Tea Party star and Delaware new GOP candidate for Senate Christine O’Donnell’s campaign has gotten off to a bewitching start with news that she said she once dabbled in witchcraft.
It sparked a host of posts including our humble offering of three possible campaign songs she might consider using for her campaign. She has already cast a spell on Tea Party movement members and supporters and on members of the budding constituency of Sarah Palin. Many believe Palin’s endorsement “made” O’Donnnell. O’Donnell may be a candidate who is dogged by old video: one of the most viewed about her (on progressive blogs, mentioned on MSNBC and alluded to by cartoonists such as in the copyrighted syndicated Cagle cartoon above by Taylor Jones that is licensed to run on TMV above) involves her coming out in favor of masturbation.
Here’s a cross section of reaction from varying viewpoints to the suggestion that O’Donnell might bring a broom into government for other reasons than to clean it up. These are excerpts so please go to the full links to read the entire posts.
–John at the highly popular Republican blog Powerline:
Christine O’Donnell’s campaign went off the rails today when Bill Maher announced that he has previously-unseen clips of O’Donnell from the late 1990s when she appeared several times on his show…
Lest there be any doubt, if I were a resident of Delaware, I would vote for O’Donnell. That is because she is far preferable to her “bearded Marxist” opponent. But O’Donnell is, nevertheless, a lousy candidate. I’m sorry, but politics is not about snatching random people out of the crowd and making them one of 100 United States Senators. Those who seek high office need to be qualified as leaders. They must be thoughtful and intelligent; they must have accomplishments in the public, or, better yet, the private sphere.
Christine O’Donnell has none of the above qualities. If the best we can say about her is that her “dabbling in witchcraft” is excusable, I rest my case. She will be a laughingstock for the next six weeks, I fear, and then will be clobbered in the general election. Whether this is better or worse than having Mike Castle as a Senator is a legitimately debatable point. But I don’t see how any conservative can deny that it would be better if the Republican Party had nominated a stronger and more qualified conservative to represent Delaware in the Senate.
—Newshogger’s Steve Hynd points out that wicthcraft is a recognized religion and nothing like what O’Donnell is alleging she dabbled in.
—Michelle Malkin (who remains one of the Internet’s liveliest writers) says Maher basically did an out of context hatchet job that that omitted a key fact. It was then spread by those opposed to O’Donnell:
Narcissism. Blackmail. Distortion. All wrapped in his trademark smirk of pallor. Yes, it’s tired old liberal “comedian” Bill Maher trying to get Senate GOP primary candidate Christine O’Donnell to come on his show by baiting her with a brief video clip in which she mentions having “dabbled” in “witchcraft” and hung around people who practiced it.
The left-wing blogs (and a few short-sighted rightie ones) are having a field day. What they all seem to have missed is the context for the discussion. The AP says the “context of what led to the comment is not clear.”
But it is if you paid close attention to the clip……At 1:03 in the video, one of the panelists on the show criticizes O’Donnell for criticizing Halloween — “Wait a minute, I love this, you’re a witch, you go ‘Halloween is bad,’ I’m not the witch, I mean wait a minute.” She responds by explaining that she opposes witchcraft because she has had first-hand experience with what they do.
So, she tried it. She rejected it. And she learned from it.
[Of course, the question then is: if a Democrat had tried it and rejected and learned from it would they be given a pass on a bit of…ahem…background that most politicos have not had — even though you can imagine some male and female politicians flying on broomsticks on Halloween? Most likely answer: No. Rush, Sean, Hannity and conservative blogs would most assuredly be writing about it until the story was old pointed hat. Politics is politics is politics — and these days NO ONE of either party gets a pass or a really embarrassing revelation.]
—Ken Layne:
Do you remember, a few days ago, when we MADE UP A COMEDIC STORY implying that Christine O’Donnell practices witchcraft? (It was a masturbation joke, somehow, like most mid-September jokes about Christine O’Donnell.) Well, guess what? Christine O’Donnell was actually a witch! But she didn’t “join a coven,” she says, in actual video from the show Politically Incorrect, which is the main source of hilarious/insane Christine O’Donnell quotes from the 1990s. Oh yeah and one time, she says she had a “little midnight picnic” of blood on a “Satanic altar,” as part of a “date.”
[Does anyone believe Nancy Pelosi would ever be allowed to live down a quote like that? Or would Rush, Sean and Glenn mention it every day?]
