If Joni Ernst wins next month’s U.S. Senate race in Iowa, two groups will be to blame, suggested Esquire blogger Charles Pierce in a Monday post. One is the mainstream media, which, Pierce complained, have played up Ernst’s supposed skills as a campaigner instead of presenting her as the “complete fking [sic] loon” he thinks she is.
The other is the Democratic party (including Ernst’s opponent, Bruce Braley) for its “great failing…over the past three-and-a-half decades…to take political advantage of the obvious prion disease that has afflicted the Republican party since it first ate all the monkey-brains in the mid-1970's.” In other words, Democrats would have won a lot more elections from the Reagan era onward if they’d only called Republicans like Ernst crazy.
From Pierce’s post (emphasis added):
The great failing of the Democratic party over the past three-and-a-half decades has been the party's failure to take political advantage of the obvious prion disease that has afflicted the Republican party since it first ate all the monkey-brains in the mid-1970's…The failure to make the Republican crazee the Republican party's standing public identity has encouraged the increased spread, and the increased virulence of the prion disease, with disastrous consequences for the rest of us…
…[R]ecent polls are indicating that Ernst has broken open something of a lead. Further, she is starting to get something of a pass on not knowing fk-all. (In [her] debate [with Braley] over the weekend, she cited cap-and-trade as something devastating to Iowa agriculture. Cap and trade, of course, never passed.) All of this despite the fact that Joni Ernst is a complete fking loon…
She supported a Personhood Amendment. She has called for the impeachment of the president and the nullification of federal laws, putting herself on the wrong side of political issues for over 150 years. She is a lifelong Truther regarding our old pal, Agenda 21, the secret UN plan to steal all our golfs. She shouldn't be allowed into the United States Senate on a tour, let alone as one of its 100 members. This is more than just a message sponsored by the Committee To Not Electing [sic] Morons. There are only 100 senators. If Iowa elects this crackpot, it is going to affect all of us in some very important ways…
…In one of those quirks that mark conventional political journalism as being anything except a job for grown-ups, it seems that Ernst is now getting credit for designing a lovely, gleaming structure of platitudes over the batshit positions she previously held. The success of that project, in the world of campaign journalism, is supposed to trump everything she once stood for. She is now considered to be a "great campaigner," because she's proven somewhat gifted at avoiding drooling in public. Since the press won't do it, it's up to Braley, and Braley seems to have fallen down completely on the job…
…Imagine if, after electing the [GOP] fools and lightweights to the Senate in 1980, the Democrats were able to construct and sell the notion that the Republican party had surrendered itself to its fringe. If they'd been able to do that, Joni Ernst could be seen as a symptom and not a senator. Ah, well…
