Joni Ernst- More Wingnut than Star

In an hour or two, Iowa's new Senator, Joni Ernst, will be giving the response to President Obama's State of the Union speech. This is typically a kiss of death for most politicians. Ernst is being pre-celebrated though as a rising star. Political Animal's Ed Kilgore shoots this down:

Thus continues the joint GOP/MSM effort to whitewash the actually very recentperiod of time when Ernst was a prominent wingnut member of the Iowa Senatewho supported constitutional personhood rights for zygotes, claimed states should be able to nullify federal environmental rules, and promoted the psychotic Agenda 21 meme. She did not go straight from a hog farm to deployment in Kuwait and then suddenly decide what the Senate needed was a big dose of Iowa Nice. She’s a dedicated ideologue who cynically ran one of the most blatantly dumb campaigns in memory, exploiting the even dumber gaffes of her opponent. And she’s about as authentic a representative of the “Iowa farmer” as Bachelor contestant Chris Soules, now that the poor guy is being used as Hollywood’s idea of what a farmer should look and act like.

He's right. She's not an "Iowa Farm Girl Done Good," but a wingnut rewarded.