SHARRON ANGLE'S EX-CULT LEADER?

... Or maybe my last post was wrong. Maybe Sharron Angle won't beat Harry Reid after all.

Now, I shouldn't get too excited, because I remember how Sarah Palin managed to sidestep questions about her and her husband's ties to the pro-secessionist Alaska Independence Party, but this could be a huge nail in the coffin of Sharron Angle's career in the political big leagues:

... 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 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.

... 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.

.... 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?" ...

I suspect that's just the tip of the iceberg regarding Daniel Hansen. I just wandered over to the party's site and found this 1999 Hansen speech -- if the story above is correct, the speech was delivered shortly after Angle left the party -- and paragraph #2, in particular, is a humdinger:

Natural man is naturally a slave. Natural man is an enemy of God. Natural man is a beast capable of plunder, deceit, abominations, treachery, cruelty, murder, genocide. The beast, natural man, the predator has turned the 20th century into the bloodiest century in the history of the world. World wars, perpetual and protracted terrorist warfare, mass murder and genocide perpetrated by tyrants such as Mao, Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Hitler have combined with conspirators, international financiers, demagogues, extortionists, drug dealers, and abortionists to lay the foundation of the bloody New Word Order. I realize that the typical American is poorly informed regarding the machinations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt deserves greater attention than this speech affords. Suffice it to say that his treachery involved with Pearl Harbor, his consistent support of Stalin, his actions at Yalta and his administrations at Potsdam qualify him to rank among the world's greatest tyrants.

Ms. Angle, do you agree with the late Daniel Hansen that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of " the world's greatest tyrants"?

I'll let you discover for yourself Hansen's anger at the IRS, his invocation of "The father of many of our present-day International Bankers, Mayer Amschel Rothschild," and his odd references to "filthiness." Filthiness? Yup -- here's another 1999 speech by Hansen, in which he says,

... Modern Americans are much like ... swine living in HOG HEAVEN fat and happy, confusing comfort with freedom.

Contrast unsuspecting fat pig with a wild boar living lean and mean in the mountains of freedom and challenge....

That speech goes on to name-check Sharon Stone, Jack Kevorkian, paganism, and the Levi Strauss company for "endors[ing the] gay lifestyle."

Dan Hansen, in short, was a loon. I now see that there could be a lot more entertainment value in Sharron Angle's past than I ever imagined.

(Oh, and coming at this from the other direction, do you know the present-day IAP wants to rescind the Patriot Act? I wonder what Angle has to say about that, and how it would go over with the voters she needs to reach.)

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Oh, did I mention that one speaker at IAP's 2001 conference was Joel Skousen, a Survivalist writer who's the nephew of Glenn Beck's favorite political theorist, Cleon Skousen? Small world....