The Insane Virginia GOP Slate: A Real-World Test of the Far Right

The current Virginia GOP slate for statewide office - Ken Cuccinelli, "Bishop" E.W. Jackson, and Mark Obenshain - are the dream ticket of the Christofascists at the Family Foundation and hate groups like Family Research Council and American Family Association.  All three are far right religious extremists who hold views dear the the Kool-Aid drinking set even though polls suggest a majority of Virginians find their positions unsettling if not down right scary.  As a column in the Richmond Times Dispatch recognizes, the trio of extremists will provide a real world teat of the far right claim that Republicans have lost elections because the GOP candidates have not been sufficiently "conservative."  I think this argument is yet another part of the alternate universe/fantasy world these folks live in, so I am hoping the trios of crazies goes down to crushing defeat.  Here are highlights from the column:

Conservatives have a ready explanation whenever the GOP loses an election: The Republican candidate was too liberal.

You heard this again and again after Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama. “When conservative principles are the focal point of the election, they win,” wrote Michael Walsh in National Review. “When ‘electability’ and ‘reaching across the aisle’ are personified in a middling candidate at the presidential level, they lose.”

Thirty-four days from today, the Old Dominion will provide a real-world test of that theory. When Virginians go to the polls, they will have the opportunity to vote for the most conservative slate of statewide candidates in modern times.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli — for whom “tea party favorite” has become an all but official agnomen — outmaneuvered the Virginia GOP establishment to seize the gubernatorial nomination from the more moderate, less confrontational Bill Bolling. Bolling has since announced the creation of the Virginia Mainstream Project “to call our party back to a more mainstream approach.”

Cuccinelli’s conservatism is unadulterated: He fought the EPA over climate change and filed the first state suit against Obamacare. He opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest; considers homosexuality “intrinsically wrong”; supports school choice, gun rights, and tax cuts; and takes a hard-line stance on illegal immigration. Three years ago, he even handed out lapel pins to his staff bearing a more demure version of the state seal — one that covered up the otherwise exposed breast of the Roman goddess Virtus. (Racy stuff, if you squint really hard.)

State Sen. Mark Obenshain, running for Attorney General, is less pugnacious but no less conservative than Cuccinelli. He has supported both fetal “personhood” legislation and requiring an ultrasound as a precondition of abortion; favors requiring a photo ID to vote; wants to drug-test welfare recipients; has a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union; and once introduced legislation permitting state regulators to yank the license of any business employing an illegal alien.

And then there is E.W. Jackson, the nominee for lieutenant governor, whose pronouncements on social issues go too far even for his running mates. An August Times-Dispatch profile summarized some of them, noting that Jackson has “linked homosexuality to pedophilia, called gays and lesbians ‘sick’ and ‘perverted,’ ridiculed President Barack Obama’s Christian faith and accused the Democratic Party of being ‘anti-God’. ... Jackson (also has) said ... ‘the Democrat Party and Planned Parenthood are partners in this genocide’” — i.e., the aborting of black children. Sunday before last, he suggested people of non-Christian faiths practice a “false religion.”

After years of enduring candidates too moderate for their tastes, fire-and-brimstone conservatives have the ticket they always dreamed of — precisely the sort of Republican ticket, they insist, that wins elections. It is also precisely the sort of Republican ticket dreamed of by Democrats — who, believing the GOP slate is far too extreme for any rational voter to support, have made its conservative principles the focal point of the election.

In 34 days, we’ll find out whose theory is right.

As I have continued to stress, it is CRITICAL that gays, women, minorities and sane Virginian go to the polls in droves on November 5, 2013, and send this trio of lunatics down to defeat and in the process drive a stake through the heart of this far right theory once and for all.