Angle’s Independent Past

Once upon a time the GOP’s star nominee, Sharon “obtuse” Angle was not a Republican.  GOP goose stepping was too liberal for Sharon.  She preferred one one of those extreme right, gun toting parties.

The key to understanding Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle may be the fact that she has not always been a Republican.

For at least six years in the 1990s before she held state-level elective office, Angle was a member of the little-known Independent American Party, a right-wing party that combines [wing-nuts delinked] elements of Ron Paul’s doctrinaire libertarianism — pro-gun, anti-tax, anti-bureaucracy, pro-states’ rights — with Christian social conservatism and fear of the "North American Union" and other forms of "global government." The small party attracted considerable controversy in 1994 when it took out a newspaper ad titled "Consequences of Sodomy: Ruin of a Nation," which suggested HIV could spread through the water.

Three members of the Independent American Party tell TPM that Angle, a Nye County, Nevada, school board member at the time, was an active member of the party in the 1990s. They say she only left the Independent American Party and became a Republican out of political expediency when she decided to seek a seat in the state assembly, to which she was elected in 1998.

"It was because she wanted to run for office. And it was difficult for members of our party to get elected at that time," Janine Hansen, executive director of the Independent American Party, tells TPM. "It was a strategic move on her part."

Hansen’s brother, the late Daniel Hansen, founded the Independent American Party in 1967 "after realizing that the Republican Party was growing too corrupt and socialistic," according to the party website [wing nuts delinked]. The party lost its ballot position in the late 1970s and didn’t get back on until a push by Hansen in 1992. That year, Angle signed the petition to get the Independent American Party back on the ballot, according to multiple party members and news reports.

That was a heady time for the reborn party. A 1992 Los Angeles Times article (via Nexis) describes Hansen at a political rally wearing a Stetson hat and bearing a sign that read, "If Guns Are Outlawed, How Can We Shoot the Liberals?" His rhetoric would not be out of place at a 2010 tea party.

"Don’t give up your guns, folks," he told a crowd. "That’s all we’ve got to protect us against the advance of socialism. America is in a survival phase."

Angle’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment…

Inserted from <TPM>

Now we know where Angle gets her love of Second Amendment Solutions, as she has said that her follows will need them if ballots don’t work.  She and other Republican nominees have implied that violent revolt is the next step if they are not elected.