Sharron Angle

The way to ruin a conservative is to pass them off as part of the radical fringe. They always try to marginalize me.

Sharron Elaine Angle, née Ott, is a batshit crazy former 2010 Senate Republican candidate for the state of Nevada, challenging Democratic majority leader Harry Reid. She was a member of the Nevada assembly from 1999 to 2007, proving to the horror of all that she could actually be elected to something. However, her loss against Reid, a vulnerable incumbent and high-profile target, served as a prime example of how the Tea Party was a double-edged sword for Republicans during the 2010 elections.

Whereas fellow Tea Party Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell would have essentially been Sarah Palin in the Senate, Angle would have been like Michele Bachmann: even crazier (if that's even possible), a true believer, and completely divorced from reality.

Senate policy positions
She thinks that there is no separation of church and state in the Constitution. She has suggested that "2nd amendment remedies" would be a proper solution if the Tea Party doesn't get what it wants on Election Day. She opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, because she believes that pregnancies under such circumstances are part of God's plan. And she apparently believes that Harry Reid should be making more jobs in Nevada; however, she also believes that government cannot create jobs.

Fox News is oppressing me!
When questioned by Fox News, she said she wants the media to only ask questions she wants to answer, since apparently she was incapable of answering even rudimentary questions about her policy positions.

Nevada Assembly
In the 42-member Assembly, she voted "no" so frequently on things everyone else agreed to that votes were often called as "41-to-Angle".

Just in case you didn't think she was crazy enough
The Church of Scientology had her ear in the Nevada Assembly and she crawled up their asses rather too often for comfort, trying to get Narconon and the Purification Rundown into Nevada jails. This was brought up in the Senate campaign; she, or perhaps her handlers, managed to pull herself out of her ibogaine haze long enough to deny she was a member of the Church.

Her policy positions are compatible with Christian Reconstructionism, a fringe movement whose main point is that Jesus will only return once society conforms to biblical standards of morality, including Old Testament law. Christian Reconstructionists believe that the government must be completely pushed out of education and welfare provision, an agenda that Angle shares and which has endeared her to the Tea Party. Notably, she has called for shutting down the Department of Education and suggested that people should "depend on God for our daily bread, not on the government".

In 1993, she wrote a letter to Harry Reid lambasting him for tax increases and claiming that they will "increase the national debt by $1 trillion" and rhetorically asked "How much more can you suck out of the taxpayers before everthing [sic] collapses?" As you should remember from the 90's, everything did collapse as she predicted, as the tech boom of the 90's was one of the most devastating and destructive eras the United States has ever been through. However, it was from speculation in tech companies and not tax increases. Ooops.

She also was a part of a group attempting to ban black jerseys from the Tonopah High School football team, citing how black was a color of the devil and evil spirits. So be sure not to wear black to the next funeral you attend; instead choose a more godly color, like white or red.

Angle's perception of racial identity seems to be a little confused. When speaking to a group of Latino students at a Nevada high school, she was criticized for some of her campaign ads, which featured a bunch of obviously Hispanic people labeled as "illegal aliens". Angle responded by claiming the ads actually depicted terrorists who snuck in through the northern border. She then went on to tell the students (all of whom were members of the Hispanic Student Union) that some of them "looked Asian to her", and mentioned that she herself had been described as "Nevada's first Asian legislator".

Sharia law demagoguery
In order to keep up with her Islamophobic demagogic colleagues on the right, she has joined in and claimed that sharia law is in the United States. She also compared the Sufi Muslim group who is planning Park51 in Manhattan to "militant terrorists". She has no problem with legislating according to her religion, however, saying that Democrats are violating the First Commandment.

2010 election results
Although she was ahead in the polls going into the 2010 election, Angle lost to Harry Reid by nearly 6 points. Nate Silver hypothesized that the Latino vote was likely underestimated in the polls going into the election and was likely the tipping point for why she lost. Apparently, making racist commercials doesn't pay when enough of the minority(ies) you targeted turn out to vote.

Life in obscurity
Angle considered a run for the US House of Representatives in 2012 but decided instead on a career in film, wanting "to produce a documentary film on how election fraud is rampant throughout the country": Not On Our Watch. She has also written a book, Right Angle: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim the Constitution (minus the First Amendment, it seems), and runs the Our Voice PAC.