After taking a drubbing in last year's state elections, Virginia Republicans are debating whether their party has come to be defined by its extremists. But in a congressional district in Northern Virginia, one of the state's main instigators of culture warfare, state Sen. Richard H. "Dick" Black, is running in the Republican primary to replace longtime GOP moderate Rep. Frank Wolf, who is retiring. And he's guaranteed to ignite wedge-issue passion. Exhibit A: As a state legislator, Black opposed making spousal rape a crime, citing the impossibility of convicting a husband accused of raping his wife "when they're living together, sleeping in the same bed, she's in a nightie, and so forth."Black, Dick, has more to share on his view on "Army rape," slavery (of course) and contraception (of course). He's quite a spokesperson for the values of the Stupid Party, to say the least (and we are).
Looking away to the land of cotton (brains) - Mississippi - we have this specimen running to the right of ultra-conservative Sen. Thad Cochran in the Stupid Party primary:
Down in Mississippi, state Sen. Chris McDaniels is going to be one to watch. He's the one mounting a primary challenge against Republican Sen. Thad Cochran for being insufficiently conservative, where insufficiently conservative now includes anyone who believes in gravity or a round earth, and since Mr. McDaniels, like all sufficiently conservative conservatives, once had his own sufficiently conservative talk radio show he is proving to be a rich source of sufficiently conservative quotes.
He was the one who blamed "hip-hop" music for Canadian gun violence, remember? It turns out he also knew what's-what about these darn Muslims and how Hollywood has been coddling them by not showing how they're all just terrahists and the like.Hoo boy. He'd be a great addition to the gravitas of Senate deliberations... We just aren't sure the rules would allow him to wear his tinfoil hat on the floor of the Senate.
Staying in the Stupid Party's regional base, another cotton head wants to provide a steady diet of wingnut word salad to the people of North Carolina:
Greg Brannon, the North Carolina Republican Senate candidate endorsed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), likened being on food stamps to slavery.
"The answer is the Department of Agriculture should go away at the federal level," Brannon said in an interview with the North Carolina Tea Party highlighted by Mother Jones on Tuesday. "And now 80% of the farm bill is food stamps. That enslaves people. What you want to do — it's crazy but it's true — is teach people to fish so they can fish. When you're at the behest of someone else, you are actually a slavery to them [sic]."Brain sore... losing IQ points... must end reading of dispatches... 'til next time.
