Just how crazy is Sharron Angle? (8)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(Welcome, Sun readers. For more on Angle's craziness, click here and scroll down.)

As the Las Vegas Sun's Jon Ralston reports, Angle, the far-right, insurgent Nevada Republican nominee for Senate (running against Harry Reid, of course), proudly declared in '06, when she ran for Congress, that she would have voted against the $62 billion in Katrina relief that Congress approved in September '05.

Only 11 House members voted against the package, which received broad bipartisan support. Far-right Rep. Mike Pence, whom Angle specifically mentions in her comments, voted for it, as did the Republican leadership, which at the time included Rep. Tom DeLay, hardly a big-government liberal. Sure, Republicans knew it would look bad to vote against relief, and against the victims of one of the worst natural disasters in American history, but at least most of them did the right thing, whatever their motivations.

Angle might have voted for it, too, or been pressured to vote for it, but the fact -- and it's on tape, thankfully, as Angle is whitewashing her past -- is that she came out publicly and determinedly against it.

Now, I'm all for budget sanity, too, but there are times when government has to step in and do what needs to be done, as in the case of historic economic crises and massive hurricanes that cause extraordinary damage to life and property. Just think back to those horrendous images of New Orleans, of so much of the Gulf Coast. You really want to play politics with that? You really want to hold out for offsets, or else?

That says an awful lot about just what sort of a human being Sharron Angle is. She's crazy, as we've known for some time, but evidently she's also cruel, the proponent of a conservative ideology, to the extent that she really understands what she claims to support, that seemingly cares nothing for human suffering, that pushes the failed trickle-down economic polities of the past at the expense of common decency, and that would have let Katrina's victims and homes, not to mention a great American city, rot.

It's good these tapes are out there, because we all, and Nevadans in particular, need to know just what Angle is all about.