ELECTABILITY, VILLAGE STYLE

Here's the header for a Politico article about how happy Republicans are with their choices for the #2 slot on their 2012 ticket:

Yup: in addition to Marco Rubio (who probably will be president eventually, alas), we have Virginia governor Bob McDonnell -- the guy who wrote a master's thesis in 1989 saying working women and feminists were "detrimental" to the family and that the law the law should favor married people over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators," the guy who issued a Confederate History Month proclamation that ignored slavery, etc., etc. Yeah, that guy would be a real boon to the ticket, right?

But I want to talk about the woman in the middle.

That's Susana Martinez of New Mexico -- and yes, demographically she looks terrific: a young ex-prosecutor who's America's first Hispanic female governor.

However, she's also the person who picked this guy for an important government job:

Martinez’s pick for enviro chief: Environmentalists are communists

While appearing on radio host Alex Jones’ show in 2009, Harrison Schmitt said that leaders of the environmental movement are communists. Earlier this month, Gov. Susana Martinez selected Schmitt -- a former U.S. Senator and astronaut -- to head the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, which oversees environmental issues.

"I think that there are individuals, [Obama science czar John] Holdren apparently among them, a very large number who have taken the -- shall we say captured the environmental movement and turned it into what was previously considered the communist movement," Schmitt said in a 40-minute interview with Jones....

"I think the whole trend really began with the fall of the Soviet Union," Schmitt said. "Because the great champion of the opponents of liberty, namely communism, had to find some other place to go and they basically went into the environmental movement...."

It gets worse -- here's a 2009 blog post under Schmitt's byline in which he literally accuses Barack Obama and congressional Democrats of practicing an embryonic form of Nazism (the post is titled "Former Senator Schmitt Outlines America’s Path to National Socialism"):

... The previously faint but obvious path of the United States toward national socialism has suddenly become a super-highway.... Using the term “national socialism” for where we are headed may make some uncomfortable, but it has historical precedent in referring to the logical end-point of current governing trends. A possible alternative term for where we are being taken would be "authoritarian capitalism," as now practiced in China, but that term does not yet have as good historical examples of the potential consequences of these trends as do analogies with the "national socialism" that swept Europe in the last Century.

Although national socialism clearly has atrocious legacies of genocide, aggression, and terrorism under the despotism of Hitler and the Third Reich, the term actually refers to a philosophy of authoritarian government that took hold in Germany early in the 20th Century. Once national socialists took control, the German government dominated individual liberties and the decision-making of private business and industry. Soon, that business and industry became an implementing arm of the domestic repression and the international ambitions of the Third Reich. Our concern today should be that "regulation" of individual liberties and "control" of the private sector now has become the often publicly stated goals of the current Congress and President in the United States....

TARP, the auto bailouts, the new health care law, and housing policies under (naturally) Democratic presidents only are also part of this creeping "national socialism," according to this appointee. Also part of the problem is "the state-committed media's full-throated support of the current President's agenda to control personal behavior and private sector decision-making," which is accompanied by efforts (by the "state-committed media" and Congress) "to demonize and unconstitutionally discriminate (9th Amendment) against education and personal achievement, marriage, and other Judeo-Christian values."

Martinez appointed this jargon-spewing crank more than a month ago. The quotes have been floating around the New Mexico press for weeks. Yet his nomination hasn't been withdrawn. (Did I forget to mention that he's a climate change denier?)

What else do we know about Martinez? Well, she just issued an executive order revising her state's immigration laws so they bear more than a passing resemblance to Arizona's. (Yeah, that would be good for peeling off Hispanic voters in 2012!) Oh, and there's a natural-gas emergency in much of her state that's left many residents of the state without heat for days, in brutally cold weather -- and yet Martinez, who's very close to the oil and gas industry, still hasn't sought federal assistance from FEMA. (The crisis was brought on by the cold weather in Texas that led to rolling blackouts in that state and sinister conspiracy talk from Alex Jones and others. Wonder if Harrison Schmitt agrees with Jones that the failure of natural gas to get to New Mexico is all Obama's fault.)

None of this, according to Politico, should be a big problem for the GOP in 2012. Nothing, I guess, makes a Republican unelectable in a national election.