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Marsha Blackburn Is the Result of 40 Years of Republican Lunacy

And she's 10 points down to a Democrat in the Tennessee Senate race.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politic...ee-senate/

By Charles P. Pierce
Apr 5, 2018

Oh, what hard luck stories they all hand me…

The Tennessean passes along a poll from Middle Tennessee State University that seems to indicate that Republican chances of holding on to the Senate seat presently held by retiring Bob Corker are slimming up quite a bit.

The poll, released Thursday, found 45 percent of 600 registered Tennessee voters said they would choose Bredesen, a Democrat and former Nashville mayor, if the election were immediately held. Blackburn, a Brentwood Republican, netted 35 percent, with another 17 percent of respondents saying they were not sure…

The MTSU poll also found Bredesen had a considerable advantage over Blackburn in terms of getting support from voters on the other side of the aisle. Forty-five percent of self-described independents said they would vote for Bredesen while only 33 percent of such voters said they would vote for Blackburn, the poll found.

Twenty percent of Republican respondents said they would vote for Bredesen while 5 percent of Democrats said they would vote for Blackburn.

There is a real problem in sharp relief here. Bredesen is a former mayor and governor and a fairly standard Democratic candidate.

Blackburn is a Tea Party loon and she is the most likely nominee the Tennessee Republican Party could find to hold onto a seat to which Corker was first elected in 2006. This has the potential of turning the Republican side of an important campaign into a real carnival.

Blackburn launched her campaign with an announcement video that was so nutty on the phony issue of the sale of "baby parts" that Twitter 86’d it almost immediately. This allowed Blackburn to bleat—on Twitter, natch—about how the liberals who run “Silicon Valley” were out to squash her proud conservatism.

Blackburn is the pre-eminent drum-banger on the whole sale-of-baby-parts fable, as well as several other issues guaranteed to gin up the rubes for several years now.

In 2014, as Joan Walsh detailed at Salon, Blackburn even briefly had delusions of running for president. I guess we should be glad she’s adjusted her ambitions to be a little more, ah, realistic.

Nevertheless, when Blackburn announced her intention to run for the Senate, according to Steve Benen at Maddowblog, the Tennessee Republican establishment dove for the bourbon bottle.

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Blackburn is what the national Republican party has left. It’s what the national Republican party has left after 35 or 40 years of entertaining irrationality for political advantage.

It did not have to happen this way, but the reason that it happened this way is that the Republican Party, at every level of government, committed itself to positions that guaranteed that, one day, someone like Donald Trump would be president*.

It also guaranteed that, one day, in a place like Tennessee, there would be nobody to run for Senate except someone like Marsha Blackburn. That’s the way things like this work out. I’d find it fascinating if we all didn’t have to pay the price for it.

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