Until now!
Allen Quist is running for Congress...against Congressman Tim Walz.
The story broke a few weeks ago now and surprisingly, posts about the extremist Quist are few and far between.
So who is Allen Quist? Simply put, a liberal bloggers delight.
The short answer is that Quist was elected to three terms in the Minnesota House and ran for Governor twice.
We've never been fans of the short answer though.
A quick look at Allen Quist's Gubernatorial coverage in both 1994 and 1998 tell us a lot about the man.
During our interview in St Peter, his home town, Quist confirmed his belief that, in a household, the husband is genetically predisposed to be master of his wife. 'In marriage, there is a political arrangement between the man and a wife, and in the political arrangement the man should be the head of the house. I think it's instinctive,' said Quist, 49, who served as a state legislator in the mid-1980s. 'I know it's true. You look in the animal world versus the human and it's virtually universal in the animal world.'
- At the funeral for his first wife, Quist directed the mortician to display the couple's unborn child.
Quist also recalls the death of his first wife seven years ago when she was pregnant. He had the undertaker remove the 6 1/2 - month fetus from the womb and display it in his dead wife's arms lying in a glass-fronted casket. That way, he said, he and his family were able fully to grieve the unborn child.
First, voters have heard a lot about Quist's reputation as a three-term legislator almost obsessed with sexual morality, including an undercover foray into a sex-oriented bookstore in Mankato, hours and hours of speeches on the House floor railing against homosexuality and pornography and sponsorship of a bill to require AIDS testing for all marriage license applicants.
He has not made a big deal out of those issues in his campaign, and explains that he got caught up in those issues, in part, because he was given grossly inflated estimates by the state about the spread of AIDS.
- He was virtually unelectable in 1994. Yep...15 years ago...
Still, with a month to go before the primary, polls show that Quist's negatives are very high and that, as people get to know him, a significant percentage strongly dislike him or disapprove of his politics.
Vin Weber, the former Minnesota congressman who pioneered the Reagan coalition in the 1980s - a coalition Quist claims to be trying to resurrect - predicted last spring that Quist would become unelectable as the news media and his opponents defined him, especially in a general election.
"He won't wear well at all," predicted Mike Triggs, a former campaign manager for Carlson. "Mr. and Mrs. Gopher are going to think [the Quists] are damn weird." Over the course of the campaign, some odd angles have been revealed about both Quist and his activist wife, Julie, who at times has been almost as intensively covered as the candidate.
“Did dinosaurs and people live at the same time, and why do so many recently discovered ancient art works accurately picture dinosaurs?”
“How should we interpret the numerous references in ancient literature to dinosaurs (called “dragons” before 1850 AD), and what are the creatures described in Job chapters 40-41?
“What is the status of various examples of irreducible complexity, and have these examples been explained in Darwinian terms?”
“How has Darwinism influenced American law and politics?”
- He wrote an "interesting book about abortion"
In his 1980 book The Abortion Revolution, Quist even compares abortion to Hitler’s murder of millions of Jews.I think you get the picture...
Quist has a long history of extremist actions and views. I wonder what Congresswoman Bachmann thinks about her friend's opinion that women remain submissive to their husband? Regardless, it will be interesting to see Quist go through a quixotic campaign down in the Fighting First, only to get thumped by Congressman Walz.
Since 2007, Congressman Walz has served the constituents of the 1st CD in an honorable and consistent fashion. He's held countless open forums and meetings across the First that have brought unprecedented transparency to the political process in the district.
Are we going to let Quist and his extremist views muck that up?
