More loons on the way

by digby

Move over Steve King and Michele Bachmann, and make room on the crazy couch for Chris Stewart:

Glenn Beck likes to say that he never endorses candidates—he just tells his followers how he feels about them. In Chris Stewart, the Republican nominee in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District, Beck has found someone he feels pretty damn good about. “If he wasn’t running, I’d be trying to convince him to work for me, to help me stay the course, strategize, and save the country,” he said last winter , as Stewart’s campaign was just getting off the ground. “I’ve actually tried to talk him out of running, because it’s a lion’s den in Washington.”

But, Beck added, “I believe he’s a Daniel.”

Beck’s a great fiction writer himself so he knows a genius when he sees one:

The villain of the Great and Terrible series—other than Satan, that is—is Drexel Danbert, a cigar-smoking, white-haired, ultra-rich European émigré. Danbert controls politicians across the globe like a puppeteer and, as one would expect from an agent of Satan, has the power to control the media too.

In one scene, Danbert and a Saudi crown prince (also an agent of Satan) plot a strategy to undermine the US government by planting a fake story in the media about a massacre by American troops. “Those who hate the United States will believe it, no matter what evidence is eventually revealed. The New York Times will front page the story for five weeks, at least,” the crown prince says. The pair ultimately succeed in creating global chaos by setting off an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that destroys America’s electrical infrastructure and forces a small group of heroes to band together to survive and defeat the forces of evil.

Stewart scoffs at the notion that his books, like the Left Behind­ series to which they’re often compared, are religious tracts. “They’re not theological books; they’re not history books or predictions,” he says. “They’re not nonfiction. They’re just novels. And we would never read anything more into them than that. They’re just a way of telling a story.” He adds, “The only thing that we think is meaningful in the book in terms of, ‘Listen people, we should be aware of this,’ again is the threat of electromagnetic pulse.”

Of course we should. Plus Satan.

I really love this:

It’s near certain that Stewart, running in a deep-red district in a deep-red state, will get his chance at fixing Washington next January. But his campaign has raised eyebrows in Utah, where Stewart has left a trail of furious Republicans calling for an investigation into electoral dirty tricks and old hands in both parties predicting the second coming of Michele Bachmann. “From time to time, we get a certified nutcase,” one former Utah Republican politician told me. “And Chris Stewart truly is a certified nutcase.”

More than “time to time” I’m afraid. He’s going to have lots of company.

.