Tag Archives: Christine O’Donnell

Bialystock, O’Donnell and Bloom

Perennial failed Delaware senate candidate, Christine O’Donnell, is now facing a federal investigation to determine if she used campaign contributions to pay off personal expenses.

The investigation should come as no surprise.  Questions about her finances and use of previous campaign funds were raised during last fall’s run.  O’Donnell has a shaky financial history, including filing for bankruptcy. The 41 year-old, not only had never won a general election, but also did not have much of an employment record.  Other than her infamous long-ago guest television appearances as a “youth abstinence advocate”, her services as a pundit were not often called upon.

But what if O’Donnell is really smarter than we all could have imagined?  What if she not only never had any intention of winning, but didn’t even want to come close?

And what if the mastermind behind her scheme was not some notorious Republican strategist?  Perhaps she came up with the plan herself, inspired not by the writings of Sun Tzu, but by the work of one Melvin Kaminsky, better known to the world as Mel Brooks.

Imagine O’Donnell, sitting around her modest home sometime in 2009.  She’s waiting for the phone to ring, hoping Bill Maher will finally return her calls and invite her on his HBO show, which would at least give her an appearance fee and some exposure.   She’s ignoring the umpteenth phone message left by her father, telling her once again it’s not too late to enroll in clown-college and learn an honest trade.  She goes through her bills, while absently flipping the channels and leaves on some old movie.  It’ll only be days before she loses even her basic cable.

The movie has just started.  She’s seen it before, and is only half-watching. The down-on-his-heels producer is playing sexy games with some old lady.

The whole scene reminds Christine of the Tea-Partiers, whom she has lately been trying to cultivate.  None of them under eighty!  Yeech.

Now the accountant is auditing the books, asking the producer about some discrepancy.  The producer, points out that the show lost money anyway, so what does it matter?

“Been there, honey,” Christine says aloud, remembering how bad things had gotten in 2008.

And suddenly there’s a spark in the accountant’s eye, and he mentions that under the right circumstances a man could make more money with a flop . . .

An idea pops into Christine head.  She had started out as an acting major and had long been aware that politics is theater.

Re-energized she thinks about an office she probably wouldn’t win.  It’s obvious.  The senate seat she’s lost twice before!

“You can do this, Christine!” She tells herself.

The beauty of it is she doesn’t even have to win the primary. If she can paint Mike Castle as an elitist, she should still be able to bring in the bucks for a write-in with the support of enough old ladies and grumpy old men.   She’ll just have to “dabble into” Tea Party Land for a while.  And like the movie, the worse she does in the election, the less likely anyone is to look into where the money went.

She sets things in motion — hires inexperienced staff, manages to alienate even previous conservative supporters, avoids the press or messes up when interviewed — and yet in a surprise upset, she wins the primary.  While she’s still a long-shot, things are getting scary.  She’s not in it, to win it.

But then her old secret-crush, Bill Maher comes through with those long ago guest appearances, releasing them to youtube where they go viral.

“What a moron, I was!” Christine mumbles, watching a clip.  She laughs at her own inanity.  Meantime the dollars keep rolling in, and the best part is Bill Maher’s new found desire for her.

“Who’s sorry now, bi-atch?” she says watching him plead for her to make an appearance on his show — a show she can finally afford to watch on HBO.

She thinks of a line from the movie that inspired her candidacy, “Flaunt it baby! Flaunt it.” She buys herself new clothes — mostly designer suits like the kind Sarah Palin bought with RNC funds, even gets herself designer eye-glasses though she still has perfect vision.  Then she shops for a condo.

Now, even Rove is a reluctant supporter.  They can’t stop talking about her on MSBNC where Pat Buchanan enthusiastically outlines a scenario that involves the libtards overselling the old anti-masturbation rants, while Tea-Party fever propels her into the Senate.

She nearly panics.  Winning the election would mean actually having to work as a senator, plus all those contributors would be expecting her to do something for the money.  It would be worse than the old days, where a guy would buy you dinner and expect S-E-X.  And if the Dems see her as a real threat, they’re more likely to investigate.

So she decides she has to take it a step further, and she comes up with the “I am not a witch,” commercial.  Comedy gold!

“Those fools,” Christine says to herself while watching an actress imitating her on Saturday Night Life“You can’t parody a parody!” Then she becomes aware of what her left hand is doing while her right is holding the remote. She turns off the set and takes a cold shower.

Election night comes off without a hitch.  No need for a recount!  Her concession is perfect.  She wonders if she just should have stuck with acting all along.  Everyone said she was a real Sally Fields-type and could have done well.

She realizes she’s taking a risk.  In the movie, they were going to take the money and run off to Brazil, but she loves her country too darn much to leave.  Besides she doesn’t even know how to speak Brazilian, and any day Fox will call and offer her a show.  If she gets a Fox contract, then even if the feds come after her, she can pay back the campaign money with change to spare.   Hadn’t Palin proved that losing could legally be so much more lucrative than winning?

But the call from Fox never comes.

“That damn Rove.  What a hater!”  It makes her cry, realizing her dreams of shopping with Sarah or maybe even babysitting her kids will never come to pass.

Disgruntled campaign staffers are talking, and the feds are moving in.  Still, she can’t help giggling as she recalls  how they attempted to blow up the theater in that movie. She knows violence is not the answer, and decides instead to issue a press release blaming Joe Biden.  Though she hopes her fellow Tea-Partiers will come to her aide, in her heart, she fears the jig is up.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Christine laments. “I picked a seat I couldn’t win, ran the worst campaign, and even lost as planned!  Where did I go right?”

