HEAR NO EXTREMISM, SEE NO EXTREMISM

You may have seen this over the weekend:

The Virginia Republican Party picked conservative minister E.W. Jackson as their nominee for lieutenant governor Saturday night. Jackson will run along side Ken Cuccinelli and is the first black candidate the party has nominated for statewide office since 1988 according to the Associated Press....

Jackson ... maintained a now defunct blog on his site, where he argued in one post that President Obama saw the world “from a Muslim perspective."

Obama clearly has Muslim sensibilities. He sees the world and Israel from a Muslim perspective. His construct of "The Muslim World" is unique in modern diplomacy. It is said that only The Muslim Brotherhood and other radical elements of the religion use that concept. It is a call to unify Muslims around the world....

You may have also seen that Jackson has compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan:

In a video posted to YouTube last September, the minister and activist urged black Christians to reject the "ridiculous lies" of the "Democrat Party." ...

He continues, "The Democrat Party has created an unholy alliance between certain so-called civil rights leaders and Planned Parenthood, which has killed unborn black babies by the tens of millions. Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was. And the Democrat Party and the black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide."

And he's said this:

Democrats now have fully embraced an abortion policy that amounts to infanticide. They have also made the lesbian-homosexual-bisexual-transgender agenda their vision for America. How have they managed to hold on to black Christians in spite of an agenda worthy of the Antichrist?

Jackson will be #2 on a ticket that, of course, will be topped by Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia's anti-gay, climate-change-denying attorney general, who's working hard to make abortion effectively illegal in the state.

Now, here's the thing: This radicalization of the state Republican Party is taking place right in the D.C. press corps's backyard. It's happening despite the fact that Virginia is a purple state now, one that voted for Barack Obama twice (although Cuccinelli seems to think that Obama was elected president twice because lack of voter ID in some states helped him steal the election). And, as The New York Times notes today, the radicalization of the Virginia GOP is no accident -- it's the result of "Mr. Cuccinelli's consolidation of his party by activating its most conservative members."

Two years ago, he challenged grass-roots Virginians excited by his lawsuits as state attorney general against Mr. Obama's health care law and environmental regulation to run for seats on the party's central committee. They did. Mr. Cuccinelli's selection was all but assured when the new blood on the committee, including Tea Party and libertarian members, canceled a Republican primary in favor of a nominating convention, which favors ideological purists.

On Friday, the central committee also ruled that it would pick next year's Senate nominee by convention.

It's obvious to anyone who's looked at how government is run in any state with Republican control, or who's looked at any recent contested Republican primary, that there's nothing anomalous about this these days. But it's happening within plain sight of the D.C. press corps -- and yet that press corps still refuses to acknowledge the Republican Party's nationwide tilt to extremism.

Remember, these are the same D.C. journalists who reported on the campaigns of Howard Dean and Ned Lamont as if they were witnessing Mao's Long March. This? No big whoop. Even the Times story focuses more on attendees at the Virginia Republican convention making IRS jokes than on the party's tilt to the extreme right. Teabaggism is just an interesting experiment in one isolated laboratory of democracy -- apart from that, nothing to see here.

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ALSO, TOO: "The 10 Most Anti-Gay Statements From The Republican Nominee For Lt. Governor Of Virginia." This, by the way, is from BuzzFeed, as is the first link above. The Klan link is from the Huffington Post; the Antichrist link is from Right Wing Watch. The New York Times has nothing on Jackson's extremism, nor does this Washington Post story.

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OH, AND: Regarding the GOP nominee for Virginia attorney general, Think Progress tells us....

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that's what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law....