If you need an excuse to jump-start your weekend drinking, Dave Weigel at Slate is covering this year’s “Values Voter Summit“, the annual fanfest for dog-torturers, luggage-lifting-rentboy-buyers, and Talibangelical-ticklers. Here’s a taste of his coverage on St. Gidget of Narnia:
… One hundred hours ago, the Republican establishment and a large number of the conservative movement’s thinkers were in agreement. O’Donnell was an unacceptable candidate. She had falsely claimed to have a college degree in hand when she didn’t, falsely claimed to have won two counties against Joe Biden when she didn’t, sued one of the citadels of the movement — the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — and in that lawsuit, mentioned a Princeton program she was supposedly in that no one heard tell of ever again. She had paid her family and herself from campaign funds. Most unforgivably, she had converted the Delaware seat from a sure Republican gain to a sure Democratic hold.
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The establishment pointed this out. The base decided to create a new reality. In this reality, O’Donnell was a maltreated, misunderstood Average American, a Christian attacked for her faith. Going after her was going after them. They responded to the negative coverage of her by crashing her website with more than $1 million of donations — this for a candidate, again, who has paid her mother from campaign funds, the kind of offense that lights up talk radio when it’s committed by Democrats.
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The media covers the reality that the base creates, and so O’Donnell arrived at this conference as a superstar. Top talent from ABC News, Fox News, and NBC News waited outside to get a chance to talk to her. A capacity room waited for her to speak, and more than a dozen cameramen splayed onto the floor to capture the moment…
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O’Donnell walked onstage and gripped the papers containing her speech. The gist: She was the embodiment of the Tea Party movement. She experienced “the despondency” that they felt when Barack Obama came to Washington, and was mocked like they were mocked.
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“There’s something about our national DNA,” said O’Donnell, “that stands up and shouts at our would-be masters, you’re not the boss of me.” She compared the movement, and by extension herself, to Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia: “Of course he isn’t safe, but he’s good.”
Fortunately for Tony Perkins, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has no mandate to prevent the ‘values-based’ parting of fools from their money…