Liberal Senator George Brandis declared on the ABC program Q&A this week that he didn’t think think that anything that was said by people in the Tea Party or the more mainstream elements of the Republican Party during the recent Congressional campaign was “beyond the bounds of legitimate but very heated criticism of the president, the current administration and their policies.” I have written about this view in today’s Crikey email but for those interested in the subject here are some further examples of what the would-be Australian Attorney General thinks are legitimate political comments.

Tea Party candidate Ken Buck, after being asked why people should vote for him for the Colorado GOP Senate nomination: ”Because I do not wear high heels. She has questioned my manhood, and I think it’s fair to respond. I have cowboy boots, they have real bullshit on them. And that’s Weld County bullshit, not Washington, D.C., bullshit.” Buck was referring to an ad run by his opponent, which decried third-party spending on behalf of his campaign and urged Buck to ”be man enough” to run the ads himself.

(July 21, 2010)

”I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one, but they wear these little Speedos and they grind against each other, and it’s just a terrible thing.”

—Carl Paladino, New York State Tea Party-backed candidate for Governor, on gay pride parades, Today Show interview, Oct. 11, 2010

[China has a] ”carefully thought out and strategic plan to take over America … There’s much I want to say. I wish I wasn’t privy to some of the classified information that I am privy to … A country that forces women to have abortions and mandates that you can only have one child and will not allow you the freedom to read the Bible, you think they can be our friend? We have to look at our history and realize that if they pretend to be our friend it’s because they’ve got something up their sleeve.”

—Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, in a debate during Delaware’s 2006 Senate primary, which she lost

”America is now a socialist economy. The definition of a socialist economy is when 50% or more your economy is dependent on the federal government.”

—Delaware GOP Senate nominee and Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell

”The Republicans have lost their standards, they’ve lost their principles. Really that’s why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me… They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government.”

—Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle, criticizing the integrity of Republicans and establishment efforts to direct her campaign, in remarks caught on tape from a conversation she had with Senate candidate Jon Scott Ashjian, who is running with the ”Tea Party” affiliation next to his name (Oct. 2010)

”I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy in the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown — in this case a $20 billion shakedown … I’m only speaking for myself. I’m not speaking for anyone else, but I apologize. I do not want to live in a county where anytime a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, [it is] subject to some sort of political pressure that, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown.”

—Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) member of the Tea Party Caucus, during a congressional hearing with BP CEO Tony Hayward, referring to a $20 billion fund for damages that President Obama pressured BP to set up to pay for the Gulf oil spill. Barton, the biggest recipient of oil and gas industry campaign contributions in the House of Representatives, was forced by Republican leaders to apologize for his BP apology.

”I’m in the construction industry.”

—Carl Paladino, New York State Tea Party-backed candidate for Governor, on why he sent emails of a woman having sex with a horse, President Obama and Michelle Obama dressed as a pimp and ho, and various other pornographic and racist chain letters

”We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves.”

—Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), founder of the congressional Tea Party Caucus, speaking at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver about the evils of the Obama administration, July 9, 2010

”I dabbled into witchcraft — I never joined a coven. But I did, I did… I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I’m not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do… One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that. We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”

—Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, in a 1999 appearance on Bill Maher’s ‘Politically Incorrect’

”The Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry…This is for us…This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical…”

—Nevada GOP Senate nominee and Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle

”We’re on to them; we’re on to this gangster government.”

—Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), at the Tea Party’s Tax Day protest in Wahington, D.C., April 15, 2010

”You are taking a very small group of cases and making a point about abortion. We have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of abortions in this country every year. And the example that you give is a very poignant one, but an extremely rare occurrence.”

—Ken Buck, Tea Party-backed GOP candidate for Senate in Colorado, defending his opposition to abortion even in the case of rape and incest, Aug. 4, 2010

”If you’re oriented toward animals, bestiality, then, you know, that’s not something that can be used, held against you or any bias be held against you for that. Which means you’d have to strike any laws against bestiality, if you’re oriented toward corpses, toward children, you know, there are all kinds of perversions … pedophiles or necrophiliacs or what most would say is perverse sexual orientations.”

—Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX), member of the Tea Party Caucus, arguing that a hate crimes bill passed by Congress would lead to Nazism and legalization of necrophilia, pedophilia, and bestiality, Oct. 6, 2009

(My thanks to the Political Humour page of About.com for the quotations.)