Joni Ernst might get moved off this beautiful agricultural land and consolidated into a city center!
It's well past time that Democrats stop playing around and start tearing Joni Ernst apart for all the truly crazy shit she's been spewing, like the recently revealed fact that she's been
running with the black helicopter crowd:
"The United Nations has imposed this upon us, and as a U.S. senator, I would say, 'No more. No more Agenda 21.' Community planning—to the effect that it is implementing eminent domain and taking away property rights away from individuals—I don't agree with that. And especially in a place such as Iowa, where we rely heavily upon our agricultural community, our rural communities. We don't want to see things like eminent domain come into play," Ernst said in response to a question about Agenda 21 at the forum.
"We don't want to see a further push with Agenda 21, where the Agenda 21 and the government telling us that these are the urban centers that you will live in; these are the ways that you will travel to other urban centers," Ernst continued. "Agenda 21 encompasses so many different aspects of our lives that it's taking away our individual liberties, our freedoms as United States citizens. So I would adamantly oppose Agenda 21. I don't believe it is responsible, not for United States citizens."
Agenda 21, if you've never heard of it, is an innocuous U.N. document that has, over the years, become
a lodestone of the wingnut fever swamps. This is
Michele Bachman-esque, out-of-your-freaking-gourd territory. And no, this wasn't some one-off dalliance with the kind of conspiracy-mongering that you'd find in the barracks of a backwoods militia organization. Ernst actually believes in this absurd nonsense:
"What I've seen, the implications we could have here, is moving people off of their agricultural land and consolidating them into city centers, and then telling them that you don't have property rights anymore," she told a crowd in rural Ida Grove in November 2013, in response to a general foreign policy question and in remarks first reported by the Associated Press in June.
This is just psycho crazytalk, the kind of thing that people who think "
The Report from Iron Mountain" is what an actual government report would say. Ernst probably believes the
NAFTA Superhighway is real, too. And that communists are fluoridating the water supply to sap her of her
precious bodily essences.
So you can understand why Ernst, when called out on this batshittery by Yahoo News' Meredith Shiner, decided to pretend that it's all been some kind of misunderstanding:
"I don't think that the U.N. Agenda 21 is a threat to Iowa farmers," Ernst said in an interview in her Urbandale campaign office.
Shah, right. As Shiner put it, "the breadth and length of her response on the topic of Agenda 21 seems to belie a deep knowledge of the conspiracy theory." She's a true believer who's only pretending to be sane. After all, she also wants to
impeach the president and thinks that Iowa can go about
nullifying federal laws.
So when is Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley going to take the gloves off and expose her for who she is? It seems like so often, Democratic candidates are reluctant to "go there" when confronting unhinged Republican opponents, sort of like how then-Rep. Ron Klein tried to stop Allen West in 2010 by constantly bringing up his freakin' tax liens instead of his, you know, lunacy.
But two years later, Patrick Murphy showed no such fear and went after West's record hard, pulling out a stunning upset. Harry Reid understood the same thing, too, and survived an impossibly bad 2010 by relentlessly hammering Sharron Angle at every opportunity.
Ernst has given Braley a ton of fodder, but Braley's attack ads so far have been about wasteful spending (seriously?) and the minimum wage (okay, that's a little better, at least). If he can't shred an outright nutter like Ernst over stuff like this, then what exactly is he planning to do?