October 26, 2010 07:46 PM UTC

Ken Buck's Christine O'Donnell Moment

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• by: Colorado Pols

Yet another blast from GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck’s primary past–this one spreading via the national liberal blog Think Progress today, and…well, it’s a doozy, as tough as it is to find superlatives to describe Buck’s litany of regrettable statements these days:

I disagree strongly with the concept of separation of church and state. It was not written into the Constitution. While we have a Constitution that is very strong in the sense that we are not gonna have a religion that’s sanctioned by the government, it doesn’t mean that we need to have a separation between government and religion. And so that, that concerns me a great deal. So I think there are cultural differences, I think there, we are as strong as we, our culture, our culture gives us our strength, I guess is the best way to put that. And, and I am worried about the fact that we seem to be walking away from culture. And, and one thing that President Obama has done that I would certainly speak about is calling the Christmas tree, which has historically been called a Christmas tree in Washington DC, a holiday tree. It’s just flat wrong in my mind.

So the first problem, as Think Progress notes, is that President Barack Obama never renamed the White House Christmas Tree, or any other Christmas tree, a “holiday tree.” FactCheck.org called the claim “hooey,” and dismissed it as an email hoax–“the sort of unsupported gossip that any sensible person should disregard and delete rather than spreading.”

That’s the first problem.

Now that we have the context of Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell, Buck’s going to have real problems asserting after this that he isn’t totally unelectable, as the nation has decided she is. At the very least, it just got much harder for Buck to separate himself from the other hard core “Tea Party” Senate candidates like O’Donnell, or Alaska’s Joe Miller, as he has tried to do since winning the GOP primary. Such a sweeping and radical–not to mention fundamentally misguided in the view of most voters–declaration pegs Buck, once and for all, as one of them.