How bad does a congressional candidate need to be for his own party to announce that he is “unfit for office at any level”? Meet Tim D’Annunzio, a tea-party candidate competing for the Republican nomination in North Carolina this fall. D’Annunzio won the primary earlier this month, but was forced into a runoff with another Republican candidate because he failed to reach 50 percent of the vote. But despite his success so far, he’s so out-of-his-mind that the state and national party is unleashing opposition research on him so that he doesn’t win and hand the election to the Democrat or worse, actually get elected and have some kind of power in Congress. “What he could do to the party as our nominee is secondary in my view to what he could do to the country if he got elected,” says the North Carolina GOP chair, chillingly. Why is the Republican party so scared of this guy? Let’s take a look at his résumé.
• Used heroin as a teenager.
• Was jailed three times for “robbing a postal jeep at 16, for burglary at 19, and later for assaulting a police officer.”
• Was discharged from the Army in 1984 after testing positive for marijuana.
• Has “described the government as the ’Antichrist.’”
• Wants to “abolish the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Energy, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Transportation, Treasury, and Home Land Security,” as well as the IRS.
• According to his ex-wife, he “traveled to New Jersey to raise his stepfather from the dead.”
• And claimed that he had “found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona” …
• … and that’s he the Messiah …
• … and that “God was going to drop a 1,000-mile high pyramid” on Greenland.
So, in a nutshell, he’s a former drug addict turned religious nut who wants to dismantle the government and bring dead people back to life with his Jesus powers. Usually we’d say he has no shot, but this is an anti-establishment year.
GOPers Try To Derail Tea Party Favorite [TPM]
Top GOP leaders line up against D’Annunzio [Charlotte Obsever]
GOP tries to upend NC campaign backed by tea party [AP via Yahoo]
