I was just on the radio with John Hawkins of Right Wing News , discussing the U.S. Senate race in Delaware. Hawkins said that Democrat Chris Coons had a 90 percent chance of victory – I agree – but added that he had weaknesses, such as the fact that he once called himself a “Bearded Marxist.”
Well, not quite. In May, Politico’s Alex Isenstadt uncovered an article that Coons wrote in 1985, as a student at Amherst. The title was “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist,” and it explained why he left for a summer in Kenya (Dinesh D’Souza, look!) as a Republican but returned as a liberal with doubts about the greatness of capitalism, although he said that his flirtation with unpatriotic thoughts was over.
My friends now joke that something about Kenya, maybe the strange diet,or the tropical sun, changed my personality; Africa to them seems acatalytic converter that takes in clean-shaven, clear-thinkingAmericans and sends back bearded Marxists.
First, a hat tip to the double major in Physics and Political Science for dropping “catalytic converter” into the sentence. Second, no one cared until Tuesday. And now, in Powerline:
Coons is the guy who once proudly held himself out as “the bearded Marxist.”
By the way, this Democrat is a Marxist. I mean, there’s a joke goingaround that here’s a bearded Marxist or Marxist with a beard. Hedescribes himself that way! This guy is a sitting duck.
The opponent in November once described himself as ” a bearded Marxist .” Since then, he’s lost he beard.
Folks, the guy was talking about a joke his friends were making. After the column he went into politics, then the private sector, then back into politics as a politician in New Castle County. He’s spent six years as county executive, which would have been a great place to try out Marxist theory. Sadly, he became a pretty standard cut-some-spending-increase-property-taxes hack.
It’s obvious why conservatives will bring this up. Not only has Glenn Beck brought the word “Marxist” from sarcasm to a Grave Threat to America, it’s frustrating to watch
Christine O’Donnell get beaten up
for all of the stuff she said as a pundit in the 1990s. The problem is that
she was a pundit in the 1990s
. She’s spent her life as an activist, pundit, spokesperson and candidate, so there’s nothing else to go on when assessing her views. If she’d spent a term on county council
not
passing anti-masturbation bills, then she’d have proof that her views don’t speak to what sort of senator she’d be. But we don’t have anything else to assess.
