centers. (After convictions, appeals got many of those in prison out due to it being proven that the ‘evidence’ was utter horseshit involving training children to say ridiculous, contrary, and physically impossible things.)
All the while, complete denials and hysterical denunciations were thrown at those complaining of ritual Catholic abuse of children.
I’m so classist and snobby for pointing out the awful consequences of these paranoid Christian fundamentalists seeing signs of ‘witchcraft’ and Satanism and blood ceremonies and pedophilia everywhere but where it actually went on.
El Cid
@kay: I tried to quote and link to the Wikipedia article of Day Care S** Abuse Hysteria, but it got stuck in moderation. The missing letters are EX, maybe that’s what got it into the filter.
El Cid
@Mark S.: At most after the movie the date suggested a picnic in a park next to a cemetery, and the rest was all paranoid and deceitful fabrication.
Like going from having a minor fender bender into telling people that the secular Satanist mafia sent armored SUV’s to crash into you because of what you knew about modern witchcraft, but God protected you, and you knew this because they told you afterwards.
Paris
@Bella Q:
That’s because they only exist in the minds of Michelle Malkin, the Snow Grifter, and Ms. O’Donnell ( Grifter 2:the Teatards Strike Out)
Joey Maloney
@Bill Murray: Have there been actual complaints filed? All I’ve seen is people on blogs pointing out how her activities appear to violate FEC regs.
Lynnehs
and so the war on science continues. Sigh. Yes, her creationist views do matter. The fact that she lives in the dark ages does matter.
Midnight Marauder
@jl:
Here’s the thing. I don’t really think there is much of a difference between this:
and this:
When you make fun of the fact that she wants to outlaw masturbation, you are illustrating her views today, right now, regarding the advisability of abstinence. When you make fun of her for saying that we are creating mice with human brains, you are highlighting her views today, right now, on public policy regarding evolution and stem cell research. You can’t really differentiate between the two here, because they are fundamentally intertwined. I understand your concern when you mention this:
But the key difference between Christine O’Donnell and Al Franken is that Al Franken has never been an outright moron. When wingnuts make fun of Al Franken, the politician, they have to resort to sending around clips of his days on Saturday Night Live, intentionally neglecting his years upon years of astute political commentary prior to running for the Senate. There is no equivalent parallel with Christine O’Donnell. She has always been a clown and a know-nothing. There is no danger in over-mocking her; she is intrinsically a joke.
RalfW
@Pangloss: We already have handed off the mantle of leading world power. It’s just unAmerkin to ever, ever admit it.
I thought we were headed to British post-colonial style decline and irrelevance, but this gripping new fall season of real-politik TV has me thinking that we’re headed more for post-Yeltsin Russian disarray/depravity/oligarch-ism.
An anti-science, anti-middle-class, kleptocrasy basket case has a hard time being a global power, even with a lot of bombs.
Lex
The GOP’s hostility to science has already run up a body count in its handling of the air quality in lower Manhattan after 9/11 alone. This isn’t just a policy-preference debate or even a question of whether or not we’ll be able to make up lost economic ground. REAL PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE if these whackjobs gain any sort of control over science policy. I don’t know how much plainer you can make it.
RalfW
@Paris: Well said. Satanists are 99% imagined.
Now witches, they’re more common than you’d think. I know quite a few, including author/activist Starhawk. And indeed, the witches I know, to a one, are lefties and activists, are often communitarian-minded, and very much interested in messing up the global corporate power structure.
So it’s handy to call them satanists and be done with it.
Not too different from the witch-burnings of olde. Those tended to be because witches wanted to mess up the male-centric power structure. Oops, that’s not really over, is it?
jl
@Midnight Marauder: I admit it is a fine line, but we should try to remember a line exists.
Yes it is hard to discuss her strange beliefs without making fun of her. But I think all fun making, or serious discussion (however you want to interpret talking about all the things she says she believes or does) should be tied to policy issues.
So, not, “Ha ha, she says she don’t jerk off, whatta marooon’
but
“Her extreme views [insert appropriate polite description or full on crude sex joke here] lead to support of ineffective sex education programs that endanger our children’s health.”
That’s all I’m talking about.
jl
@RalfW:
“I thought we were headed to British post-colonial style decline and irrelevance,”
We should be so lucky!
“we’re headed more for post-Yeltsin Russian disarray/depravity/oligarch-ism.”
Probably more like that. Peronist Argentina is another possibility. Nice welfare state for lucky small segment of the right kind of white people, with an eye for hot ladies as political leaders after the old guy Dear Leader dies off.
Carol
@p.a.: And cost jobs. Meanwhile our rivals in China and India are busy creating the economics of the future and the jobs that go with it, and the rising standards of living. Remember when America used to make fun of China and India for being superstitious and ignorant? China and India don’t make their schoolteachers teach it as science. No matter what their beliefs, at least they believe in science in science’s place.
Mark S.
@El Cid:
What’s absurd is no one goes to the Satanic altar until the third or fourth date.
Carol
@Midnight Marauder: And Franken was kidding, being an entertainer. His personal life off the stage was stable and productive.
