WASHINGTON — Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party-supported
Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware, has no secrets. The
press has even gone back to her high school years and found that
she “dabbled” in witchcraft.” But now Jeffrey Lord
of The American Spectator has been scrutinizing her
opponent, Democratic candidate Chris Coons. Lord did not have to go
back to Coons’ high school days. He found quite a lot in Coons’
infatuation with Marxism, starting in college. Coons found Marx
about the time that large numbers of Marxist pols behind the Iron
Curtain gave up him up. By the 1990s even jailers and torturers
were forsaking old Karl, but not Coons.
Now if you read about Coons in the New York Times
or the Washington Post you will not find anything
particularly diverting about him. He began college as a young
Republican and ended as a young Democrat. As the Post
writes in profiling him, he “spent time in South Africa and Kenya
doing relief work.” The Times never mentions Coons’
African sojourn but only talks about his later work with the
homeless, the Investor Responsibility Center, and the “I Have a
Dream” Foundation.” Apparently, he has been a goody-goody, but in
the end, a bore.
Yet Lord went back further. He found that before Coons
became the Democratic opponent of O’Donnell he was profiled in
early May in Politico. In that profile Politico
reports that as a 21-year-old about to graduate from Amherst he
wrote a piece in the college newspaper that was titled “Chris
Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist.” Apparently there was more
to that trip to Africa than he would like voters to recall or than
the Post chronicled.
Coons reported in the student newspaper that his trip to
Africa was what we now call a transformative experience. “[I]t is
only too easy to return from Africa glad to be American and smugly
thankful for our wealth and freedom” Politico quotes the
returning student. “Instead, Amherst had taught me to question, so
in turn I questioned Amherst and America.” The groundwork for this
questioning began before he left for Africa, during a course in
cultural anthropology that “undermined the accepted value of
progress and the cultural superiority of the West.” A course on the
Vietnam War also caused him to “suspect…that the ideal of America
as a ‘beacon of freedom and justice, providing hope for the world’
was not exactly based in reality.”
Then came his trip to Kenya. “I became friends with a very
wealthy businessman and his family and heard them reiterate the
same beliefs held by many Americans: the poor are poor because they
are lazy, slovenly, uneducated,” young Coons wrote. “I realize that
Kenya and America are very different, but experiences like this
warned me that my own favorite beliefs in the miracles of free
enterprise and the boundless opportunities to be had in America
were largely untrue.” He found a moral equivalence between Kenya
and the United States and became a “Bearded Marxist.”
My guess is that he is still a Marxist. Certainly he shows
no scruples about keeping his hands off other people’s property. As
county executive of New Castle County, Coons promised voters he
would keep taxes down. Once elected, he raised property taxes by 5%
in 2006, by 17.5% in 2007, and by 25% in 2009. He loves taxes. Lord
tells us he has proposed to raise hotel taxes, paramedic taxes, and
something heretofore unheard of. Lord tells us that Coons has a
proposal to raise taxes on 911 calls. Lord discovered that by
reading Byron York’s report in the Washington
Examiner.
I hope that both York and Lord will continue to review
Coons’ record. The entire mainstream press is at work on O’Donnell
and they have Bill Maher the funnyman on their side.
He had her on his comedy show in the 1990s, and the two clowned
around together. Now Maher is calling her indiscreet — but what
about him?
Coons apparently did not have to appear on a clown’s show
to be indiscreet. He did it in college and in his later work as a
good-goody bore. Just how radical was he? Stay tuned. Lord is on
the case, and he has the ear of Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. They
are broadcasting Lord’s findings to an ever wider audience. Maybe
the race for the open Senate seat in Delaware has just begun, and
it is fitting that it is Vice President Joe Biden’s seat. At any
rate, mainstream America is no longer dependent on mainstream media
for the news. There is Lord and York and Hannity and Levin. What
will they come up with next?
