Adventures in TEA PARTY Campaigns: Sharron Angle's COMMANDMENT Unto the Rest of Us

Thou shalt not worship a false God, the god of government, so said Sharron Angle: “And these programs that you mentioned -- that Obama has going with Reid and Pelosi pushing them forward -- are all entitlement programs built to make government our God. And that’s really what’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.”

According to “Tea Party” orthodoxy, government is our enemy, tyrannical, with those evil entitlement programs –- Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- the teabaggeers rely on. The “Tea Party” doctrine says, do away with government, even if it means large classroom sizes, laying off teachers, firefighters, and police, unpaving our roads, turning off our lights, allowing the interstate highway system to go to rot, defunding the Department of Education, the EPA (who needs safe drinking water and unpolluted air and streams –- let the corporations decide what are necessary safety regulations (for their bottom line) –- what’s a few worker deaths and higher cancer rates to thin out the herd of liberals, not to speak of the uninsured, in the bigger scheme of things…?), and last but not least, garbage disposal.

For Sharron Angle this would mean shutting her up, which is an infringement on her “god-given” First Amendment right to make a fool of herself. After all, in the teabaggers’ revisionist, Texas textbook history, Jefferson never said there was “a wall of separation” between church and state.

One could mention most of the other Commandments, too:

Thou shalt not kill, except in the prosecution of unnecessary wars in which the innocent dead are “collateral damage;”

Thou shalt not commit adultery, except that Sharron’s prospective caucus colleagues John Ensign and David (diaper boy) Vitter in the “family values” party didn’t get the memo from on high;

Thou shalt not steal, and teabaggers opposing stricter regulation of lobbyists and corporate contributions really moves the ball forward on this Commandment;

Thou shalt not bear false witness … hmm, where to begin, teabaggers collecting Social Security -- ON MY DIME -– calling the president a socialist, or Sharron Angle LYING about her extremism;

Covet thy neighbor’s house, or Senate seat -– why is Angle running to be part of a tyrannical government? – Is it her Christ complex and missionary zeal to cast out of the Temple all those who “sold and bought” in it … psst Sharron, best to start with your own party and vote straight line Democratic;

... wife (covered), nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass (hmm … covered (?)).

Sharron Angle and her extreme religious fundamentalism is the reason the Founding Fathers fought so hard to separate religion and state. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom:

“Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that it would read ‘A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;’ the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”