Midnight Marauder
@jl:
See, this is where I have to disagree with you. In no way, shape, or form is this woman qualified to serve in the United States Senate, and accordingly, she should be treated as such. In the context of running a campaign for the United States Senate, she should be laughed out of every room she enters and wholly dismissed as a loon. Her supporters should cringe in acute embarrassment every time her name is mentioned in a public place. They should feel such a deep and abiding sense of shame that they eventually decide to not vote at all rather than enable such a complete whack job. In the context of running a campaign for the United States Senate, Christine O’Donnell is not deserving of niceties or respect because she’s insane.
I would argue that this:
enables you to hammer it home with this:
My point is that they are both necessary to get the job done. At a base level, you have to expose her as lacking even a scintilla of respectability or reasonableness. Once you do that, then you bring it all together by demonstrating how her extremist views translate into policy.
catclub
@Cat Lady:
“Can someone explain to me, like I’m five, what the essential difference is between what Christine O’Donnell represents and the Taliban?”
Interesting question! I think if the Taliban had nuclear weapons they would NOT nuke Jerusalem because it is a holy site of Islam. Not so the talevangelicals.
However, if the Taliban _did_ nuke Jerusalem it would be because they hate the fact that Israel exists.
The telvangelicals would nuke it because they love that Israel exists – and that the Israelis’ blood will grease the way for the talevangelicals to make it to heaven!
Clearly different!
Amir_Khalid
I’m amazed that a candidate like Christine O’Donnell who misrepresents her credentials, who is accused of misusing campaign funds, who dares not face media questioning, who can’t hold her own (no pun intended, honest) in a serious policy debate, has a chance at all, even if only because her supporters are more fired up than anyone else’s. I suppose low-info voters are a lost cause. But if her opponents are scared away from showing up her ignorance, stupidity, laziness in thinking through issues, and poor character because it’s not nice, then how are they to convince people that she must not be allowed to win a US senate seat?
What her opponents must do, every time and all the time, is connect each of these failings to her unfitness for office. As Midnight Marauder demonstrates to perfection.
jl
@Midnight Marauder: Well, OK, in this case, follow your vision quest, Midnight Marauder. As long as you take some time to explain why she would be very bad and dangerous in office, make as much fun as you want.
fasteddie9318
Fuck it, let them take us back to blood-letting and leeches and let’s see if that wakes the voters the fuck up.
Joel
@Midnight Marauder: The problem is that O’Donnell isn’t laughed out of the room. So we need to move the national (newspapers, blogs, television) discussion to the point where she is. Until that happens, people will just get insulted by the teasing.
El Cid
@Mark S.: You know how much blood a young man has to let on the altar before he can afford to give his young ladyfriend a Satan ring? They say you have to be ready to spend at least 3 quarts.
El Cid
@RalfW: I understand the whole attempt to let self-defined modern “witches” / wiccans define themselves, but let’s be honest for a minute.
This has nothing to do with what the right wing loons are discussing.
Forget for a minute that there are various people out there doing ceremonies and communing with natural forces, etc., who need to be respected.
Just deal with what the fundies are talking about when they talk about ‘witches’, and there simply are no such things.
They mean actually having contact with Satan and Satanic forces, not just messing around in spooky clothing and imitating movies about witches etc., if there is anyone doing that.
They are so not talking about wiccans (though they hate those too and lump them in with ‘witches’, but they’re still not talking about anything which has anything to do with this actual real world.)
El Cid
By the way, we laugh (or among the more decent of us we are horrified) at these stories of African countries in which people get all hyped up about rumors that so & so is a witch / are witches, and run them down and beat them or worse.
Often men accuse them of things like stealing their penises or making them smaller.
Thankfully we don’t have anyone here encouraging such insane viewpoints in our political system.
Midnight Marauder
@Joel:
Agreed, but I would say that the discussion is moving that way. She bailed on the Sunday shows this weekend and they haven’t taken too kindly to that in The Village. Now she’s being hounded by Mike Pence to explain herself for her witchcraft comments on her right and Wiccan organizations on her Left. And in addition to all of this, the story about her EPIC campaign finance failure is just breaking out into the open.
I think examples like this allow for what jl has been discussing, in terms of not mocking her to the point where people begin to feel sympathetic to her (although I would counter by saying that people made this same argument when Sarah Palin came on the scene, and look at how that situation turned out). In this case, you have someone who is so fundamentally incompetent that she is unable to follow the most basic of finance laws, while simultaneously swindling her supporters out of money so she can pay for gas. You can mock her on a basic level (she is totally unserious as a human being) and then extrapolate it to her performance as a senator (she will be corrupt and dangerous).
Admiral_Komack
@jake the snake:
Or “Black Magic Woman”.
eemom
@El Cid:
But how is this different from that post of Greenwald’s last week — to the effect that the Villagers’ so-called “scorn” of O.D. and other TeaTards is classist — that you said you agreed with?
Serious question; I do respect your opinion as an intelligent commenter.
El Cid
@eemom: It’s hugely different, and your main objection that you stuck with — and it could be correct — was that Greenwald was empirically wrong that ‘the Village’ (the establishmentarian media and pundits as I normally understand it) was dismissing the TeaTards more than standard right wingers.
