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in overthinking what happened in Delaware on Tuesday night, which is not something of which the winner of the state's GOP senatorial primary ever has been accused. In case you missed it, and Chris Matthews ascending into the heavens above your house, a woman named Christine O'Donnell won that primary over an establishment android named Mike Castle, who, at one point or another, apparently had held every elected office in Delaware except this one. Once O'Donnell's victory was assured, the requisite thumbsucking over What It All Means got dialed up to 11 almost immediately. Matthews was the wildest, divining a secret hidden block of frustrated Hillary Clinton voters who had been marinating in frustration since the 2008 primaries and were bleeding from the teeth to vote for anyone with ovaries, even someone who spent the 1990s inveighing against the evils of jacking off. This astonished Rachel Maddow, who famously wrangled with Matthews back in 2008 over his career-long obsession with the naughty bits of both of the Clintons. Matthews further maintained that it might be dangerous for Democrats to treat O'Donnell with the scorn and derision her campaign so richly deserves because he remembered that they did that to Ronald Reagan, too, and look how that turned out.

Well, that's bullshit, and Chris Matthews knows it. By the time Reagan won in 1980, he was a giant figure in the Republican Party, and an even bigger one in the conservative movement that had risen to energize it after the Goldwater debacle in 1964. He had delivered thousands of speeches, all over the country, to anyone who'd stand in one place for five minutes and listen, the kind of party-building woodshedding that hardly any candidate does any more. In 1976, he'd run a close campaign against Gerald Ford, an unelected incumbent president, but an incumbent nonetheless. For all his carefully stage-managed anti-politics, Reagan paid more real political dues than any candidate of in the past 60 years — including, God knows, both John and Robert Kennedy.

And Christine O'Donnell is a sideshow freak.

Seriously now, she was a crackpot when she rose on primary morning, and she's a crackpot now, and she will be a crackpot whether she wins or loses in November. She no more belongs in the Senate of the United States today than she did the day she was born. That 30,000-odd primates in Delaware thinks she belongs there is their problem. If enough people in Delaware come to think so, then she becomes our problem.

O'Donnell is a creature of an age in which politics have no meaning beyond performance art. She is the Creature from the Green Room, with no apparent public career beyond being available whenever some teenage booker from the cable shows needed someone to say something reliably stupid. She is one of those people who'd show up at CNN with a waterbowl in her teeth if someone there blew a dog whistle.

Her résumé is so thin as to be opaque, and a lot of it seems to be a lie. She seems to be something of a deadbeat, and "U.S. Senator" seems to be her idea of an entry-level position. This morning, she stands one step away from the job.

She is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government. She is what you get when you sell to the country that nothing government can do will help, and that the government is an alien thing, and that politics is nothing more than the active public display of impotent grievance.

She is what politics produces when you turn it into a game show and the coverage of it over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. She is what you get when political journalism reduces politics to numbers on a scoreboard, divorcing it from the real-world consequences of what are increasingly seen as cute little eccentric decisions.

She is what politics produces when we abandon self-government for self-gratification. And that's the real obvious irony in her victory on Tuesday night, and the only thing about it that truly matters. Christine O'Donnell's campaign is a successful exercise in angry, misfit masturbation, with as little to do with the deadly problems this country faces as some guy wanking in the balcony of a grindhouse has to do with Romeo and Juliet.

This is the first in a weekly series on where we're at by Charles P. Pierce on The Politics Blog. Stay attuned.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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