Sharron Angle, the nitwit Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, is now claiming that there is a threat of a Muslim takeover of several cities–like Dearborn, Michigan, which has a large Muslim population. Actually, I was just in Dearborn a few weeks ago. Celebrating the end of Ramadan with–yikes!–Muslims. They were business owners and academics, moderate to conservatives, most of them were former members of the Republican party who had joined that august organization because they are social conservatives and anti-big government. They hadn’t left their Republican values; the Republican Party had left them because it sanctioned the kind of smear attacks leveled by people like this Angle.
I have no idea what impact Angle’s idiocy will have on the legions of the mindless and witlessly convinced. It is a form of terrorism, though. It may result, at the margins, in dirty looks and shunning directed at women in hejab; it may result in one of those whitebread militia psychopaths, whom Bart Gellman wrote about on our cover last week, to take matters into his own hands. I’m waiting to hear whether any member of the Republican leadership has anything to say about this.
