One of the new stars of the Tea Party movement, an entertainer recently mistaken in Delaware for an actual politician, is Christine O'Donnell. Start here with O'Donnell, just because you have to:

Even Karl Rove thinks she is too far off the grid. This from a guy who thought Dick Cheney was fine.

Delaware is a state that has about one-third the population of Brooklyn. O'Donnell, running for the U.S. Senate, won her primary race with just over 30,000 votes. Even the Mets occasionally draw more people than that. No matter, she was suddenly a new drum majorette for the Tea Party.

Oh, sure. O'Donnell is a younger, peppier, more pleasant version of Sarah Palin, whom she channels in clothing, mannerisms, peppy rhetoric. So she and her 30,000 votes were supposed to be another example of the tidal wave of Tea Party fervor that is supposed to be sweeping America, even though her real campaign slogan should go something like this:

There are a lot of whack jobs in Congress, from both parties, and I aim to be one of them!

Or perhaps not.

Because on "Real Time" the other night, Bill Maher ran a clip from his old "Politically Incorrect" show in which O'Donnell voluntarily copped to the following:

"I dabbled into witchcraft - I never joined a coven. But I did, I did! I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around with people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me to do.

"One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it."

At this point, you wanted somebody to jump in and ask what she thought the altar was, the counter at White Castle?

The younger version of O'Donnell sure didn't stop there. She can talk the way Michael Phelps can swim. Apparently the only way to shut her up is to have video like this hit the Internet. As soon as it did, O'Donnell canceled both "Face the Nation" and "Fox News Sunday."

O'Donnell also volunteered this in the 1999 clip:

"I mean, there's a little blood and stuff like that. We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar."

Now last week, Rush Limbaugh lost his mind after he heard Rove criticizing O'Donnell, as if Rove had committed an act of high treason by thinking that O'Donnell was some low-common-denominator candidate, especially at a time when we're supposed to need every good Republican we can find to take back the country from the infidels.

The tax liens against O'Donnell in the past weren't supposed to matter, maybe because she's playing to an audience where anybody who doesn't pay taxes is viewed as a living saint. And her weird ideas about masturbation, and how condoms don't really prevent AIDS, weren't supposed to matter. Neither was the suggestion that she has confused campaign contributions with a cost-of-living stipend.

No, sir. O'Donnell was another spunky underdog running against big government and looked like an "All About Eve" version of Palin and anybody who attacked her had to be bad, bad, bad.

You wonder how all those who have fallen madly in love with her would feel if somebody in politics they truly hate, like Nancy Pelosi, admitted she was the one who once dabbled in witchcraft. Or if they'd simply decide that Pelosi being a witch was old news and move on.

You want to worry about this country and how it seems to be getting dumber by the minute? Worry that the problems with it are so profound, and have made people so desperate and crazy, that there are actually 30,000 people in Delaware who think that Christine O'Donnell and her beliefs - whatever they are - are some kind of solution.

Or that in New York a loudmouth like Carl Paladino, another big Tea Party guy with ideas about immigration and illegals that make Arizona's look enlightened, is suddenly a candidate for governor.

You actually want to see Paladino on a whistle-stop tour with that Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, at his side. You may have seen Brewer make a television appearance not long ago and wait 15 seconds for her next thought. Boxers get counted out after 10.

Paladino would have been delighted and jumped right in. Already you can tell he thinks having any kind of unspoken thought is a felony.

Paladino is supposed to be another part of the tidal wave of those set to take back the country, starting in November. And no worries if he stumbles along the way, the way poor Christine O'Donnell did this weekend. He can just say the devil made him do it.

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