You've got to LOVE this guy

Washington Democratic hacks, take note: THIS is what we want in a candidate:

The tip-off that a politician is about to speak gobbledygook is when he or she says, "I’ll be candid with you."

Except for Paul Hackett, and he says, "I’ll be candid with you" a lot. But rather than spewing mindnumbing nothingness, this politician and lawyer actually is candid to a fault.

Hackett said he and Brown probably agree on nine out of 10 issues, except the extent of 2 nd Amendment rights. Hackett grew up hunting, he relied on guns in Iraq and he has a concealed-carry permit (he wasn’t packing at our coffee klatch). Rather than restricting gun access for lawabiding citizens, Hackett wants the laws enforced and the cops fully funded "to make sure that the men and women who break the laws with guns are prosecuted so they quit screwing up our right to enjoy them."

Hackett said he opposes capital punishment – too much risk of executing an innocent person – for everybody except the fool who violates his family and home.

"Break into my house, we won’t have to worry about the application of the death penalty. It’s going to be a simple 911 call: Come pick up the body."

With succinct coherence, Hackett said: "I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gayrights, I’m pro-gun-rights. Call me nuts, but I think they’re all based on the same principle and that is we don’t need government dictating to us how we live our private lives."

Asked to define being pro-gayrights, Hackett said anybody who tries to deny homosexuals the same rights, including marriage, as every other citizen is un-American. Are you saying, he was asked, that the 62 percent of Ohioans who voted in November 2004 to constitutionally deny same-sex marriages are un-American?

"If what they believe is that we’re going to have a scale on judging which Americans have equal rights, yeah, that’s un-American. They’ve got to accept that. It’s absolutely un-American."

[snip]

"The Republican Party has been hijacked by the religious fanatics that, in my opinion, aren’t a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden and a lot of the other religious nuts around the world," he said. "The challenge is for the rest of us moderate Americans and citizens of the world to put down the fork and spoon, turn off the TV, and participate in the process and try to push back on these radical nuts – and they are nuts."

After a week which saw a bunch of dispirited Democrats go listlessly through the motions of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee who would without a doubt vote to turn George W. Bush into a quasi-king under the lunatic "unitary executive theory", reading about Paul Hackett is like giving a drop of water to someone who's crawled through the desert for days.

The party hacks will never let him win, of course, the same as they mustered all their heavy artillery in Iowa in 2004 against Howard Dean. Because in the Democratic Party, politics is judged like Olympic ice dancing -- you have to wait your turn. And the party believes it's Sherrod Brown's turn.

The problem is, given how Washington Democrats have completely sold us down the river and show no signs of wanting to be an opposition party again, why on earth should we believe that Brown would be a significant improvement over Mike DeWine?

UPDATE: In the same vein, the always indispensable James Wolcott (bookmark his blog if you haven't already) weighs in on Lanny Davis telling the Democrats to not "politicize" (read: fight back) the Jack Abramoff situation.