Can We Calm Down About Delaware's Tea Party Already?
September 15, 2010 at 12:27AM by Charles P Pierce
There is a real danger in overthinking what happened in Delaware on Tuesday night, which is not something of which the winner of the state's GOP senatorial primary ever has been accused. In case you missed it, and Chris Matthews ascending into the heavens above your house, a woman named Christine O'Donnell won that primary over an establishment android named Mike Castle, who, at one point or another, apparently had held every elected office in Delaware except this one. Once O'Donnell's victory was assured, the requisite thumbsucking over What It All Means got dialed up to 11 almost immediately. Matthews was the wildest, divining a secret hidden block of frustrated Hillary Clinton voters who had been marinating in frustration since the 2008 primaries and were bleeding from the teeth to vote for anyone with ovaries, even someone who spent the 1990s inveighing against the evils of jacking off. This astonished Rachel Maddow, who famously wrangled with Matthews back in 2008 over his career-long obsession with the naughty bits of both of the Clintons. Matthews further maintained that it might be dangerous for Democrats to treat O'Donnell with the scorn and derision her campaign so richly deserves because he remembered that they did that to Ronald Reagan, too, and look how that turned out.
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O'Donnell is a creature of an age in which politics have no meaning beyond performance art. She is the Creature from the Green Room, with no apparent public career beyond being available whenever some teenage booker from the cable shows needed someone to say something reliably stupid. She is one of those people who'd show up at CNN with a waterbowl in her teeth if someone there blew a dog whistle.
Her résumé is so thin as to be opaque, and a lot of it seems to be a lie. She seems to be something of a deadbeat, and "U.S. Senator" seems to be her idea of an entry-level position. This morning, she stands one step away from the job.
She is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government. She is what you get when you sell to the country that nothing government can do will help, and that the government is an alien thing, and that politics is nothing more than the active public display of impotent grievance.
She is what politics produces when you turn it into a game show and the coverage of it over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. She is what you get when political journalism reduces politics to numbers on a scoreboard, divorcing it from the real-world consequences of what are increasingly seen as cute little eccentric decisions.She is what politics produces when we abandon self-government for self-gratification. And that's the real obvious irony in her victory on Tuesday night, and the only thing about it that truly matters. Christine O'Donnell's campaign is a successful exercise in angry, misfit masturbation, with as little to do with the deadly problems this country faces as some guy wanking in the balcony of a grindhouse has to do with Romeo and Juliet.
This is the first in a weekly series on where we're at by Charles P. Pierce on The Politics Blog. Stay attuned.
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http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/christine-o-donnell-delaware-091510#ixzz0zhI5x2pv
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