Christine O'Donnell on human mice, lying to Nazis, and the women of Middle Earth
I've long belittled Delaware for contributing little to the nation other than traffic jams and toll booths. But if the First State sends Christine O'Donnell to Washington, all will be forgiven.
She has been the Republican Senate nominee for mere hours, but already those investigating her past have come up with enough curiosities to fill a wing at the Smithsonian.
Three years before she discovered that her opponents were lurking in the bushes, it turns out O'Donnell was a "Republican strategist," volunteering her scientific expertise on Fox News's O'Reilly Factor. It was there, as part of a debate on stem cell research on Nov. 15, 2007, that she broke the news to Bill O'Reilly that there are mice with human brains:
O'REILLY: Everybody knows that scientists have enough knowledge to clone a human being if they wanted to.
O'DONNELL: Right.
O'REILLY: But they're not, at least not that we know of. And now they're in the monkey realm. And I don't understand, if that's the possibility that people might be cured, why the objection. Because I never buy the slippery slope....
O'DONNELL: By their own admission these groups admitted that the report that said, "Hey, yay, we cloned a monkey. Now we're using this to start cloning humans." We have to...
O'REILLY: Let them admit anything they want. But they won't do that here in the United States unless all craziness is going on.
O'DONNELL: They are -- they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment.
And if you don't believe her, just ask Mickey and Minnie.
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We know that O'Donnell was telling the truth about the mice with human brains. We know this because, several years earlier during an appearance on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, she made clear that she would never lie -- not even to a Nazi to protect Jews from being captured:
O'DONNELL: A lie, whether it be a lie or an exaggeration, is disrespect to whoever you're exaggerating or lying to, because it's not respecting reality.
MAHER: Quite the opposite, it can be respect.
COMEDIAN EDDIE IZZARD: What if someone comes to you in the middle of the Second World War and says, 'do you have any Jewish people in your house?' and you do have them. That would be a lie. That would be disrespectful to Hitler....
O'DONNELL: I believe if I were in that situation, God would provide a way to do the right thing righteously. I believe that!
MAHER: God is not there. Hitler's there and you're there.
O'DONNELL: You never have to practice deception. God always provides a way out.
God works in mysterious ways. That's why he gave human brains to mice.
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O'Donnell was not idle between her time on Bill Maher (in 1998) and Bill O'Reilly in 2007. In 2003, she gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation about -- wait for it -- the portrayal of women in J.R.R. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy.
At the time, O'Donnell was described as "director of communications for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute." She spoke about how Tolkien properly wrote about the importance of "you know, the role of supporting your man," but the movie version rejected this feminine portrayal because the "softer side was offensive to women."