—Le-Gal In-sur-cec-tion:
Do our self-appointed guardians of “the Buckley Rule” [Editor’s Note: That was that you vote for the best conservative, versus the Limbaugh Rule which is you vote for the most conservative] think that the tens of thousands of Delawareans who will be forced off their private health plans, whose businesses will be decimated by cap-and-trade, whose 2nd Amendment rights are under attack, whose right to be left the hell alone is about to evaporate, really care that when Christine O’Donnell was young and irresponsible, she was young and irresponsible?
Does high blog traffic trump our collective national desire to see our kids grow up in a nation in which the state is the servant not the master (h/t Margaret Thatcher)?
To those on the right playing into the Think Progress and Media Matters playbook because they think it makes them look wise, don’t you see the game?
The left is doing to O’Donnell exactly what they did to Sharron Angle — swamp her with accusations and nonsense in the days after the primary to keep her from organizing her campaign. The Nevada primary was months ago, so Angle had a chance to recover. O’Donnell doesn’t have that luxury of time given the late primary. She needs to integrate millions of dollars in new cash, gear up with staff, and plan her attack.
With each of your self-righteous columns and snide blog posts, you become part of the problem not part of the solution.
After Bill Maher aired those tapes last night on his HBO show, O’Donnell suddenly canceled her appearances on CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday. In her defense, who wants to dredge up painful memories about the time you dated that witch who charmed you with a picnic basket at a bloody alter? Nobody wants to go down that road again! Of course, a date with a witch is old hat for O’Donnell, what with her already being anti-masturbation, doubting evolution, and her hypothetical refusal to deceive Nazis about where the Jews were hiding.
But as O’Donnell starts to shy away from the media, for tomorrow at least, could all this hype end up helping her? Even if O’Donnell skips her media appearances on Sunday, Maher now plans to keep on playing old clips of O’Donnell on his HBO show. This sort of things has worked for other tea party darlings, who now might run for president.
But by O’Donnell’s telling, this witchcraft she dabbled in does not sound like Wiccanism.
That religious practice is a form of neo-Paganism that denies the existence of Satan, raising questions about exactly what sort of religious community it was that she “dabbled” with. Indeed, contemporary Wiccans are very explicit about having and wanting nothing to do with satanism, which is the territory of The Church of Satan and other forms of religious practice.
I’d have a hard time taking her seriously as a Senator, but then, I have a hard time taking the Senate seriously. If she is into witchcraft, she needs a seat on the budget committee.
On a related odd position of hers, she ought to turn her “no masturbation” policy into a positive by promising to end self-pleasuring in Congress. Earmark reform – that’s what she was talking about!
As ThinkProgress reported, last night on his HBO show, Bill Maher aired a clip from an Oct. 29, 1999 show of Politically Incorrect, in which Republican senate candidate Christine O’Donnell revealed that she “dabbled into witchcraft.” As O’Donnell’s comments begin to attract national attention, it appears the tea party candidate is trying to avoid media scrutiny. She was schedule to appear on CBS’ Face the Nation tomorrow, but host Bob Schieffer has tweeted that O’Donnell canceled…
O’Donnell isn’t even heeding her consigliere Sarah Palin’s advice, who urged her this week to “speak through Fox News.” O’Donnell was scheduled to appear on Fox News Sunday tomorrow, but has canceled that appearance as well.
[She’s using the Sarah Palin model — which works: avoid tough questions from reporters. In this case, it sounds as if she is trying to avoid questions from all reporters in the hopes that controversy about past comments will die. This means she’ll likely only appear on talk shows hosted by Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh — ideological, partisan p.r. shows where she won’t have to talk to a reporter…even a Fox News reporter. The reason: Fox New news reporters will still ask her questions that people “out there” want to hear her address. Prediction: she’ll appear before Fox News reporters once some controversies die down and be fully prepared after prepping with advisors. But don’t look for her to hold a press conference or appear on ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN any time soon. The Palin model of dealing with the press should concern ALL Americans of ALL parties since it slices away accountability…virtually a century of norms where candidates answered questions from journalists who were not handpicked for their ability to throw softballs or look the other way at political warts.]
—American Power:
So now that Bill Maher is sewing the Scarlett Letter on O’Donnell, the editorial elites at the Times will no doubt soon look to issue their coup d’grâce. I seriously doubt that revelations of Christine O’Donnell’s growing pains will have much impact on her electoral chances, especially in this political environment. She’s already eccentric. She’s already iconoclastic. And she’s already scaring the holy guacamole out of the “Ruling Class Elites.”
