Alan Keyes, to Kick Around Again

Alan Keyes is running for president again. The man who lost to Barack Obama by 43 percentage points (70%-27%) in his 2004 race for the US Senate thinks he should be president. Tonight, Keyes will be part of the "Voter Values Debate" of fringe Republican candidates.

In honor of Keyes, here's some quotes from an article I wrote in 2004 about Keyes:

Keyes said the 9/11 attacks were a message from God to oppose abortion: "I think that's a way of Providence telling us, 'I love you all; I'd like to give you a chance. Wake up! Would you please wake up?'"

During a campaign appearance in Bedford, N.H., in 2000, Keyes asked a class of fifth-graders, "If I were to lose my mind right now and pick one of you up and dash your head against the floor and kill you, would that be right?"

"I do stay up at night thinking about what's going to happen to America. I do stay up at night with a vision of our people in conflict, of our cities in flames, of our economy in ruins."

Because the Republican National Committee withheld financial support for his losing cause, Keyes accused them of racism and complained that in the GOP, "colorblind means that when a colored person walks in, you suddenly go blind."

Keyes told the media, "You do to me what you did to my ancestors! You ignore my successes, just as you ignored my ancestors' successes!"

When it comes to race, Keyes rejects the idea that any black person – except for Alan Keyes – suffers discrimination. He told Larry King in 2000 that if he were the victim of a "driving while black" police stop, he would fault the "black folks out there disproportionately committing certain kinds of crime."

Keyes claims, "Hitler and his supporters were Satanists and homosexuals." To Keyes, "The notion that is involved in homosexuality, the unbridled sort of satisfaction of human passions," leads to totalitarianism, Nazism, and communism.

During a 2000 presidential-primary debate he referred to "Massa Bush" and his tax-cut plan because "this is all a discussion between the masters of how well or ill they're going to treat the slaves."

Citizens, he says, have a duty to "resist and overthrow the power responsible" if their right to have guns is "systematically violated." In 1999, Keyes even seemed to threaten the president by saying, "the Second Amendment is really in the Constitution to give men like Bill Clinton something to think about when their ambition gets particularly overinflated."

“On all the matters that touch upon the critical moral issues, Arnold Schwarzenegger is on the evil side," Keyes said.

Greg Blankenship, a Republican who runs the "Obama Truth Squad" Web site, calls Keyes' candidacy "truly nuts" and "borderline delusional." Blankenship says, "I've dealt with Keyes personally. . . His ego is too big for the Senate, Presidency, and probably God."