Sean Hannity

Having to defend a candidate like Christine O’Donnell is an exhausting task. Finding her bizarre beliefs and troubled financial history almost impossible to defend, the right-wing has moved to demonize her Democratic opponent Chris Coons.

On the face of it, the County Executive of New Castle County appears to be a talented, progressive Democrat.   Before he became involved in local politics, Coons has a long history in the non-profit field: he participated in relief work in Kenya, assisted the Protestant anti-apartheid South African Council of Churches, and in the US worked for the National Coalition for the Homeless and the “I Have a Dream” Foundation.

But according to conservative commentators, he is a crypto-Marxist boogieman who make “community organizers” look like Republicans!

Although he came to Amherst as a young Republican, his political views became more progressive, especially after his time in Kenya.  Coons’ Republican friends joked with him about becoming a “bearded Marxist,” and he included the joke in his college newspaper profile which he wrote as his Class’s Commencement Speaker: “My friends now joke that something about Kenya, maybe the strange diet, or the tropical sun, changed my personality; Africa to them seems a catalytic converter that takes in clean-shaven, clear-thinking Americans and sends back bearded Marxists.”

Of course innocuous sarcasm doesn’t stand a chance in the conservative echochamber: Sean Hannity on Fox News said that Coons “made some very anti-American statements, apologizing for America and calling himself a bearded Marxist,” and Glenn Beck called him a “staunch anti-capitalist.”

The American Spectator’s Jeffrey Lord took umbrage with the fact that Coons wrote about studying “under a Marxist professor at the University of Nairobi,” which effectively makes him a Marxist! Now back from Kenya (more than 20 years later), Coons is “determined to get to the Senate and be an agent of the Obama radical redistributionist agenda.” R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. also of The American Spectator finds suspicion in his “African sojourn” that made him into an anti-American Marxist. Tyrrell says that he “loves taxes” and “shows no scruples about keeping his hands off other people's property.”

Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily claims that Coons “himself may have ties to Black Liberation Theology” and even discovered another “avowed Marxist” professor that Coons took a class with: Cornel West. Of course, West is one of the country’s most prominent philosophers and thinkers alive today, and studying under a professor does not make you bound to his or her views. Yet none of this makes a difference for right-wing smear artists.

With the GOP’s radical candidate Christine O’Donnell trailing Coons by wide margins in all of the recent polls, is it any wonder that they are now using jokes to disingenuously discredit her opponent?

Fox News was against anti-gay bullying before it was for it. Or so it would seem.

Anyone who’s been watching Fox lately knows that GLSEN – which promotes tolerance and safety in schools and was founded by Obama school safety “czar” Kevin Jennings – is supposedly engaged in a secret plot to turn straight kids gay. That’s why right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin was so surprised when she saw a GLSEN ad on Fox yesterday:

Interesting. (Un)safe schools czar Kevin Jennings's GLSEN is running public service ad on...Fox News.

But she shouldn’t have been surprised. Just a year ago Fox News headliner Bill O’Reilly lavished praise on the group’s anti-bullying ad campaign and ‘patriot’ Hilary Duff:

But now that Kevin Jennings has a political target painted on his back, Fox is making GLSEN out to be public enemy #1. That’s just hypocritical nonsense.

GLSEN’s work is crucial and straightforward. It promotes tolerance and safety for all children, regardless of sexual orientation. Nothing more, nothing less. Even Fox has recognized the value of the group’s work.

Meanwhile the bashing of Kevin Jennings goes on, with Fox, the Washington Times, Limbaugh, and right-wing blogs taking turns. But the Obama Administration has given Jennings its full support. And the only way to defeat bullies is to refuse to give in to them.

[Jason Linkins at Huffington Post also reported on this story]

Ralph Reed has made it clear over the last several weeks that his new organization, the Faith and Freedom Coalition, is "not your daddy's Christian Coalition" by which he means that this new effort will be young, hipper, more tech-savvy, and also more strident.

He's also made clear that much of its focus will be on economic issues, while still maintaining the traditional Religious Right positions on social issues.

And to kick things off on the economic front, Reed spoke at a TEA Party rally last week in Georgia:

"Barack Obama rushed through a stimulus package - $787 billion," [Reed] said, "almost 85 percent of which is pork and waste and bureaucracy."

He said the president's explanation of why "we had to have it right then ... was that if we didn't have it, unemployment would go over 8 percent."

But the jobless rate now is "heading toward 10 percent," Reed said.

He said Obama vowed that the plan would create 4 million jobs. Instead, Reed added, 2.6 million have been lost.

"He was only off by 6.6 million," Reed said.

Drawing cheers for himself and jeers for Obama, Reed also lambasted the president's budget, energy policy and health care proposals.

Reed praised the Tea Party movement, which drew nearly 1,500 people to a similar event at the plaza on April 15, the federal income tax filing deadline.

"These tea parties ... across the country are scaring the White House to death," he said. "... We are putting on our work boots and we're going to take our country back to the principles on which it was founded."

From a quick look at the photos from the rally accompanying the article, it doesn't look like Reed's audience was particularly young, hip, or tech-savvy ... but hey, he's got to start somewhere.

And presumably things will pick-up later this month when Sean Hannity joins Reed for his organization's "Freedom Rally":

• Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, formerly the home church of the late D. James Kennedy, has chosen a new pastor to replace its founder: Rev. Tullian Tchividjian, who just so happens to be the grandson of Billy Graham.
• Sen. Orrin Hatch stepped in at the last minute and saved Rob Schenck’s annual National Service for the Pre-born by signing on as an official sponsor so that the event could take place in the US Capitol Visitor Center.
• Sean Hannity has thrown his support to Michael Steele for Republican National Committee Chairman.
• Connecticut Democrats are calling on Sen. Joe Lieberman to apologize for a litany of things, including his support of John Hagee.
• Ralph Reed stayed away from Barack Obama’s Inauguration yesterday, but still couldn’t help but get overwhelmed by the emotions of the day – not because of our historic new president but because “it was a lot more emotional to watch George W. Bush depart the capital than I thought it would be.”
• Finally, Matt Barber is not happy with the new White House’s proclamation of “support for the LGBT community,” seeing it as evidence that “Barack Obama’s administration will likely be the most leftist, divisive and discriminatory in recent memory”:

The gravity of this situation cannot be overstated.  Right out of the shoot, Obama has told the world that he is signing off, without exception, on every demand of the extremist homosexual and transsexual lobbies.  The radical homosexual agenda and religious and free speech liberties cannot occupy the same space.  It’s a zero-sum game.  When 1 - 2 percent of the population is granted special rights based on deviant sexual proclivities and changeable sexual behaviors, to the detriment of everyone else, that’s called tyranny of the minority.  People of faith and those of you with traditional values: hold on to your hats – it’s going to be a bumpy four years.