Bewitched, Bothersome, and Bewildering

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Happy Halloween, Christine O'Donnell, who is not a witch this year! (Instead, she's pretending to be a political pundit.)

October wanes to one last spin of the globe and thoughts of Halloween turn a not-so-young man’s fancy to writing about Christine O’Donnell.

Remember her?  It wasn’t all that long ago.  It seems like last year.  Actually, it was last year.

GOP nominee for U.S. Senate from the First State of Delaware — in fact, the only state of Delaware! —  placed there by the conservative equivalent of the Occupy Wall Street movement (now so described) as its political effectiveness is emphasized to us on cable, ran a TV commercial explaining that she was “not a witch,” but was rather “you,” meaning us.

(I don’t know which was scarier, that Christine O’Donnell might have been a witch, or that she was “us.”)

Some of you may be thinking, “hey, I know that tomorrow is Halloween and all, but you still shouldn’t hit Christine O’Donnell while she’s down!”  Ready for the punch line?  She’s not down!

She was on Piers Morgan in August, although she walked off her gig promoting her book, “Troublemaker: Let’s Do What It Takes to Make America Great Again” (which if you are a conservative I dare you to buy and place on your coffee table when company is coming over) when Morgan kept asking her about witchcraft and gay marriage.   (Or perhaps it was “gay witch marriage”; few states yet approve of warlock wedlock.)  Her decision to donate to Mitt Romney — and, to be on the safe side, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum too, because she wants each of them to be in the top tier, and oh she also loves Michele Bachmann — made the news on Roll Call, The Hill, and the ABC News site, among other reputable outcomes.  And remember, this is a woman who made history by helping deny the GOP the Senate (because no one should have trusted Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson not to switch parties if doing so could have made the difference.)  She’s never going to be nominated again!

But on this first Halloween in which children could dress up as Christine O’Donnell without scaring the adults, her mere persistent existence on the political scene begs several questions.  She was famous for campaigning on the issue that “masturbation is wrong,” but objected to Morgan asking her about it on his show.  Yet she is the one who brought it up in the first place!

I have associated O’Donnell with Halloween for another reason: last year, Bill Maher pulled out some archival footage of a 1999 interview with O’Donnell (from which the above image, which I’ve Photoshopped to make more spooooooky!, was taken) where she said this:

“I don’t celebrate Halloween because of what it means–because it is a Satanic holiday.  It is a Pagan holiday. And while people are going around getting free candy other people are falling victims to human sacrifices and this like that.  I mean, that’s the reality of what’s going on on Halloween.”

Now, I’m from the political party that, so far as I can tell, has no loud and even dominant faction within it that considers Halloween to be Satanic, let alone asserting that it is a night in which people fall victim to human sacrifice.  So I invite, I encourage, people from the loyal opposition to explain to me: how was this woman ever taken seriously as a potential member for the U.S. Senate?

It’s not an idle question: all major GOP candidates who aren’t Mormon could have been completely capable of uttering a quote like that themselves, and for all I know Rick Perry did so in his recent speech before I had to turn it off and floss my brain.  This is what sells in one of the two major parties in the most powerful nation in the world, a nation whose very existence was an expression of Enlightenment thinking and values.  What is (you should pardon the expression) Hell is going on?

If you think that I’m being unfair in saying that this could come out of the mouths of Republican Presidential aspirants, my conservative brethren, then I encourage you to ask them, because the election comes right after Halloween next year and I promise you that if you don’t I will!

But I have another skeletal bone to pick when I’m reminded of O’Donnell, and that is this:

It is an article of faith among some on the Left that there is nothing that a Republican pundit or political operative can say, other than perhaps something that suggests support for some aspect of liberal ideology, that would keep them off of the media.  Say that Obama is the Antichrist, that god sends hurricanes to punish those who tolerate gays, that by ensuring that almost everyone will have access to basic healthcare in a mere three years Democrats are ushering in Stalinist socialism, that there should be no minimum wage at all, that whites are the master … well, whatever Pat Buchanan routinely says that stays a whisker’s width away from that — and you’re fine.

I’d like to know this: what illiberal sentiment, if any, would scare conservatives enough that they would be shunned from the conservative airwaves?

I have a feeling that, for my political opponents, there truly is no longer any line that cannot be crossed.  As Halloween approaches — beginning a year when unlimited amounts can be spent to convince the electorate that white is black, up is down, and that Jesus would campaign on Satan’s platform — that’s what really scares me.