Crackpot Class
by digby
This freshman class of the new congress is going to be one for the books. Here’s the latest Tea Party member, via Kyle at Right Wing Watch:
After a contentious recount, Rep. Dan Maffei has conceded to Republican Ann Marie Buerkle, who led the Upstate New York Democrat by just 567 votes. While Buerkle ran as a Tea Party conservative, she has her political roots in the anti-choice movement. Buerkle formerly served as her region’s spokesperson for Operation Rescue, the militant anti-choice and anti-gay organization founded by Randall Terry. Terry, like Buerkle, is from Upstate New York where he made a run for Congress and started his career of attacking “murderous abortionists and demonic homosexual sodomites.”
According to the Syracuse Post-Standard, Buerkle “was the local spokeswoman for Operation Rescue when the group demonstrated outside of a gynecologist’s office in 1989. In that protest, 44 abortion protesters who blocked the entrance to the office were charged with trespassing. Earlier that year, she was with a group that carried a blackened fetus named ‘Baby Choice’ to a protest at Planned Parenthood in Syracuse, where 14 protesters were arrested.”
Buerkle told a Tea Party rally that under Democratic leadership “we lose more and more freedoms every day” and that if Republicans don’t win the election, “by 2012 we’re not going to recognize the United States of America.” One threat to freedom that Buerkle falsely alleges is that “the Obama Health and Human Services Department is planning to compile a federal health record on all U.S. citizens by 2014, and will include information on each individual’s Body Mass Index in the files.”
(Sadly, these idiotic, useless airport scanners play right into this delusion.)
There have always been cranks and crackpots in politics. But has there ever been this many at one time, all under the influence of the same paranoid rantings of the far right? I would be surprised. This woman is fairly indicative of “Tea Party” candidates. Her roots are in the far right, in this case the anti-choice terroristic side, which trained a fair number of the Tea party politicians. But the health care fear mongering is Tea party all the way.
It’s democracy. They won fair and square. But man, this is one cracked group of legislators we have coming in, with a small army of cracked followers who don’t even know they are working in service of the wealthiest people in America. Not that they would care if they did know — they’re fine with that as long these billionaires hate the same people they do. Unfortunately, what the Tea Partiers don’t realize is that the billionaires hate them too.
.