O'Donnell once claimed to have 'classified' info on Chinese plot to 'take over America'

Republican tea party favorite Christine O'Donnell may really be her own worst enemy.

According to excerpts from a 2006 debate between her and other GOP candidates running for US Senate in Delaware, O'Donnell scoffed at a suggestion that the US and China could harbor friendly relations.

The actual letters of her response, republished Monday by the Associated Press, are eye-opening: and not for their informational content.

Explaining that China has a "strategic plan" to "take over America," O'Donnell insisted that the two nations simply could not be friends and that proponents of US-China relations are merely appeasing their enemy.

"There's much I want to say," O'Donnell proclaimed. "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?" she continued, according to the AP. "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."

Pressed by an opponent on where her "classified" information had come from, O'Donnell did not offer any specifics, the report noted.

She said what?

In her short time as the Republican Party's candidate in Delaware for US Senate, O'Donnell has stumbled into more gaffes and misstatements than almost any other politician in recent memory.

“We took the Bible and prayer out of public schools, and now we're having weekly shootings practically,” O’Donnell claimed in August, 1998, during an appearance on ABC’s Politically Incorrect hosted by liberal comedian Bill Maher.

O'Donnell, then a Christian activist, was a regular guest on Maher's since-defunct program. After she won the GOP nomination in Delaware, Maher began goading her to come on his new show, broadcast by HBO, and threatened to play video clips of her saying "crazy" things every week until she agrees to return.

When she did not appear, the clips began to trickle out. Her public criticism of masturbation, history of "dabbling in witchcraft", belief that evolution is a "myth", desire to prevent Americans from having premarital sex and objections to calling AIDS suffers "victims" all very quickly became national news, and it wasn't just Maher who joined the muckraking.

But even as she scrambled to distract voters with a fictional story about mice imbued with human brains, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint and called for a criminal investigation of O'Donnell's finances. CREW alleged she'd used campaign money to pay for rent, gas, meals and entertainment, citing charges to her campaign dating back to 2009, before she was a candidate for any office.

"Perhaps this unexplained access to classified documents explains her widely mocked warnings about the mouse people?" New York Magazine's Daily Intel blog quipped. "Oh, God — are the mouse people involved in the Chinese plot? We should have listened to you when we had the chance, Christine. We should have listened."

A Talking Points Memo average of available polling data from Delaware showed Democrat Chris Coons leading O'Donnell 55-39% in the weeks before November's election.