If I had ever heard of Christine O’Donnell before three days ago, I couldn’t remember. But now the type of people I intensely dislike are attacking her, so it is time to head back to my the typically-dormant ideological post and be ready to do politics with the next O’Donnell-bashing lefty whom I may encounter between now and November.

I truly look forward to any such encounters since they have proven to be a source of great pleasure in the past. Here’s why; Typically, lefty-attackers are just regurgitating who-could-possibly-disagree-with-this Katie Couric-ish pablum. They’re not really looking or prepared for an argument, they’re just trying to let others know that they get it, they are part of secular mainstream thought.

Aside from financial difficulties [she’ll be fine if elected as we know], O’Donnell’s main sin to date is a video taped program where she discusses with other young adults why masturbation is not healthy. From a tactical view, the video tells me that Christine O’Donnell is no Elena Kagan. Kagan’s confirmation process revealed that she spent her life avoiding doing or saying anything which would cause discomfort in confirmation hearings or as described by man-card-penalized-into-the-next-century George Stephanopoulos [I am sure that testosterone-testing is part of his ABC contract. I just can’t figure out if they want him above or below the line].

Turns out that libertarian David Friedman, at best an agnostic, while not necessarily a fan of Ms O’Donnell, is much less of a fan of the type of weak logic exhibited by those who are currently ripping Ms O’Donnell. How lucky can I get. It’s like I had a scheduled fight after-school and an MMA fighter begged me to let him take my place.

The great David Friedman on what qualifies as nutty:

Getting curious, I followed up on some of the other evidence offered that she was a nut. One repeated claim was that she was, in Moynihan’s words, “opposed to the sinister habit of masturbation,” which makes it sound as though she had been campaigning against it. Another story describes her as the “masturbation hating candidate” and links to another informing us that “One of the most notable things on her political résumé is her well-publicized position against masturbation.”

All of this seems, as far as I can tell, to be based on a single comment made in the course of an MTV program on sex in the nineties. O’Donnell asserted that the bible says that lust in your heart is to commit adultery, and that you cannot masturbate without lust—both, I think, correct statements. As best I can tell, that is the sole basis for the claims of “well publicized position” and “masturbation hating candidate.”

I don’t take the bible as a source of truth, but quite a lot of people do, and the fact that O’Donnell does, or at least did at one time, isn’t evidence that she is a nut.

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Running through much of the criticism of O’Donnell is the implications that she is committed to fundamentalist Christianity. It is surely at least worth mentioning that a large part of the reason she sued her employer was, by her own account, the fact that they were.

Finally, it’s worth noting that a good deal of the material used to make O’Donnell look nutty is coming from her activities in the nineties, when she was a twenty-something crusading for sexual purity. It would be interesting to see a similar selection for left of center candidates.

Finally, in a later post, Friedman provides a link to an O’Donnell talk on the women in The Lord of the Rings – see C-SPAN 2003 video – a decidedly un-nutty performance. Odds that talk will come up on the networks? Zero. A fight over Christine O’Donnell? I’m in with the blog and a few nutty bucks. Here’s the O’Donnell campaign web site.

Please check out a fellow local blogger — Robert Molleda’s Searching for Signs — who also reacts to the attacks on O’Donnell. Robert spells out in more detail some of O’Donnell’s flaws as a candidate, but ultimately believes that the attacks on her are rooted in her social and religious conservative views as opposed to those flaws.