The Deification of Momdom or Why Christine O’Donnell is No Sarah Palin

Christine O or Pristine the Virgin Queen as she’s dubbed in some corners of the Internets, is the new “it” girl.  Since her surprise victory in the Republican senate primary in Delaware, she’s all over the headlines the youtube and the cable.

We see and hear her in many incarnations.  There she is in the 1990’s on Politically Incorrect, a woman in her thirties who still looks childlike and has big curly hair leftover from her college days in the 1980’s, promoting chastity and discussing her brief flirtation with Satan.  In more modern times, when asked about the whisper campaign started by her supporters that her primary opponent is secretly gay, O’Donnell replies that the opponent needs to “put his man-pants on.”

You can listen to a radio interview where a conservative announcer loses patience as she insists that in a previous senate bid, she  “tied” Biden in two counties that she clearly lost.

Post primary, she’s been handled, dressing now in Palin red and even adding eyeglasses to give her gravitas.  She skips Meet the Press, but stops in to visit the friendlier Scarborough Country because she had “business in New York.”  Pristine has now been parodied on SNL and been the subject of countless masturbation and witchcraft jokes.

Is it ok to laugh or should we be taking her more seriously?

After all Palin was funny at first.  Remember the good old days when she spectacularly messed up with Katy Couric and Charlie Gibson?  She might not have cost McCain the presidency; his complete befuddlement at the economic collapse probably sealed his doom, but she certainly didn’t help.  She should have retreated after the election, but instead she quit her job, went to work for Fox, got a fat advance on her book published by another Murdoch entity, and is now being touted as a likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

The joke has worn thin, and those of us who believe in evolution, like social security and understand that regulating health insurance companies does not mean “death panels,” are all a bit nervous and have stopped laughing.  Even if she can’t get elected, Sarah can certainly rile up her base.  Does Pristine represent a similar threat?

Probably not.

Is it because unlike Palin, O’Donnell has never actually been elected to anything?  Nope.  Is it because she’s dumber than Palin, more gaffe prone?  Doubtful.

It’s because she’s an unmarried woman with no kids who talks about chastity and decries masturbation while shaking her long locks and looking like an overage cheerleader.

There’s something just too weirdly jarring about this.  All we can do is wonder about what’s really in her dirty drawer or what led her while in college to give up her sexy ways and become a celibacy crusader.   Lots of spiritually seeking young people get religion.  Some may become missionaries in foreign lands, feed the hungry, go into seminary or join a religious order, but few translate their fervor into founding an organization devoted to promoting abstinence.

Maybe something happened.  It’s hard to look at her, especially in those clips from the 90’s when the bloom was still on the rose, and not wonder.  Was there some football hero she had a crush on who got her drunk and cruelly pimped out an incapacitated Pristine to his friends?  Was she too guilt-ridden and perhaps disturbed by her own vulnerability to call it rape?  Was her decision to be chaste a way of empowerment, keeping herself from ever feeling so used again?

That’s where my mind goes.  Others may have their own theories.  You can’t help having a theory.  Closet lesbian?  Out and out hypocrite?  Hormonally challenged?  Tease?

Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart both think her opponents will make too much out of Pristine’s anti-masturbation stand and the voters won’t care.   They may be right in that the jokes will become silly and her opponent can’t run on being the pro-jerk-off candidate.

But maybe Limbaugh is just trying to change the subject, canny enough to know that there’s something about Pristine that doesn’t make sense and won’t resonate with voters.

Palin may be a phony who uses her kids as election props, but she has kids to use.  Most of us don’t buy her narrative, but her audience does.  She’s a “mom”.  She’s not only a “mom,” but a “special needs mom.”  One of her sons is a veteran.  Her daughter made a mistake, but chose life and responsibility.

Palin gets that her audience isn’t anti-sex. They simply believe sex should be heterosexual and within the context of marriage.  Outside of that it’s sin.  They understand that human being are prone to sin and no one is perfect.  Thus Sarah’s daughter Bristol can be forgiven as long as she’s learned her lesson and has the baby.  An abortion would have been unforgivable, but “choosing life” is brave and they love her for it.  Doesn’t matter that who knows who is actually raising the baby while Bristol dances with the stars and collects fees for lecturing other teens.  Doesn’t matter that we were treated to a fake engagement during the Republican National Convention.  It’s the myth that counts.  Sarah’s “momma grizzly” rhetoric hits home especially for woman who’ve succeeded at little else in their lives besides having children.

Pristine is something else.  There’s a strangeness to a woman who extols traditional values but is unmarried, childless and chaste at forty-one.  We could take it if she looked more like the repressed lesbian/nun types with which we are familiar.   If she resembled your mustached, never married great-aunt, the one who sacrificed her youth taking care of her widowed mother while buying generous gifts for her nieces and nephews, voters might buy it. They’ve heard that story.  They could even feel a little sorry for poor Pristine, too plain to ever catch a man.  But the problem is Christine is just too sexy for her celibacy.

She comes off at best as a scold, a high-maintenance prude who never met a man who could measure up to her ideal husband — Jesus Christ.

There are of course women who do marry Christ.  They are called nuns.  But they choose the veil and not politics and cut off their locks.  Pristine is a Catholic while the majority Tea Partiers including Palin are Protestants.  Catholicism despite JFK and Joe Biden is still viewed by many “real” Americans as a foreign church.  The scandals haven’t helped. Joan of Arc may have led France, but there is no American mythological equivalent and real America disdain the French.  Our nuns may be beautiful like Ingrid Bergman or even cute and feisty and fly like Sally Fields, but they don’t rule.  Moms rule.

Real American women leaders aren’t nuns, they’re moms.