If nothing else, the 2010 election cycle was busy. It was a year chock-full of legislative accomplishments, political showdowns, and heated rhetoric that stretched beyond lucid into the bizarro universe most aptly called, “are you kidding?” In this fantastical world, a dimension in which Glenn Beck is free to disgorge and virtues of fact, logic, and rationality are inverted, the GOP thrives.
Following up on this blog’s series of year-end superlatives, here is our version of the Top 10 GOP “Are you kidding?” moments of the 2010 election. Due to the overwhelming amount of material from which to choose, certain moments may be absent from this list – but hopefully those moments weren’t lost on the American people.
10. Ken Buck (R-CO) called the Department of Education ‘Unnecessary’: “We need to get the federal government out of education.”
9. Representative Steve King (R-IA) patriotically declared: “If I could start a country with a bunch of people,” it would be the Tea Party folks.
8. Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY) argued Social Security should be privatized and called it a “ponzi scheme.”
7. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), during a speech to the Independent Institute, vowed that health reform must be stopped: “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”
6. Senator-elect Ron Johnson (R-WI) during the election, denied the existence of global warming claiming that the “science of global warming is unproven.”
5. Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) apologized to BP after the oil spill and the company agreed to create a fund to help victims on the Gulf Coast: “I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words — amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize.”
4. Sue Lowden (R-NV) stated that, "before we all started having health care, in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I'll paint your house. I mean, that's the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I'm not backing down from that system."
3. Sarah Palin, in what soon became Politifact’s prestigious “lie of the year,” wrote: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care.”
2. Christine O’Donnell (R-DE): "I'm not a witch. I'm nothing you've heard. I'm you.”
**Paired closely with Christine O’Donnell’s denial that the separation of church and state exists in the United States Constitution.1. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) asserted Republicans’“top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office.”