Just how crazy is Sharron Angle? (4)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(You can find the first three parts of this ongoing series here, here and here.)

Just how crazy is she? So crazy that her people are trying to hide just how crazy by erasing her history of craziness:

Sharron Angle has resorted to an unusual maneuver to counter Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's attacks on her past quotes and positions, the Reid campaign has announced: A cease-and-desist letter, demanding that Reid no longer republish Angle's previous campaign website.

The short version of the story is as follows: After the former state Rep won Nevada's Republican Senate primary, Angle's campaign took down most of its website, and later replaced it with a relaunched version that in some ways toned down her right-wing rhetoric. But Internet pages are rarely ever forgotten -- the Reid campaign saved the old version, and put up a website called "The Real Sharron Angle," reproducing the old content.

Then, they say, the Angle campaign sent them a cease-and-desist letter, claiming misuse of copyrighted materials in the reposting of the old website -- which was, of course, being posted for the purposes of ridiculing Angle. The Reid campaign has in fact taken down the site, rerouting visitors to another website that goes after Angle's positions, "Sharron's Underground Bunker."

I'm not exactly an expert in copyright law, and she (and her campaign) may have a good case here. The Reid campaign, after all, has taken down the website that included verbatim content taken from her website. While this will perhaps be fought out in the courts, I agree with the Reid campaign: "While we do not necessarily agree with the Angle campaign's assertions, a point is made," said one campaign official. "Sharron Angle is hiding her views from Nevada voters."

To be fair, Angle's campaign is sane enough to realize that it has to whitewash her craziness out of existence, or at least to try to hide written evidence of her craziness from public view. Playing to the far right during the campaign, that is, directly appealing to the far right that controls the Republican Party at the grassroots level, as well as increasingly at the state and national levels, and doing so successfully, the campaign is retreating to, well, not to the center, nor even to the center-right, where the few remaining sane Republicans remain, but to the somewhat less far right. Even in Nevada, where a certain amount of political craziness sells, and even in a time of anti-incumbent bias, it's really the only way, barring a complete Reid collapse, which is possible given his unpopularity, for Angle to pull this off.

Regardless of what the Reid campaign posts and is allowed to post online, though, it is essential that the truth about Sharron Angle be known, and that Nevada voters know who and what she really is. So go ahead and check out Sharron Angle's Underground Bunker.

Angle can run from the truth, and her campaign can try to rewrite her history, but her craziness is there for all to see.