For who knows how long, the Republicans and their conservative supporters have been using scare tactics and distractions to keep people's focus off the important issues affecting them in order to advance their right-wing agenda and railroad it through Congress. But the scope, frequency, and intensity of these distractions have ratcheted upward since Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
Since that time, we have been treated to the right wing noise spectacle of Obama being compared to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, Pastor Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Acorn, Obama's birth certificate, the "Beer Summit", Michael Jackson, "death panels", Balloon Boy, Glenn Beck, Snooki, "anchor babies", headless corpses in the Arizona desert, Ground Zero mosques, burning Qurans, etc.; the list goes on and on and I'm sure I missed some items here. The point of all these is that the right wing has been trumpeting these mostly non-issues to cover up the fact that they have been obstructing President Obama's attempts to get the nation back on track to fiscal stability and give economic help to the middle class, the poor, and small businesses, while at the same time offering up no solutions of their own other than recycling the same Bush/Cheney policies which led us to the brink of disaster in the first place.
This week we have the spectacle of Miss Christine O'Donnell, who was just elected as the GOP nominee for Senate. Not that Miss O'Donnell is someone we shouldn't be giving attention to (in fact, she does deserve our attention), but much of the focus on her post-GOP primary victory has been on her anti-masturbation crusade in the 1990's. While that in itself is probably worthy of scorn, mockery, and ridicule, it should not be the focus of progressives in making sure the Democratic nominee for Delaware's Senate seat is elected this November. Believe me, the wingnuts don't care about whether she chooses not to pleasure herself in the privacy of her own home; in fact, they mostly share her warped values. What needs to be focused on is the fact she is uniquely unqualified to serve the people of Delaware in the U.S. Senate. She shares the same extremist views of Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, and Joe Miller, and if elected to the Senate, she will push to undo all of the advances President Obama and the Democratic Congress has worked so hard to pass. So while it is tempting to focus on Miss O'Donnell's personal skeletons, it's much more important to stay on message and get our voters out to the polls this November.
I have a feeling that this may become an ongoing feature here, so if the GOP or their conservative supporters say or do something that has nothing to do with our daily lives but grab the media news cycle, I'll keep you posted.