OP - Thank You, Tea Party

Almost instantly after pressing the power button on my Insignia television remote, I hear that this is the year in which the tea party makes its anti-incumbent fervor known. It is the year in which the tea party votes out those slimy tax-and-spend liberals and replaces them with quintessential conservatives in November’s midterm elections.

But how much has the overzealous, far-right tea party jeopardized the Republican Party’s chances of winning control of the United States Senate? In other words, is the tea party actually helping the Democrats?

Multiple experts have noted that the nomination of radical conservatives, specifically Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, is hurting the Republican Party’s chances of winning general elections in November.

We all witnessed Angle revive Majority Leader Harry Reid’s dismal reelection hopes when she defeated establishment favorite Sue Lowden in Nevada’s June Republican primary.

Angle’s campaign has been marked by overt craziness: she has openly supported the phasing out of Social Security and Medicare the abolishment of the Education Department and the federal income tax and the United States’ withdrawal from the United Nations Of course, this was all before she eluded reporters at a July press conference that her campaign organized.

“[Harry] Reid has gone from being a very heavy underdog to being a slight favorite,” Ted Jelen, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told the Christian Science Monitor. “The fact that Sharron Angle won the primary was a major break for him.”

This week, the tea party sent the Democrats another gift—Christine O’Donnell. O’Donnell defeated Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican primary for the Senate seat formerly held by Vice President Joe Biden.

O’Donnell, a clear snake oil saleswoman, has been caught in numerous lies on the campaign trail. In the past, O’Donnell has defaulted on her mortgage and repeatedly lied about a college degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University, which she just received two weeks ago. In fact, as Delaware’s News Journal has documented, the university sued O’Donnell in 1994 for $4,823 in unpaid expenses. To add insult to injury, she is currently being audited by the IRS, yet she is campaigning as a fiscal conservative.

She has also taken strong stances against masturbation and, ironically enough, lying. Asked on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect in 1998 whether it would be tolerated to lie in a situation in which Jews were hiding in one’s home and Nazis came to the door, she replied, “If I were in that situation … God would provide a way to the right thing.”

In addition to her outlandish stances on primitive issues, O’Donnell has shown that she is fairly misguided.

On a November 2007 appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor,” O’Donnell said, “American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning brains.”

Then, in a 2008 appearance on Fox News, she called President Obama “anti-American” because he voted against adopting English as the official language of the United States.

This all goes without mentioning that O’Donnell admitted to previously experimenting with witchcraft in a 1999 appearance on Politically Incorrect.

Prominent Republicans, like Karl Rove, have rightfully expressed severe skepticism about O’Donnell’s primary victory. Public Policy Polling, an automated poll conducting firm, recently came out with data showing Democratic nominee Chris Coons with a projected 50-34 percentage point lead over O’Donnell in November’s general election. The same polling service showed Castle defeating O’Donnell in November with 45 points to a projected 35 points for Coons.

Nate Silver, a political statistician for The New York Times, has all but called the seat for Coons, giving the New Castle County executive a 94 percent probability of winning.

As the tea party takes over the base of the Republican Party and continues to purge the Party of all moderates in favor of loons like Angle and O’Donnell, that same Party’s election chances become bleaker and bleaker.

So will there really be a Republican takeover in the Senate? Not if the tea party has anything to say about it.