{"id":2787,"date":"2010-10-19T21:21:44","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T21:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2787"},"modified":"2010-10-19T21:21:44","modified_gmt":"2010-10-19T21:21:44","slug":"dog_whistle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2787","title":{"rendered":"Dog Whistle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Law students don&#8217;t have a reputation for spontaneously bursting into laughter, but that&#8217;s what happened during a debate at a Delaware law school when Delaware Republican Senate candidate (and avowed anti-onanist) Christine O&#8217;Donnell <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/story\/2010\/10\/19\/911658\/-DE-Sen:-Video-proof-that-ODonnell-really-did-say-that\">challenged her opponent&#8217;s assertion that the principle of separation of church and state is contained in the the Constitution<\/a>. Her comments prompted a lot of guffaws from the audience, but liberal commentator Peter Daou points out that O&#8217;Donnell is simply (if clumsily) <a href=\"http:\/\/peterdaou.com\/2010\/10\/odonnell-on-the-first-amendment\/\">repeating a talking point that is popular among Christian conservatives<\/a>: the words &#8220;separation of church and state&#8221; don&#8217;t appear verbatim in the Constitution, which means the whole concept was fabricated by godless liberals after one of their cocaine-fueled orgies. O&#8217;Donnell may not care if the audience laughs at her because she knows she has almost zero chance of winning the election. Instead, she may be burnishing her far-right credentials for a post-election gig as an authoritative voice of the Tea Party.<\/p>\n<p>If that is her strategy, it&#8217;s a clever one. The Tea Party needs telegencic spokespersons, but I&#8217;m not sure O&#8217;Donnell is ready for the Sunday talk show circuit. Silly me; she probably won&#8217;t venture far from the Fox News lair. <\/p>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?w=695\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Law students don&#8217;t have a reputation for spontaneously bursting into laughter, but that&#8217;s what happened during a debate at a Delaware law school when Delaware Republican Senate candidate (and avowed anti-onanist) Christine O&#8217;Donnell challenged her opponent&#8217;s assertion that the principle of separation of church and state is contained in the the Constitution. Her comments prompted <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2787' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-IX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}