So Obsessed With The Constitution That He Doesn't Even Know When It Was Written

I missed this little gem on Friday.

Sen. Jim DeMint, the overtly eager and reactionary Senator from South Carolina, is just another in a long line of conservatives that get their constitutional facts complete wrong.

He has issued a pitch for his reelection bid in 2010 that revolves around the constitution, the year 1776, and the amount of money that he would like to raise.

I can’t do all this alone. That’s why I launched my Club 2010 team of Internet activists to help propel my re-election campaign. Just last week we received $5,000 from donors giving $17.76. I trust that conservative activists are willing to stand behind the ideas I’ve been pushing in Washington, so I’ve set a loft (sic) goal of raising $17,760 in $17.76 increments over the next five days.

Of course when people make their living as a politician, there are bound to be some verbal slip-ups, gaffes, and foot-in-mouth moments. But if you are a representative of the party that claims to be about "country first", limited government, and appreciation of what the founding-fathers had done, don't you think you would have the desire to do a little fact-checking?

In Senator DeMint's case, I suppose that the desire to get your message out first overrides the ability to be correct.

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Considering that this is part of DeMint's reelection campaign, one has to wonder what his state, and those that are considering reelecting him, have to say about this.

It's probabaly a fair assumption that no Republican in the state is going to have any qualms with DeMint's comments simply because they sound good. This is one of the foundations of the conservative movement and the Republican party - say something about your country that sounds good and back it up with a gimmick that will entice people to follow you around like a celebrity. We saw this with the "tea-parties" earlier in the year ( and word is that there's going to be more on July 4th ) and conservatives loved the idea.

Will this rhetorical mistake have an adverse effect on DeMint? Not at all. It's always the ones that say they know their history most and love their country most that have no relative sense of either country or history.