The Virginia Taliban Strikes Out

If the Virginia Republican Party wanted to lose the 2013 elections, they were faced with an urgent problem.

At the top of the ticket they would be facing off against Terry McAuliffe, the glad handing, ethically challenged slime ball money man of the Clinton political machine. Who, by the way, had never held elective office in his entire life, and, who was running in what is essentially a conservative state.

How do you lose to a guy like that in a state (OK—a Commonwealth. Save your hate mail for a more worthy cause.) like Virginia?

So here’s the plan.

Start by not selecting your candidates in a state-wide primary, where a more moderate and reasonable Republican could emerge who might have a chance of peeling off some votes in the hated liberal precincts in Northern Virginia. Instead select your candidates in a closed convention that could be dominated by the most extreme, most hateful, and the most regressive elements in your party.

Check.

Then you offer candidates that could have been endorsed by Mullah Omar (See my prior post on this topic. No need to rehash it here.) Start with Ken Cuccinelli for Governor. The Cooch is anti-science, anti-academic freedom, anti-women’s right to choose their own health care options, pro-medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds, wanted to make oral sex between consenting adults, including married couples, a felony, climate change denier, and an opponent of expanding Medicaid under the ACA. Did I mention that he was also caught up in the Governor Ultrasound corruption stink-show by accepting cash from the magic tobacco pill guy and not disclosing it? Not only is that not going to play well with educated voters who actually live in the 21^st Century (aka ”Northern Virginia”), but it makes it kind of hard to raise ethical issues about your opponent, doesn’t it?

Check.

It gets better. The next step in the plan is to nominate Bishop Jackson for Lieutenant Governor. This is a man who believes that Planned Parenthood is worse than the Ku Klux Klan (after all, the Klan never offered mammograms or screenings for cervical cancer. Or something.), gay people are sick and twisted as well as “icky”, and the unamended Constitution, including the provision to count slaves as 3/5s of a person was actually an anti-slavery manifesto. We were even treated to a television interview when the Bishop, when confronted with his own repulsive statements, tried to deny he said those awful things. When you try to live in the 18^th Century, you often lose your grasp of some essentially modern things—like digital recordings of nearly everything a public figure says. If you want to run away from your past, then you have to do better than just lie your way out of it. We have the tape.

Check.

The last stroke of genius in the master plan to lose the election is to nominate Mark Obenshain for Attorney General. Mr. Obenshain is noted mostly for introducing a bill in the Virginia legislature that would have required women to report miscarriages to the police. Or go to prison. Small government and freedom for old angry white men—police state for women.

Check.

So trot out this lunatic trifecta from Right Wing Nutbagistan and you will lose to the Democratic slime ball, even in a conservative state. And lose they did—0 for 3. To be fair, Mr. Obenshain could still pull this off in the recount that is coming. A recount, by the way, that will be subject to oversight of the sitting Attorney General—the Cooch himself.

The Virginia Republican corruption stink show continues.