Lord of the zings: Sharron Angle fights back at ‘hobbit’ comment

By Karoun Demirjian

Thursday, July 28, 2011 | 12:04 p.m.

Sharron Angle, who has been taking great pains during the debt crisis to increase her visibility via Twitter and appearances to promote her autobiography, “Right Angle: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim the Constitution” is ticked that an old friend called her foolish on the Senate floor.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona raised Angle’s ire for quoting a Wall Street Journal editorial Wednesday that went to town on members of the Tea Party, calling them “hobbits” for holding up Republican resolutions to raise the debt limit, as well as Democratic ones, and naming Angle as one of the worst products of the movement.

“What none of these critics have is an alternative strategy for achieving anything nearly as fiscally or politically beneficial as Mr. Boehner’s plan,” McCain read. “The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling ... the public will turn en masse against Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame.

“Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the Tea Party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor,” McCain continued, still quoting. “This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees.”

It’s a bit of a turnaround for McCain who came to campaign for Angle in her race last year to unseat Harry Reid.

Angle dished out a heavy dose of Tolkien as she tore into McCain for this irony.

“As in the fable, it is the hobbits who are the heroes and save the land. This Lord of the TARP actually ought to read to the end of the story and join forces with the Tea Party, not criticize it,” Angle wrote. “It is regrettable that a man seeking dialogue, action and cooperation for votes on the floor of the United States Senate has only one strategy to achieve that effort: name-calling. Nice.”

McCain is not the only one dishing out harsh words to the Tea Party. So is House Speaker John Boehner, who at a caucus-wide meeting yesterday told GOP members who were publicly splintering away from his proposal to “get your ass in line.” And guess what? It’s working.

Thursday morning, Tea Party freshmen tried to assume an air of independence as they meekly heeded Boehner’s call, and lined up to pledge their support to his legislation — and redirect their vitriol exclusively toward Reid.

(Nevada Rep. Joe Heck, though he is a freshman in Congress who received Tea Party support, had never spoken out against Boehner’s plan, so he wasn’t part of the bunch. Despite being a freshman rep to the GOP’s Steering Committee, he rarely appears at these all-freshmen events.)

But Reid says that is not budging far enough to benefit anybody, least of all the country.

“It’s time for the Tea Party Republicans to stop resisting compromise,” he said. “They must start joining the Democrats ... to put the economy ahead of politics.”

Reid has been stressing that the short-term approach in Boehner’s bill — which allows a five- to six-month extension of the debt limit but requires Congress to vote on more, much deeper cuts and a balanced-budget amendment before he’ll allow any more — will rock the markets almost as badly as a technical default because it provides absolutely no sense of stability or continuity.

The international credit rating agencies have said that if the U.S. does not raise its debt limit and does not do it in a responsible, at least medium-term way, the U.S.’s credit will be downgraded and interest rates will rise.

But many in the Tea Party, including Angle, seem to have only heard half that rationale.

“While Senator McCain advocates raising the debt ceiling as a solution — world markets and credit rating industries propose to downgrade our credit worthiness, impacting the value of the U.S. dollar and the state of our economy because of our world-famous spending problem,” Angle said, seemingly missing the fact that world markets and credit rating industries have said raising the debt ceiling is the only solution to avoiding all the fallout that Angle cites. Both Democratic and Republican leaders have accepted that, though they continue to argue about whether the life span of the agreement will have effects beyond that.

“Meanwhile, we look forward to meeting members of Congress and the President at the polls in 2012 … when ‘We the People’ choose the names we call to serve us in Washington,” Angle continued. “And we will keep in mind those who supported increasing our nation’s mountain of debt, what could be called their very own Mount Doom.”