Just how crazy is Sharron Angle? (1)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It would be unfair to allow Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, to qualify for our Craziest Republican of the Day series. Why? Because in this campaign season she could win it day after day. She's that crazy.

So let's start a new series -- How crazy is Sharron Angle? -- in which we document, as far as possible, the mounting evidence of her astonishing craziness.

Okay? Okay.

Let's get started with the WaPo's Greg Sargent:

Here's another one that could be tough for Sharron Angle to explain away: In an interview in January, Angle appeared to float the possibility of armed insurrection if "this Congress keeps going the way it is."

I'm not kidding. In an interview she gave to a right-wing talk show host, Angle approvingly quoted Thomas Jefferson saying it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years -- and said that if Congress keeps it up, people may find themselves resorting to "Second Amendment remedies."

That's right, armed insurrection, an attempt to topple the country's democratically elected government. For more on what we're talking about here, see TPM's Justin Elliott:

The key to understanding Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle may be the fact that she has not always been a Republican.

For at least six years in the 1990s before she held state-level elective office, Angle was a member of the little-known Independent American Party, a right-wing party that combines elements of Ron Paul's doctrinaire libertarianism -- pro-gun, anti-tax, anti-bureaucracy, pro-states' rights -- with Christian social conservatism and fear of the "North American Union" and other forms of "global government." The small party attracted considerable controversy in 1994 when it took out a newspaper ad titled "Consequences of Sodomy: Ruin of a Nation," which suggested HIV could spread through the water.

Three members of the Independent American Party tell TPM that Angle, a Nye County, Nevada, school board member at the time, was an active member of the party in the 1990s. They say she only left the Independent American Party and became a Republican out of political expediency when she decided to seek a seat in the state assembly, to which she was elected in 1998.

That's right, she was well to the right of Ronald Reagan and the bulk of the Republican establishment of the '80s and '90s. She's more "mainstream" now, given how far to the right the GOP has moved, but she's still a fringe-dweller in broader terms.

This is a woman, after all, who appears to hate democracy, and whose loyalty is not to her country but to a far-right ideology of delusion and paranoia.

How crazy is she? I'm not sure we have a scale big enough to contain her. We may be beyond Michele Bachmann territory here (if not by much).