To no one’s surprise, in her interview with Nevada reporter John Ralston yesterday, Tea Party extremist Sharron Angle started trying to walk back some of her earlier disastrous statements: Sharron Angle grilled on Social Security, Medicare and ‘taking Harry Reid out’.

In her TV appearance Tuesday, Angle said that she now believes in protecting Social Security by placing the funds needed to pay for current obligations in a “lockbox” while also allowing some manner of privatization for future recipients. On the phrase “take Harry Reid out,” Angle said she misspoke and has since changed her choice of words to “defeat Harry Reid.”

“I was speaking broadly about the Constitution, and that was the context of that rhetoric,” Angle said. “I admit that was a little strong, ‘taking out,’ but you know what I meant.”

“I don’t know what you meant,” Ralston replied.

If this weren’t such a transparently false claim it might be funny. Here are Angle’s actual words; she wasn’t “speaking broadly about the Constitution,” she was very specifically referring to “Second Amendment remedies” when she made her outrageous comment about Harry Reid:

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact, you know, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.

I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this, this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies, they’re saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? And I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

This isn’t even a dog whistle; she’s standing on the corner of Far Right Avenue and Tea Party Boulevard, shouting “Come and get ‘im, droogies!”

She may have tried to obfuscate this remark about Harry Reid, but in the interview she still managed to sound like a complete wacko, reiterating her view that people on unemployment insurance are being “spoiled,” insisting that abortion should be denied to victims of rape or incest, and pushing the religious right’s nonsense that the separation of church and state is not part of the Constitution.

According to Angle, “Thomas Jefferson was misquoted” when he wrote about the need for separation of church and state, an appallingly false statement that comes straight from the Dominionist wing of the religious right.

For the record, these are President Thomas Jefferson’s words, from a private letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.