Another Teabagger Nut Case !!
PTCru...@webtv.net
AP
Tim D'Annunzio, Republican congressional candidate for North Carolina's
8th district, speaks at a news conference in Concord, N.C. on Monday.
Conservatives have spent the past year or so gleefully citing the Tea
Party phenomenon as evidence of the president's unpopularity. This was
always a fantastical claim: the arrival of a new political movement
doesn't tell us more about public opinion than, you know, actual
measures of public opinion. But it was an easy weapon to hand, so there
it was.
But in wielding the Tea Party as a rhetorical cudgel against the
president and his party, elite Republicans made a crucial
miscalculation. By making the approval of the Tea Partiers the measure
of legitimacy, they entrusted their own fate to this new group of
activists. And now the establishment of the GOP is stuck trying to wrest
control of the party back from these ruffians, whom they wanted to
exploit without actually empowering.
Out of North Carolina today, there's a story about Republican leaders
trying to put the skids under the congressional campaign of Tea Party
candidate Tim D'Annunzio, who?s running to challenge vulnerable
Democratic incumbent Rep. Larry Kissell. The state Republican Party has
been publicizing D'Annunzio's past run-ins with the law and his
questionable sanity. Apparently, the guy went through a phase in the
1990s in which he claimed to be the messiah and had a lot of theories
about the Ark of the Covenant, 1,000-mile-high pyramids, the New
Jerusalem -- you get the picture.
"Mr. D'Annunzio has disqualified himself by his background, his record
and his behavior," says the GOP state chairman, which is a pretty strong
line for a party chief to take on an ongoing primary. Still, given
D'Annunzio's, shall we say, colorful past, it's little wonder that the
party is eager to be rid of him.
D'Annunzio acknowledges a "troubled upbringing" but says that the party
is just engaging in dirty tricks to keep power now. "The bigger story is
that the power brokers in Raleigh and in Washington are willing to go to
any length and use any unscrupulous tactic to try to destroy somebody.
They think that they're losing their control over the Republican Party."
And some D?Annunzio supporters, at least, look like they?ll interpret
the fight as evidence of their candidate?s independence. "He's not the
kind of person the parties can rule over and manipulate," said one.
Whether this guy is a nutcase, there's obviously something happening
here. North Carolina isn't the only place where the GOP is trying to put
a lid on the Tea Party. We saw it in Kentucky in the primary race
between Trey Grayson and now-nominee Rand Paul. There's also a similar
conflict playing out in Nevada, where Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle
may or may not be surging past Republican front-runner Sue Lowden for
the right to challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the fall.
Reid may be toast against Lowden, but he might have a shot against the
less-known and more extreme Angle.
This tension is an inherent part of running a political party,
especially when the issues on the national agenda are making the party
base restive. Political scientists have long been aware of the natural
conflict between the "professionals" and the "purists." What the
professionals want is to get and hold power; what the purists want is to
enact their agenda. The professionals have some use for the purists:
they can point to them as evidence of a popular base, they can use them
to staff campaigns and organizations and mine them for fundraising. But
they won't risk actually turning power over to the activists. This is
true, of course, of both parties. Early last decade, we saw a similar
fight play out around the presidential candidacy of Howard Dean. The
general sense of a self-dealing elite that would prefer to sacrifice
cherished principles than to lose power is arguably the single most
important factor contributing to the current state of discredit of our
political institutions.
Viewed from a partisan Democratic vantage point, there's something
satisfying in seeing the GOP turn against its own. Surely, there'll be
more of this to come, especially as the Republican presidential
primaries get going. But Democrats shouldn't celebrate too much. After
all, activists on the left have been reminded, repeatedly, of the limits
of their own power in the face of centrist, technocratic expertise. The
Tea Party and activist liberals are hardly allies. But they share, at
least, a common set of problems -- and they probably always will.
condor
In Hoke County divorce records, his wife said in 1995 that D'Annunzio
had claimed to be the Messiah, had traveled to New Jersey to raise his
stepfather from the dead, believed God would drop a 1,000-mile high
pyramid as the New Jerusalem on Greenland and found the Ark of the
Covenant in Arizona. A doctor's evaluation the following month said
D'Annunzio used marijuana almost daily, had been living with another
woman for several months, had once been in drug treatment for heroin
dependence and was jailed a couple times as a teenager.
The doctor concluded that his religious beliefs were not delusional. A
judge wrote in a child support ruling a few years later that
D'Annunzio was a self-described "religious zealot" who believed the
government was the "Antichrist." The judge said he was willfully
failing to make child support payments.
more ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20100524/us-gop-tea-party/
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condor
See, to win a Republican primary these days, you have to be bat-shit
crazy!
A little crazy isn't good enough. You have to tell the TEABAGGERS
that GAWD is going to drop a 1,000 mile-high pyramid on Greenland.
And guess what? The BAGGERS will vote for you, just like they did for
this D'Annunzio guy!
The GOP is being taken over by religiously insane, crazy TEABAGGERS!
And what a show they're putting on for the rest of us!
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herm...@webtv.net
"I'm not a leftist, I'm where the righteous ought to be"