Virginia’s Democratic Party, still reeling from the losses it’s suffered in the last two elections, has decided the only way it can maintain its tenuous hold on the state Senate is to invent an enemy. It’s choice? Former Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell.
As reported in The Hill, O’Donnell, speaking at a tea party fundraiser in Northern Virginia, uttered the usual number of sound bytes that drive the left nuts (comparing Pearl Harbor to an extension of unemployment benefits? To arms!). But the fun was only beginning. Quickly following her appearance, the Senate Democratic caucus issued a fundraising appeal that put O’Donnell front and center. The appeal, sent under Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple’s signature, thundered that O’Donnell was “…raising money to be spent next year against our Democratic senators,” and was just the latest sign of how Gov. McDonnell, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and a cabal of shadowy, outside groups were preparing to bring “…their radical agenda into our state.”
It’s almost enough for me to head to the barricades. But wait…what positive agenda do Senate Democrats have to offer in repose to these crazed hordes? Nothing except to state, almost as an afterthought, that the Democratic senate remains the “last bastion of sanity” in Virginia government.
I’m sure House Democrats were pleased to hear that.
It’s easy enough to put all of this down as fundraising hyperbole. But it does make one wonder how Sen. Whipple (and her crafty copywriter) define “sanity.”
Is it sane to back a gas tax hike in the face of a weak economy and rising gas prices? Or perhaps it’s quite sane to accuse those who support school choice of wanting to sell children? Perhaps, then, sanity is defined as trampling a property rights bill championed by fellow Democrat Ward Armstrong. Then again, he’s a House member and Sen. Whipple has already told us the House and its members are not sane.
To recap: sanity, in Sen. Whipple’s world, requires one to embrace higher taxes, disdain property rights and view school choice as the next best thing to Jim Crow.
With a record like that, no wonder they have to invent bogeymen like Christine O’Donnell to scare the faithful into action. It saves them from having to defend their own delirious brand of crazy.