If that main empirical claim is wrong — i.e., that TeaTardish leaders have been derided more by the establishmentarian media/pundit etc complex than other prior ultra-rightists — then the entire Greenwald argument is wrong.
[I.e., Greenwald was not suggesting that harsh coverage or commentary on or denunciations of TeaTardists was ‘classist’ as would be done for any right wingers, but what would possibly be classist would be a much greater objection to the same things done by TeaTarders than was applied to more recent and prior loony ultra-rightists. Presumably if you applied similar principles at all times, and not just to some particular group of politicians with particular background, the argument would not apply.]
So, this is not in any way a similar argument, and I’m really surprised that you tried to analogize it, unless supposedly it’s supposed to be a stain upon someone’s reputation with you to ever agree, even provisionally, with Glenn Greenwald, in which case I of course wouldn’t waste a second responding to such a person.
eemom
@El Cid:
no, not at all. It was really just an honest question, and I’m sorry that you seem unwilling to take my word for that.
I guess there’s not much point in attempting to have a respectful dialogue with someone who thinks my sole agenda in life is to diss Glenn Greenwald. So, scratch that “respect” thing I said.
El Cid
@eemom: I’ll take your word for it that it was an honest question. It’s pretty rare that I think I see one of those wrt GG, so I’ll just note that those are what I see as clear differences between the two arguments or admonitions, and neither one need be correct.
cursorial
Of course, if some stereotypical witches, satanists, death eaters or whatever showed up to support O’Donnell (because, you know, she’s one of us!) that might be tactically useful.
I’m sure her supporters would be hospitable. They’re all about diversity and the Big Tent after all.
elmo
This whole “witch” thing has been the strangest experience. I read lefty or center-ish blogs, and their reaction is the same as mine: “Witchcraft, ha, what a whackjob. Ain’t no such thing.”
Then I read righty blogs, and their reaction is “Witchcraft, well, that was a long time ago, and anyway, she rejected it.”
And I wonder (again) how a country with half its population stuck in 1692 can really be a global superpower.
Axe Diesel Palin
Was this experience of hers around the same time as the McMartin preschool hysteria and the fear of Satanic Ritual Killings? Back then there was a tremendous amount of paranoia about satanic cults and ritual killings. I wonder if she was swept up in that.
She said “One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar” … “We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar”
Umm. Occam’s razor…
More likely the dude was trying to get her alone and get her scared. What moves this guy had! Take a girl to a midnight picnic, then literally attempt to scare the pants off her. To me this is so much more likely than her explanation.
She was born in 1969. Which would have made her 18 years old in 1987 at the peak of the satanic cult hysteria. Also, she would have been exactly the right age for this attempted exploitation by some young man while on one of her first dates.
She also became religious and abstinent during college, so lets assume that occurred at age 19 or 20. This witchcraft experience fits right in to the peak of the satanic cult hysteria phenomena.
asiangrrlMN
@Bella Q: Yep. I have noted that elsewhere. I have also noted that if she did any of this shit, it was her and a bunch of girlfriends being ‘daring’ and chanting some satanic spells. I didn’t see the ‘I know what they told me they did’ part. That makes it even more ludicrous.
And, the only reason any of her statements are relevant at all is because they pretty much represent her thinking across the board.
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: You go, FH#3. I like it when you get righteously angry.
@jl: I agree to a certain extent. However, much of the shit she spewed back then is pretty consistent with the shit she’s spewing now, so I think it’s relevant for that reason.
@Bella Q: I made this point elsewhere. If she did participate in anything like this, it was just her and a bunch of girlfriends spouting satanic spells one Saturday night because they were bored. I hate the misrepresentation of Wiccan beliefs.
P.S. FYWP. Big time. First comment didn’t show and then showed up after I posted this.
El Cid
@Axe Diesel Palin: I quoted from all the Satanic day care hysteria above. I too was young in the 1980s and I heard all this Christian conspiracy theory bullshit from people who literally believed that Satan was an invisible magic guy waiting to trap people into giving him their souls.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@eemom:
FWIW, I think Greenwald’s piece that you refer to got it wrong and that is part of what I was referring to with the “there are those who say”.
John Bird
Psh, your friend studies GUPPIES? I bet your friend even gets federal money for GUPPIE RESEARCH. What a waste of tax-payer dollars. All research should be done directly on human subjects, or how is it valuable? I therefore reluctantly volunteer myself as a breeding male for studies of sexual selection.
John Bird
@jl:
The byline makes perfect sense – it’s a purposefully mangled joke. It’s making fun of Megan McArdle, the libertarian “business and economics editor” for The Atlantic Monthly who has been schooled under her own byline, among other embarrassing incidents, on business by Matt Taibbi and on economics by Prof. Brad DeLong, who both revealed that McArdle does not grasp even basic terms in both areas. Because, you see, DougJ is as qualified as she is to . . . okay, you get it.
jl
@John Bird: thanks. I never bothered to look at McArdle’s byline until I read your comment.
Ha ha.
This blog is too sophisticated for me, as I have often noted.