A Long--Difficult--Look at Ken Cuccinelli

Ken Cuccinelli: Far right, very far right, off the globe right.

The Washington Post profiles Ken Cuccinelli today in a piece that is fair, but hardly pretty. My guess is that Cooch would agree with that assessment, too.

This is a guy who is proudly an "inflexible ideologue," the story says. The examples of his unbending nature are numerous and those of you who believe that he won't act on his outrageous social agenda, but will concentrate instead on job creation, you'll want to reconsider. He fully understands how wildly out of sync he is with most people and simply changes the subject when the uncomfortable topics come up these days.

This is a man who has been at the heart of the anti-abortion movement, shutting down access, closing Planned Parenthood Clinics, approving of vaginal probes that have no purpose other than to discourage the procedure, attempting to deny access to simple birth control (he's a hard-case Catholic). He attempted to make it legal for employers to fire workers for speaking Spanish and wanted to deny U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants citizenship. He denys hating gay people, then sets out to strip them of simple human rights and dignity.

His former colleagues in the Virginia General Assembly--including fellow Republicans--seem to think he's right on the border of nuts. Majority leader and Democrat Dick Saslaw of Fairfax is quoted as saying, “He didn’t drink the Kool-Aid; he made it. You name the antiabortion tactic and he was for it. Believe me, we had some very conservative people in the Senate and they winced at his bills, they were so extreme. Whether it was bashing gays or immigrants, nobody wanted to be associated with him.”

Republican Del. Dave Albo of Fairfax (right-wing nutjob Congressman Morgan Griffith’s former drunk driving law partner), is quoted as saying he "supports his bid for governor but says it will be hard to convince some voters that Cuccinelli is anything but a radical." Republican Vince Callahan, a 40-year House veteran, "sees an ideologue 'who would not vote with his own party and wouldn’t work at all with the Democrats. He was off on a little island by himself. He’s against government. To get things done, you have to work with people. But we never saw him at night. You don’t go to a bar and have a drink with him.'”

Former Republican Senator Russ Potts says, “For somebody who calls himself a conservative, he’s awfully eager to impose himself in people’s private lives.” And that's the biggest part of the problem.