Sharron Angle: In wake of Gulf spill, we need to "deregulate" Big Oil

Dems are gearing up to paint Sharron Angle, the ultra-conservative candidate who's now taking on Harry Reid, as another Rand Paul and possibly even further to his right.

And here's another data point: Angle said in a recent interview that the Gulf spill was an "accident" and opined that we need to further "deregulate" the oil industry in the wake of the disaster.

Here's the exchange, from a Nevada Newsmakers interview on May 26th, more than a month into the spill crisis:

QUESTION: You have been in support of onshore drilling in the United States as well as offshore drilling, are you rethinking that policy with what is going on in Louisiana? ANGLE: No. I think that what happened in Louisiana was an accident. They're cleaning it up. We need to go forward and talk about prevention and not about whether we keep it out all together. We know that lot of the problems that have been caused for us with foreign policy and even with our own gas prices here domestically going up is our dependence upon foreign oil. We have oil reserves and petroleum reserves that we should tap into. And that's a policy that we really need to look at as a nation. How do we deregulate enough to invite our industries to come back into the United States and quit outsourcing their business?

It's astonishing how quickly a picture of Angle is taking shape as more and more info comes to light. Sam Stein, for instance, finds an Angle quote from 2009 in which she seems to suggest that it's wrong for a married man and woman to hold jobs simultaneously.

And TPM reports that Angle embraced the patriot group "Oath Keepers," which warns members to resist some sort of nefarious plot that apparently exists -- who hatched it is unclear -- to create "giant concentration camps."

As I noted here yesterday, the Reid operation is gearing up to paint Angle as, well, a nutjob, as a cross between Rand Paul and Orly Taitz. There doesn't appear to be a shortage of material.