What’s especially interesting is how the Wicca Tapes are further exposing the fault lines among right-wing bloggers after the blogosphere blowout before the primary.
You think any of this might show up in a campaign commercial?
…I also like the bit about how she wouldn’t lie to the Nazis at the front door to save Anne Frank. But lie about which counties she won to defuse a tough question from an interviewer? No problem!
If only someone had warned us that she has this tendency to say nutty things…
….This should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway. Yes, they are going to use this, and yes, I think it will hurt her candidacy.
I would still vote for her. She could still be a witch for all I care, as long as she takes time out from her potion-mixing to vote the way I want her to vote.
What, like the Democrats don’t have flawed candidates that they have to hold their nose and vote for?
Please forgive and correct me if I’m wrong, but…this doesn’t actually sound like Wicca, does it? I’ve only met a few practicing Wiccans in my life but this particular comment strikes me as the sort of thing that drives them up the wall, in terms of their religion being misrepresented by people who seem to think that anyone who dares label themselves a “witch” is off somewhere, Weird Sisters-style, cackling into a cauldron, or poisoning apples, or threatening to, you know, “get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.”
I don’t think it’s terribly weird for anyone to “dabble” in any particular belief system during their formative years before settling on something that speaks to them, but I wonder if O’Donnell using her former “satanic altar” date as some kind of street cred, in a way, to back her fundamentalist views, as if to say: “I know these things are ‘evil’ because I was a part of them once, before I was saved,” or some such. But this, of course, is all conjecture, as no one knows for sure what the O’Donnell of 2010 has to say about such things; I suspect she’ll be asked at some point in the near future.
In any case, the things O’Donnell said on television eleven years ago may be having an effect on her current Senate campaign…
No matter how horrible a woman is, we would never call her a “witch”—unless she actually practiced witchcraft. Republican senate candidate Christine O’Donnell is a witch. Back in 1999, she told Bill Maher that she ‘dabbled in witchcraft’…
…But this explains so much! For example, it explains why our eyes start to bleed whenever we see Christine O’Donnell on TV. (And, also, why cows in Delaware keep giving birth to calves with human faces.) But It’s good to see that witches are finally overcoming America’s deeply-entrenched anti-witch bigotry. They had such a rough time of it in the 1600s. Seriously, though, O’Donnell is the most exciting openly-supernatural candidate since Ralph Nader revealed he was a magick shape-shifting gnome. But how is this revelation going to play with the GOP’s strong warlock base? Paging Politico!
Now you can follow Joe Gandelman on Twitter.
UPDATE: Maureen Dowd uses O’Donnell to make a point about Obama’s recent seeming inability to connect with voters or display empathy anymore. Here’s a chunk of it:
We the People in the Ruling Class Elites do think O’Donnell comes across as alarmingly loopy. But maybe she’s smart as a fox in doing a Single-White-Female, Fox anchor makeover to look more like her queen-maker, Sarah Palin.
She’s also smart to think of politics in terms of passion and myth — two elements Barack Obama was able to summon during his campaign that are sorely missing from his presidency.
She might have gone a broom too far, though, when she once told Bill Maher that she had “dabbled into witchcraft” and went on a date with a witch that included “a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”
Obama’s bloodless rationality has helped spawn the right’s bloodletting of irrationality. His ivory tower approach to the nation’s fears and anxieties about the economy gave rise to a tower of angry babble. Tea Party is basically a big tent for anger.
The president’s struggle to connect and inspire passion is a dispiriting contrast to, as Yeats said, the worst, full of passionate intensity.
The first African-American president, who wrote in his memoir that he trained himself as a young man not to let his anger show in a suspicious white society, now faces anger on an unprecedented scale from a mostly white movement.
He seems weary of crisis management, conveying the attitude of the hero in “The Incredibles” who has to keep saving the world: “Sometimes I just want it to stay saved!”
The president seems put upon and impatient with reality while his foes seem happy to embrace fantasy.
Read it in its entirety.
Prairie Weather has a post that should be read in full. A small part of it:
Funny. Maureen Dowd examines the latest Republican candidate, Christine O’Donnell and finds a “loopiness” in the woman who has, apparently, “dabbled in witchcraft” and who may have “gone a broom too far.” The distance between the efficient, if limited, “Obamacare” and the Republican casual, costly health care proposals makes the Republicans look pretty loopy themselves.
We keep trying to explain the distance between Obama’s cool and the anger and volatility of the right. It sure reverses the stereotype of the cool rational (read “superior”) white and the volatile, explosive (read “loopy”) African.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.