[Vision2020] Wild Woman Chenoweth

[Tony]

WOW gIER, you are one mercenary bastard.  Helen Chenoweth is not yet cold 
before you leap on her grave, pissing all over her memory.  A gentleman you 
are NOT.  A man of grace and charity you are NOT.

She had class, while you are just a sniping punk.

Tired of the vicious left, -T
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <nickgier at adelphia.net>
To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 9:04 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] Wild Woman Chenoweth


> Helen Chenoweth: An Appreciation.
> Wild Woman
> by Michael Currie Schaffer
> The New Republic
> Greetings:
>
> We were all wrong in believing that Doug Wilson was the first 
> neo-Confederate in Idaho.
>
> The New Republic 10.05.06
> Helen Chenoweth: An Appreciation
> Wild Woman
>
> Among her many political accomplishments, Helen Chenoweth was responsible 
> for what was almost certainly the best dependent clause in the recent 
> history of American journalism. In a 1996 New York Times profile, the 
> Idaho Republican, then a freshman member of Congress, was outlining her 
> support for the Confederacy's states-rights take on the Civil War. But the 
> Times' Timothy Egan saw fit to preface her comments with this remarkable 
> opening caveat: "Though she is not in favor of slavery..."
>
> Since Chenoweth, who died Monday at age 68, had gleefully embraced an 
> array of other positions similarly unacceptable in civilized company, the 
> clarification might actually have been necessary. A fire-breather even by 
> the unreconstructed standards of the GOP's class of 1994, Chenoweth (who 
> married just before she left Congress and became 
> Chenoweth-Hage)popularized the notion that federal agents were secretly 
> using black helicopters to spy on her constituents, and she even held a 
> hearing on the matter. She sought to require U.S. law enforcement 
> officials to get local permission before carrying firearms into a county. 
> She served guests canned salmon not in spite of the fish's status on the 
> endangered species list, but because of it. She proudly called herself 
> "congressman," and she said that white, Anglo-Saxon males were America's 
> true endangered species.
>
> Back in the early days of the 104th Congress, the press lapped it all up. 
> In a town full of phonies and panderers, here was the genuine article, an 
> authentic wild woman of the wacky, wacky west, with a beehive hairdo and 
> everything. But Chenoweth's shtick lost some of its exotic appeal in the 
> spring of 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing introduced the coastal 
> elites who once gawked at Chenoweth to the real live rage of the militia 
> movement. Chenoweth, it turned out, had ties to the militias, several of 
> whose members had helped her get elected. And her own comments in the wake 
> of the deadly attack were hardly reassuring: Searching for just the sort 
> of root-cause explanation her party now disdains, Chenoweth speculated 
> that the bombings were a result of "public policies that may be pushing 
> people too far." Her remarks included yet another brilliant dependent 
> clause: "While we can never condone this..."
>
> Despite all of Chenoweth's efforts to roll America back to an age of log 
> cabin simplicity, modern political life plowed right ahead. By the time 
> she left Congress, adhering to her own three-term limit and not running 
> again in 2000, Chenoweth's tribe of true believers were already on the way 
> out, replaced by (or converted to) the sort of career politicians she had 
> despised. Today, Chenoweth's brief turn on the national stage already 
> looks like a more innocent era, a time when our terrorists were home-grown 
> boys with Ryder trucks, a time when our bloviating televisual rebels were 
> against the government rather than for it. A time when vast federal 
> conspiracies to spy on presumably law-abiding citizens were kooky and 
> creative and implausible and outrageous--and not, you know, true.
>
> In turn, the modern GOP looks back through rose-colored glasses at 
> Chenoweth's feisty cohort, who have achieved a hallowed status akin to the 
> pioneers of her own Idaho. If the party loses its majority this fall, the 
> debacle will rightly be blamed on the fact that the sagebrush rebels of 
> 1994 died when they came to Washington. Far from the bracing democracy of 
> the frontier, they became city slickers besotted by compromise and 
> manipulated by the capital's army of handlers and hacks--the black 
> helicopter pilots of contemporary politics.
>
> Perhaps it's fitting that Chenoweth went on to that great unregulated 
> federal wetland in the sky just as her erstwhile comrades are facing their 
> own Appomattox. She wasn't the last Republican lawmaker whose Confederate 
> sympathies would lead to trouble--a certain Virginia senator can attest to 
> that. But, with Chenoweth, there was the quaint notion that her public 
> utterances about the Civil War--and maybe even about the black 
> helicopters--were based on something akin to principle. Rest in peace, 
> congressman.
>
> Michael Currie Schaffer is a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer.
>
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