downdb.net

John Cole, on the news that Orly Taitz is running for the Republican nomination for California Secretary of state:

The Republicans have spent the last couple of years doing everything they could to feed this kind of nutbaggery in the shadows while “respectable Conservatives” pretended to not know anything about it. The very first thing the Republicans did when Obama won the nomination was to court frothers and birthers in the PUMA movement and court the lunatic fringe with attempts to “otherize” Obama. Whisper campaigns about him not saying the Pledge or refusing to swear on a bible or not wearing enough USA #1 bling on his suit led to “underground” email campaigns that led to the continued existence of birthers and other nutjobs who insist Obama is a socialist Muslim Kenyan. You thought that rhetoric from Sarah Palin was a mistake when she said “He doesn’t look at America the way we do” and he “pals around with terrorists?” They knew what they were and are doing. They teases and teased, introducing citizenship bills and hinting he might not be American, and now Orly is one of them.

Two things.

First, I quite regularly read and hear people saying that while the Right has its nutjobs, so does the left. Complaints about extremist ideologies and general crazy-talk by Republican supports are generally shouted down by cat-calls about Cindy Sheehan and Sean Penn. Sorry, but no comparison when you have stuff like a member of your own party casually throwing around terms like “raghead”, or someone like Taitz making an apparently serious run for a major state office under your banner.

Second, Cole engages in some serious schadenfreude regarding the possibility of Taitz winning the nomination, the idea being that her name appearing on the Republican side of the ballot would result in a Democratic landslide. As much as I would like to laugh derisively at that, a part of me seriously wonders if Taitz’s chances of winning really would be that small.