ISSUES: Anti-Masturbation Candidate Is 'Truly Strange'

Christine O’Donnell, the masturbation-hating, Sarah-Palin-endorsed, Tea-Party-funded Delaware Senate candidate, gets picked apart in Gail Collins’ latest New York Times column. She’s had “a series of financial problems” and may have earned only $5,800 last year; she claimed to be a university graduate, “but it turns out she actually got her degree ... last week”; and she claimed to have won two counties against Senator Joe Biden in 2008 … even though “Delaware has only three counties and she lost the election by 65% to 35%.”

Then there’s her weird obsession with shrubs—she has her team “check all the bushes” around her house to make sure she’s not being followed, and she claims her opponents enjoy “hiding in the bushes when I’m at candidate forums.” Collins realizes it’s traditional for political parties to stay neutral during the primaries, “but those rules shouldn’t apply if there’s a truly strange and unelectable person on the ballot,” she concludes. Thank goodness her opponent “abandoned the high road and began running ads about O’Donnell’s past financial difficulties. (‘Owes $11,744 in back taxes. Defaulted on her mortgage.’)”