Technically, Jim DeMint is in an election campaign.  So, I guess all his utterances have to been seen through the prism of electioneering.  Though, it is all a matter of establishing himself a national reputation, to become the Dean of an incoming “Tea Party Caucus”.  Where Economic issues merge with Social issues.

the senator went further and “said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom.”[…] “(When I said those things,) no one came to my defense,” DeMint said on Friday in Spartanburg. “But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn’t back down. They don’t want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.”

I saw this book a while ago — The Politically Incorrect Guide to the 1960s.  It’s a series of books that began with the “Lost Cause anti-Lincoln” take on the Civil War.  The conservative cause version of the “For Dummies” / “Idiot’s Guide” series of bullet-points and condensed references.  I do not know why you would want to celebrate the “Cultural Conservatism” of the 1960s, but that is their business.  History pulls tricks on us.  Nixon, caring not at all about domestic policies, positioned himself just so that McGovern would be the Left of him, all the while buttering up the darker angels of Americans, and the effect is a sort of “Damned the Hippies, and we’ve got you an Earth Day!”.  But history is full of surprises.

On gay high school teachers, it’s worth remembering that Ronald Reagan as long ago as 1978 aligned with Harvey Milk in opposing discrimination in the Brigg’s Initiative. His op-ed before the initiative was regarded as a turning point against the anti-gay teacher crusade:
The timing is significant because he was then preparing to run for president, a race in which he would need the support of conservatives and moderates very uncomfortable with homosexual teachers. As Cannon puts it, Reagan was “well aware that there were those who wanted him to duck the issue” but nevertheless “chose to state his convictions.”
Reagan penned an op-ed against the so-called Briggs Initiative in which he wrote, “Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.” This was a remarkably progressive thing for a politician, especially a conservative one about to run for president, to say in 1978. The Briggs Initiative was overwhelmingly defeated. Its sponsors blamed Reagan for the defeat.

It is interesting to see that Harry Reid has plopped out Jim DeMint for an advertisement — though, one that’s a “web” ad for the base.

Though, I guess Sharron Angle asked for that reference.  You go to the Third Party spoiler candidate and ask him to step away, and what do you have to offer?  JIM DEMINT!!! Who wouldn’t want to see Jim DeMint?

Earlier this week, Tea Party candidate Scott Ashjian released a secret tape of himself meeting last week with Angle. As she had told Ashjian: “That’s really all I can offer to you (Ashjian) is whatever juice I have, you have as well…You want to see DeMint, I have juice with him…I go to Washington, DC, and want to see Jim DeMint, he’s right there for me. I want to see Tom Coburn, he’s right there for me. I want to see Mitch McConnell, he’s there.”

But that wasn’t improper at all, Angle told conservative talk radio host Heidi Harris: “Well, of course, I offered him meetings with people that are friends of mine. Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn are friends of mine, and I would offer that to any constituent in Nevada.”

In a sense, Sharron Angle came out Independent of McConnell, though maybe the way to buttress Ashijan is to hold forth against the economic malfeasance of the Republican Party — and show that you have ins with — Jim Demint… Maybe Ashijan is Holding off for Sarah Palin?

“Joe, please explain how this endorsement stuff works, is it to be completely one sided,” Todd Palin wrote to Miller, family attorney Tom Van Flein, and SarahPAC treasurer Tim Crawford after he had become upset when Miller did not offer a full-throated endorsement of the former Alaska governor’s still speculative presidential campaign. […]

Sarah Palin later tweeted a link to her husband’s statement and added, “There’s no ‘there, there’ but the lamestream media will keep on tryin’.”

There’s a lot of “there” there.  Take, this, for instance:
“Sarah spent all morning working on a Facebook post for Joe, she won’t use it, not now.”
Read that sentence several times, and marvel at the state of of our politics.

Years ago, 1996, as I was looking at the Clinton — Dole campaign, I couldn’t quite help but feel depressed.  Clinton, you understand, began his presidential campaign, more or less, by signing a Welfare Bill that seemed to politically calculatedly buck a principle he, Democrat, should stand for.  Bob Dole began his presidential campaign by endorsing a 15 percent tax cut, undermining political principles of a Fiscal Conservatism he had stood for through his career (butted heads against Reagan, for instance.)  So, with these principle-less realizations in mind in mind, I was looking about ways one could rationally vote for politicians, and coming up with different schemes.  One was to look at the advertisements and see who put up the fewest number of ads, and vote for that candidate.  I understood just how false political advertisements were:

In an effort to relate to West Virginia voters, the National Republican Senatorial Committee hired an outside company that put out a call for actors with “a ‘Hicky’ Blue Collar look” who could appear in an ad as “coal miner/trucker” types, Mike Allen reports for Politico.

Allen says clothing suggestions for the commercial “included jeans, work boots, flannel shirt, denim shirt, ‘Dickie’s type jacket with t-shirt underneath,’ down-filled vest, ‘John Deer [sic] hats (not brand new, preferably beat up),’ ‘trucker hats (not brand new, preferably beat up).'”

Once the actors and scripts were picked, the commercial was shot … in Philadelphia.

That’s one way of deferring your image cultivated by announcing that your fortune came “the old fashioned way” — inheritance.

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