I was thinking about posting the covers of the two witchcraft books I still have when I returned home today, but the whole logic behind wicca in the nineties being the end of O’Donnell’s candidacy today is seriously flawed. It requires that tea partiers be so small-minded that they will abandon her now.

It isn’t the tea-party that’s making a deal of this. It’s the small-minded people on the left who think this really matters in 2010. It’s the left that’s trying to scare this up into a career-killer, just like it’s the left saying that being Catholic is a career killer. And it’s career politicians on the right who are helping fan the flames.

Looking at Wicca sometime before the nineties is a career-killer in politics? If you can’t be Christian in politics and you can’t be Wiccan in politics, that’s cutting a whole lot of good people out of politics.

This reaction by the left touches on something I saw today at my first tea party rally, in El Cajon. One of the candidates said that he would not repeal all of the bad laws enacted by the Pelosi and Reid congress, and he received strong applause for saying it.

The candidate was Jim Miller, and he received applause because he’s running for superior court judge in San Diego. He said he wasn’t going to be an activist judge, and rather than using examples you normally would expect a conservative to use, he told them point blank that they had better vote good legislators in, because he was not going to legislate from the bench to kill all of these bad laws just because he disagrees with them.

The small-minded tea party crowd approved. I think the small-minded cocktail party is projecting their bigotry onto less extreme movements such as the tea party.

Incidentally, I also dabbled in witchcraft a long time ago, and I also hung out with a few people who called themselves witches, in the late eighties, early nineties. At least one of our Dungeons & Dragons players in the nineties was a witch. Yes, I played the game that figured in Tipper Gore’s crusade against the occult. Between being born Catholic, playing D&D, and being friends with Wiccans, I couldn’t even get elected dog-catcher if the left has their way.

I still have a couple of the witchcraft books I picked up in the seventies.

It says “supernatural”, but it’s a manual on developing supernatural powers and casting spells.

That second book says “supernatural”, but it’s a manual on developing supernatural powers and casting spells. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever read, but that didn’t keep me from trying a few of them out before deciding they were complete bunk (as opposed to partial bunk).

Note, however, that I didn’t get these two books from any of my Wiccan friends—I didn’t meet them until the nineties. I got those two books because my mom is a major yard-sale hound, and I often tagged along to look for strange discarded technology and used books about science fiction, science fact, UFOs, and the occult. I dumped most of the latter two topics several years ago, and only kept a few of the most interesting.

Both of these books—as well as most of the other occult, supernatural, and UFO books I’ve kept or tossed—came from seventies or very early eighties yard sales of average people in rural Michigan. These were people who bought the books and then had no problems selling the books to their friends and neighbors when for whatever reason they decided they didn’t need them anymore. And no, I don’t recall any wicker men hanging around our neighborhood.

Having things like this in your past is not out of the ordinary. This is just one more attempt by career politicians to exclude people who aren’t career politicians and who don’t censor everything they say and take part in, from high school on, based on how well it will play politically.