Just how crazy is Sharron Angle? (7)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Joe McCarthy crazy. Here's Greg Sargent with the details:

On a radio interview conducted on the day she announced her Senate run in 2009, Sharron Angle clearly and unequivocally agreed with an interviewer who asserted flatly that there are "domestic enemies" and "homegrown enemies" in the "walls of the Senate and the Congress."

In a separate post, he quotes Harry Reid's justifiably angry response:

Sharron Angle's rhetoric is irresponsible and over the top. Let me be very clear. While I may have some differences of opinion with my Republican colleagues in the Senate, I have never questioned their patriotism. For Sharron Angle to agree that any of them -- Republican or Democrat -- is an enemy of the state is not only an insult to every United States Senator, it's a disgrace to our country. If she is going to use such rhetoric, she has an obligation to name names and explain to the American people exactly who she thinks is a domestic enemy.

Needless to say, Reid has a lot of material to work with, though, as Sargent notes, he generally avoids any direct criticism himself, leaving it to his supporters. But this, a direct attack on Congress -- and specifically on Reid and his Democratic colleagues (because it's not like Angle was calling any Republicans "enemies" of the state) -- required a direct response from Reid himself.

Of course, Angle either doesn't know what she's talking about, just nodding like a puppet, or really does think that some in Congress -- it's not clear, but likely those more progressive members of Congress who object to the far-right-fringe conservative ideology that is now at the heart of the Republican Party -- are basically traitors working to undermine "our system," as far-right-fringe radio host Bill Manders put it to her.

This is crazy, yes, but also cowardly, and Reid is quite right that she should name names and be held accountable for making such an outrageous claim. But this is how conservatives work -- these days, at least. Without much to stand for in any positive way, other then the failed economic policies of the past, theocracy at home, and warmongering abroad, they resort to the politics of us and them, feeding the culture of fear and hatred with partisan divisiveness and scapegoating of the Other, undermining the "system" and the American way by acting and speaking with un-American zealotry.

Angle is just one of them, crazy and stupid, and she needs to be called out on it.