No Beard, No Marx

The Senate race in Delaware is one I’ve covered before, if only in featuring the GOP candidate, “tea party” favourite Christine O’Donnell. She is trailing her Democrat opponent Chris Coons in the polls, and some of her rhetoric is getting desperate.

First off, she’s at odds with her own party: the National Republican Senatorial Committee has given her a 42,000 Dollar contribution, but is not spending on advertising additional to this amount. Their reasoning is that there are more deserving candidates who are in tighter races – where the extra spend could make the difference.

But O’Donnell is also having trouble making her attacks on Coons stick. She has persistently labelled him as a “Marxist”, a characterisation taken up by a number of hosts at Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) as they try to bolster the various “tea party” hopefuls across the country.

Unfortunately, the basis for the Coons “Marxist” story is a very obvious joke he made in an article for his college student newspaper, written in his senior year. Otherwise, O’Donnell uses the guilt-by-association smear when observing that Coons praised one of his professors who was a Marxist – then saying that made him one too.

It’s quite desperate stuff. And, following their customarily thorough examination of the facts, the folks at Politifact.com have awarded Christine O’Donnell their coveted Pants On Fire accreditation.