Oh, what hard luck stories they all hand me…

The Tennessean passes along a poll from Middle Tennessee State University that seems to indicate that Republican chances of holding on to the Senate seat presently held by retiring Bob Corker are slimming up quite a bit.

The poll, released Thursday, found 45 percent of 600 registered Tennessee voters said they would choose Bredesen, a Democrat and former Nashville mayor, if the election were immediately held. Blackburn, a Brentwood Republican, netted 35 percent, with another 17 percent of respondents saying they were not sure… The MTSU poll also found Bredesen had a considerable advantage over Blackburn in terms of getting support from voters on the other side of the aisle. Forty-five percent of self-described independents said they would vote for Bredesen while only 33 percent of such voters said they would vote for Blackburn, the poll found. Twenty percent of Republican respondents said they would vote for Bredesen while 5 percent of Democrats said they would vote for Blackburn.

There is a real problem in sharp relief here. Bredesen is a former mayor and governor and a fairly standard Democratic candidate. Blackburn is a Tea Party loon and she is the most likely nominee the Tennessee Republican Party could find to hold onto a seat to which Corker was first elected in 2006. This has the potential of turning the Republican side of an important campaign into a real carnival. Blackburn launched her campaign with an announcement video that was so nutty on the phony issue of the sale of "baby parts" that Twitter 86’d it almost immediately. This allowed Blackburn to bleat—on Twitter, natch—about how the liberals who run “Silicon Valley” were out to squash her proud conservatism.

Getty Images

Blackburn is the pre-eminent drum-banger on the whole sale-of-baby-parts fable, as well as several other issues guaranteed to gin up the rubes for several years now. In 2014, as Joan Walsh detailed at Salon, Blackburn even briefly had delusions of running for president. I guess we should be glad she’s adjusted her ambitions to be a little more, ah, realistic. Nevertheless, when Blackburn announced her intention to run for the Senate, according to Steve Benen at Maddowblog, the Tennessee Republican establishment dove for the bourbon bottle.

Almost immediately, several Republican senators

Blackburn’s most recent slide into the spotlight had to do with a very weird and useless “investigation” into Planned Parenthood, and what Blackburn believed was that organization’s fetal-parts mail-order business. This turned into a burlesque that embarrassed even the current House of Representatives. From MSNBC:

Twelve states have looked into allegations that Planned Parenthood broke the law. Those states brought no charges. Another eight declined to investigate. Instead of charging Planned Parenthood, a grand jury convened in Harris County, Texas, by an avowedly anti-abortion prosecutor brought charges against Daleiden and his associate.

Blackburn holds a sonogram picture of her grandson in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Getty Images

In addition to secretly recording abortion providers, Daleiden released video interviews with a former StemExpress employee, Holly O’Donnell. An investigation in The Los Angeles Times found that unpublished footage showed Daleiden coaching O’Donnell, and that he and his associates sought to ply abortion providers with alcohol and induce them to use certain phrases. With regards to one video that later inspired a notoriously distorted presidential debate pronouncement from Carly Fiorina, the Times wrote, “Outtakes show he edited out her statement that the fetus was dead before the brain tissue was removed — but included her saying that the heart was briefly restarted by being tapped.”

“Any investigation worthy of the name would begin with taking sworn testimony from Mr. Daleiden, Ms. O’Donnell, and their associates,” said Fay Clayton, an attorney and Democratic witness before the committee who in 2000 represented a foundation accused of selling fetal tissue. The key witness to support the allegation in that case admitted under oath before the House Committee in 2000 that he had lied to support the accusation.

Blackburn is what the national Republican party has left. It’s what the national Republican party has left after 35 or 40 years of entertaining irrationality for political advantage. It did not have to happen this way, but the reason that it happened this way is that the Republican Party, at every level of government, committed itself to positions that guaranteed that, one day, someone like Donald Trump would be president*. It also guaranteed that, one day, in a place like Tennessee, there would nobody to run for Senate except someone like Marsha Blackburn. That’s the way things like this work out. I’d find it fascinating if we all didn’t have to pay the price for it.



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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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